from Pachelbel’s Canon to a Beatles medley. One weekend they had sung for charity in a shopping centre in town.
Inside the library the noise from the roads was muffled, like the light through the wavering greenish glass of the windows. If it was raining outside, or if the sky grew dark, then the intimate atmosphere intensified around the clacking of the computer keyboards, the bleeping of the scanner. Strip-lights were suspended from the ceiling by chains. After stamping and putting out the newspapers in English and Urdu and Arabic, Cora would print off the ‘holds’ list of books requested by other libraries all over the county, then begin to work through it, locating these books on the shelves, scanning them and fastening labels to them with elastic bands, ready for collection; she would be interrupted every so often by borrowers wanting something at the issue desk. The librarians conferred together in murmured voices.
In her teaching job at a further-education college in London, Cora had been active and forceful; she had worn herself out preparing classes and marking, standing up for her students, fighting threats from bureaucracy. Yet she’d always felt that this work, which in anyone’s eyes could have amounted to a real career, was provisional, while she waited to do something real with her life. In her job in the library, which paid less than half as much and hardly began to use her capacities, she could imagine herself growing old. But she tried not to let her imagination run away with her. She knew how you could deceive yourself, falling into one of those pockets of stasis, where you could not see change building up behind its dam.
The weather stayed fine for Frankie’s visit. Making up extra beds in the spare room on Saturday morning, Cora heard their car draw up outside and the familial tide spilling out, Frankie’s chivvying and encouragement, whimpers from the baby. Cora dawdled downstairs through the house’s last held breath of emptiness and quiet, waiting on the bottom stair until one of them actually rang the bell – ‘Let
– Cora, look! he said.
Lulu held up her arm to show off pink plastic bracelets, making them fall one way, then the other.
– Hello, you two.
Hugging and exclaiming over them, it was as if she pushed herself with an effort out of her adult solitude; this had not happened when she saw the children all the time in London and must be another aspect of her new life. Frankie struggled in last, laden with bags, the baby on her hip. She had given up trying to keep her shape, after this last birth, and wore whatever loose clothes she pulled first out of the high-piled ironing basket – sometimes her husband Drum’s shirts – over tracksuit bottoms. Cora was self-consciously aware of the summer dress she’d chosen, after trying on other things in front of the mirror.
– Shit, it’s hot! Frankie said. – The motorway was a nightmare. I’ve been dreaming of your nice bathroom. Hold him, will you, while I use it?
Magnus had been woken up out of his sleep. Red-cheeked, strands of auburn hair darkened with sweat and pasted to his head, smelling of regurgitated milk, he squirmed in Cora’s arms, opening his mouth to bawl. She walked into the kitchen and then on into the garden to distract him, kissing the top of his head and talking encouraging nonsense. The linen dress had been the wrong choice; it would soon be crumpled and look like a rag. The other two were getting drinks from the tap, standing on a chair, spraying water everywhere because they had turned it on too hard. The baby was transfixed by the sight of next door’s cat on the wall; then he screwed his head round to stare with serious scrutiny at Cora’s face, taking her in. She seemed to see for a moment that he looked like Robert: surrounded by her husband’s family, she was ambushed.
In their time at university together, it had been Cora and not Frankie who was sure she wanted children. Frankie was clever, she had got a First, she had been set on a career as an academic; this was a surprise to people when they first met her, because her looks were sporty and unsubtle: round, pink, handsome face, messy chestnut curls, calves that in those days didn’t have any spare fat on them, but were as substantial as young tree trunks. She had dyed her hair black, painted kohl round her eyes, taken drugs, but all her efforts couldn’t eradicate the glow of sanity and good health. When Cora fell in love with Robert, she thought she might lose her friendship with Frankie: it had been one of the elements of her old life that she had been calmly ready to trample underfoot in order to have him. But the friendship had only grown gnarled and tangled, woven around all the complications and surprise developments in their lives since. There were so many sensitive spots to beware of that they hardly bothered to try.
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.
–
– 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 facade 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
