The London Train (19 page)

– I don’t know. What is it?

– I told you, I’m ill.

He put a hand on her shoulder and it was true that she was burning hot, scorching him through the thin cotton.

– I saw Frankie, she said. – I went round there after my last class.

Frankie was pregnant at the time with Magnus, having some medical problems.

– How is she?

– She told me about the fire at the removal centre, and the inquiry.

He knew at once it had been a mistake to keep this from her. Nothing would convince her now that he hadn’t been hiding it.

– You don’t have to worry about that. I’m confident it’s going to be all right. Some effective work’s been done in those places since the early days.

He tried to reassure her that no one had been hurt, that the man who died had a pre-existing heart condition, which was in his records. The curtains at that moment were blowing into the room, lifted on a breeze from outside. Cora uncurled herself onto her back, gazing at him.

– Robert, you frighten me sometimes. What does it feel like, to say those things?

Under her scrutiny he felt himself transparent, hollowed out.

– Sorry: am I talking civil servant? It’s an occupational hazard.

– I don’t blame you for anything, she said. – Only you use this calm and steady language about things that aren’t steady.

– No, of course they’re not.

– Things that are horrors really. Filthy and bloody.

– I suppose it’s force of habit.

– Someone has to do it, I know that, she said heavily. – I know that, in comparison, I don’t do anything.

When for a while Cora had visited Thomas, the Zimbabwean detainee, he had been at a removal centre in an old building outside Brighton, converted from a private school, with a spreading cedar – left over from the past – still in the garden, where the detainees were not allowed. Even as a visitor, she had been body-searched and made to leave her fingerprints. The shaming details of the place – Thomas had told her that when they brought him in they used fabric leg-restraints, so he couldn’t run – still recurred, not in her dreams, but when she was defenceless, alone with herself, skewered by her guilt (she had been his only contact in the outside world, and after eighteen months she had stopped visiting). Robert’s fire, however, had been at one of the new purpose-built centres: brick buildings on brownfield sites, as blandly featureless from the outside as mail-order depots or units on an industrial estate. The brutality of Victorian prisons had a negative moral weight, pressing heavily on the earth; this modern apparatus for punishment stood lightly and provisionally in the landscape, like so many husks, or ugly litter. The appearance of the buildings, Cora thought, was part of the pretence that what was processed inside them was nothing so awful or contaminating as flesh and blood. The buildings made possible the dry husks of language in the reports that Robert read, and wrote.

Frankie was going to drive back to London on Monday morning when Cora went off to work. Saturday night was rather a flop. The two women had promised themselves hours of talk once the children were asleep, but by the time Cora came downstairs from reading Johnny his story, Frankie, who had put things in the dishwasher, was yawning and ready for bed.

– God, I’m so pathetic. It was the wine in the sunshine. It’s the bloody baby. Literally, I’m dozing on my feet: look!

She presented her moon-face for inspection – broad nose, big cheeks, thick dark brows – pegging her eyelids up with her fingertips; her girlish looks were gaining gravitas, personality stamping on them strongly as a mask. Cora began to believe in her as a vicar. As soon as Frankie had taken herself upstairs, Cora felt excessively wide awake; resentment dispersed like a fog lifting, and affectionately she tidied away her visitors’ mess, thinking she would have made a more organised mother than Frankie. Pouring herself another glass of rosé, she stalked round the ground floor of the house in her bare feet, thirsty for contact and explanation now there was no one to explain to. Her lovely rooms, unappreciated, wasted their charm on the warm evening air; the windows were open, and footsteps passing in the street sounded unexpectedly close. The dishwasher churned in the kitchen. The usual quiet of the house was thickened by the sleeping children in it, their restlessness and rustling and little cries: inexperienced, she stopped at each new noise, listening anxiously.

As it grew dark, she lit the candles meant to enchant Frankie, then met herself accidentally in the mirror above the fireplace in the front room, ghost in her own house, with a shocked hostile look, unlike the carefully prepared scrutiny she usually allowed herself. In the mornings, or before she went out, she put on her make-up and arranged her clothes satisfactorily, as if she existed as a mannequin outside herself, whose beauty must be served. Catching herself unawares now, she seemed to see something that she had squandered, and had to answer for, and couldn’t. Her face wasn’t broad and dreamy, suited to quiet work at the library, as she liked to feel it from inside: the weight had fallen off her jaw and cheek bones, she looked questing and thwarted. The mirror was old, foxed, an antique, divided in portions like a triptych, in a thin cracked gilt frame. In the empty grate beneath, a fan of folded gold paper was arranged with some pinecones sprayed gold.

She did not want to see herself, or think about herself. The appetite for communication, which Frankie had roused and then frustrated by going to bed, broke in dangerously on the steady rhythm that her days had fallen into. Tamping down her restlessness, Cora put on the television, with the sound turned low. She remembered watching a different television in the childhood room that had occupied this same space, where she had once known how to possess herself confidently. That sitting room had been poky and papered in her mother’s cautious stab at 1970s taste – stylised pink flowers on a mud-green background. Now that it was gone, Cora regretted that she had not kept even one scrap of this paper, which must have been one of the first things she opened her eyes on; although when she was a teenager, she had complained to her mother that it made her feel like a frog in a pond. But she had begun work on the house in a kind of frenzy, wanting to alter everything after her parents’ deaths, which she had not foreseen, and which had struck her terribly. She had always thought they would come into their own in old age, they would have a talent for it. Dad’s fatal heart attack, however, had come only two months after he took early retirement from teaching mining engineering at the University of Wales Institute; a year later, Mum was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. Cora had taken six months off work to nurse her.

Magnus cried several times in the night (poor Frankie, who was trying to get him to sleep through), and on Sunday morning Johnny and Lulu woke up early. Cora dozing in her own bed heard them, excited and tentative, testing the freedom of the downstairs emptied of adults, conferring in miniature voices, Johnny chiding and bossy: ‘You mustn’t touch, Lulu!’ She gambled that they wouldn’t break anything, and wondered idly what it would mean to have a sibling to explore with. They would be stepping with bare feet where the sun, on another fine day, crept its long, low, early light along the blond floorboards, warming them: Cora liked doing that too. If this long spell of lovely weather was unnatural, she could hardly make herself care. They would be entranced as well by the next-door cat, meowing through the glass from where it waited every morning on the sill outside, though she determinedly wasn’t feeding it.

Luxuriantly she turned over under the cotton sheet that was all she needed these warm nights, closing her eyes, floating at the edge of the dream she had woken from, of a long pillared hall like a temple, sloping down out of sight. Sometimes sleeping alone, after twelve years of marriage, was a huge relief; it was blissful to stretch her limbs across an empty space, weightless and free. In her memory, sometimes, Robert beside her in the bed had been a brooding and oppressive mass in those last months, weighing down the mattress on his side until she had to cling to her edge so as not to roll into him. She had lain tensed in the cramped margin, his sexual need gnawing at her (‘sexual need’ had been her mother’s ashamed phrase for it), though she obstinately ignored it, and he never tried to touch her if she didn’t want him to. At other times in her new life, however, Cora was so scalded by her solitary nights, sodden with dreams and longing, that she crawled downstairs to sleep sitting up in one of the armchairs. Then, her empty bed seemed ignominious, as if she was an old woman already, having lost everything.

After breakfast Frankie took the children to the little church along the road where Cora was married, while Magnus slept and Cora listened out for him. She made a picnic, thoughtfully putting in wet wipes and kitchen paper, bibs and nappies and changing kit. ‘You’re a genius,’ Frankie exclaimed, and Cora saw how she almost went on to say that Cora was gifted for motherhood, and would have taken to it naturally, but stopped herself in time. Returned from her immersion in spirit, or whatever it was, Frankie looked washed with some new shine that made her impermeable to Cora. She had actually put on eye make-up and lipstick, combed out her mop of hair. Church had made the children momentarily big-eyed and solemn. Lulu was sucking her fingers wrapped in the skirt of her dress; the three of them composed a picture of wholeness and grace. Some great-uncle or other of Robert and Frankie’s had been a bishop; Frankie’s Drum belonged to that world too, his family had a big house and land in Scotland somewhere. These patterns were remembered in the blood, Cora thought sceptically. It didn’t even spoil the picture of wholeness when Johnny flung a door open in Lulu’s face and there were howls, Frankie shouted that he was an ‘absolute bloody idiot’. Long ago, when they first met in Leeds, Cora had felt the difference of class background as an uneasy terrain dividing her from Frankie, in crossing which Frankie must somehow make the first move, propitiatory. Cora had been brought up a socialist. Her father’s father had been an electrician in a coal mine and had volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. She had used to burn with a sense of the wrongs done to her forefathers in history.

The friends got on more easily on this second day of their weekend together, because they’d stopped expecting too much. They drove up to the folk museum at St Fagans; almost carelessly, they let slip the old strenuous habits of their intimacy, and were nice to one another instead, even polite. Their lagging progress round the Welsh farmhouses and cottages done up in the styles of different periods, with smoking hearths or fumy gas-lamps, gave adequate shape to an aimless day; they bought flour from the water mill, rode in the horse-drawn cart. There were goats for Lulu to love and dread, and their picnic was blessedly wasp-free. Cora took them backwards down the row of tiny terraced houses from Merthyr Tydfil, furnished as a historical sequence: starting in the 1970s, they retreated to the early nineteenth century, because that was the only way she could bear to do it when she was a romantic girl, passionate against modern degradation, besotted with a purer past. Now, the past choked her, its tiny stuffiness, antimacassars and flat irons, rag rugs and faded photographs of dignified assemblies of Baptists, all men. Frankie peeked, when an attendant wasn’t looking, into a massive old Bible in Welsh, which Cora couldn’t read although her mother’s family had been Welsh-speakers. Discreetly, neither of them mentioned religion when they stepped into the Unitarian chapel, with its democratic pulpit in the midst of the congregation, its clear light from windows of plain glass.

The longed-for idea of children was always remote from the reality of hours that Cora actually spent with Johnny and Lulu and Magnus. Caught up for the day in their clamour and tangled joys and crises, her skin printed with the hot impress of little bodies, it hardly occurred to her to feel the old cruel twist of her own lack. She couldn’t want somebody else’s children. She would be relieved – however much she liked them – when somebody else’s were put to bed at the end of the day; she couldn’t yearn after these completed persons, who belonged to themselves. Frankie’s children only made her envious when they were absent, reduced to an idea; and in any case, the lack that had used to be savage pain was flattening into a duller wincing, in the more general ruin of her life. The great thing was to carry it off, so that no one pitied you. Cora knew that she was naturally good at this. Walking round with Lulu on her hip, explaining things to Johnny without overburdening him, she was aware she made a picture of a clever aunt, or a favourite school teacher. An uncompromised adulthood could make a clearer air for children, sometimes, than foggy mothering. Once, when Frankie had taken Johnny in search of toilets and Lulu tripped, Lulu was not inconsolable, accepting Cora’s comforting as second best. That would have to do. Other families, passing their little group burdened with pushchair and bags, would not be able to tell immediately which one was the mother.

Frankie found herself explaining, while the children were on the slide in the playground and Magnus slept, how our modern sensibility, deprived by scientific rationalism of a mythic dimension, was floundering in darkness. – We’ve subjected religious beliefs to the wrong kind of scrutiny, as if they needed to be true in a scientific sense. So we’re desolated by our cleverness, in an empty universe. We need the symbols and stories that embody the idea of another dimension, beyond the one we actually inhabit.

– But just because we need them, that doesn’t make them true. Maybe there isn’t any other dimension.

– No: the fact that we need them is what makes them true. We bring that dimension into existence, our imagination in creative collaboration with the life-forces outside us and the mysteries of physics, which otherwise have no outlet into being known. Those forces are incomplete without our faith as we’re incomplete without their existence beyond us.