The London Train (23 page)

– I told them I’d be away for a couple of hours. They won’t expect me back till two. We’ve got till then.

She had wanted him to say that the office didn’t matter.

II

C
ora, three years ago, on the train from Cardiff to Paddington.

It was a few weeks since she’d run away from the fertility clinic, almost six months since her mother died. Her teaching had more or less finished for the summer, and she was throwing herself furiously into the transformation of the Cardiff house, telling Robert she wanted to do it up to sell it. No matter what difficulties came up, how the builders found dry rot, or messed up the French windows in the extension, she encouraged herself: bite the bitter pill. She had got her force back, even if she didn’t know what to do with it, and was only pressing mightily up against an invisible resistance. She had chosen a wood-burning stove, she had scoured the reclamation yards for antique tiles for the bathroom, for lovely old pink bricks. Now, outside the train windows, the afternoon landscape fumed with rain, the green fields and woods were secretive, withdrawn around their own dense history, pressed under a lead-coloured lid of sky. The train wasn’t full; she sat at a table by herself. Dark drops rolled sideways along the window glass. For no reason, her heart was beating thickly, as if she was expecting something, though she wasn’t, she mustn’t look forward, because there was nothing ahead, nothing.

A man stopped beside her, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee from the buffet, a briefcase slung on a strap across his shoulder.

– Do you mind if I sit here? I’m escaping from an idiot with a mobile phone.

– How do you know I’m not one?

He glanced at her, taking her in quickly. – You don’t look like an idiot.

– You’re safe, she said. – Mine’s turned off.

– Good girl.

Half-heartedly she was offended by his calling her a girl. Sitting down in the window seat opposite her, he got out a book from his briefcase and started to read. It was a book of poetry, by someone Cora hadn’t heard of. She was embarrassed that she was reading
Vogue
– she knew the man had taken this in, in his quick survey, as a mark against her. She never used to buy magazines, but on her journeys backwards and forwards from Cardiff, not wanting to think too much, she tried to fill her head with ideas for things she might get for the house, or plans for new clothes.

He scowled into his book, gripping it as if he might tear it apart at the spine. Cora always looked at people’s hands when she met them (Robert’s were huge, with soft hollows in the palms and unexpectedly delicate finger ends). This man’s hands were long and tanned and tense, slim as a woman’s though he wasn’t effeminate, one finger nicotine-stained, the nails naturally almond-shaped; when he took a mouthful of coffee she noticed that they shook. He wore a wedding ring. She thought he might be precious, or pretentious; there was something dissatisfied in his ripe, full mouth, although he was attractive, subtle-looking, only just beginning to lose his hair – which was the colour of silvery washed-out straw – at the temples. Under the hooding curved lids, she seemed to see the quick movements of his eyes as he read; he was a hawk, jabbing into his book for its meanings with an unforgiving beak. Determined not to care what he thought, she returned to her magazine. After a while he dropped the book down on the table. Cora looked up from serious contemplation of a winter coat.

– You didn’t like the poems, she said.

She expected his vanity to be gratified by her taking an interest in his opinion, but he only looked surprised that she had spoken, as if they existed in different worlds.

– Do you read poetry?

She supposed he meant: as well as magazines.

– I do. I’m an English teacher.

He wasn’t enthusiastic. – Oh, good for you.

– Well, actually, I love what I do. But I don’t get to teach much poetry.

– Have you read this?

– No, I’ve never heard of him. I don’t think I’ll bother now. You looked violent. I thought you might have thrown it out of the window, if these windows opened.

– As a matter of fact, I did quite like it, he said. – But not enough.

– Enough for what?

After a pause he added that he wished the windows did open, because he would have enjoyed throwing books out of them, from time to time.

Cora had read that when someone is attracted to you they begin unconsciously imitating your own movements: she noticed that when she sat back in her seat now, he was drawn forward towards her, leaning his elbows on the table, frowning. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk with her about poetry, dreading the conventional and gushing opinions she might try to impress him with, reluctant to unpack his own ideas for anyone not likely to appreciate them. He had a high opinion of himself, she thought: his surface as it met the world was obviously touchy, ready with disdain. He asked where she’d got on the train and whether she lived in Cardiff; she replied that she was born there, but lived in London.

– Visiting your parents?

Cora explained that both her parents had died, and how she was doing up their house to sell. She expected him to say something sympathetic, but he only asked her what she felt about Welsh nationalism. She replied that her father had taught her to be suspicious of all nationalisms as parochial.

– Sounds like a good old Trotskyite.

– He made up his own mind about everything.

– You’re very Welsh.

She said she hated having any set of qualities foisted on her.

– That’s what I mean, he said. – If you accuse anyone of being very English, they accept it apologetically.

His accent was English, neutral rather than distinctly ruling class.

The train drew into the station at Swindon, new passengers got on, someone hesitated in the aisle at their table. They made no effort to move their bags from the seats beside them; both looked studiedly out at the platform, where those who wanted a different train seemed to wait in suspension, in a vague dusty light, cut off from the rain that poured in streams from the ends of the roofs. The person moved on: there were plenty of other places to sit. Neither acknowledged that anything had happened, but by the time the train started up again the atmosphere between them was altered, they were cut off together in their corner.

It turned out he had a house in the Welsh countryside somewhere – her geography was approximate; Robert would have known where it was. He had three daughters, two small ones, one from a first marriage, who didn’t live with him and must be about fifteen, maybe sixteen.

– How often do you see her?

– Not often enough. We don’t have anything to talk about when we do meet. I find her thoughts impenetrable. No doubt the feeling’s mutual. My other girls are darlings, they’re my heart’s delight. And do you have children?

He looked at her ring.

Something impelled her not to answer him ‘not yet’ or simply ‘no’.

– I can’t have them. We tried, but I can’t.

– I’m sorry. Should I be sorry? Are you?

She shrugged. – I would have liked it. But there it is.

– Might you think of adopting?

– No.

– OK.

It was a relief, to state the thing with such finality – as if she made it exist as an object to contemplate, stony, with clean lines and hard edges. With the loss of her parents behind her, and the loss of the babies she might have had ahead, she was withdrawn out of the past and future into this moment of herself, like a barren island, or a sealed box. It was easier to lay out this truth for the stranger’s penetrating scrutiny, and not in expectation of any kindness. The hawk beak of his interest jabbed at her, as it had at the poetry book.

They could lose one another at Paddington.

She was sitting forward at the table now, and he had fallen back into his seat. He was studying her, half-closing his eyes, as if to get her at a distance, in perspective.

– So you’re an English teacher. And what does your partner do? he asked.

– He’s a civil servant. Quite a high-up one.

– Oh dear.

– He’s an intensely moral, conscientious man, and I love him dearly.

– I can read it in your face, he said.

For a moment, ready to be enraged, she thought he intended a cheap irony; but no, he meant what he said, quite straight.

– Really?

– Yes, he’s there in your expression, something settled and steadied.

– That’s nonsense. You wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t told you, you might have thought I was involved with an unstable drunk. Or someone who taught juggling skills. You can never guess other people’s partners, they’re almost always unexpected.

– I’d never, ever, have believed you were involved with anyone with juggling skills, he promised her solemnly.

– But an unstable drunk . . .

– An unstable drunk, at a stretch. Though you wouldn’t put up with him for long. You’re not the martyred kind.

Cora didn’t ask him about his wife, mother of the little girls, his heart’s delight. That corrected the imbalance between them, where he was freighted down on his side with children.

He went to the buffet to get them both coffee. She commented that this was his second cup, and he agreed it probably wasn’t good for him – and he smoked too, he confessed, he ought to give that up. To her relief he didn’t show much interest in these subjects; some of her colleagues could talk for hours about their diet regimes and health.

– So, are you a poet? she asked him.

– Do I look like one?

– What is this physiognomy thing with you? There’s no art, you know, to read the mind’s construction in the face.

– Shit! I forgot, you’re an English teacher.

– What have you got against English teachers?

– Nothing, he said with exaggerated gloom. – Someone has to do it. A quotation for every occasion.

– Don’t you think it’s a wonderful thing: opening up young minds to the possibilities of literature?

– Oh, that. Do you really do any of that?

– Not much, she admitted. – I work with young adults with literacy problems. But I do like it. And I do read to them sometimes, good difficult things. You’d be surprised how much they can take in. You see, they’re made to stumble, because their reading is stumbling. So everyone gets the wrong idea, that they’re not interested in what’s in books. But just because they can’t read for themselves doesn’t necessarily mean their minds aren’t capable of following a sophisticated text. Some of them. I mean, I wouldn’t want to exaggerate. I wouldn’t want to claim I was reading them Henry James.

– No one reads Henry James these days, he said. – Do they? Not after they’ve been made to at university. The shelves in the bookshops are full of them, people buy them because of the titles and the nice pictures on the covers, they think it’s going to be fun like a costume drama on telly, but they don’t actually read them, not to the bitter end, surely they don’t?

–
The Golden Bowl
is my favourite novel. I reread it every couple of years.

– Well, you’re one, he said. – You’re the one. You’re a rarity. You’re the rare, exceptional reader that the book was looking for. It found you, across the years. Rather you than me. I’m not sure I’d want to be found by
The Golden Bowl
.

He wasn’t really listening to what she said, he was watching her: or, he saw what she said as if it was an attribute, part of her quality, not an idea separate from herself. She felt herself laid open in the bleaching light of his attention. What he liked, she understood, weren’t her liberal ideas on education, but her hardness, which was personal and – newly, after the last two years – had something finished and ruthless in it. He was not taking advantage of her desperation; it met something in him, he reciprocated it. And also, of course, he was drawn by how she looked; he couldn’t help it and she couldn’t help drawing him after her. She began to feel herself enveloped in that rich oil of sex attraction, so that she moved more fluently, knew there was something gleaming and iridescent in how she turned her head away or smiled at him. The sensation of his physical closeness mingled with her awareness of herself, as if there’d been brandy in the coffee they drank: the ripe blend in his face of softness – cheeks and skin and mouth – and hard hooded eyes, the deliberate slow changes in his expression, as if each thought she offered dropped into a cave inside him, lit up with ironies. She would not have wanted to belong to any mere club of desperate people, if there hadn’t been sex and beauty in it.

In the past, she had always tried to deflect any attention to her looks onto something else, as if in itself it wasn’t worthy of her. She had insisted on being loved for her qualities or her ideas; but she might put those aside, for this moment. Dizzy, she was confused about what she was supposed to be arguing for; somehow they had got onto the subject of class. He was insisting that Marx was sentimental, deluded with hope on the subject of the proletariat. When Cora had to get up to use the toilet she looked around dazedly at the other occupants of the carriage, suddenly returned inside herself and self-conscious about their conversation – how loud had they been? – as if instead of coffee they really had been drinking alcohol. Making her way back to him, balancing between the seat ends, after the unnerving swaying toilet and its complicated locking, she saw the cooling towers of Didcot power station float past the windows, the squat, fat pillows of their steam half-quenched in drizzle. The sight lifted her back into the surrounding routines of her life – they would be in London in less than an hour, she needed to shop before she got back to the flat – as if she was surfacing from somewhere underwater. When she reached their seats, he had picked up his book again and was reading as if he was reconciled with it. They had lost their momentum and sat in silence, restored to their separate existences. Cora thought coldly that their little exaltation had all been nothing, a false flurry.