dried herbs and corn dollies and postcards pinned to the beams and thick with dust, school notices bristling on the fridge door.
– Whoever lives in this house, Elise said, – I’m glad it’s not us. It’s a filthy mess.
– Me too. I’m glad about it.
– I’d hate to have to go in there and get started on that washing up.
Her voice was careless; massaging her shoulders, though, Paul felt her disappointment and humiliation, resistant as a knotted rope. Her jumper slithered under his working fingers, against the silky shirt. Through his hand, he seemed to be in touch with the surge of her inner life, which mostly wasn’t disclosed to him: deeper and more chaotic than it ever showed itself in the words they exchanged. He felt as if he hardly knew her, this wife and mother of his children. When they first met he had been drawn to Elise because she seemed complete and fearless, with all the bright presumption of the class she came from. Now, it was as though she was stepping out of that identity – leaving it behind like a husk – into something new and more precarious. He was stricken and desiring, imagining her walking about alone, before he came home, under the trees in the meadow where the children had played in the twilight. What had she been thinking, all that time?
– Let’s not go inside just yet, he said. – Let’s walk.
– It’s some crazy hour of the night, you know. We’ll be shattered tomorrow. Those kids’ll be up at the crack of dawn.
– I know. But it’s nice out here.
At first they were both blind again, when they turned to face into the garden, because they’d looked too long into the kitchen light. Paul promised to get up first with the children in the morning.
– All right then, Elise said. – I don’t mind, if you promise.
Only Children
I
C ora on the eve of her wedding day, twelve years ago.
Before dawn she had woken in her parents’ house, her childhood bed, to the sound of rain pattering and rushing, intimate around her, on the roof, in the gutters. Net curtains, blowing out into the rain through the open window, were soaked at the hem. She got out of bed and knelt on the window seat, where some of her old dolls and teddy bears were still arranged, out of habit – she wasn’t infantile, but her childhood really wasn’t far behind. The house was in a terrace overlooking a narrow strip of park: she leaned out of the window, breathing in freshness from the saturated earth, the drenched, labouring trees. She didn’t care about the rain spoiling things, she didn’t care anything about the outer shell of the wedding, which so devoured her mother: flowers and guest list and caterers. Cora hadn’t been brought up as religious, and she’d never belonged to any church, but her religious instincts were strong; she was concentrated in the mystery of what she was undertaking. Also, she imagined herself in a continuum with the serious, passionate women whose weddings she’d read about in novels: Kitty in
It had cleared up anyway later in the morning, the sun had blazed on the grass in the park pearled with little drops as she walked on her father’s arm, white dress dragging in the dirt of the Cardiff city pavement, from the front door of their house to the little church on the corner. They normally only came to this church when it was used for concerts; Cora had performed on the clarinet in here, on occasions organised by her music teacher. Her mother had been agonised, wanting to pick up the dress out of the wet dirt, afraid to countermand her headstrong daughter. Cora had loved the weight of the skirts kicking against her limbs; she had loved the passers-by, dog- walkers in the park, stopping to watch; she had laughed at her mother.
She thought of these scenes now with derision. They made her sick.
Now she couldn’t even live with Robert. She was living in her parents’ house again, sleeping in her old room, although she had changed everything.
Robert waited for her to come home from her work at the library. He didn’t have a key to this house, so he waited in the park. The weather was hot for spring; taking off his pullover, he knotted it round his waist, feeling he must be even more conspicuous than usual (he was six foot four, fifteen years older than Cora, big and loosely put together, clumsy), among the few dog-walkers and mothers with pushchairs and small children. He hadn’t brought a bag, only a slim briefcase, supposing he would be going back again by train to London later. He hadn’t spoken to Cora for weeks. She wouldn’t answer his calls, and he only knew about the job at the library because his sister had told him.
Cora wasn’t expecting him. The kind of work Robert did – he was fairly senior in the Home Office – made him think calmly about the interview he needed to have with her, certain things it was time to ask her straight, arrangements they ought to put on an established footing. He was used to grasping bleak necessity firmly. He was only agitated, anticipating the first moments that she saw him, in case she hated it that he was lying in wait for her. What would he see in her face, before she put up the guard he had got used to: disgust? An instinct for flight? Cora was tall – not as tall as he was, but as a couple they had occupied an exaggerated space – with long legs and a narrow high waist, shapely hips. He remembered that she didn’t run badly, as a girl apparently she had even got to a certain level in county championships as a sprinter – but her trainers had said her technique was too eccentric to go farther, with her big feet flying out at an angle, hands raised at the wrists. She hadn’t minded, she had been bored already with the hours of training; she had preferred poetry.
In the end Robert need not have worried: he was expecting her from the wrong direction. Cora must have had minutes to observe him and adjust her expression behind her sunglasses before she decided to come up behind him and touch him on the arm.
– Hello. What are you doing here?
That flat brightness was in place, deflecting him as if it was a light in his eyes. In his confusion he hardly recognised her; she was wearing clothes he didn’t seem to remember, a skirt and a short-sleeved white linen blouse. She looked good, but surprisingly much older than he ever imagined her. He saw how completely she filled out this latest performance, as if she had lived like this for ever – single, resourceful, bravely dedicated to her modest job, perhaps with sources of secret suffering. Her hand looked naked without its wedding and engagement rings. She still wore her hair long: thick, clean light-brown hair, chopped off crisply below her shoulders. His arm ached in hyper-awareness where she had touched him.
– Sorry. I hate springing myself on you like this, without warning. But as you didn’t want to talk on the phone, it seemed the only…
– All right. Never mind. D’you want to come in? It’s lucky I noticed you standing over here. How long would you have waited if I hadn’t seen you? I’m hot, I need to get a cold drink.
On the doorstep, fishing in her straw basket for the key, for a moment she couldn’t find it. She had lost innumerable keys over their years together; she’d be humiliated if she’d lost this one now. He was as relieved as she was when she dug it out from among the rest of the female apparatus in there: purse, apple, sunscreen, mobile, make-up bag, book, tissues.
The house inside was blessedly cool, shadowy because before she left at midday (her job at the library was only part-time) Cora had pulled down the blinds at the windows. Without asking, she made Robert a gin and tonic – what he always drank. She poured herself tonic, put ice and lemon in it, then, after hesitating, splashed gin in it too. They stood in the kitchen.
– So…
– I haven’t come to pester you, he said. – It’s just a few practical arrangements, about the flat and so on. Of
