Paul was helpless to stop himself sounding English and effete. I tried to persuade Pia that it was an unreasonable hour. But she was adamant.
Adamant wasn"t a word he even used.
Is he here? Pia persisted, desperate.
At that moment James appeared on the stairs in boxers and saggy T-shirt, bare legs fuzzy with blond hair, face bloated and blinking from sleep, missing a couple of steps in his fuddled state and only just saving himself from falling headlong by grabbing the handrail. Susan Willis was still staring at Pia, calculating, bemused but not preparing to be outraged or devastated, Paul thought. He"d only seen her in pa.s.sing before; he"d spoken to her once or twice when he was sent to buy ice-cream and she was serving in their shop. He hadn"t recognised then this reserve of irony in her. Perhaps she was sleeping in the annexe to be apart from her husband.
She says she wants to talk to James, Paul said. But we could come back in the morning, if you"d rather she didn"t stay.
She can stay if she likes, said Susan warily. If it"s what James wants.
What? James said. What"s she doing here?
She wants to talk to you. It looks like you might have something to talk about.
It"s nothing to do with me, said James.
No, it is, Pia said.
This is what she told me, Paul said, in the car on the way down here.
I pretended it wasn"t to do with you. I almost came to tell you the truth once. I bought the ticket at Paddington and then I didn"t get on the train. I got on and got off again, at the last minute.
I don"t believe you, James said.
He was rubbing his fists in his eyes, shocked out of his deep adolescent sleep, doubting and resistant. Pia looked shocked too, as if the revelation wasn"t going the way she had pictured it in advance.
It"s a girl, she said shyly. Apparently it"s a girl.
When Paul was born, his mother had been expecting a girl, they had had a girl"s name ready. There was some old wives" tale: you dangled a ring on a thread over the unborn child, watching to see if it spun clockwise or anticlockwise. So much for old wives" tales. Evelyn hadn"t been disappointed, she"d been relieved. She"d said to him once when he was still living at home that she hadn"t wanted a daughter, to be born into drudgery. A son could get away into a different life. Perhaps she had felt otherwise about it later, when Paul in his different life had left her behind didn"t visit often enough, didn"t know how to turn over on the phone with her the interminable, essential detail of her everyday. A daughter might have been a better bet.
Paul sat for a while in his car after Pia had been swallowed up inside the Willis"s house. Evelyn, when she was alive, would have hated the idea of Pia pregnant and unmarried; she wouldn"t have understood why they were all taking it so calmly, as if it wasn"t momentous. The world turned and the old forms, which had seemed substantial as life itself, were left behind and forgotten. There wasn"t any place he could go now to remember his mother. Perhaps her name was written in a book in the crematorium or did they only do that in churches? name after name in neat black calligraphy, with an embroidered bookmark on the opened page, furred with dead moths and dust. He preferred to think about her in the dark. She had been visiting him again, since he came home but with less ferocity than at first. In her dead self, in his dreams, she could even seem forgiving, the knots of her anxious fearfulness loosened. Paul was so tired, he almost fell asleep there in the car. He didn"t want to drive the last quarter of a mile.
Searching everywhere inside the house, he wasn"t sure what to expect. Was Gerald here somewhere, with Elise? Party mess was piled up in the kitchen, dirty plates, sleazy regiments of bottles, leftover food not put away in the fridge. Upstairs, the spare mattresses were dragged out onto the girls" bedroom floor, extra children were curled heaps under duvets or in sleeping bags. All of them were asleep amid signs of wild play cut short, the toy box upended, dressing-up clothes trampled on the floor where they"d been thrown off. He touched the door to the bedroom across the landing, which stood open as always: swinging back soundlessly, it revealed only the landing light trapped in the mirror, the expanse of white counterpane on their bed undisturbed, Elise"s make-up bag on the dressing table disgorging pencils, tweezers, pots of colour. The open window rattled on its catch; the flurry of rain had stirred up smells of earth and growth in the garden. Moths batted inside the luminous paper globe on the landing behind him.
Elise was extravagantly absent.
Were all these children safe, alone in the house without her?
From the window he thought he saw pale shapes moving in the meadow. He went downstairs again, deliberately clattering, running the tap noisily in the kitchen, calling out of the back door for her. Coming from the lit indoors, when he stepped out into the yard and then across into the garden it felt as if he pressed against a skin of darkness and then broke through it, having to step cautiously and lift his knees, wading in a thicker medium, not sure where he was putting his feet down.
El? Where are you?
She seemed to break through something, too, when she was suddenly ahead of him, the night thinning out around her form. She must have pulled a jumper over her shirt when it turned chilly, but he knew from her height in relation to his shoulder that she was still barefoot. He intuited across the s.p.a.ce between them her intensely familiar sceptical scrutiny, invisible in the night.
Paul? Is it you? What have you done with Pia?
I"ve left her at Blackbrook. She wanted to be with James.
That"s good, because there are children on all the mattresses. What was it all about? Is she all right?
Paul told her more or less what had happened, Pia"s deception and escape, waking Susan Willis in the middle of the night. I can"t believe we"re mixed up with the appalling Willises now. Actually genetically mixed up with them. It"s a nightmare.
Elise said she"d thought there was something funny with Pia"s dates. She had looked too big in the pictures she sent Becky.
Was it a good party, after I"d gone?
It was a drunken party. We drank too much.
Fun drunk or hazardous drunk?
Anyway I"m sober now. I"ve been sober for hours. I went out to walk under the apple trees by myself. It"s amazing what you can see and hear in the dark. Your eyes get used to it. It was lovely there.
Did Gerald turn up?
She answered airily, lightly. He did turn up. But you know what he"s like. He doesn"t say anything in company. He just sits there exasperating really. You"re wondering all the time whether he"s judging everything, or just oblivious to it.
He doesn"t like parties much.
Someone brought the speakers outside and we danced, but Gerald wouldn"t join in. Then I looked round and he"d gone. I suppose he caught the last train. But I"d told him he could stay. I mean, this was almost his home for weeks, when he was ill. We were very close, when he was here and I was looking after him. One night I had to hold onto him for hours, Paul, he had such an attack of horrors. Nothing happened, you understand, except that I held him.
Paul took this in.
Never mind, he said. You know what he"s like. That"s what he does, he comes and goes. He lives in his own world.
Garden flares stuck in the plant pots had burned out hours ago, the yard was dark. They peered in through the window at the lit-up kitchen: the piles of dirty washing up, the greasy leftovers, the chairs displaced, bunches of dried herbs and corn dollies and postcards pinned to the beams and thick with dust, school notices bristling on the fridge door.
Whoever lives in this house, Elise said, I"m glad it"s not us. It"s a filthy mess.
Me too. I"m glad about it.
I"d hate to have to go in there and get started on that washing up.
Her voice was careless; ma.s.saging her shoulders, though, Paul felt her disappointment and humiliation, resistant as a knotted rope. Her jumper slithered under his working fingers, against the silky shirt. Through his hand, he seemed to be in touch with the surge of her inner life, which mostly wasn"t disclosed to him: deeper and more chaotic than it ever showed itself in the words they exchanged. He felt as if he hardly knew her, this wife and mother of his children. When they first met he had been drawn to Elise because she seemed complete and fearless, with all the bright presumption of the cla.s.s she came from. Now, it was as though she was stepping out of that ident.i.ty leaving it behind like a husk into something new and more precarious. He was stricken and desiring, imagining her walking about alone, before he came home, under the trees in the meadow where the children had played in the twilight. What had she been thinking, all that time?
Let"s not go inside just yet, he said. Let"s walk.
It"s some crazy hour of the night, you know. We"ll be shattered tomorrow. Those kids"ll be up at the crack of dawn.
I know. But it"s nice out here.
At first they were both blind again, when they turned to face into the garden, because they"d looked too long into the kitchen light. Paul promised to get up first with the children in the morning.
All right then, Elise said. I don"t mind, if you promise.
Only Children.
I.
Cora on the eve of her wedding day, twelve years ago.
Before dawn she had woken in her parents" house, her childhood bed, to the sound of rain pattering and rushing, intimate around her, on the roof, in the gutters. Net curtains, blowing out into the rain through the open window, were soaked at the hem. She got out of bed and knelt on the window seat, where some of her old dolls and teddy bears were still arranged, out of habit she wasn"t infantile, but her childhood really wasn"t far behind. The house was in a terrace overlooking a narrow strip of park: she leaned out of the window, breathing in freshness from the saturated earth, the drenched, labouring trees. She didn"t care about the rain spoiling things, she didn"t care anything about the outer sh.e.l.l of the wedding, which so devoured her mother: flowers and guest list and caterers. Cora hadn"t been brought up as religious, and she"d never belonged to any church, but her religious instincts were strong; she was concentrated in the mystery of what she was undertaking. Also, she imagined herself in a continuum with the serious, pa.s.sionate women whose weddings she"d read about in novels: Kitty in Anna Karenina, Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow. She was twenty-three. The rain seemed blessed to her, sitting alone in her washed-pale pyjamas at the window, thoughts reaching out into the night. She had a vision of herself as a figure outside her own self-knowledge, emblematic, almost sacrificial.
It had cleared up anyway later in the morning, the sun had blazed on the gra.s.s in the park pearled with little drops as she walked on her father"s arm, white dress dragging in the dirt of the Cardiff city pavement, from the front door of their house to the little church on the corner. They normally only came to this church when it was used for concerts; Cora had performed on the clarinet in here, on occasions organised by her music teacher. Her mother had been agonised, wanting to pick up the dress out of the wet dirt, afraid to countermand her headstrong daughter. Cora had loved the weight of the skirts kicking against her limbs; she had loved the pa.s.sers-by, dog-walkers in the park, stopping to watch; she had laughed at her mother.
She thought of these scenes now with derision. They made her sick.
Now she couldn"t even live with Robert. She was living in her parents" house again, sleeping in her old room, although she had changed everything.
Robert waited for her to come home from her work at the library. He didn"t have a key to this house, so he waited in the park. The weather was hot for spring; taking off his pullover, he knotted it round his waist, feeling he must be even more conspicuous than usual (he was six foot four, fifteen years older than Cora, big and loosely put together, clumsy), among the few dog-walkers and mothers with pushchairs and small children. He hadn"t brought a bag, only a slim briefcase, supposing he would be going back again by train to London later. He hadn"t spoken to Cora for weeks. She wouldn"t answer his calls, and he only knew about the job at the library because his sister had told him.
Cora wasn"t expecting him. The kind of work Robert did he was fairly senior in the Home Office made him think calmly about the interview he needed to have with her, certain things it was time to ask her straight, arrangements they ought to put on an established footing. He was used to grasping bleak necessity firmly. He was only agitated, antic.i.p.ating the first moments that she saw him, in case she hated it that he was lying in wait for her. What would he see in her face, before she put up the guard he had got used to: disgust? An instinct for flight? Cora was tall not as tall as he was, but as a couple they had occupied an exaggerated s.p.a.ce with long legs and a narrow high waist, shapely hips. He remembered that she didn"t run badly, as a girl apparently she had even got to a certain level in county championships as a sprinter but her trainers had said her technique was too eccentric to go farther, with her big feet flying out at an angle, hands raised at the wrists. She hadn"t minded, she had been bored already with the hours of training; she had preferred poetry.
In the end Robert need not have worried: he was expecting her from the wrong direction. Cora must have had minutes to observe him and adjust her expression behind her sungla.s.ses before she decided to come up behind him and touch him on the arm.
h.e.l.lo. What are you doing here?
That flat brightness was in place, deflecting him as if it was a light in his eyes. In his confusion he hardly recognised her; she was wearing clothes he didn"t seem to remember, a skirt and a short-sleeved white linen blouse. She looked good, but surprisingly much older than he ever imagined her. He saw how completely she filled out this latest performance, as if she had lived like this for ever single, resourceful, bravely dedicated to her modest job, perhaps with sources of secret suffering. Her hand looked naked without its wedding and engagement rings. She still wore her hair long: thick, clean light-brown hair, chopped off crisply below her shoulders. His arm ached in hyper-awareness where she had touched him.
Sorry. I hate springing myself on you like this, without warning. But as you didn"t want to talk on the phone, it seemed the only . . .
All right. Never mind. D"you want to come in? It"s lucky I noticed you standing over here. How long would you have waited if I hadn"t seen you? I"m hot, I need to get a cold drink.
On the doorstep, fishing in her straw basket for the key, for a moment she couldn"t find it. She had lost innumerable keys over their years together; she"d be humiliated if she"d lost this one now. He was as relieved as she was when she dug it out from among the rest of the female apparatus in there: purse, apple, sunscreen, mobile, make-up bag, book, tissues.
The house inside was blessedly cool, shadowy because before she left at midday (her job at the library was only part-time) Cora had pulled down the blinds at the windows. Without asking, she made Robert a gin and tonic what he always drank. She poured herself tonic, put ice and lemon in it, then, after hesitating, splashed gin in it too. They stood in the kitchen.
So . . .
I haven"t come to pester you, he said. It"s just a few practical arrangements, about the flat and so on. Of course, half of it"s yours.
I don"t want half the flat.
All that"s settled with the lawyers. But I ought to have your name taken off the mortgage, in case anything happened to me and you were liable. And we ought to take your name off the bank account too, I suppose. If you think that"s best.
He suffered, seeing her name beside his on the cheque book and bank statements.
I"ve brought instructions you need to sign.
On the kitchen table, he began unzipping the briefcase.
I don"t want anything.
She turned and went pacing with her long stride around the ground floor of the house, carrying her drink. He followed her. Self-conscious about her height, she always wore flat shoes; today they were brown brogues, decorated on the toe with a flower cut out of the same-coloured leather.
I can"t talk about this now, Robert.
You"ve done things up very nicely here.
Oh G.o.d!
It was an undistinguished late-Victorian terrace at the thin end of a long park, smaller inside than it looked from the front; her parents had bought it shortly after they were married, in the late Sixties. Robert had trouble making out his in-laws" old house now, underneath what Cora had done to it since she inherited: knocking the two reception rooms into one, extending the kitchen into a new conservatory, sanding the floors, painting everything white, getting rid of most of the old furniture. She had had the building work done while she was still living with him in London; they had talked at first as if she would sell the house when it was finished. He spotted some of her father"s framed geological maps still on the walls, kept presumably for their aesthetic appeal. This question troubled him: whether it was still the same place as it had been when Alan and Rhian lived here, or whether a house was a succession of places, blooming one after another inside the same frame of stones and brick and timber.
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 gla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s, mournfully aloof from the squat, bustling shopping street of fast-food joints, quirky cafes, 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 p.r.o.neness 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.