The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  – I’m sorry I was late. I was painting.

  – Pictures?

  – No, the bathroom window.

  When they had got coffee and were sitting down he brought out a notebook and pen. His hands shook, but she remembered they had shaken on the train, even before he noticed her. – Listen, he said. – I can’t ever let you go again, English teacher, Henry James lover. Married to the senior civil servant. What’s your name? What’s your number?

  She had forgotten everything about this man; it was like meeting a stranger all over again. He seemed more compact than she had remembered, more sleek, he might have had his hair cut in between their meetings, he was less like her idea of a poet. His eyes were grey-blue – she hadn’t remembered that – and slightly prominent, the sleepy lids lifted as if he were shocked awake. She could hear traces of a Midlands accent now in his voice, which was deliberate, strong, lazy. He contemplated her steadily, drinking her in, swallowing her, so that she had to look away, down into her coffee. Sometimes she thought afterwards of the man on the train as if he had been someone else, whom she’d never seen again after that first time.

  Cora had no notebook with her. Paul wrote down his name and mobile number on a scrap of paper he found screwed up in his pocket, and she put it in her purse, still thinking she could throw it away later, or put it through the shredder when she got back to London. He took her hand, hot from nursing her coffee cup, in both of his, unfurled her palm and kissed it, pressed his knees hard against hers under the table. She thought: this works, it’s his system, he’s done this with women before. It’s not a trick or anything, but he’s worked out that if you prevaricate too long, you pass a point where you can’t get back to the truth of what you really want from the other person, and you wind round and round each other in tedious games, which are for children. So if you want sex, you might as well be plain about it, seize the possibility that’s flowering at once, before it passes. That’s all this is.

  – Cora. I made up names for you. But none of them was as good as that.

  – This is ridiculous. We don’t know one another.

  – I don’t want to know you. Not so that you’re familiar, filmed with familiarity, so that I forget the shock of you.

  – You might not like me if you knew me.

  – I like you. But that’s the least of it.

  What would she think of him, she wondered, if she was watching this from a cold distance, if she wasn’t herself? Her nostrils tightened for a moment in disgust. She didn’t want to be one of those women with hardened faces, joking about sex, lighting up at the idea of sex like an old, tired torch when the contacts are pressed, expert in techniques and devices.

  But then, Paul – Paul, she savoured the name, as though she had always kept it ready, empty, as a mansion prepared for him – Paul wouldn’t have wanted one of those women.

  She thought: isn’t it what I came for? Aren’t I glad, that he is shameless? She didn’t pull her knees away.

  – Where can we go? Paul said.

  The house smelled of paint and damp plaster, it was coldly unfriendly. The men had gone home: Mark the plasterer who had been finishing the walls in the new front room, Terry the builder who had been putting in the units in the kitchen. Ladders were propped along the hall, cloths were spread out across the floors, the empty rooms resonated as Paul and Cora walked around them, stepping over the mess. If Terry or Mark had still been in the house, she would have made Paul tea and then sent him away, and she would have shredded his note. Everything they touched was thick with plaster dust; she seemed to feel it coating her tongue.

  – I’m an idiot, bringing you home with me like this. Like one of those desperate women who get murdered. I don’t know anything about you.

  – Cora, he said. – It’s all right.

  But he must be thinking the same thing, anxious suddenly that she would bore him, or cling to him. Now they were alone together, they must both be full of doubt. She was coldly ready to let him go, and at the same time frantic at the idea of it. After he went, what would she have left?

  – Here, there were two poky rooms, she was explaining. – I’ve knocked through.

  He was bored, desperately bored, his eyes slid away from what she showed him. She took him upstairs, but only to show him the paintwork in the bathroom. He must be imagining that under the veneer of her caring for poetry, this was her secret self, devoured by the cult of home improvement.

  – There was an awful old suite in here. You know, face-powder pink? Anyway, I ripped that out.

  She could not help herself processing round the rooms, explaining the plan of the old house, which was disappearing under the emerging shape of the new. She even showed him the airing cupboard and the new boiler, hearing herself mention constant hot water, knowing she sounded quite mad. They opened the door and went into her parents’ bedroom. She had had the fitted wardrobes taken out and the floor sanded, got rid of most of the furniture. The room was a light, white box, rain washing down the curtainless window.

  – My mother died in here, Cora said, surprising herself. – In this bed.

  When she had opened the door, the whole scene had been laid out in front of her for a moment like a tableau, shaking her violently: she had seen it in a new perspective from the doorway, herself at a distance standing bent over her mother, the nurse on the other side of the bed, perhaps preparing a syringe, with her back turned. At a certain moment, without warning, something like thick black blood had gushed from her mother’s mouth, choking her, flooding over her nightdress and the bedclothes. She had met her mother’s eyes, seemed to read full awareness in them, protest and shame and terror. The next moment the nurse had turned round and cried out in surprise. ‘Oh, she’s gone.’

  Cora had run downstairs and out into the garden in the dark, unbelieving.

  – How long ago was this? Paul asked. – Were you with her?

  He looked where she was looking, as if he might see something.

  The room was empty.

  In Cora’s room, he closed the door behind them.

  In here too it was almost empty, there was just her bed and a chair, no curtains at the windows, a few books. She slept in here when she stayed over.

  – At last, I’ve shut up, she said, lifting her face to be kissed.

  – At last, you’ve shut up.

  – It was funny, when I insisted on showing you the boiler.

  – Sssh.

  She remembered his hands holding the book on the train, as if he might tear it in half. Those same hands, hard and precise, now took possession of her – the hands first. They were determined, he knew what he was doing, he didn’t fumble over her buttons or her zip. She gave herself up to them, to the dangerous sensation of being possessed. When it came to her skirt, he told her to step out of it, and laid it on the chair. Her skin as he uncovered it goosefleshed in the unheated room; her nakedness was changed, because this stranger saw it with new eyes. He reached round with both hands behind her to unhook her bra, without looking; did it easily, and pulled it free. Her breasts spilled out against his shirt front.

  – Oh, he said, and staggered, losing his poise.

  She staggered too, they fell onto the bed together, then he had to scramble out of his clothes, pushing trousers and boxers down and kicking them off his feet, tearing his half-unbuttoned shirt off over his head. Their love-making was clumsy, this first time, because they didn’t know one another yet, they were too desperate for one another. He actually still had his socks on the whole time, which was something people joked about as unromantic. The violence of Cora’s sensations – afterwards she lay unsatisfied against him, too shy to ask, with her wet thigh over his, and then had to finish her climax alone in the bathroom, avoiding the wet paint – was something new. She had only made love with one boyfriend before she married Robert. Both her lovers, before Paul, had been deferential, grateful, careful, eager to please her; she had never shaken off knowing that they found her lovely. She had not k
nown whether to believe in this grabbing, grunting, flaunting, heedless sex, when she had seen it on television and in films.

  – I like this rain, Paul said, after the storm of sex had passed.

  He didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere; she didn’t know how long he was able to stay. They lay listening to it: spilling over the rim of the gutter, drizzling into the street, bringing the exterior acoustic suggestively inside the room. The tyres of passing cars pressed, hissing, through surface water on the tarmac, footsteps smacked in pools collected in the hollows of the old pavings. This bedroom seemed somewhere Cora had never existed in before, as if she’d gone through the mirror into the reflection of the place she’d known. The veiled grey light, the pearly shadows blooming and moving on the walls, made her think it must be about seven o’clock, evening: but evening as an infinite sea to sink into, not the couple of short hours between afternoon and night. Back from the bathroom, she had not known how to lie down beside Paul, because she didn’t know yet what their intimacy was. She arranged herself on her side, not touching him, looking at him lying on his back, smoking a cigarette; she’d brought him a paint-pot lid to use as an ashtray. From where he lay hieratic, thoughtful, outward-borne, he skewed down his glance to take her in, his eyes sliding over her – naked shoulders, breasts slipped sideways, mound of her hip under the duvet – in a slow retrospective satisfaction, which ran like oil over her skin.

  – Cora, Paul said, relishing her name. – Cora. Was this your bedroom when you were a child?

  She said it was, but hardly believed it as she said it.

  – Then where are all your things?

  Before she started decorating, she explained, she had put all her old toys and children’s books in a skip. She had given away the desk at which she used to do her homework, and her clarinet.

  – I’m doing the place up to sell, I had to get rid of all the old junk.

  – Commendably unsentimental.

  – I’m not sentimental.

  – Good, for an English teacher.

  She thought that he saw through and through her: to the filthy stricken sessions she had spent clearing the house of her parents’ things, dreadful as scrabbling in a mausoleum. Robert had tried to help, and Frankie; they had tried to persuade her to keep stuff, when she had wanted to throw everything out or give it away.

  – Are you an only child? Paul asked her.

  – How can you tell?

  – Me too. That’s why we understand one another. Two onlys. We want too much.

  She hardly knew how he earned a living, she didn’t know where he was born. As they talked, she seemed to perceive the outlines of his character as if they were drawn in ink, in clean lines on the air. He was interested in his own ideas, not very interested in hers, though he wasn’t oblivious of her: he addressed himself to her intelligence, so that she moved ahead of him, agile, to meet him. He was anxiously gloomy, disappointed with what he’d done in his life (he wrote critical books, he taught, he had once hoped to write a novel, he had tried and failed). And yet he was springing with energy, much of it negative. He tried to explain a book he was reading, which was filling him up: on commodity and singularity, and the control of knowledge in commerce between the rich and poor nations. She didn’t dare tell him that Robert worked in immigration; she could guess what he would think of that. She liked his thick strong chest, not muscled, but not soft with fat. When she put her hand over his heart, on his hot skin, she seemed to feel his personality bounding and burning there.

  – I can’t leave my little girls, he said. – Can you forgive me for that? I have to tell you right away.

  This moment wasn’t really right away. But Cora only shook her head as if an insect buzzed; she had not even been sure he would want to see her again, let alone imagining a future in which she might make any claim on him. They agreed they were desperate for a pot of tea. Cora hadn’t got any food in the house, only biscuits and bread. Paul said he was ravenous, he would like toast, but then when she made a move to get up from the bed, he put his arm around her and kept her.

  – Don’t go. I can’t part with you yet.

  – I’m only going downstairs, I’ll come back.

  – But not the same. You won’t be exactly the same as you are now.

  – Don’t be ridiculous, she laughed, settling down under his arm, tasting cigarette on his skin, in his mouth, wet sweat in the fine tangle of hair on his breast.

  – You’re grieving for your mother. Of course you are. Good girl.

  – Is your mother alive?

  – She’s frail, lives in a flat where there’s a warden on call. But she’s beginning to be confused. She may need full-time care.

  – Are you close to her?

  – We’re friendly, Paul said. – We get on well. We were very close, once, but I changed. I grew away from her.

  – I don’t know how people go on walking around, after their mother dies. I don’t know how they keep getting up in the morning.

  – But you’re walking around.

  – No. Not really, she said. – Really, I’m not.

  He only nodded, taking her seriously. Pushing the duvet off onto the floor, he knelt beside her on the bed, taking her in intently where she lay naked on her back on the sheet, as if the grief she had confided in him was dispersed around her body, not her mind. She succumbed, experiencing herself opened out and pressed flat, against the white background, liberated from possession of herself.

  Cora kept the scrap of paper with Paul’s name and telephone number scribbled on it, though she soon knew it off by heart. The paper grew soft with folding and unfolding. She left it in her address book where Robert could easily have found it, and might have asked whose name it was, although he might not.

  – You’re wearing more make-up, Robert once commented, and she thought for a moment that he knew.

  – Am I? Don’t you like it?

  He considered carefully. – I think it means you’re feeling stronger, which is good.

  – But you don’t like it.

  – 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 glass 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 scrap 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 imagina
tion. 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-class 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 superstition 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.