The London Train (17 page)

Cora was experiencing Robert’s presence in here as a shock to her whole system, her breathing felt smothered and irregular, her voice seemed to her shriller and more childish, sounding inside her head. When he wasn’t present, her idea of him dwindled to something small and convenient as a toy; she forgot how he crowded her perceptions. Her rooms – which were her new life – seemed smaller with Robert in them; and he wasn’t properly interested in the nuances of her taste, the lovely mugs she’d chosen for instance, one by one, with such delight in each, for the kitchen. Habitually Robert ducked when he came through doors, even if he didn’t need to, and he smelled, not a bad smell – sweat and wool and soap and something else, oaky with a high note of lemon – but intrusively masculine and overpowering. He had on an awful shirt: she knew he would have bought it in a cellophane packet, on his way home from work, from one of those shops for tourists. His hair – like very dark old tobacco, threaded with grey – hung in lank locks over his collar; he needed a haircut. She couldn’t look properly into his complicated ravaged face, strong beard-growth speckled over shaven jowly folds, because its familiarity filled her with shame. It was unbearable to imagine now her earliest intimacies and confessions with Robert.

Without asking, he put on the news on the television in her bare white sitting room, stood watching it while swallowing his gin, swishing the ice cubes round in his glass, grunting ironically at something political, which of course he would know all about from the inside. Was she supposed to stand around waiting in her own house, while he caught up on the latest scandal? She snapped up the blinds at the front windows, and bold squares of light sprung onto the bare boards. Nothing could shake his hierarchy of importance, where work was a fixed outer form, inside which personal things must find their place. Once, she had gloried in cutting herself to the right shape to fit it.

– I’m surprised you managed to make the time to come down, she said.

Innocently, he said he thought they could manage without him for an afternoon.

Just an afternoon.

– I don’t want anything, she said, to attract his attention. – If you leave me anything and then you die, I’ll just give it to Frankie.

– That will be your choice, of course, he said reasonably. – Anyway, I’m not planning on dying any time soon. But I wish you’d let me give you some money now, until you’re settled. You’d have a right to it, in any court of law. You put your share into the flat. He turned the television off. – Nice set.

– You want to control me by paying for me.

Funnily enough, he clearly remembered her saying the same thing to her mother when they were arguing years ago over the wedding. It had been nonsense then; afterwards she and Rhian had cried and made up, as they always did. Was there any truth in it now? Very likely he did wish he could control her, but he had surely given up, out of realism, any belief in the possibility. Bruised as he was, he believed he truly didn’t want her, in her brave new venture of living here, to fall flat on her face or want for anything. And he had no use for the money himself. But in case she was right he didn’t press her, he only asked her to sign the papers relating to their joint bank account.

– They’ve started the inquiry into the detention-centre fire, he said. – I’m giving evidence next week.

This was momentous, but neither gave away their reactions to it.

– Frankie told me. Oh, that reminds me: she’s coming to stay this weekend, bringing the children.

Frankie was Robert’s sister, Cora’s close friend, Cora’s age. It was through Frankie that they had met in the first place. Cora and Frankie had done English together at Leeds; Frankie’s much older brother had taken time out of his already busy life to come to her graduation.

– I know. She told me. She’s looking forward to it. Will you mind the invasion?

Cora flinched as if he’d caught her out: these rooms weren’t well designed for children, with white walls, rugs on the polished floors to skid on, treasures displayed on low shelves.

– I’m not lonely, you know, she said angrily, writing with the usual flourish her boldly legible signature.

In the library Cora sometimes felt as if she had fallen to the bottom of a deep well. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. She hadn’t known that there could be a job like this, pressing so weightlessly on the inner self, allowing so much space for daydreaming. At first she had thought it might be her duty to encourage the borrowers, talking to them about the books they were choosing, but she quickly learned that they looked at her with shocked faces if she tried, as if their reading was a private place she’d intruded into. The whole point of her role was to be neutral, she realised, not engaged or committed. The hand-to-hand exchange at the issue desk – taking the books, opening them, date-stamping them, handing them back – was a soothing ritual of community. Even when she was helping the asylum seekers who came in to research information on the Internet in support of their appeals, she never discussed the content of what they were looking for; they only strove together through the process of finding it. This exemption from the effort of relationship seemed to her to be a relief to them both. In London, for eighteen months, she had visited a failed asylum seeker awaiting deportation (the problem was not at this end, but with the Zimbabwean authorities, where the crumbling bureaucracy made obtaining the necessary paperwork impossible). The memory still produced guilt and confusion: she had not liked him, she had let him down.

If she was on a morning shift, her first task of the day was to do the health-and-safety checks, making sure the place had been cleaned, the shelves were securely bolted in place, and no one could trip over the carpets; she was also supposed to go outside into the little garden between the library building and the street, checking for needles left by drug users. (She had never yet found any; perhaps they had them at the libraries closer in to the city centre.) The library was at a junction on a busy road carrying traffic in and out of the city from the valleys. It was a Carnegie endowment from the early twentieth century, built like an odd-shaped church with two naves at right angles and high windows of greenish glass, mournfully aloof from the squat, bustling shopping street of fast-food joints, quirky cafés, cheap mini-markets, hairdressers. Inscribed in stone above the entrance were the words ‘Free To The Public’, which moved Cora and made her nostalgic for the idealism of another era, although many more things were in fact free now. The staffroom looked over the Victorian city cemetery, a conservation area for wildlife. Sometimes she ate her lunch in there.

Cora told her fellow library workers she was divorced, which wasn’t true, yet. Annette, the librarian in charge – long, dramatically ugly face, red hair, resilient jutting bosom – was divorced with grown-up children. At first Cora had been wary of her slicing ironies and touchy proneness to take offence. It was always Annette, scathing and jollying in an outbreak of noise, who tackled the occasional unruly drunk wandering in. Cora found herself imitating some of Annette’s patterns, although Annette must be twenty years older. She began making her own brown bread for sandwiches, and joined the choir that Annette sang with, which met one evening a week and would try anything from Pachelbel’s Canon to a Beatles medley. One weekend they had sung for charity in a shopping centre in town.

Inside the library the noise from the roads was muffled, like the light through the wavering greenish glass of the windows. If it was raining outside, or if the sky grew dark, then the intimate atmosphere intensified around the clacking of the computer keyboards, the bleeping of the scanner. Strip-lights were suspended from the ceiling by chains. After stamping and putting out the newspapers in English and Urdu and Arabic, Cora would print off the ‘holds’ list of books requested by other libraries all over the county, then begin to work through it, locating these books on the shelves, scanning them and fastening labels to them with elastic bands, ready for collection; she would be interrupted every so often by borrowers wanting something at the issue desk. The librarians conferred together in murmured voices.

In her teaching job at a further-education college in London, Cora had been active and forceful; she had worn herself out preparing classes and marking, standing up for her students, fighting threats from bureaucracy. Yet she’d always felt that this work, which in anyone’s eyes could have amounted to a real career, was provisional, while she waited to do something real with her life. In her job in the library, which paid less than half as much and hardly began to use her capacities, she could imagine herself growing old. But she tried not to let her imagination run away with her. She knew how you could deceive yourself, falling into one of those pockets of stasis, where you could not see change building up behind its dam.

The weather stayed fine for Frankie’s visit. Making up extra beds in the spare room on Saturday morning, Cora heard their car draw up outside and the familial tide spilling out, Frankie’s chivvying and encouragement, whimpers from the baby. Cora dawdled downstairs through the house’s last held breath of emptiness and quiet, waiting on the bottom stair until one of them actually rang the bell – ‘Let
me
do it’ – pushing open the letter box in a scuffle of excitement, peering through – ‘Is she in?’ – then poking in small hands and turning them to and fro in the hall’s dimness, as if it was water. When she did open the door, they were suddenly shy on the doorstep, both of them stripped down to their shorts in the heat, skinny torsos pale: Johnny the eldest, her godson, red-headed, shuffling behind his dark-haired sister, shoving her forward as if she was an exhibit.

– Cora, look! he said.

Lulu held up her arm to show off pink plastic bracelets, making them fall one way, then the other.

– Hello, you two.

Hugging and exclaiming over them, it was as if she pushed herself with an effort out of her adult solitude; this had not happened when she saw the children all the time in London and must be another aspect of her new life. Frankie struggled in last, laden with bags, the baby on her hip. She had given up trying to keep her shape, after this last birth, and wore whatever loose clothes she pulled first out of the high-piled ironing basket – sometimes her husband Drum’s shirts – over tracksuit bottoms. Cora was self-consciously aware of the summer dress she’d chosen, after trying on other things in front of the mirror.

– Shit, it’s hot! Frankie said. – The motorway was a nightmare. I’ve been dreaming of your nice bathroom. Hold him, will you, while I use it?

Magnus had been woken up out of his sleep. Red-cheeked, strands of auburn hair darkened with sweat and pasted to his head, smelling of regurgitated milk, he squirmed in Cora’s arms, opening his mouth to bawl. She walked into the kitchen and then on into the garden to distract him, kissing the top of his head and talking encouraging nonsense. The linen dress had been the wrong choice; it would soon be crumpled and look like a rag. The other two were getting drinks from the tap, standing on a chair, spraying water everywhere because they had turned it on too hard. The baby was transfixed by the sight of next door’s cat on the wall; then he screwed his head round to stare with serious scrutiny at Cora’s face, taking her in. She seemed to see for a moment that he looked like Robert: surrounded by her husband’s family, she was ambushed.

In their time at university together, it had been Cora and not Frankie who was sure she wanted children. Frankie was clever, she had got a First, she had been set on a career as an academic; this was a surprise to people when they first met her, because her looks were sporty and unsubtle: round, pink, handsome face, messy chestnut curls, calves that in those days didn’t have any spare fat on them, but were as substantial as young tree trunks. She had dyed her hair black, painted kohl round her eyes, taken drugs, but all her efforts couldn’t eradicate the glow of sanity and good health. When Cora fell in love with Robert, she thought she might lose her friendship with Frankie: it had been one of the elements of her old life that she had been calmly ready to trample underfoot in order to have him. But the friendship had only grown gnarled and tangled, woven around all the complications and surprise developments in their lives since. There were so many sensitive spots to beware of that they hardly bothered to try.

After lunch, Frankie fed the baby, the light gleaming on the skin of her breast where the tension tugged and puckered it. Cora wiped surreptitiously with a cloth around the sticky chair backs and edges of the table where the children had been sitting.

– Are you supposed to drink coffee? she asked.

– Hell, I don’t care, Frankie said. – I do everything. I shouldn’t eat this, for a start; look at the size of me.

As well as brown bread, Cora had made courgette cake, which was still warm. Johnny and Lulu carried slices into the garden on their palms. Johnny nibbled at his like a bird, dipping his head to it; Lulu tried to coax the cat to eat hers. Frankie sighed, relaxing, admiring the cake and her cake plate and her coffee mug, white china with a pattern of blue leaves.

– You’ve got everything so nice here. Don’t think I’ve changed my opinion about the awful mistake you’re making, leaving Bobs. But I’m jealous too. Everything here’s deliciously calm and organised. London’s vile.

– It isn’t exactly that I’ve left him. We both agreed to try living apart for a while.

– Rubbish, he’s desperate. You left him. Just because he’s an inhibited stick doesn’t mean he isn’t in torment.

– He keeps trying to give me money, Frankie. He turned up the other evening, waiting in the park to catch me on my way home, with a briefcase full of forms and papers. He wants to make over half the flat to me. That’s how he thinks about relationships. It’s horrible. As if the whole thing in the first place had been like arranging a contract or a piece of legislation. It didn’t occur to him to ask me how I was feeling.