The London Train (21 page)

– I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.

– Would you ask him to call me?

There was a moment’s hesitation, which was almost personal. Elizabeth wouldn’t use her name. – On which number should he call?

Robert wouldn’t have given her any detail of the collapse in his home life, except what was functionally necessary.

– Tell him I’m in Cardiff. Well, he knows that.

– I’ll let him know. He’s very busy this afternoon.

Putting down the receiver, Cora was flooded for an unexpected instant – before she quashed the weakness – with nostalgia for the old-fashioned wife-identity she had forfeited. She had hardly cared for it while she had it, had scarcely used the word ‘wife’ about herself, or thought of Robert as her husband. In the first years of her marriage, the conventional category had seemed somewhere below what she aspired to be to him; more lately, it had seemed above her range. She made up her mind not to wait around for Robert’s call. It was her day off from the library, she had plans to go into town to buy fish at the market. Determinedly, she was feeding herself properly, cooking from her recipe books with fresh ingredients, although sometimes, sitting to eat alone at the place set with her heavy silver knives and forks (a wedding present to her grandmother, on her mother’s side), on the soft old wood of the dining table in the conservatory, with the doors open to the evening light in the garden, she could hardly finish what was on her plate and had to scrape into the bin what she had so scrupulously prepared. She daren’t stand on the scales to see what weight she’d lost.

Robert called her back almost right away; they arranged to meet for lunch in London the following week. She suggested the National Portrait Gallery restaurant, because although they had both liked it, they had not gone there much together. He discussed her days off at the library as respectfully as if they existed in the same category as the time he contrived to squeeze between his appointments in the diary Elizabeth kept for him; he was so cavalier with his importance that Cora was anxious he must not get the wrong idea about why she wanted to see him.

– You were right, she said abruptly. – We ought to sort things out more sensibly.

– Sort them out?

– For your sake. It isn’t fair.

There was a short pause, while he puzzled over what lay behind her words. – When you say, ‘sort things out’ . . . ?

– I mean, financial and practical things.

– It’s all right, I thought you must mean those.

When he’d rung off, she stood with the receiver pressed to her chest, pulling at the coiling wire of the phone, doubting whether she had done the right thing. Was there any truth in the possibility that she was manipulating him, or playing with his feelings? Could anybody think that of her plan for lunch – or that she was meddling with him, planning trips to London, because she was bored? Horrified, she almost rang Robert back to cancel, but realised that would only seem worse, she would only be digging herself in deeper and deeper. She burned with how far she didn’t trust herself.

By the time the day came for her London journey, these qualms had lapsed; on the train she thought only about how best to arrange things with Robert. She didn’t know anything about divorce law, except that these days it wasn’t necessary to prove that anyone had committed adultery, or been violent or mentally cruel. It would have been sensible to research it on the Internet before their meeting, but she hadn’t had a connection set up yet at home, and couldn’t have looked up anything so private at the library. Anyway, she recoiled from typing the word casually into a search engine, as if it was only a topic like any other. She found herself picturing Robert calmly as an old friend. Divorce seemed an exaggerated and crude instrument for prising them apart when they were already so remote.

She had allowed herself an hour or so to look around the gallery before lunch. After the assault of heat and crowds in the Tube and on the street, her consciousness sank into the cool interior like dropping gratefully underwater, then bloomed towards the otherness of the portraits. Concentrating on the twentieth century, she shivered in her sleeveless dress, pulled on her cardigan, drank stories in unguardedly; when it was time to meet Robert, she was borne up in the lift by an elegiac vision of lives piled high, one after another, full of colour and incident, involuntarily expressive of their era. She arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early, and ordered a prosecco while she waited. The particular present – cacophonous acoustic, well-dressed people (no doubt she’d forgotten already how not to look provincial), celebrated view of the mauve-grey roofscape – lost its power for a moment, dislodged by the weight of the long past.

Robert saw Cora before she saw him: exceptionally attuned to her, he even saw her mood of grave generalised regret, and didn’t want to spoil it. He had no idea about clothes, but did see that she looked less like London than she had when she lived with him: it must be the blue cardigan with its small buttons, which suited her, but made him think of a school teacher (he didn’t have any up-to-date idea of what librarians looked like). Reflectively she was eating the cherry from the top of her drink. Attractive women usually made him feel tall and too bulky; although Cora was slim, she had always seemed to be made to his scale. She had a narrow waist, but her hips were shapely, as wasn’t fashionable now. Making his way towards her between the tables, he ignored at least two parties of people he recognised; when Cora caught sight of him she half-stood up, knocking over her glass, which fortunately was almost empty. By standing she meant to convey, Robert understood, that she was his host and had convened their meeting: he must not try on any air of entertaining her. He tried to think how he could defer to this respectfully, without letting her pay.

– I shouldn’t have had that prosecco, she said, blushing. – It’s gone straight to my head.

– D’you want another one?

He hoped that didn’t sound as if he wanted to make her drunk.

– No, thank you. Thank you for coming. I suppose you’re very busy.

Hanging his jacket over the back of his chair, loosening his tie, he admitted that the reorganisation was a bit of a nightmare.

– What reorganisation?

Robert looked sharply at her: could she really have missed it? Inside the Westminster village, it was easy to forget with what little interest the public outside followed the earthquakes that consumed them. He explained that part of the Home Office was being separated off as a Justice Ministry.

– Oh, yes, of course, Cora said vaguely.

The procedural aftershock, he said, had disturbed even the farthest reaches: he was helping to make sense of the creation of the new Borders and Immigration Agency.

– Is that a good thing?

He was never exasperated with her, but he wouldn’t set out his serious interest in the issue for her benefit, either, if she wasn’t really interested. – Well, I’ve been spending rather more time than is pleasurable in Croydon.

– Croydon?

– Where the Agency is based. I’m still at Marsham Street, but I’ve wanted to see what they’re doing on the ground. I suppose Croydon’s the ground, or part of it. Though sometimes there one seems to be in some kind of middle air – it doesn’t remind one much of earth. What shall we eat?

Neither of them, looking at their menus, could read them at first. The effort of their conversation, that appeared so easily offhand, actually dazzled them, blanking out everything else. In the moment of catching sight of Robert and knocking over her glass, Cora had thought that he was impossible, ‘just impossible’; but she didn’t try yet to disentangle what the thought meant. He wasn’t handsome, she had never thought that, though she had liked his looks, and other women liked them. His nose was good, straight; his eyes were in deep hollows under brows that, without her supervision, were growing bushy. His shoulders and hands and feet were generous and his movements rather shambling. He hadn’t looked much younger in his late thirties, when she first met him. Some men altered exaggeratedly in form from the child they had been, more than women ever had to; and yet sometimes in Robert’s guarded look you saw what he was as a boy – shut up in those horrible schools his parents had paid a fortune for – more plainly than in a more boyish man. Over the years this glimpse of his childlikeness had come to pain her more than the more obvious thing people thought: that she had chosen a father figure.

When they’d managed to pick something from the menu and order it, Cora told him she’d been looking round the gallery. – As I came into the restaurant I had the weirdest sensation, as though our present had turned into the past already, and we were all over with too. Doesn’t it seem strange to you sometimes, how we only live in this one moment of the present? Like a light moving along a thread which stretches out behind us and ahead. I mean, why is it
this
moment, and no other?

Her metaphysics always went somewhere under Robert’s radar, which was tuned to practical effects. – We’re not over with, though, he said.

Did he mean their relationship? She was alarmed: he had never protested at her going to live apart from him, accepting her decree fatalistically. But she realised he only meant that they weren’t dead. They were stuck with themselves, with their ongoing lives. To distract him, she brought out her suggestion about his old girlfriend.

– Robert, you ought to get in touch with Bar.

He didn’t know straight away who she was talking about.

– With Bar? What an extraordinary idea. Why would she want to see me? Why would I want to see her, for that matter? Bar’s probably married with five kids, on a farm somewhere.

She saw he didn’t even notice what he said about the five kids.

– I don’t really want to discuss this now, but perhaps everything would have been better if you’d stuck with her in the first place. There are people smiling over at you. Do you know everyone?

– I hardly know anyone, he said, not turning round to see. – How extraordinary of you to bring up Bar, all of a sudden.

– What do you think about this weather? Cora said brightly, as their food arrived. – Is it global warming?

Outside the window, which ran the whole length of the restaurant, the delicately nuanced monochrome of the top of the capital – lost in its secret quiet above the seething busyness below – was bathed in a transforming sunlight. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky; glass and metal surfaces on the rooftops flashed like signals.

Robert lifted his eyes from the plate set in front of him, only to look at her.

– Probably only a normal climatic variation, even if within a changing spectrum.

They both ate all three courses of the set lunch. It all seemed delicious to Cora – in Robert’s familiar orbit she recovered her old appetite. She had calves’ liver with creamed cauliflower and crispy bacon. Robert’s portions vanished as easily as if they were snacks, and he drank a couple of glasses of Bordeaux – he wasn’t a wine buff, he was bored by too much fuss, but he liked fruity reds. He had to eat, to fuel his big frame and his indefatigable stamina, and he could drink a lot without it having much effect on him, although he usually didn’t drink at lunchtime.

It was strangely ordinary, eating together.

– I suppose we ought to get a divorce, Cora said, towards the end of her salmon with hollandaise. Robert had been reaching with his knife and fork for an extra potato. He put the knife and fork back on his plate and for a moment rested his hands, clenched in fists, on the edge of the table, staring down into his food. Cora was appalled by the idea he was going to cry, and by her own tactlessness – although, when would have been the right moment? It would have been absurd to wait to discuss it with their coffee, like
petits fours
.

But of course he would never cry, probably not on any occasion – Cora had never seen him do so – and certainly not because of a woman, in a restaurant full of acquaintances. That was nonsense, it wasn’t how he was made. He was just taking in with the appropriate seriousness what she had said. What kind of man would have gone on to take the potato?

– I don’t know much about it, she went on quickly, covering up her confusion, explaining how she hadn’t yet fixed up the Internet at home. – Isn’t there something about irretrievable breakdown? We could go for that.

– Is it irretrievable?

She knew she flushed, and in her embarrassment was suddenly furious with him. – My God, yes, Robert. Have you no idea? Doesn’t it
feel
irretrievable to you?

– Then you’re right, we ought to go ahead with a divorce. There’s no reason not to.

– It would leave you free.

He made one more necessary effort. – Frankie tells me there isn’t anyone else.

The idiotic formula sounded incongruous, coming from him; she wanted to cover up his shame.

– You don’t need to worry about that, truly. Not on my side. All I want is my solitude. You probably think that’s nonsense. But I would like you to find someone and be happy. That’s why we should divorce.

After a moment’s thought, Robert helped himself to the potato after all, and cut it up carefully into pieces on his plate. Cutting up all his food before he started eating was one of the irritating habits Cora blamed on the form of education he’d been forced into.

– If it’s what you want, he said eventually.

They agreed that both of them would contact their solicitors. Cora would go to the same firm in Cardiff who had dealt with her parents’ mortgage, and then their wills, and then the transfer of the property into her name. Finishing her salmon, she had to dab her eyes once surreptitiously with her napkin, but she mainly felt relief at getting the painful discussion over with. Afterwards, however, it was difficult to start conversation up again. Casting around in her mind, she rashly asked Robert about his session at the inquiry; he replied that it hadn’t gone too badly. The day-to-day running of the centres was contracted out, and the primary remit of his team was contract letting and agreeing procedural guidelines; as far as that went, the questioning had been sympathetic. They had nothing to cover up; in fact, some of the work they were doing had been commended. He paused to take a mouthful of his wine; Cora guessed he was calculating how much more to say to her, weighing the chance of provoking one of their disputes against his desire, always, to give her the whole picture if she asked, which was his kind of truth-telling. Despite their relatively easy ride, however – he went on – he wasn’t sanguine about the outcome. She mustn’t repeat this, of course. But there was something in the air that made him think the press wouldn’t let it go. The Iranian who died turned out to have been someone, and the story was starting to make waves.