The London Train (24 page)

I don’t even like him very much, she thought, embracing emptiness with relief. If I saw him talking to someone else, I’d think he was opinionated, and preoccupied with his own inner life, blind to other people. Physically, he’s not my type, with that face that will grow into pouches and folds as he ages, like an actor in a Bergman film. I prefer someone with sharper bones, leaner. Not that Robert has sharp bones exactly.

She looked out of the window, repudiating
Vogue
, taking in the pleasure boats disoriented on the flooded upper reaches of the Thames, then the outer sprawl of the capital, its usual intricate mica-glitter extinguished in the rain, stretching out in its flat plain in every direction like a plan of itself, punctuated with green, with the poignant ruins of the old factories. They were swallowed between the backs of office blocks. As they stood up to leave the train at Paddington, they said goodbye.

– It was nice talking to you, he said.

– Yes, wasn’t it? she idiotically replied, and then blushed furiously at her mistake, which he obviously noticed and took – so unfairly – for the last word on her vanity and self-satisfaction.

In the crowd hurrying along the platform he was ahead of her, taking long oblivious strides. They were borne forward, apart, in the tide of the combined purposes of so many anonymous others, all moving in uncanny swift unison without speech, only to the sound of their steps. The great station gave out its roaring exhalation of echo. She hadn’t even asked him what he was coming up to London for. Dirty pigeons flapped like derision under the vast arch of the roof. Following, faced with his back, Cora was suddenly desperate at the idea of letting this unknown man go into the crowd where she would never find him again; she convinced herself that she might not be the whole of what she could be, without his knowing her. Hurrying behind, she willed him to turn round. And beyond the automatic barrier where they fed in their tickets, he did. He stopped in his tracks.

He was wearing – she noticed properly for the first time – a slightly ridiculous blazer, grey linen with a light stripe, like something a woman might have bought for him but had meant him to wear in the sunshine.

Cora almost fell into him.

– Oh, hello, he said. – It seems a shame, not to see you again. After we got on so well. Didn’t we? When are you next in Cardiff?

That was Paul: Paul, although she didn’t know his name yet – he forgot to tell her, forgot to ask hers. Or perhaps didn’t forget. They didn’t exchange phone numbers either. They were bound together, for the moment, only by the slenderest thread of an arrangement, an hour, a place (not her parents’ house, but a café near the park).

When the day and the hour came round, Cora was almost too busy putting on white undercoat in the upstairs bathroom. By the time she got all round the window frame she was already late, and then when she changed out of her decorating clothes she realised that she smelled of white spirit and there was paint in her hair and under her nails. This seemed a doomed and desperate condition in which to seek out a love-affair. In the mirror she saw a caricature of herself, lips bloated, eyes bloodshot, charcoal eyeliner smudged. Fatalistically she almost changed her mind again and didn’t go, only she couldn’t bear the idea of the hours passing after she hadn’t. Crossing the park under her resisting, buffeted umbrella, she felt the louring sky and sodden, thrashing trees were her own blemish, a weight she had to carry on her shoulders.

As soon as she came into the busy, noisy, steamy place, putting down the umbrella and shaking it out of the door behind her, he stood up from the table where he’d been waiting and came over and put his hands on her, holding her while she unbuttoned her wet mac, kissing her – right cheek, left – as if they knew each other well. Her mind was still in the chaos of wind and rain in the park. They were both breathing hard. There might be people in the café who recognised her, had known her parents: she didn’t care. All the shops and cafés in Cardiff were poignant to her in that moment, suffused with a fond idea of home and the past.

– Oh, he said into her neck, – I thought you wouldn’t come.

He smelled of cigarettes.

– I’m sorry I was late. I was painting.

– Pictures?

– No, the bathroom window.

When they had got coffee and were sitting down he brought out a notebook and pen. His hands shook, but she remembered they had shaken on the train, even before he noticed her. – Listen, he said. – I can’t ever let you go again, English teacher, Henry James lover. Married to the senior civil servant. What’s your name? What’s your number?

She had forgotten everything about this man; it was like meeting a stranger all over again. He seemed more compact than she had remembered, more sleek, he might have had his hair cut in between their meetings, he was less like her idea of a poet. His eyes were grey-blue – she hadn’t remembered that – and slightly prominent, the sleepy lids lifted as if he were shocked awake. She could hear traces of a Midlands accent now in his voice, which was deliberate, strong, lazy. He contemplated her steadily, drinking her in, swallowing her, so that she had to look away, down into her coffee. Sometimes she thought afterwards of the man on the train as if he had been someone else, whom she’d never seen again after that first time.

Cora had no notebook with her. Paul wrote down his name and mobile number on a scrap of paper he found screwed up in his pocket, and she put it in her purse, still thinking she could throw it away later, or put it through the shredder when she got back to London. He took her hand, hot from nursing her coffee cup, in both of his, unfurled her palm and kissed it, pressed his knees hard against hers under the table. She thought: this works, it’s his system, he’s done this with women before. It’s not a trick or anything, but he’s worked out that if you prevaricate too long, you pass a point where you can’t get back to the truth of what you really want from the other person, and you wind round and round each other in tedious games, which are for children. So if you want sex, you might as well be plain about it, seize the possibility that’s flowering at once, before it passes. That’s all this is.

– Cora. I made up names for you. But none of them was as good as that.

– This is ridiculous. We don’t know one another.

– I don’t want to know you. Not so that you’re familiar, filmed with familiarity, so that I forget the shock of you.

– You might not like me if you knew me.

– I like you. But that’s the least of it.

What would she think of him, she wondered, if she was watching this from a cold distance, if she wasn’t herself? Her nostrils tightened for a moment in disgust. She didn’t want to be one of those women with hardened faces, joking about sex, lighting up at the idea of sex like an old, tired torch when the contacts are pressed, expert in techniques and devices.

But then, Paul – Paul, she savoured the name, as though she had always kept it ready, empty, as a mansion prepared for him – Paul wouldn’t have wanted one of those women.

She thought: isn’t it what I came for? Aren’t I glad, that he is shameless? She didn’t pull her knees away.

– Where can we go? Paul said.

The house smelled of paint and damp plaster, it was coldly unfriendly. The men had gone home: Mark the plasterer who had been finishing the walls in the new front room, Terry the builder who had been putting in the units in the kitchen. Ladders were propped along the hall, cloths were spread out across the floors, the empty rooms resonated as Paul and Cora walked around them, stepping over the mess. If Terry or Mark had still been in the house, she would have made Paul tea and then sent him away, and she would have shredded his note. Everything they touched was thick with plaster dust; she seemed to feel it coating her tongue.

– I’m an idiot, bringing you home with me like this. Like one of those desperate women who get murdered. I don’t know anything about you.

– Cora, he said. – It’s all right.

But he must be thinking the same thing, anxious suddenly that she would bore him, or cling to him. Now they were alone together, they must both be full of doubt. She was coldly ready to let him go, and at the same time frantic at the idea of it. After he went, what would she have left?

– Here, there were two poky rooms, she was explaining. – I’ve knocked through.

He was bored, desperately bored, his eyes slid away from what she showed him. She took him upstairs, but only to show him the paintwork in the bathroom. He must be imagining that under the veneer of her caring for poetry, this was her secret self, devoured by the cult of home improvement.

– There was an awful old suite in here. You know, face-powder pink? Anyway, I ripped that out.

She could not help herself processing round the rooms, explaining the plan of the old house, which was disappearing under the emerging shape of the new. She even showed him the airing cupboard and the new boiler, hearing herself mention constant hot water, knowing she sounded quite mad. They opened the door and went into her parents’ bedroom. She had had the fitted wardrobes taken out and the floor sanded, got rid of most of the furniture. The room was a light, white box, rain washing down the curtainless window.

– My mother died in here, Cora said, surprising herself. – In this bed.

When she had opened the door, the whole scene had been laid out in front of her for a moment like a tableau, shaking her violently: she had seen it in a new perspective from the doorway, herself at a distance standing bent over her mother, the nurse on the other side of the bed, perhaps preparing a syringe, with her back turned. At a certain moment, without warning, something like thick black blood had gushed from her mother’s mouth, choking her, flooding over her nightdress and the bedclothes. She had met her mother’s eyes, seemed to read full awareness in them, protest and shame and terror. The next moment the nurse had turned round and cried out in surprise. ‘Oh, she’s gone.’

Cora had run downstairs and out into the garden in the dark, unbelieving.

– How long ago was this? Paul asked. – Were you with her?

He looked where she was looking, as if he might see something.

The room was empty.

In Cora’s room, he closed the door behind them.

In here too it was almost empty, there was just her bed and a chair, no curtains at the windows, a few books. She slept in here when she stayed over.

– At last, I’ve shut up, she said, lifting her face to be kissed.

– At last, you’ve shut up.

– It was funny, when I insisted on showing you the boiler.

– Sssh.

She remembered his hands holding the book on the train, as if he might tear it in half. Those same hands, hard and precise, now took possession of her – the hands first. They were determined, he knew what he was doing, he didn’t fumble over her buttons or her zip. She gave herself up to them, to the dangerous sensation of being possessed. When it came to her skirt, he told her to step out of it, and laid it on the chair. Her skin as he uncovered it goosefleshed in the unheated room; her nakedness was changed, because this stranger saw it with new eyes. He reached round with both hands behind her to unhook her bra, without looking; did it easily, and pulled it free. Her breasts spilled out against his shirt front.

– Oh, he said, and staggered, losing his poise.

She staggered too, they fell onto the bed together, then he had to scramble out of his clothes, pushing trousers and boxers down and kicking them off his feet, tearing his half-unbuttoned shirt off over his head. Their love-making was clumsy, this first time, because they didn’t know one another yet, they were too desperate for one another. He actually still had his socks on the whole time, which was something people joked about as unromantic. The violence of Cora’s sensations – afterwards she lay unsatisfied against him, too shy to ask, with her wet thigh over his, and then had to finish her climax alone in the bathroom, avoiding the wet paint – was something new. She had only made love with one boyfriend before she married Robert. Both her lovers, before Paul, had been deferential, grateful, careful, eager to please her; she had never shaken off knowing that they found her lovely. She had not known whether to believe in this grabbing, grunting, flaunting, heedless sex, when she had seen it on television and in films.

– I like this rain, Paul said, after the storm of sex had passed.

He didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere; she didn’t know how long he was able to stay. They lay listening to it: spilling over the rim of the gutter, drizzling into the street, bringing the exterior acoustic suggestively inside the room. The tyres of passing cars pressed, hissing, through surface water on the tarmac, footsteps smacked in pools collected in the hollows of the old pavings. This bedroom seemed somewhere Cora had never existed in before, as if she’d gone through the mirror into the reflection of the place she’d known. The veiled grey light, the pearly shadows blooming and moving on the walls, made her think it must be about seven o’clock, evening: but evening as an infinite sea to sink into, not the couple of short hours between afternoon and night. Back from the bathroom, she had not known how to lie down beside Paul, because she didn’t know yet what their intimacy was. She arranged herself on her side, not touching him, looking at him lying on his back, smoking a cigarette; she’d brought him a paint-pot lid to use as an ashtray. From where he lay hieratic, thoughtful, outward-borne, he skewed down his glance to take her in, his eyes sliding over her – naked shoulders, breasts slipped sideways, mound of her hip under the duvet – in a slow retrospective satisfaction, which ran like oil over her skin.

– Cora, Paul said, relishing her name. – Cora. Was this your bedroom when you were a child?

She said it was, but hardly believed it as she said it.

– Then where are all your things?

Before she started decorating, she explained, she had put all her old toys and children’s books in a skip. She had given away the desk at which she used to do her homework, and her clarinet.