The London Train (31 page)

The school was Victorian, with twin doorways for Boys and Girls, behind a venerable church; those were the days, Bar said. Then she sat slumped behind the steering wheel with her eyes closed, suggesting the performance of her personality was exhausting. Opening them, she talked about Robert as if they’d never left the subject.

– His cutting out like this isn’t so untypical, actually. From what I remember. He’s rather an Olympian, you know. Well, I expect you know. High-handed. Like when after he left school he was so absolutely set on going into the army – which I thought lunacy – then something or other happened in the early stages of training to make him change his mind, and he just walked away.

Stonily Cora stared forward through the windscreen, jealous of Bar’s claim to prior knowledge of Robert. She hadn’t known any story about him wanting to be in the army.

– Literally walked away. Set out on the road, and came home. Well, I expect he caught a bus or something. But straight home. Except they didn’t really have a home, of course, after their parents smashed. So to my parents’ house in Devon actually, of which he used to be very fond. He was in all kinds of trouble for absconding; people had to run around after him, pulling strings so that he got away with it. I don’t remember the details. When he’s finished with something, he just drops it, tramples it on his way to the next thing. I should know. Bingo was my dearest, bestest friend when we were kids. It’s a shame. We should never have got in the sack together. Fucks everything up, always. Avoid the sack. Too late of course for you. But good advice. And not much of a lover anyway. You won’t mind me saying that, as you’re separated.

Noggin when he appeared, borne on a tide of children, was small and pale, with swags of shadow under his eyes to match his mother’s. Shoving a couple of drawings indifferently at her (‘Nog, these are utterly splendid’), he slung his bag across the back seat and announced like a gloomy little prince that he would get car-sick if he wasn’t in the front. Cora didn’t offer to change places. It was difficult to imagine him rampaging.

– Gummo stinks the place out, he complained.

Barbara dropped Cora off at the station.

– Did you think of looking for him at our old place near Ilfracombe? she suggested at the last minute, leaning out of the car window. – As I said, he used to be fond of it. They stayed there, even before their parents died. My brother and I still keep it up – can’t afford it, but you know, it’s our childhood. Bing had lots of happy holidays there.

– Where is that?

Bar explained to her how to find it, and then Cora remembered having spent a few days in the house once, when she and Robert were first together. – I hadn’t realised it belonged to you.

– It’s just like him not to tell you.

But Cora decided not to go to Ilfracombe. If Robert was there, it must mean he didn’t want her to find him.

On the train, when Cora opened the
Guardian
supplement, she found a piece by Paul: a double spread about his childhood reading. Trapped in her window seat – a woman beside her tapped her keyboard inexorably – Cora gasped for a moment for air, crumpling the pages down in her lap, drinking in help from the landscape that was still and cooling beyond the window glass; a green hill, a little stand of birch trees. His picture come upon so unexpectedly was a blow. She’d never had any photograph of him apart from the out-of-date one on the back flap of his books. She looked again. He was in quarter-profile, staring sombrely in black and white, outlined against bookshelves. Painfully, Cora had to begin to supply him with a study in his house somewhere in the Monnow Valley. She couldn’t read the blurry titles on the spines of the books. Paul’s hair was untidy and she thought that his air of spiritual, troubled absorption was contrived for the camera. He had become already not quite the man she’d known, changed by whatever had happened to him since they parted: the set of the full, pale lips was more definite, the grain of the complexion thicker, the jaw fleshed more heavily. He had never belonged to her.

There was a childhood picture too, which was almost more wounding – the socks pulled tightly up, the skinny chest thrust forward as if at attention, the too-beaming offer of himself to his mother or whoever pointed the camera. Cora didn’t know if she could bear to read the article – and then she read it. Paul remembered borrowing books about nature from the Birmingham central library when he was a boy. His idea of nature at that time, he wrote, had been as a Platonic intimation of a more real reality outside the built-up cave of his city present: the lists of bird names and diagrams of animal spoor were symbols of a transcendent elsewhere. That library building had replaced the Victorian reference library, demolished in the Sixties, and had itself been replaced since. He said that since his mother had died, the last link to his past in the old city had been broken.

So his mother had died.

And his oldest daughter must have had a baby; he was a grandfather, which seemed extraordinary. This daughter must be living with them now, or near them, because he implied that he saw his granddaughter every day.

It was as if Cora read these things about a stranger.

Once, Cora had believed that living built a cumulative bank of memories, thickening and deepening as time went on, shoring you against emptiness. She had used to treasure up relics from every phase of her life as it passed, as if they were holy. Now that seemed to her a falsely consoling model of experience. The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.

Robert felt the afternoon outside without looking at it: mildly grey, unimportant. A flossy indefinite light made everything seem to keep still, out of indifference; summer was over, foliage wasn’t miraculous any longer, only a plain fact. Footsteps approaching in the street, and passing, didn’t rouse him. He was in Cora’s house in Cardiff, sitting with his back to the window, at the wooden table in the front room she used as a desk (but didn’t use much), writing a letter on her laptop, painstakingly picking out the letters with his right hand because his left (he was left-handed) was bandaged, and in a sling. The air of the house was vaguely stale around him – he had been there now for two days, waiting for her, and he hadn’t opened any windows, or got round to washing any of the dishes he’d used, which were piled in the kitchen sink, though he fully intended to attack them sometime soon (his excuse to himself was that the bandage made chores bothersome). He hadn’t gone out once since he arrived, in case he missed Cora, but there had been food in her freezer, home-cooked and meticulously labelled in her big clear hand. Defrosting and heating soup and shepherd’s pie in her microwave, he had felt himself in a kind of comical, tenuous connection with her, though only through his theft; eating her food alone, the illusion of their connection failed him. He did not know what she would think of his invading here, making himself at home among her things. He had run out of milk this morning and was drinking his tea and coffee black.

Deliberately, Robert hadn’t once turned the television on. He didn’t want to know whether they were making any fuss about him – or not, as was more likely (he didn’t flatter himself on the subject of his importance). He had not opened up the computer either, before he sat down to write this letter; nor had he spoken on the telephone until twenty minutes ago, when Frankie called him on his mobile. He hardly knew what he had done with all the hours that had passed since he got here. At first, of course, he had expected Cora back at any moment. When he’d arrived yesterday he hadn’t had any idea of entering the house without her permission; however, when he turned into the little concreted area in front of the house, he’d seen at once that her keys were hanging from the lock in the closed door. Robert rang the bell and knocked, but no one came; Cora must have opened the door in a hurry and then gone out again later, not noticing that she hadn’t retrieved her keys. From her key ring there dangled – as well as an ornamental knot of beads and ribbon, tarnished from being tumbled around in the bottom of her bag – other keys beside the Yale stuck into the lock, including a mortise Robert guessed was for their London flat. It was lucky he had come along before anyone else saw them. He had hesitated before letting himself in. But it would have been too ostentatiously tactful to hover outside, waiting to present the keys when Cora appeared, so that she could open her own door. He hoped she wouldn’t imagine that in rescuing them he meant to be reproachful, or gloating.

At first he had wandered round her rooms, picking up sections of newspapers that were out of date, and then not finishing reading anything in them. He had made a conscious effort, to begin with, not to take anything in: he was not supposed to be inside here, so he mustn’t take advantage of it by studying the shape of how Cora lived, or interpreting any traces she had left, as if he was spying. In any case, there were no traces; it was remarkable, he thought, how little mark the tumult of inward experience leaves on the external shells we inhabit. He couldn’t tell whether the clean, tidy place, with all its bright, hopeful decoration, meant that Cora was happy in her new life without him, or unhappy. He only allowed himself to notice, because it was relevant to his mission here, that there were no signs of any man living in the house with her, or even visiting it. Anyway, being so acutely attuned to her sensibility – and because she was so conspicuous, incapable of concealment, whatever efforts she made – he had felt sure from their few meetings and conversations recently that there was not another man now; just as he had felt sure when there was. As the hours passed and she did not return, he was less certain. After all, anything could be happening to her, in this very moment. Nothing could be worse, he supposed, than for Cora to come back from the embraces of some new lover and find him waiting.

Nonetheless, stubbornly, against all his best calculations, he waited.

It was even oddly a relief, inhabiting Cora’s space, as if it meant he could stop thinking about her. He had a lot of other things to think about. He had to make plans. On Thursday evening his mood was buoyant, exhilarated, amidst this comical blow-up in his career. Its tone was definitely farce as opposed to tragedy. He even began to be glad that Cora hadn’t turned up yet. Where else in his life would he ever come across such a pocket of free time as this one he had stumbled into accidentally: empty hours upon hours, with no external constraints, nothing required of him? Losing his inhibitions, poking round in Cora’s cupboards, he found her whisky first, then decided to help himself to food. He turned on his phone, only for long enough to glimpse a backlog of messages and missed calls he didn’t check through, and to send one text to his sister, reassuring her he was all right, but not telling her where he was. Then he looked on Cora’s shelves for something to read, and took down
Vanity Fair
, which he had loved when he was fifteen for the Battle of Waterloo.

Long past the middle of the night, when he felt sure that Cora wasn’t going to come now until morning, he went upstairs to sleep. The spare beds weren’t made up, and he didn’t know where to find sheets, so he slept in hers, only stalled momentarily by the sight of her pretty white-embroidered pillow cases and duvet. Really, he was suddenly too tired to care whether he desecrated anything. He hadn’t bathed for a couple of days; he was still in the crumpled suit he’d dressed in on Monday morning, although he had at least bought clean underwear and shirt on his way to Paddington. He had changed into these – more farce – in the toilets in the first-class lounge. He undressed down to this underwear now, climbed into Cora’s bed – only cold at the first shock – and slept that night more deeply than he had for weeks, or months or years, dropping down so far that if he had dreams at all, he carried nothing back from them when he surfaced, only seemed to have dredged some deeply silted ocean-bottom. Waking on Friday, he had no idea what time it was. He’d slept with the blinds up: the stuffy, unsecret daylight outside the window gave no clue whether it was morning or afternoon. Cars droned every so often in the street, the footsteps of passers-by were dawdling and indefinite after London. He heard their dogs’ scuffing, or the dogs’ nails tip-tapping on the pavement.

By the kitchen clock, it was past one in the afternoon. He hadn’t slept as late as that since he was a teenager, even when he’d been ill (he was hardly ever ill), or jet-lagged after a long-haul flight. Some tight-coiled spring wound up in him for years was winding down dramatically. He ran a bath and washed his hair, a strange indulgence in the afternoon; found a new toothbrush in its packet in a cupboard. His bruises hurt less, and he unbound the bandage to check on his sprained wrist, and the gash on his hand. After his bath he had to dress again in the same clothes, and he couldn’t shave. Still Cora didn’t come. There was no reason to think she would be back today, Robert decided: probably she had gone away for the weekend. But he would wait. His wait had transformed into something beyond its ostensible purpose, weighing him down like the silt from his dreams.

A tabby cat persisted in its efforts to make eye contact through the kitchen window; he let it in, fed it the end of the shepherd’s pie. Then he played music. Cora had taken most of the music when they separated, and some of the CDs he recognised as his, from before he knew her: the Amadeus playing Beethoven late quartets, Solomon playing Mozart. These had been his mother’s favourites, he liked them for her sake, even though he hadn’t been close to her. He had used to dread the scenes she made. Probably he’d been horribly priggish, he thought now. His mother must have thought he was trying to imitate his father’s detachment. She must have seen through the stubborn, principled stands that Robert made when he was a boy and a young man, pretending he was the only sane and reasonable one, conforming to some inflexible standard of decency and decorum, while all the time he was burning with a rage like hers, only turned inwards. In Robert’s dreamy, sluggish state now, the music penetrated him purely, without distraction.