The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  Robert lifted his eyes from the plate set in front of him, only to look at her.

  – Probably only a normal climatic variation, even if within a changing spectrum.

  They both ate all three courses of the set lunch. It all seemed delicious to Cora – in Robert’s familiar orbit she recovered her old appetite. She had calves’ liver with creamed cauliflower and crispy bacon. Robert’s portions vanished as easily as if they were snacks, and he drank a couple of glasses of Bordeaux – he wasn’t a wine buff, he was bored by too much fuss, but he liked fruity reds. He had to eat, to fuel his big frame and his indefatigable stamina, and he could drink a lot without it having much effect on him, although he usually didn’t drink at lunchtime.

  It was strangely ordinary, eating together.

  – I suppose we ought to get a divorce, Cora said, towards the end of her salmon with hollandaise. Robert had been reaching with his knife and fork for an extra potato. He put the knife and fork back on his plate and for a moment rested his hands, clenched in fists, on the edge of the table, staring down into his food. Cora was appalled by the idea he was going to cry, and by her own tactlessness – although, when would have been the right moment? It would have been absurd to wait to discuss it with their coffee, like petits fours .

  But of course he would never cry, probably not on any occasion – Cora had never seen him do so – and certainly not because of a woman, in a restaurant full of acquaintances. That was nonsense, it wasn’t how he was made. He was just taking in with the appropriate seriousness what she had said. What kind of man would have gone on to take the potato?

  – I don’t know much about it, she went on quickly, covering up her confusion, explaining how she hadn’t yet fixed up the Internet at home. – Isn’t there something about irretrievable breakdown? We could go for that.

  – Is it irretrievable?

  She knew she flushed, and in her embarrassment was suddenly furious with him. – My God, yes, Robert. Have you no idea? Doesn’t it feel irretrievable to you?

  – Then you’re right, we ought to go ahead with a divorce. There’s no reason not to.

  – It would leave you free.

  He made one more necessary effort. – Frankie tells me there isn’t anyone else.

  The idiotic formula sounded incongruous, coming from him; she wanted to cover up his shame.

  – You don’t need to worry about that, truly. Not on my side. All I want is my solitude. You probably think that’s nonsense. But I would like you to find someone and be happy. That’s why we should divorce.

  After a moment’s thought, Robert helped himself to the potato after all, and cut it up carefully into pieces on his plate. Cutting up all his food before he started eating was one of the irritating habits Cora blamed on the form of education he’d been forced into.

  – If it’s what you want, he said eventually.

  They agreed that both of them would contact their solicitors. Cora would go to the same firm in Cardiff who had dealt with her parents’ mortgage, and then their wills, and then the transfer of the property into her name. Finishing her salmon, she had to dab her eyes once surreptitiously with her napkin, but she mainly felt relief at getting the painful discussion over with. Afterwards, however, it was difficult to start conversation up again. Casting around in her mind, she rashly asked Robert about his session at the inquiry; he replied that it hadn’t gone too badly. The day-to-day running of the centres was contracted out, and the primary remit of his team was contract letting and agreeing procedural guidelines; as far as that went, the questioning had been sympathetic. They had nothing to cover up; in fact, some of the work they were doing had been commended. He paused to take a mouthful of his wine; Cora guessed he was calculating how much more to say to her, weighing the chance of provoking one of their disputes against his desire, always, to give her the whole picture if she asked, which was his kind of truth-telling. Despite their relatively easy ride, however – he went on – he wasn’t sanguine about the outcome. She mustn’t repeat this, of course. But there was something in the air that made him think the press wouldn’t let it go. The Iranian who died turned out to have been someone, and the story was starting to make waves.

  – What d’you mean, someone? Everyone’s someone, you know.

  – I do know. All I meant was the kind of someone the press can attach a label to, if he comes to a sticky end.

  The Iranian was a journalist, he’d been living in London for years, not bothering to renew his visa; some of his short stories had even been published in translation by a small press over here, in the Eighties. He’d been touted around the usual literary festivals and readings for a while. He should never have been refused asylum, it had clearly been an error, by their own criteria – the adjudicators could be idiots, that was often half the problem. It would have worked against him that he hadn’t done anything about the visa until he was picked up. The man had been depressed, he’d had a drink problem for years, everyone had forgotten who he was, probably he hadn’t even looked presentable when he came up in front of the tribunal. It seemed he’d managed to alienate his lawyer and ended up representing himself – he’d made a bit of a mess of it, ranting and not making a lot of sense.

  – And then he died.

  – He had a dodgy heart. It could have happened at any moment, anywhere.

  – But it happened there. He had to die in one of those places.

  – It was a bad way to go. There are worse ones.

  Cora was determined not to row with him; she didn’t point out that a journalist and writer might have met one of those worse ones precisely in Iran, where Robert had been trying to send him. Sometimes she was tired of herself, pushing against his reasoning, chipping away at it, as if he was in her path like an immovable rock. It had been the same before he moved to immigration, when he was in prisons. She baulked at the detail of what he oversaw; he said that someone had to oversee it, so long as the government had an immigration policy, or wanted to lock people up. He said he’d rather do it himself than someone else, who would do it worse. Delivered with his authority, that sounded like an unassailable defence of what he did; but so were her qualms unassailable, they came from deep inside her nature, she couldn’t learn to suppress them, or want to, although she had tried when they were first together and she was very young.

  – What were the things the inquiry commended? she asked.

  Robert explained that his team was working on a new scheme, whereby within a few days of application each asylum seeker would be allocated a ‘case owner’, who would manage their case through every stage, from the initial interview through to integration into the UK. Or deportation, if necessary.

  – Was this your idea?

  – My recommendation, in a Review.

  – It sounds like a good one. For them to have a continuous point of human contact.

  He couldn’t let her plaster him with good intentions. – It should be more efficient. Speed things up, help move the backlog.

  The waitress brought the pudding menu.

  After her mother died, three years before, Cora had been in a bad way.

  Through the last months of her mother’s illness, she had made a good nurse, resourceful and resilient. Robert had been moved to find that the wilful girl he married, with her strong gift for pleasure, had this patience in her. When, after a spell in hospital, Rhian had come home to die, Cora had risen to the occasion as if it were a test, like other tests she’d always passed with flying colours. She hid her own desperation from her mother; she worked as if she was part of the team of doctor and cancer nurses who came to the house, and they had praised her steady, unsqueamish caring. – Whatever happens, I will be with you, she had said to her mother calmly, and her calm had seemed to help. Rhian had been querulous in life, but was rather stoical at the conclusion of it. Near the end, Cora had seemed to know how to make the dying woman more comfortable on her pillows, lifting her so gently and exactly.

  Carelessly, Robert had presu
med – without thinking about it – that this new strength would be part of Cora permanently. However, as the months passed after Rhian’s death, she was hardly recognisable as that capable nurse, wise instinctively about entrances and exits. Her old energy seemed irrecoverably broken. She wouldn’t talk to him about her parents; wrung with pity for her, he wondered uncharacteristically if counselling would help, but she insisted she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Drooping from her usual straight height, she complained of period pains, nursed a hot-water bottle to her stomach, went to bed early, watched television in the day. If they made love, it forced tears out of her eyes, which she tried to hide from him. He imagined her collapse as though she had drawn too deeply upon subterranean reservoirs of her nature that, once tapped, couldn’t be replenished by any ordinary process of rest and recuperation. Her spirit seemed darkened and poisoned, and Robert suffered because he felt himself inadequate to clearing it.

  Rhian had died in February; after Easter, Cora insisted on going back to teaching. At least it meant she had to get dressed in the mornings, and she had to prepare for her classes and mix with her colleagues and students. But he was afraid it was too soon. One evening when he came in late from work, he found her sitting on the side of their bed in her coat with her knees together and a grey face, as if she had dropped there when she came in and hadn’t moved since. Her heavy case, crammed full of books and marking, was at her feet.

  – How long have you been sitting here?

  – I don’t know. What time is it?

  Unwisely, kneeling to take off her shoes and help her out of her coat, he reopened a suggestion he had made before, and which she had fiercely rebuffed. Why didn’t she give up teaching at the FE college? A friend of his had contacts at a private school, the conditions there would be so much easier, she could take on part-time hours to begin with, the kids were eager to learn.

  Cora shrugged her arm out of her coat sleeve, pushing him away.

  – Why can’t you get it into your head that I wouldn’t work for a place like that, if it was the only school left on earth? I actually happen to prefer the kids I teach. They don’t have much of a chance in life, I don’t pretend I can do much to alter that. But at least I’m more useful, teaching them basic literacy skills, than cramming pampered brats for Oxbridge. And I don’t have discipline problems. I’m an experienced teacher. Where do you get your ideas of what goes on in a place like ours: from the Daily Mail ?

  – But look at you. You’re desperate with fatigue. You owe it to yourself to take it easy. Just for a few months, till you’re feeling better.

  – I suppose you’re blaming my principles now, for me not getting pregnant?

  He was slow to rearrange his insights in the light of this new element; he must have shaken his head, he thought afterwards, like the bewildered ox he was.

  – Getting pregnant? Is that what you want?

  – Oh, Robert: how could you not know?

  – But aren’t you having those injections?

  She said she had stopped having the injections two years ago: he was astonished, but didn’t question that she hadn’t discussed this with him at the time, or ever told him. She said that she had ‘wanted it to be a surprise’. He accepted that in this area of experience women had a natural primacy, and must make up the rules according to their own mysterious intimations.

  In two years, nothing had happened. This last week, she had been hopeful, but when she got home tonight, her period had come.

  – I suppose that Rhian knew about it?

  Not only Rhian, it turned out, but Alan too. Part of Cora’s grief was that they had been cut off without ever knowing their grandchildren.

  Without having gone through the long build-up, with its slow cycles of anticipation and disappointment, Robert was plunged suddenly into the extreme end of the angst of childlessness. But he put himself entirely at Cora’s disposal. He would do whatever was necessary, if it would make her happy. Anyway, without thinking about it much, he had also always wanted to have children, at some indefinite future point. That seemed the right inevitable shape of their family, if they were a family: between the two of them, the vaguely sketched-in graduated sequence of their children, two or three – never babies when he imagined them, but sturdy children in shorts and sunhats, with fishing rods, and their own plans. His picture was made in the mould of himself and his own siblings, and from the phase of childhood he had enjoyed most (when he was at prep school, and had spent summer holidays with his parents and siblings – apart from Frankie, not born yet – in a house at the top of steeply wooded cliffs in Devon). He had believed too, without acknowledging it to himself, that children would seal the bond of his marriage with Cora, which otherwise, even after all this time, he thought of as provisional and precarious. She might, if there weren’t children, remove herself one day as arbitrarily as she had thrown herself at him in the first place.

  So, three years ago, they had found themselves in the waiting room of a clinic in a handsome Georgian house in Wimpole Street, on the brink of their first appointment with the fertility doctor. Robert had made discreet enquiries of the right people, and found this was the place that got the best results. It was a close, wet June day, rain blowing in a warm mist in the streets, the pavements greasy with it. Cora, who had hardly noticed for months what clothes she put on in the morning, had dressed with feverish care for this appointment, as if she needed to seduce the doctor, not consult him. Now she was suffering because her Betty Jackson satin print blouse, with a bow at the neck, was stained with damp, and anyway was surely wildly inappropriate, making it appear that she wasn’t serious about the whole process. She couldn’t look at the other couples waiting with them. Afterwards, she wondered if she had hallucinated the fact that the walls of this room were covered, every square foot, with photographs of babies, of smiling mothers and couples with babies. It seemed too manic to be probable; and wouldn’t it be an insensitive message, anyway, to blare at those who might, after all efforts, still fail to conceive?

  Robert beside her was a dark mass, in suit and tie because he’d come from work to meet her here. Chairs in any public place always seemed too small for him, and it was surprising to see him reduced to a client or a patient in a queue like everyone else, as if all his body language by this time involuntarily exuded authority and control. He didn’t give any sign, however, of minding waiting, or of wanting to be anywhere different. She wondered what he’d told Elizabeth about why he was leaving the office: nothing, she was sure, that would have given away Cora’s business here, or her failure, or her desperation. Nonetheless, she burned with those things, just as if Elizabeth knew about them – and everyone knew. She wished Robert had nothing to do with the whole process, and that she could have come by herself, in secret. Wasn’t he only consoling her, playing along with one of her whims? She couldn’t remember them ever discussing fertility treatments at a point before it would have been a subject charged with importance for her, but as they sat in silence she attributed to him a masculine disdain for them, a stoical preference for letting nature take its course, for the discipline of accepting whatever life sent. His views would be based on a long perspective, taking into account world population growth, viewing the cult of baby-making as a kind of sentimentality only available to those in the advanced economies.

  She was in fact quite wrong about what Robert thought, but she seemed to hear these opinions uttered in his reasonable, reluctant, rather growling voice, which never ran on unnecessarily, but chopped and cut to minimise wasted words, always holding something back. The judgements she attributed to him threw her into an agitated dismay, so that she longed to get up and walk around the room, but didn’t want to give herself away to the others waiting. Robert fetched her a drink of water from the cooler. Cora had some idea of the humiliations that awaited them, after the doctor had turned his doubtless considerable charm on them, although she wasn’t sure whether they would happen today, or at a second appointment. It didn’t matter
if she was pushed and pulled about like a doll, and probed, she didn’t care. But she scalded at the idea of the affront to Robert, shut in a little room, perhaps even a toilet, with magazines, to produce a sample. How could she allow it? This place and everything about it was a mistake, she was suddenly sure. There must be a way out from it, in which she was true to herself, didn’t betray her deepest instincts.

  She cast around, remembering the last days of her mother’s illness. How had she summoned then that strength beyond herself, to act well? She remembered how at a certain point when she might have allowed herself to sink in suffering, the thought had come to her like an instruction: bite on the bitter pill. Bite hard. She had bitten hard, and the flood of strength that came had even had a savage joy in it. Now, too, she was carried away, in a suffering beyond her control. Cora stood up, the receptionist and the strangers in the waiting room looked at her, Robert looked.

  – I’m just stepping outside, she said loudly, picking up her mac and her bag. – For a bit of fresh air.

  In the street, the rain blowing at her was a balm; she lifted her face into it. Robert came hurrying after her, with the silk scarf she’d forgotten.

  – No, she said definitively to him, gripping his forearms. – It isn’t what I want.

  – Then that’s all right, he said. She imagined he was relieved, although this wasn’t in the least true, he was only trying to cover up his regret, so that she didn’t feel she’d failed at anything. He was disappointed that what had seemed a way out of Cora’s sorrows was a dead end.

  – Let’s go somewhere and have lunch, he said.

  – Do you want to go back and tell them?

  He was indifferent to the administrative hiccups at the clinic when they discovered that one set of clients had fled. It must have happened before. – I’ll phone them later.

  – Don’t you have to be back in the office?

  – I told them I’d be away for a couple of hours. They won’t expect me back till two. We’ve got till then.