The London Train (26 page)

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 manuscript: 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 Saturday 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 café, 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 passion 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 embarrassed 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 passed 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 glass 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 café, 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 knobs on the radiator.

– It’s dismal as fuck, 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 glass, while she arranged her wet outer clothes along the cold radiator. In the strange surroundings it was as if they had passed 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 breasts. Her secret hadn’t had time yet to accumulate 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 reassured her.

Sex 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 passages 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 classroom. 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 knobs 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 cocooned 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 circumstances 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 passing roused washed-pale frail butterflies 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 spacious crown, casting its shadow on the dense wheat in the fields.