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.
Frankie was going to drive back to London on Monday morning when Cora went off to work. Saturday night was rather a flop. The two women had promised themselves hours of talk once the children were asleep, but by the time Cora came downstairs from reading Johnny his story, Frankie, who had put things in the dishwasher, was yawning and ready for bed.
– God, I’m so pathetic. It was the wine in the sunshine. It’s the bloody baby. Literally, I’m dozing on my feet: look!
She presented her moon-face for inspection – broad nose, big cheeks, thick dark brows – pegging her eyelids up with her fingertips; her girlish looks were gaining gravitas, personality stamping on them strongly as a mask. Cora began to believe in her as a vicar. As soon as Frankie had taken herself upstairs, Cora felt excessively wide awake; resentment dispersed like a fog lifting, and affectionately she tidied away her visitors’ mess, thinking she would have made a more organised mother than Frankie. Pouring herself another glass of rose, she stalked round the ground floor of the house in her bare feet, thirsty for contact and explanation now there was no one to explain to. Her lovely rooms, unappreciated, wasted their charm on the warm evening air; the windows were open, and footsteps passing in the street sounded unexpectedly close. The dishwasher churned in the kitchen. The usual quiet of the house was thickened by the sleeping children in it, their restlessness and rustling and little cries: inexperienced, she stopped at each new noise, listening anxiously.
As it grew dark, she lit the candles meant to enchant Frankie, then met herself accidentally in the mirror above the fireplace in the front room, ghost in her own house, with a shocked hostile look, unlike the carefully prepared scrutiny she usually allowed herself. In the mornings, or before she went out, she put on her make-up and arranged her clothes satisfactorily, as if she existed as a mannequin outside herself, whose beauty must be served. Catching herself unawares now, she seemed to see something that she had squandered, and had to answer for, and couldn’t. Her face wasn’t broad and dreamy, suited to quiet work at the library, as she liked to feel it from inside: the weight had fallen off her jaw and cheek bones, she looked questing and thwarted. The mirror was old, foxed, an antique, divided in portions like a triptych, in a thin cracked gilt frame. In the empty grate beneath, a fan of folded gold paper was arranged with some pinecones sprayed gold.
She did not want to see herself, or think about herself. The appetite for communication, which Frankie had roused and then frustrated by going to bed, broke in dangerously on the steady rhythm that her days had fallen into. Tamping down her restlessness, Cora put on the television, with the sound turned low. She remembered watching a different television in the childhood room that had occupied this same space, where she had once known how to possess herself confidently. That sitting room had been poky and papered in her mother’s cautious stab at 1970s
