I like your real face.
She couldn"t answer. She carried these words round with her like a hot coal, hardly knowing how to take hold of them. Did he know about Paul? Had he guessed? He never gave any other sign. How dared he think he knew her, that he could judge what her real face was? She felt contempt for his schoolboy puritanism, disapproving of women wearing make-up. Treasuring them up, she thought of the words Paul used to her, shamelessly, for parts of her body and for what they did together. Robert never used those words, he never even used them for cursing. But then what Robert said about her make-up surprised her again. It wasn"t like him. Ordinarily it was in his nature to be vigilant against just such a loaded remark, with its knife-twist of appearing-love. Did that mean he knew? Was he striking at her, to hurt her? But there was never any other sign.
When Cora did her face in her bathroom in the flat she and Robert had a bathroom each, hers was all mirror gla.s.s and white tiles she painted her eyes elaborately in defiance of him, put on blusher and lipstick. Then she scrubbed it all off and began again. She put together a separate make-up bag to keep in Cardiff, but often didn"t bother with it. Paul didn"t care what make-up she wore. She asked calculating carefully so that she didn"t sound needy whether he liked her better with make-up or without, and he said both.
The sc.r.a.p of paper where Paul had written his number was a compliments slip from the London Review of Books. Cora began to buy the Review, looking out for articles by him, but never found any. When she asked him about it, he told her some long, complicated story about how he had offered to review something for them, then got stuck and couldn"t do it, and now they were offended with him and wouldn"t give him anything else to write about. There were a number of such stories about his relationship with various kinds of authorities, fraught with offence and resentment; she wasn"t able to judge yet whether his account of them was to be trusted, or whether the feuds were in his imagination. He was relentlessly critical of power. His explanations of politics of the war in Iraq, for instance, or of the credit boom were illuminating, he sliced away the slack of lazy language, and always seemed to have access to facts and insights that weren"t common knowledge. She found it difficult to argue with him. Sometimes, thinking of the difficulties of Robert"s daily work, Cora wanted to ask him: but how would you do it better, if you were them?
It isn"t so easy, she said, to put everything right.
He said any ambition to put things right was subject to the doom of unintended consequences; she experienced his pessimism as a force, clean of the contaminations of privilege and duty. He came from a working-cla.s.s family and had studied hard to get into Cambridge, and then been unhappy there; he got away to London to do his PhD, and then spent years in France. He let slip to her once that his wife his second wife, mother of the little girls had been to boarding school, and although Cora pretended to hardly notice this, she seized on the information as if it set the two of them apart, connected through their modest backgrounds. When she told him about her grandfather working in a coal mine and going to fight in Spain, she could see it moved him, even though the episode in Spain wasn"t particularly edifying: her grandfather had become sick with dysentery as soon as he arrived, then injured his hand in an incident while training, and had to come home. Cora"s dad had used to tell it as a funny story.
She never, ever searched for Paul"s name on the Internet; it was a superst.i.tion with her that everything would be spoiled if she unleashed into their secret intimacy the world"s promiscuous noise, its casual judgement of him. Or it might have been worse if she"d not found anything, apart from the listings for his books. He insisted he was no one, he had no public profile, no one cared what he thought: but surely that was disingenuous, as he had a publisher, and readers? She heard him once giving an interval talk on Radio 3: completely by chance, because he hadn"t mentioned it, and she never looked at the radio listings. At home in the Regent"s Park flat, she had been half-listening to a concert of piano music, half-reading the paper: then suddenly Paul"s voice was loud in the room, uninhibited, talking about Georges Sand and Chopin, blasting her with dismay and joy. The traces of his Birmingham accent came over more distinctively in his recorded voice. All the time it was on, Robert was working at his desk, with the door to his study open, so that from the sitting room Cora could see his back bent over his papers, hear the occasional percussion of his biro, jotting notes. If he had only turned around, she thought, he must read the truth in her excruciated stillness. She couldn"t move from her chair to turn the radio down, or off, or shut the study door, until Paul"s talk was over.
She bought his books, the most recent first, having it sent to her address in Cardiff; she devoured it eagerly, full of admiration and interest. It was difficult, but her knowledge of him was like a light held up to each page, so that she leaped ahead and understood where he was going even before he explained it. At unexpected moments his ideas went stealing through her like a secret power. That summer, she often stayed over in Cardiff for days at a time during the week, supervising the building work in the house, getting on with the decorating, driving to fetch whatever was needed from Ikea or the DIY store. When Robert asked her when she was putting the house on the market, she explained that it wouldn"t be ready for a while yet. Paul came over every evening that he could. He said he told his wife he was visiting a friend who lived nearby, across the park.
Does this friend know what you"re really doing?
More or less. I haven"t spelled out the whole situation.
What does he think? Does he mind?
Don"t worry. He doesn"t mind. It"s not sleazy. He"s imaginative.
As if light flashed off some jagged gla.s.s-shard, Cora guessed: he"s covered up for you before. But she didn"t say anything, or allow herself to think about this properly. It was good to be busy all day. She got on well with Terry and the other men who came to work in the house. For as long as they were around, she was calm, could lose herself in her plans for each room. She was able to see clearly what effects she wanted: clean and open, unfussy, with bold touches of romance (the ironwork in the conservatory-dining room, the old French mirror she"d found to go above the front-room fireplace; at night in her dreams the little house was a crumbling, burdensome palace). Often she could prolong this calm into the early evening. She would take a bath after the others left. They hadn"t done the floor tiles yet in the bathroom, so she stepped out of the water onto gritty bare boards, then dried her hair in her room and made herself something to eat on her new cooker. Consumed in expectation of Paul"s arrival, she would hardly be thinking about him consciously. She had given him a key. Then, when she heard his key turn in the lock, for a split second she could even feel panicked; the serene hours of waiting for him drained out of the air, replaced by his complicated real presence, which was almost too much.
Once or twice when she was expecting him Paul phoned at the last minute sometimes using the flat, subdued voice that meant he was talking where he could be overheard to say that for some reason he couldn"t come. Although she was clever enough to keep her voice steady on the phone "OK, I"ll miss you" her reaction afterwards, in the privacy of the empty house, was extreme; she frightened herself. She never told Paul about these times when they were over, she didn"t even like to think about what they meant. She reached inside herself and found nothing there without him, only a void. Once, she stayed crouched for what felt like hours in the dark, downstairs on the floor by the phone where she"d taken the call; when finally she tried to move, she was too cold and stiff to stand up straight, and had to crawl upstairs on her hands and knees. There was no television in the house, and she couldn"t read. She would get into bed with the radio on, and try to fall asleep to the sound of voices, so that time would pa.s.s, bringing the morning.
He would bang the door behind him, his shoes were loud on the uncarpeted stairs. Then he was in the room with her, already throwing off his coat, which was sometimes a green country waterproof, dripping wet. She"d never seen again the grey-striped blazer of their first meeting on the train. Even while he was still talking, explaining, he would come over to look into her face intently, framing it in his hands. Sitting on the side of the bed to undo the laces in his trainers, he grumbled to her about his journey into the city, or how he was stuck with his writing. She too would be undressing, because she never quite wanted to be waiting for him in her pyjamas, or naked: how terrible, if she was eagerly undressed and he for some reason didn"t want to make love to her. Sometimes, depending on how much time they had, they didn"t undress right away, but huddled together in their clothes, talking and kissing; or she made him coffee in the kitchen, or got them drinks. She made Manhattans, which he said he"d never had before, although she couldn"t believe it; he swore that every Manhattan he drank, for the rest of his life, would be dedicated to her. Although it was their joke that Cora had tried on their first day to put him off by taking him round her home improvements, nonetheless she sometimes showed him the latest alterations in the house, and he tried to pretend to take an interest. If she made food, she felt as if she was playing at keeping house, and enjoyed having him watch her. Once, they were overtaken by s.e.x in the kitchen, in the middle of cooking tagliatelle, which was spoiled; afterwards they had to shower, because the newly laid slate floor was still thick with dust, however many times Cora washed it. They were comically concerned together, brushing out his clothes, that he shouldn"t be in trouble with his wife for getting his trousers filthy.
Paul reminded her sometimes, carefully, courteously, that he would never leave his little girls; once, when she sat on the side of the bed, and he was kissing her knees. She saw herself at that moment as a tiny figure at a great distance, like an illumination in a ma.n.u.script: a naked female with little white, forked, vegetable legs, emblematic of the vanity of earthly delights. Pushing her hands into his hair, bending over him, she felt the cup of his skull under her palms, as if she held his thoughts there.
I know, I know, she said soothingly into his hair.
As if it was all right.
Sometimes the phone rang downstairs while they were in bed together. Cora never answered it, but they had to wait suspended, not moving or speaking, while it went on ringing, sometimes for a long time, because she didn"t have any messaging service set up. Once, she forgot to turn her mobile off and it rang in her handbag, in the bedroom with them. Once, Terry the builder came in to get on with the kitchen on a Sat.u.r.day morning, when Cora was not expecting him (he"d been going away with his wife for the weekend, but they"d cancelled because of the weather). She had to run down to negotiate with him, in her sweater pulled over her pyjamas, elaborately regretful, making up some unconvincing story about friends coming to lunch. She was sure that Terry guessed something; she shouldn"t have pulled the bedroom door so carefully shut behind her. Their friendship afterwards, working together in the house, felt strained.
It was the rhythm of this love love, she named it to herself in the mirror, not to him that every hour she and Paul spent together existed in a perpetual present, which when they parted would recede in an instant without warning, becoming the irrecoverable past, sealed in itself, not to recur. She longed to have back his pursuit, his desperation for her in the cafe, when his hands had trembled, writing down her name.
I read your book, she said to him shyly.
No, really? Which one? Did you buy it? I could have given you a copy.
Even though it was August, it was cold in the room. He pulled the duvet up around her shoulders; she had begun to notice every sign of his attentiveness outside of the love-making itself, because she had flashes of fear that he was losing concentration, was over the first flush of his pa.s.sion for her. Trying to give him her responses to the book, about the representation of nature in children"s stories, Cora was nervous, not wanting to betray some gross error of understanding, even though while she was reading she had followed his argument confidently enough.
I can"t explain, she said, stumbling. But you know what I mean.
Animated, Paul pointed out the gaps in how he"d covered his theme, saying he would do everything differently if he could write it again. Cora had hidden away her copy of the book in her bag; she had been afraid naively, she saw now that he would be embarra.s.sed by her having sought it out, as if she was smothering him with her devotion. Paul suggested he should sign it. She hesitated before she handed it over, fearing the finality of whatever words he chose.
What if your husband finds it?
I"ll tell him I queued up for you to sign it at a reading.
Paul laughed, and showed her what he"d written. "For Cora, wild for to touch".
Some reading, he said. Better keep it on a high shelf. Do you know where it"s from? It"s a quotation.
The Wyatt poem had been a favourite since she was a girl. Of course I do.
Of course you do. You"re the English teacher.
In another life, she might have judged his dedication cloying, somehow preening. It fixed her. His power over her sometimes made him clumsy. The rest of the poem fast-forwarded past her awareness didn"t Anne Boleyn belong to Caesar, and it all end badly?
But I have had this, she thought. No matter how it ends.
She already knew that she was pregnant.
Paul went away for a week to Scotland, on holiday with his family (including the teenage daughter from his first marriage). While it rained in the south, they were lucky up there with the weather. Cora flew to Paris for a long weekend with Robert, but afterwards could hardly remember what they did, as if she only existed in connection with Paul. When he came back she held his hands in hers, burying her face in them: felt his calluses from rowing, seemed to taste salt, smell suncream, babies (his smallest girl was only three). She couldn"t tell him yet about her pregnancy.
That evening she said that she would like to spend time with him somewhere else apart from in her half-made house. Sitting up against the pillows, drinking coffee, the sheet pulled across his chest, he calculated how he could plausibly get away for a whole night. He would tell his wife he was on a research trip for his new book, about zoos. As he got more used to Cora he relaxed, tolerant and benign, while she stiffened as if a wire was pulling tight around her. She talked less, she shrank from making mistakes that would disgust him intellectually. It was difficult to believe that when she first met Paul on the train she had half-disliked him, thought him pretentious, been ready with her contempt in return if he"d despised her; those judgements only seemed flaws now in her own understanding. She was aware how anyone else would see her abjection, if they looked at it from outside; how she handed him his dangerous power over her. In her life before she met Paul, she had not known about this capacity in herself. When she had heard or read about other women desperate or abased for love, she had pa.s.sed over the descriptions with puzzlement or pitying distaste, along with a vague sense that she might have missed out on something.
At the end of August Paul drove her to west Somerset, and they stayed one night in a bed-and-breakfast place, a tall grey house on the main street in a little town on the Bristol Channel that had a marina and a paper mill. She was enthusiastic about the house precisely because it wasn"t too pretty: it was clean, but the furniture and decor were utilitarian, relics from the 1950s, brown linoleum on the floors and up the spindly high staircase. In the windows the gla.s.s was ancient and distorting. Their bedroom at the top, where the bed was made up with cellular blankets and a candlewick bedspread, overlooked a wet cobbled back yard and a high black wall sprouting ferns and buddleia. The weather was cold and it rained. When they went out she had to wait on the esplanade while Paul walked away from her, crouching over his phone in the wind, pulling his jacket up round his head, talking to his wife; the sailboats" rigging clanged and rattled. They ate fish and chips in a corner cafe, squalls of rain blowing against the windows, which steamed up on the inside. Cora hardly thought ahead, beyond the end of the night. When they got back to their room the heating didn"t seem to be on, though they fiddled with the k.n.o.bs on the radiator.
It"s dismal as f.u.c.k, he apologised gloomily. I"m sorry. I thought it was a nice little town when I came before. I expect the sun was shining or something unlikely.
Don"t worry, I love it.
She actually did love the bad weather that seemed to wrap them up together in the room; she had a moment"s intense consciousness of the scene, as if it was revealed by a lightning flash, or in a painting. Paul stood at the dark window with his hands in his pockets, irritated, water sluicing down the gla.s.s, while she arranged her wet outer clothes along the cold radiator. In the strange surroundings it was as if they had pa.s.sed through into a different country, might step out next day into the unknown. Cora"s new state of pregnancy made her feel unknown to herself. She hadn"t had any real morning sickness, but she had been sure she was pregnant even before she did the test: she felt a faint perpetual nausea, not unpleasant, and a floating sensation in her full tender b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her secret hadn"t had time yet to acc.u.mulate responsibilities or consequences: she couldn"t tell anybody about it, only shielded it and tended to it, like a flame lit inside her.
When Paul turned from the window, she was afraid she would see in his expression that he regretted coming there with her, but to her relief he had collected himself finally after his phone call. She should have trusted him to know how to seize their opportunity. He was ambitious: not in his career like Robert, but for himself, his experiences. He wouldn"t waste this night by spoiling it. In the veiled light from the beside lamp chrome, with a little upright press-switch, parchment shade, ancient twisted flex his tapered male silhouette melted her, wasting from the shoulders to its centre of gravity in the lean hips. She had not known what it was like to make love to a man whose body she worshipped; this had to do fatally with his arrogance, and some cold core of his freedom. Taking his hands out of his pockets, he admired her she"d bought new underwear in Paris. His look on her skin was like a force, and in it she felt the ends and limits of herself. Their relations were asymmetrical. She was the completed thing he wanted, and had got he had seen her whole that very first time on the train, her strong particular stamp of personality written for him to read, clear as a hieroglyph; whereas she was absorbed in his life as it streamed forward, lost in him, not able to know everything he was. She couldn"t have imagined, in her old self, the pleasure to be had in such abandonment.
You"re so lovely, he rea.s.sured her.
s.e.x each time had its different flavour and character. In the pink cave under the candlewick spread (they were cold, they kept it wrapped around them) it was muddled for Cora, because of the funny room and the rain, with imaginings of austerity, as if their bodies here were thinner and sharper, their sensations acute and poignant. They were the sensational expurgated pa.s.sages from a black and white Fifties love-affair, in cheap boarding houses, on wrinkled sheets.
She woke in the night from a dream of her mother. It was something trivial some anxious muddle of arrangements, an appointment to meet Rhian that Cora had missed, or was trying to keep, prevented by the usual stalling sequence of diversions, a bus straining to climb a high hill, students waiting for her in a cla.s.sroom. Her mind ached with the effort to keep fixed on this goal of a meeting, which moved ahead of her, dissolving; there was not any grief in the dream, only panic and pointless indignation.
Waking and remembering was as terrible as tearing through some restraining membrane; she flooded with sorrow and came to herself bunched up against Paul"s curved back, nose and mouth pressed up against the k.n.o.bs of his vertebrae, his skin wet with her breathing, her knees crooked inside the bend of his. Excising carefully, she separated herself without waking him, pulled his shirt over her head and crept to the bathroom, which was not en suite, but across the top-floor landing, shared with another room. They had been confident this second room was empty, but now she saw a light under the door, and was ashamed they might have made the bed creak, or rocked it against the wall. The house was still coc.o.o.ned in the hurrying noise of the rain.
The bathroom was crammed into what must have once been a boxroom under the slope of the roof; there was a slanting skylight, more lino, a shower with black mould growing in its corners. Cora stepped squeamishly in her bare feet. Around the toilet pedestal was a pink mat that matched the bedspread; when she tried the cold tap, wanting to wash her face, all the piping in the house shuddered loudly in sympathy, and she turned it off quickly. In the middle of the night the old-fashioned austerity didn"t seem quaint but hostile, the setting for a disaster. Doubled up on the loo, she sat hugging her knees, wanting to cry with pity for herself, but rigid with shame and dread. Her parents had adored her, she had been spoiled, their treasured princess, their little star. How hideous this now seemed, what dust and rotten falsity. The pain of missing them was so severe that she expected to see blood when she dabbed at herself with the toilet paper, but there wasn"t anything, it was all in her mind.
The door handle rattled, someone was trying to get in: Paul? Surely he would have called her name. Then Cora heard some peremptory and disapproving noise, unmistakably male and close at hand. She kept very still, although it would have made more sense to flush the toilet, or to call out that she was almost finished. Whoever it was waited longer, then padded off across the landing, pulling his door shut: not quite banging it, but loud enough in the middle of the night to convey righteous grievance and reproach. No doubt it wasn"t only the locked bathroom she was being reproached for, but also the bed springs earlier. Cora cowered in the bathroom, gambling like a child that, so long as she wasn"t seen or heard, she might get away with her invisibility.
What if I was really ill? she justified herself. I"d have a right to stay in here. Anyway, there must be another bathroom the man could use, on the floor below.
Eventually whoever it was came out and tried the door again, rattling hard; then he hung about on the landing until Cora was forced to flush the toilet and open up. Luckily the landing light wasn"t on, because she realised that Paul"s shirt hardly covered her bottom. Seeing her, the stranger made something like the same subterranean noise of disgust as before phlegmy and guttural. Their interaction at that hour and under the circ.u.mstances seemed stripped of all requirement for courtesy, or even mutual acknowledgement. Cora didn"t look towards him or mumble any apology, only fled across to her room; in the light from his door open behind him she took in a tall white-haired man, very upright, with a big choleric face, jowly as a mask. He was wearing pyjamas and one of those striped towelling bathrobes that seemed of a piece with the period effects of the whole place, knotted with a cord around his high, hard stomach.
In the morning she asked Paul if they could go out for breakfast, and he agreed, thinking she was only afraid that the food might be awful. He paid, and they got out of the house without encountering any of their fellow guests. They had a happy day together. He had brought his car; she had never been driven by him before. She didn"t know this part of the country well. After the rain the late-summer sunshine was chastened and tentative, and had the first frisson of autumn in it. They walked on a single-track road so little used that dark moss grew down its middle, and their pa.s.sing roused washed-pale frail b.u.t.terflies like dust out of the high hedgerows, which Paul said were ancient field boundaries. He said the soil was red because the rock beneath was red sandstone. The beech hedges were a revelation to Cora. Paul explained how in winter these hedges didn"t drop their leaves like the other trees, although they were deciduous; the dead leaves stayed in place until the next spring when the new ones grew, making the hedges an especially effective windbreak. The beech leaves were by now a heavy metallic green, almost bronze. At regular intervals a tree was left to grow whole above the height of the laid hedge, standing up eloquently in the slanting light, grey limbs thick and smooth in the s.p.a.cious crown, casting its shadow on the dense wheat in the fields.
The following week in an explosion of drama it was all over.
Paul"s wife Elise found out what had been going on. One morning when Cora was at work in London, in the middle of enrolments for the year"s new courses, her mobile rang and a woman"s voice asked, "Who is this, please?"
Cora knew immediately what this meant, and turned the phone off without answering. She finished dealing with a student"s query. That was it then. Her whole consciousness quaked, blacked out for one moment imperceptible on the surface but it was also almost a relief, the onrush of this antic.i.p.ated smash. Endowed with super-sensory intuition, she seemed to have learned everything about Elise from that momentary s.n.a.t.c.h of her voice husky, flattening, contemptuous, capable. She was not fine-grained or clever, but she was powerful. She made fine-grained seem mucky, sickening. Cora believed she could even see from her voice what Elise looked like: stocky, attractive, pugnacious, with sandy fair hair; or had Paul let these details slip? On the way home from work Cora dropped her phone into a waste bin in the street and pretended afterwards that she"d lost it. Everything she did in those last days was worse than cowardly, it was craven and inchoate; she was ashamed to recognise herself. She ought to have had something to say to Elise, if only to concede everything. But instead she fled ahead of trouble.
She called Paul on her landline, fingers so clumsy that she misdialled twice. The story was that Elise had suspected something, found Cora"s number on Paul"s phone, confronted him. Cora never quite believed that this was really the whole thing: something in the way Paul told it sounded incomplete. There was something else, another story he was keeping from her, involving much, much more confession and concession and preference for Elise and the children on his part; but she would never be able to find out about that, because a door was squeezing shut on her, closing her out from everything in his life. Paul rea.s.sured Cora that Elise didn"t know her name, or anything about her. This must mean she didn"t care to know, because Paul had convinced her Cora didn"t really count for much.
He had always warned her that this was what he would choose if he had to.
She didn"t tell him about the baby. She held this back, thinking that the right moment might come for spilling out with it. They spent one dreadful final hour together at the Cardiff house, rather decorous. Cora had dreamed that they might make love for the last time, and that she would tell him then that she was pregnant, but knew this was out of the question as soon as Paul came in. He was distracted and embarra.s.sed and after a while, sitting apart at the table in the kitchen, they ran out of things to say. Cora wished she had the strength to send him away; but she was weak, clinging on to her last minutes in his actual presence, however humiliating. All her desire in the world was used up in this one particular body, in his hunched posture at the table, in the frowning way he smoked two cigarettes and ground them out pa.s.sionately into the saucer she gave him. Even his suffering was exceptional and illuminating, because it belonged to him.
Elise had said: one hour!
When it was time for him to go, Cora clung to his coat sleeve and cried into it, pleading with him for some reprieve. He bent over her head, stroking her hair.
It"s my fault, he said, it"s really all my fault. I didn"t know that it would be this bad.
You"ll be relieved to be free of me, I"m sure you will.
Is that what you think? I won"t be free of you. That"s the whole trouble. Not so easily.
He was truly unhappy, he pressed her to his heart. She knew he meant it, and it would have to do. If he"d wanted her, he could have asked for her, she would have broken up everything for him. But he didn"t ask.
How could something that had filled your life up completely, to the brim, be withdrawn and leave no trace? Sometimes in the days that followed Cora felt as if the huge percussion of an explosion had left her deaf, sucking the noise out of the tranquil, ordinary-seeming days. If she died now, she thought, it would be exactly as if the whole thing had never existed. A body sank into a lake or a quicksand and the lake closed over again behind it, the broken ice healed.
She had not told anyone about him. Perhaps if Frankie hadn"t been Robert"s sister as well as her best friend she might have confided in her; in the circ.u.mstances this had been out of the question. There were no ordinary connections between her life and Paul"s, there was no way his name or news of him was going to crop up in conversation among her friends. Only Paul knew what had happened and Elise, his wife, in whatever travestied version she had it but he was locked away from her irretrievably now, he might as well not exist in her present. It was true that to begin with she hallucinated meeting with him everywhere. Every step she took, dressing in the morning or teaching her cla.s.ses, she got through in the delusion that she was performing for him to witness. The hardest thing was the jolting on-off alternation between the delusion of his witnessing presence and the knowledge of his real absence. With some last-ditch instinct for preserving her sanity, she continued her superst.i.tious interdict against searching for his name on the Internet. She bought a notebook to write down what had happened, so that it was real outside her own mind; but when she sat down to begin, she realised she couldn"t possibly find the words.
Anyway, a notebook would be too dangerous, it could have consequences: if she was killed, for example, and Robert found it. It seemed quite possible to her, during those first weeks, that she might be killed, or die, at any moment. Infantile, she thought she wanted to die, she wanted to be reunited with her parents, even in nothingness. What kept her afloat, unexpectedly, was the lack of any consequences from her crisis in her daily life. This might have been partly cowardice (she was ready to believe anything low or shameful about herself). She might have simply dreaded too much seeing Robert"s face change if he found out about her, feeling his kindness drop to nothing in an instant. In her weakness she depended on his kindness, took advantage of it. She didn"t allow herself to think any longer, as she had at the beginning when she was strong, that Robert might have some idea of what she"d done; if he"d ever had any idea, then he must have buried it. Burying was best. The friendly, decent surface of daily intercourse was best. Cora submitted to it, with the remote pale grat.i.tude she could imagine someone feeling who lived with a debilitating illness. Though it was wicked to make comparisons between her suffering and any real illness. Nothing had happened to her that weighed a feather in the world outside. It was nothing but the clamour and simulated agonies of selfishness.
The baby was the only vivid focus in her present. She clung to the idea of it as the key to another life, growing up out of this collapse; not believing in anything else, she felt this hope inside her body. Although it was the product of what she and Paul had done, it existed now beyond the end of that, and would exact love and responsibility from her on its own new terms, in the time ahead; she could already begin to feel this. If when it was born it looked like Paul, that wouldn"t mean anything to anyone except her. There was no one else who could have any reason to recognise him in her child. Her child and Robert"s, everyone would think. When it was born she would throw away the sc.r.a.p of paper with Paul"s telephone number, and all his books, including the book with the dedication, so that no clue was left to lead anyone back to him. She hoped it would be a boy, because Paul had only had daughters. She saw those little girls in her mind"s eye often, small as if through the wrong end of a telescope, so that she couldn"t make out their faces clearly: one was dark, one blonde.
Once in a spasm of longing she rang Paul"s number, and got a recorded message saying it was un.o.btainable: he must have changed his phone, Elise must have made him change it. It seemed extraordinary now that Cora had never asked him for his home address, or his email; she supposed she would have been able to find these out, if she"d really wanted them. Paul did write her one letter, after the end of their affair, which he posted to the Cardiff house: the builder must have picked it up, it was propped waiting for her on the radiator in the hall when she arrived one weekend to show the estate agent round. She had half-expected there might be a letter, and had held off the expectation. Tearing it open with blind fumbling urgency, her heart striking like blows against the cage of her ribs, she felt her fate was in it. It was a wonderful letter. He said extraordinary things about her, in words that were not too smooth or coaxing or clever; he struggled to tell her truthfully how he felt. He said they all had been ill with flu, that family life had not been glamorous, that in his fever he had dreamed horrible dreams of her, in which her skin was hard and cold, or they met in a polluted ruined factory, or she mocked him in a foreign language he didn"t recognise (was he dreaming now in Welsh, he asked?). He told her what he was reading, and that his writing was stuck and dead. Cora couldn"t forgive him for that letter. Sobbing, she tore it into tiny pieces and then lit them with a match in the sink, washing the soggy cinders down the plughole. She never answered it. She had nowhere to send an answer.
The estate agent thought she would sell the Cardiff house easily, for a good price, but Cora decided that she wasn"t ready to part with it, not yet. She didn"t tell anyone she was pregnant, not even a doctor. Until one day when at about fifteen weeks (by her estimate) bleeding began while she was at work, and wouldn"t stop; her colleagues called an ambulance, and kept the students out of the car park when the paramedics carried Cora out wrapped in a red blanket. She took in for the first time why it needed to be red.
It"s an encouraging sign, Robert said in the hospital when it was all over and she"d come round from her routine dilation and curettage. He sat heavily in his work suit on the plastic chair beside her bed, tie loosened, hands clasped between his knees, weighed down and made inept, inarticulate, by the degree of his upset and pity for her. It shows something could happen.
III.
Cora was weeding the books in the library. This meant she was going through the shelves, taking out any books more than seven years old, or any that had not been borrowed for a year or longer. When she had selected the books for withdrawal she had to scan them and make a note beside their entry on the computer; sometimes there was a flag beside the name of the book, warning that it was the last copy in any of the Cardiff libraries. Weeding was a job that waited for whenever there was nothing else more urgent to do. At first Cora had felt it was an outrage, she had argued indignantly with Annette and Brian that they mustn"t get rid of Penelope Fitzgerald, or Colm Toibin. But she had got used to the idea. Everything had its moment in the sun, then must give way. Anyone really interested in the back catalogue of these writers could buy what they wanted online. Books withdrawn from the system were offered for sale at 10p on a shelf beside the checkout, and Cora bought some of them herself. She had been ruthless when she brought her books from London, getting rid of more than half of them, but now her shelves were filling up again.
She always turned her phone off while she was at work, but today she was checking it every so often. She had made friends with a woman called Valerie at choir practice, and Valerie was trying to get them tickets for the Welsh National Opera"s Orfeo. Valerie was active in the local Amnesty group and had tried to get Cora to come along to that too, a.s.suring her they were a nice bunch of people. Cora thought she might join, but not yet. Sluggishly, her old conscientious discomfort had begun to p.r.i.c.kle her, like something coming slowly awake after a long oblivion; she had been surviving as cautiously and unimaginatively as an animal in its burrow, husbanding her strength. Now, her mind sometimes ached to stretch and flex itself. Was working in the library enough, as the expression of her belonging in the world? There was always a gap between the urge to do something useful and the actuality of what was possible. She was wary of making some gesture of commitment, then having her faith in it collapse, so that she let people down. This distrust of herself, of her capacity to act, was a new element in her personality. Once, she hadn"t waited to ask herself what she believed.
She saw Frankie had left an urgent message for Cora to call her back. Cora went outside to make the call in the little garden outside the library entrance. It wasn"t raining, but the day was stuffy, dark under a woolly layer of cloud.
Cora, he"s disappeared, said Frankie as soon as she answered. Is he with you?
Who"s disappeared?
There was a fraction of a second"s register of Cora"s insensibility, like a coin falling into a deep well: plink!
Robert.
Robert"s disappeared? How do you mean?
He isn"t with you then?
Of course not.
Frankie explained that Robert had had Sunday lunch with her and Drum, then apparently had been in work as usual on Monday. On Tuesday his PA Elizabeth had called Frankie to ask if she knew where he was. That morning he had been supposed to chair a meeting and hadn"t turned up. He never missed anything, even if he was at death"s door. Well, he never was at death"s door. No one had seen or heard anything from him since; he wasn"t responding to phone calls or emails. His office colleagues were cautiously and tactfully alarmed. Frankie had been round to the flat, she had let herself in (she had a key), but there was no sign of him. All his stuff seemed to be around; it looked as if the cleaner had come in as usual on Tuesday morning and nothing had been touched since. She was calling from there now.
Frankie"s voice had the elated breathlessness of crisis, although she was trying not to give way to that, to keep up her humorous, sane perspective. Anxious about her brother, she must be tempted to blame Cora for something: only Cora had ever disrupted Robert"s equanimity and imperviousness. She would also be squashing this impulse to blame anyone, because she was going to be a vicar and had to hold back from condemnation.
And that was Tuesday?
It was now Thursday.
There was a horrible man, Frankie said, an Adviser or something, who wanted to borrow her phone in case Robert called her on it, so they could talk to him. And wanted to take his computer.
A Special Adviser probably. A SPAD.
I"m not letting him have it. It"s Robert"s business whether he wants to call anyone. But he came over pretty aggressively.
Frank, would you like me to come up? I could be there in a couple of hours. Three hours. Perhaps I could help. I could wait there at the flat.
I don"t know why everyone"s in such a flap. He could have just thought, you know: b.u.g.g.e.r this, decided he needed a break from it all. Well, I presume that"s what"s happened. What else could have happened? He"s not the suicidal type. Or the breakdown type. He was fine on Sunday. At least I think he was fine. He doesn"t make much noise. We"re so noisy collectively, did we drown him out? Will you try ringing him? I know it"s awkward.
Of course I will. And I"ll come, Cora said. It"ll be all right.
It"s bedlam here. I"ve got all the kids with me, it"s half-term. I had to bring them on the Tube, Drum"s got the car, I"ve given mine up because of the carbon footprint. It"s only funny that Bobs hasn"t called us. Wouldn"t you have thought he"d call?
Cora told Annette she had to go, something had happened in London involving her husband.
I expect we"ll hold the fort without you, Annette said. What husband? I thought you were divorced.
In an emergency Cora had natural authority, seeing straight away the best course of action without making an unnecessary drama of it, or using it for any display of herself. She ordered a taxi to the station, asked the driver to wait outside the house while she threw a few things in an overnight bag. She tried ringing Robert"s mobile, but he didn"t answer.
The train was delayed, and then they were diverted to Waterloo. There was an incident on the line someone said a suicide beyond Reading. Cora hadn"t really been worried about Robert when Frankie phoned; her idea of him as the rational centre around which other people"s chaos whirled wasn"t easily dislodged. While they waited motionless in a siding, however, then had to transfer across the station platform into a new train, which trundled at walking pace in a detour past all the back gardens of Surrey, she began to experience the symptoms of panic: her heart raced, her thoughts circled round and round the same vacancy. Restlessly she stood up out of her seat, walking forwards along the train to a gap between compartments, deluding herself that she was getting somewhere, leaning to look out of the window, calling Frankie with updates. The other pa.s.sengers, with nothing else to look at, looked at her: tall, commanding, handsome, with straight thick brows, curving cheekbones, clear grey eyes, a concentrated urgency in her face. Men hoped she was a doctor or a lawyer. They tried to draw her in to their resentful outbursts against the train staff; someone joked tastelessly about bodies on the line.
Cora couldn"t help thinking of Paul whenever she caught the train to London: although she was skilled now at shutting up the memories of him, as soon as they came, into their casket, turning the key. She imagined a casket like a part of some dangerous, obsolete game, like the gold and silver and lead caskets in A Merchant of Venice, with their folklorish trite messages about love. She had seen him once since they separated: not on the train, but driving down a road in Cardiff not far from her home. He hadn"t seen her, he wouldn"t have been looking for her; she knew that his friend lived nearby. That ordinary glimpse of Paul sealed inside the completed fullness of his life on its parallel track apart from hers had made her nauseous, helpless, desperate. She fantasised about meeting him on the train and simply walking past without acknowledging him; in the first year after they parted, it had seemed very possible that she would meet him in her travelling up and down from London. Now, taking in the hundreds of strangers who made that journey, day after day, she had understood that their meeting was improbable which was a relief and also a flattening loss.