The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  After lunch, Frankie fed the baby, the light gleaming on the skin of her breast where the tension tugged and puckered it. Cora wiped surreptitiously with a cloth around the sticky chair backs and edges of the table where the children had been sitting.

  – Are you supposed to drink coffee? she asked.

  – Hell, I don’t care, Frankie said. – I do everything. I shouldn’t eat this, for a start; look at the size of me.

  As well as brown bread, Cora had made courgette cake, which was still warm. Johnny and Lulu carried slices into the garden on their palms. Johnny nibbled at his like a bird, dipping his head to it; Lulu tried to coax the cat to eat hers. Frankie sighed, relaxing, admiring the cake and her cake plate and her coffee mug, white china with a pattern of blue leaves.

  – You’ve got everything so nice here. Don’t think I’ve changed my opinion about the awful mistake you’re making, leaving Bobs. But I’m jealous too. Everything here’s deliciously calm and organised. London’s vile.

  – It isn’t exactly that I’ve left him. We both agreed to try living apart for a while.

  – Rubbish, he’s desperate. You left him. Just because he’s an inhibited stick doesn’t mean he isn’t in torment.

  – He keeps trying to give me money, Frankie. He turned up the other evening, waiting in the park to catch me on my way home, with a briefcase full of forms and papers. He wants to make over half the flat to me. That’s how he thinks about relationships. It’s horrible. As if the whole thing in the first place had been like arranging a contract or a piece of legislation. It didn’t occur to him to ask me how I was feeling.

  – It shows how he’s suffering, that’s just what he would do. Don’t pretend you don’t know him.

  – I told him I wouldn’t touch anything. I don’t want any of it.

  Frankie groaned. – You think you’re so high-minded, but you’re both just as bad as each other.

  Open-mouthed, the baby fell asleep, away from her nipple, milk trickling at the corner of his mouth; she lowered him cautiously into his car seat. – By the way, I’ve got a new life-plan too, she said. – You’re going to hate it. But you have to tolerate it, if I’m tolerating yours. At least mine’s virtuous. I’m going to train for the ministry.

  – Which Ministry?

  Cora was thinking politics.

  – The ministry. You know, the jolly old C of E. To be a vicar. Can’t you just see me in a dog collar?

  – You aren’t serious. You don’t even believe in God. You used to be a Marxist. You used to hate the establishment.

  – The Church can be fusty, agreed. But behind the façade there’s all this anarchic stuff about truth and social justice. We need that.

  Reasonably, Frankie explained that if she’d been born in Baghdad she’d be a Muslim, or a Baha’i or a Jew, but the revelation most naturally to hand was the one she was born into, however imperfect and incomplete, because it was woven into her history and culture.

  – So I love Protestantism. I sort of love it, romantically. The whole strenuous wrestling-for-grace thing, inside the individual soul. That does it for me.

  – But you don’t believe in the impossible bits, like Jesus dying and rising again?

  Frankie’s face sometimes took on a certain expression of tactful patience if she thought Cora was showing her ignorance, or failing to understand a difficult idea. – Well, I do, though I’m not sure it’s helpful thinking about believing or not believing it, in that kind of either/or way. I don’t suppose I believe in the Resurrection literally. For me it’s a way of expressing the mystery of renewal, as a narrative.

  Cora felt her own face stiffening in hostility, false sympathy. Apparently Frankie had been going to church off and on since Lulu was born. She had spoken to her parish priest, and then to a Vocations Adviser; they had told her she could do her training part-time, so she thought of beginning when Magnus started nursery. If Cora tried to imagine what Frankie meant by grace, a kind of ash seemed to settle inside her, sinking down through her chest like a blight. She didn’t feel any longer that she had a soul, and she thought then that she hardly knew her friend, they were only connected out of habit. Love is a kind of comfortable pretence, she thought, muffling everyone’s separation from one another, which is absolute. Probably she had more in common with embittered Annette at the library than with Frankie.

  – What does Drum think about it?

  Drum, Frankie’s husband, worked for the campaigns-and-policy division in a major charity.

  – Well, of course he’s a militant atheist. But I think he thinks it’ll keep me happy. Or at least he thinks it’ll keep me off his back.

  Cora offered to put suncream on the children playing in the small back garden. She had eradicated from inside the house every trace of her parents and their long lives here, almost zealously, as if she couldn’t bear to be reminded of it; and yet she had never dreamed of touching the garden, apart from where the new extension encroached into it. Otherwise it was still laid out just as her mother had it: low walls overgrown with roses; a crazy-paving path meandering in the grass; a dwarf pear tree, which was blossoming now. Only Cora didn’t have Rhian’s gift for gardening. Nothing grew quite as well as it used to: diseases rioted among the plants, slugs ate them, the roses were arthritic and blighted with black spot, the lawn was full of dandelions, she forgot to water things in pots. Sometimes she knew they needed watering, and obstinately put off doing it. Every time she stepped into the garden, even while it soothed her, she also suffered from her failure.

  Later in the afternoon Cora and Frankie and the children processed across the road and along beside the iron railings to the park gate, bearing – as well as the baby – blankets and cushions, shrimping nets, picnic supper, plastic cricket ball and tennis ball, a bottle of rosé and glasses. Both women knew they must look like an idyll from the kind of old-fashioned children’s book they used to read. Other sections of the long park that ran through this eastern part of Cardiff for more than a mile were given over to cultivated beds, bowling greens, a rose garden; at its far end there was a lake with a clock tower built as a little lighthouse commemorating Scott’s expedition to the Pole, because the Endeavour had set out from Cardiff docks. Opposite Cora’s house the park’s ambitions were less strenuous: winding paths, grass worn thin under the spreading trees, dusty shrubbery. Older children were already in possession. Johnny eyed them warily: bikes dropped on their sides in the grass, a football game in progress, goals marked with T-shirts stripped off in the heat, girls paddling calf-deep in the brook. Cora had played in this park all through her childhood, felt as if it was yesterday the ooze of the stony brook between her toes, her mother’s dread of broken glass and lockjaw.

  They had forgotten the corkscrew and she went back for it; the others watched her summer dress flickering past the far side of the railings, her unhurried long stride with head held high. She waved to them, but Frankie, throwing the ball at Johnny’s bat – he could hit it if she threw from about a yard away – was annoyed and alarmed at how unreachable Cora was these days. Always she had had a surface poise like a thick extra skin, which Frankie had admired and envied; she supposed you had to be beautiful to acquire it, as Cora was. It had something to do with being so much looked at, deflecting an excess of attention, to protect yourself. But in the past she had been passionately available to her friends, beyond the act of herself; in fact she had used to seem to Frankie uncomplicated, in the best sense – admirably not opaque. Now, her spontaneity was extinguished. You knew about disillusion, but you didn’t really believe in it as a tangible force, or anyway not in its coming on so soon – after all, they were only in their mid-thirties. In Cora’s expression, it was as if a shutter had dropped with a crash, one of those dismal metal ones that shopkeepers install in areas of high crime. Frankie felt disappointed in her brother and Cora; she thought they should have had more resilient imagination than to have let their relationship collapse. They shouldn’t have given up so easily on being happy,
even if it was about not having children, which it might be, though Cora denied it.

  Frankie crouched businesslike over the rosé when Cora brought back the corkscrew; both friends felt the strain at the idea of the weekend stretching out ahead of them to be filled. It was the first time Frankie had come to stay since Cora had moved to Cardiff ten months before; both had looked forward to it and now they were both thirsty for the first kick of alcohol, as if they might otherwise run out of things to talk about, which had never used to happen.

  – Before you say anything, I know I’m not supposed to drink this, either, while I’m breastfeeding.

  – He’s such a feeble baby, you can see it’s taken its toll.

  Huge Magnus, on his back on a shaded corner of blanket, slept with clenched stout fists, reminding Cora of a pink plastic doll she’d had whose eyelids closed when you tipped it. They talked about the library, and although Frankie pretended to be sympathetic to what Cora described, the peaceful routines and absorption in administrative tasks, Cora was as defensive as if her friend had voiced the conventional pieties: that she was wasting herself, in a job where she wasn’t using her brains or her education. Cora wished she was alone; one of the girls in the choir had offered her a spare ticket for something at the theatre – it didn’t matter what. Yet the sunshine and the children’s noise and the playful scrap of breeze, riffling the pink candles in the horse chestnut, made out of the park an image of blissful leisure.

  – Bobs thinks, Frankie said, drinking down fast, – that you can’t forgive him for the fire at the immigration removal place. But I said you couldn’t be that irrational. How could you think it was his fault? He has to take responsibility, in the chain of command, that’s how things work in government. But it’s not personal. It’s not morally his fault, in a way anyone could blame him for. You couldn’t think that.

  – I thought you were the one going into the Church. Your idea of conscience seems pretty flexible.

  – So you do blame him.

  – Of course not, Cora said. – I know he’s an impeccably good man. Good in a way I’ll never be. But those centres are unspeakable, it’s a horror that they even exist. I can’t talk about it, it’s too awful.

  – What do you mean, good in a way you’ll never be?

  – Nothing. She added – I can’t imagine Robert saying that, about me blaming him for the fire. Whatever he thought, he wouldn’t actually say it.

  – Perhaps not in so many words.

  – You shouldn’t make the words up, Frank. They’re important.

  – You’re right, I’m sorry.

  – It’s OK.

  – Only I did know what he was thinking. He is my big brother.

  – You never could know, not for absolutely sure.

  They shifted positions on the blanket, each dissatisfied with the other, Frankie unpacking hard-boiled eggs and yoghurts from a cool-bag, Cora stretching out on her back and pulling up the skirt of her dress in a semblance of sunbathing. Lulu wandered out from the shrubbery to sit astride her, showing her an earthworm in a seaside bucket.

  – Look at my snake.

  – Don’t bounce on your Auntie Cora.

  – She’s not my auntie.

  – I don’t mind, Cora said. – She isn’t bouncing very hard.

  But Frankie lifted Lulu by the armpits and swung her away, protesting, skinny legs bicycling wildly. Only the memory of the contact with her heated little life remained across Cora’s pelvis and flat stomach for a few moments, vivid and distracting as when, the other week, Cora had had to pick up a starling that flew by mistake into the house and dazed itself, flashing round the ceilings and against the windows – its racing metabolism had seemed to leave its trace in her hands for hours afterwards.

  There had been no loss of life during the fire at the immigration removal centre, but a detainee in his fifties, an Iranian, had died of a heart attack a day later, which was why the ombudsman had been asked to conduct a private inquiry. Recent inspections had reported a somewhat improved regime at the centre since the scandals of the early days, and the local fire chief had been paying regular visits. The usual decision had been made against installing sprinklers – too prone to being activated in the event of detainee protest – but Robert didn’t think this would constitute a significant criticism, the ground having been gone over so thoroughly in previous inquiries. It wasn’t clear that sprinklers would anyway have made a significant difference to the spread of the fire. Building design defects – a failure to plan for the need to isolate sections of the centre in an emergency – were much more likely to crop up, but blame for those could hardly be laid at his door, as the centre had been operative for two years before he came into his present role. The problem came back to the perpetual tension between allowing the detainees to associate – they weren’t supposed to be under prison discipline – and the difficulty of managing large-scale protest, or controlling them safely in any emergency.

  It shouldn’t be too bad for us, Robert had reassured Frankie. He’ll say, of course, in the report that these aren’t very nice places. How could anyone imagine they might be nice? We can only be required to try to make them function as humanely as possible in the circumstances. It could have been so much worse. Staff followed procedures pretty well, the disturbances that started the whole thing were quelled rapidly, the individual who set the fires had a history of instability and had only been brought in the night before, there was a model evacuation, even the damage to the buildings had been limited. The couple of detainees who did abscond were picked up within hours.

  This fire had happened a year ago, when Cora was still living with Robert in London, in Regent’s Park; he hadn’t told her right away that it had implications for him, not because he was hiding anything from her, but because she seemed at that point to have stopped taking an interest in his work. (She had stopped watching the news, as well, and reading the papers.) He thought she must still be grieving for her mother, but this didn’t reassure him, he felt himself helpless to put up any argument against the blind force of her feelings, where he couldn’t follow her. Also, he noticed that she had started avoiding undressing in front of him in the bedroom, turning her back so that he couldn’t see her nakedness when she stripped off her top or stepped out of her knickers, hurrying on her pyjama top before she’d even taken off her skirt. He turned his eyes away from her, he went into the bathroom and took his time cleaning his teeth, he became scrupulous to protect her privacy, took her inhibition inside himself. It began to be their routine that he stayed up late, working on papers, long after Cora had finished whatever marking and preparation she had to do. Almost always she would be asleep, or pretending to be asleep, by the time he turned in.

  Eventually Cora had learned from Frankie about the fire. When Robert arrived home in the flat from work one evening, Cora was already in bed. She said she was ill, she couldn’t stop her legs trembling; she must have a fever or something.

  He was still in his suit jacket and loosened tie, skin sticky and gritty from his Tube journey. – Why don’t you take a break from teaching? he said. – You’re putting yourself under too much strain.

  – Is that what you think it is? she said bitterly from where she was huddled, clasping her knees in her pyjamas with her back to him, staring at the window. The late sunshine showed as shifting yellow rectangles on the thin muslin curtains.

  – 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.