taste – stylised pink flowers on a mud-green background. Now that it was gone, Cora regretted that she had not kept even one scrap of this paper, which must have been one of the first things she opened her eyes on; although when she was a teenager, she had complained to her mother that it made her feel like a frog in a pond. But she had begun work on the house in a kind of frenzy, wanting to alter everything after her parents’ deaths, which she had not foreseen, and which had struck her terribly. She had always thought they would come into their own in old age, they would have a talent for it. Dad’s fatal heart attack, however, had come only two months after he took early retirement from teaching mining engineering at the University of Wales Institute; a year later, Mum was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. Cora had taken six months off work to nurse her.
Magnus cried several times in the night (poor Frankie, who was trying to get him to sleep through), and on Sunday morning Johnny and Lulu woke up early. Cora dozing in her own bed heard them, excited and tentative, testing the freedom of the downstairs emptied of adults, conferring in miniature voices, Johnny chiding and bossy: ‘You mustn’t touch, Lulu!’ She gambled that they wouldn’t break anything, and wondered idly what it would mean to have a sibling to explore with. They would be stepping with bare feet where the sun, on another fine day, crept its long, low, early light along the blond floorboards, warming them: Cora liked doing that too. If this long spell of lovely weather was unnatural, she could hardly make herself care. They would be entranced as well by the next-door cat, meowing through the glass from where it waited every morning on the sill outside, though she determinedly wasn’t feeding it.
Luxuriantly she turned over under the cotton sheet that was all she needed these warm nights, closing her eyes, floating at the edge of the dream she had woken from, of a long pillared hall like a temple, sloping down out of sight. Sometimes sleeping alone, after twelve years of marriage, was a huge relief; it was blissful to stretch her limbs across an empty space, weightless and free. In her memory, sometimes, Robert beside her in the bed had been a brooding and oppressive mass in those last months, weighing down the mattress on his side until she had to cling to her edge so as not to roll into him. She had lain tensed in the cramped margin, his sexual need gnawing at her (‘sexual need’ had been her mother’s ashamed phrase for it), though she obstinately ignored it, and he never tried to touch her if she didn’t want him to. At other times in her new life, however, Cora was so scalded by her solitary nights, sodden with dreams and longing, that she crawled downstairs to sleep sitting up in one of the armchairs. Then, her empty bed seemed ignominious, as if she was an old woman already, having lost everything.
After breakfast Frankie took the children to the little church along the road where Cora was married, while Magnus slept and Cora listened out for him. She made a picnic, thoughtfully putting in wet wipes and kitchen paper, bibs and nappies and changing kit. ‘You’re a genius,’ Frankie exclaimed, and Cora saw how she almost went on to say that Cora was gifted for motherhood, and would have taken to it naturally, but stopped herself in time. Returned from her immersion in spirit, or whatever it was, Frankie looked washed with some new shine that made her impermeable to Cora. She had actually put on eye make-up and lipstick, combed out her mop of hair. Church had made the children momentarily big-eyed and solemn. Lulu was sucking her fingers wrapped in the skirt of her dress; the three of them composed a picture of wholeness and grace. Some great-uncle or other of Robert and Frankie’s had been a bishop; Frankie’s Drum belonged to that world too, his family had a big house and land in Scotland somewhere. These patterns were remembered in the blood, Cora thought sceptically. It didn’t even spoil the picture of wholeness when Johnny flung a door open in Lulu’s face and there were howls, Frankie shouted that he was an ‘absolute bloody idiot’. Long ago, when they first met in Leeds, Cora had felt the difference of class background as an uneasy terrain dividing her from Frankie, in crossing which Frankie must somehow make the first move, propitiatory. Cora had been brought up a socialist. Her father’s father had been an electrician in a coal mine and had volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. She had used to burn with a sense of the wrongs done to her forefathers in history.
The friends got on more easily on this second day of their weekend together, because they’d stopped expecting too much. They drove up to the folk museum at St Fagans; almost carelessly, they let slip the old strenuous habits of their intimacy, and were nice to one another instead, even polite. Their lagging progress round the Welsh farmhouses and cottages done up in the styles of different periods, with smoking hearths or fumy gas-lamps, gave adequate shape to an aimless day; they bought flour from the water mill, rode in the horse-drawn cart. There were goats for Lulu to love and dread, and their picnic was blessedly wasp-free. Cora took them backwards down the row of tiny terraced houses from Merthyr Tydfil, furnished as a historical sequence: starting in the 1970s, they retreated to the early nineteenth century, because that was the only way she could bear to do it when she was a romantic girl, passionate against modern degradation, besotted with a purer past. Now, the past choked her, its tiny stuffiness, antimacassars and flat irons, rag rugs and faded photographs of dignified assemblies of Baptists, all men. Frankie peeked, when an attendant wasn’t looking, into a massive old Bible in Welsh, which Cora couldn’t read although her mother’s family had been Welsh-speakers. Discreetly, neither of them mentioned religion when they stepped into the Unitarian chapel, with its democratic pulpit in the midst of the congregation, its clear light from windows of plain glass.
The longed-for idea of children was always remote from the reality of hours that Cora actually spent with Johnny and Lulu and Magnus. Caught up for the day in their clamour and tangled joys and crises, her skin printed with the hot impress of little bodies, it hardly occurred to her to feel the old cruel twist of her own lack. She couldn’t want somebody else’s children. She would be relieved – however much she liked them – when somebody else’s were put to bed at the end of the day; she couldn’t yearn after these completed persons, who belonged to themselves. Frankie’s children only made her envious when they were absent, reduced to an idea; and in any case, the lack that had used to be savage pain was flattening into a duller wincing, in the more general ruin of her life. The great thing was to carry it off, so that no one pitied you. Cora knew that she was naturally good at this. Walking round with Lulu on her hip, explaining things to Johnny without overburdening him, she was aware she made a picture of a clever aunt, or a favourite school teacher. An uncompromised adulthood could make a clearer air for children, sometimes, than foggy mothering. Once, when Frankie had taken Johnny in search of toilets and Lulu tripped, Lulu was not inconsolable, accepting Cora’s comforting as second best. That would have to do. Other families, passing their little group burdened with pushchair and bags, would not be able to tell immediately which one was the mother.
Frankie found herself explaining, while the children were on the slide in the playground and Magnus slept, how our modern sensibility, deprived by scientific rationalism of a mythic dimension, was floundering in darkness. – We’ve subjected religious beliefs to the wrong kind of scrutiny, as if they needed to be true in a scientific sense. So we’re desolated by our cleverness, in an empty universe. We need the symbols and stories that embody the idea of another dimension, beyond the one we actually inhabit.
– But just because we need them, that doesn’t make them true. Maybe there isn’t any other dimension.
– No: the fact that we need them is what makes them true. We bring that dimension into existence, our imagination in creative collaboration with the life-forces outside us and the mysteries of physics, which otherwise have no outlet into being known. Those forces are incomplete without our faith as we’re incomplete without their existence beyond us.
Cora wasn’t interested, she was drawing with the toe of her sandal in the bark chippings of the playground.
– Have you left Bobs for somebody else? Frankie suddenly asked. – Is there anyone else?
Cora turned on her a look dishevelled, tragic. – Can’t you see there isn’t anyone else?
– You could have him bundled out of sight somewhere.
– Well, I haven’t. There isn’t anyone.
– OK. Don’t be mad with me for asking. I didn’t really think there was. I thought that if there was, I’d see the signs, and be able to tell.
– I’m not mad with you.
– Only I’m still so perplexed at what went wrong between you and Bobs. Because in spite of all the differences between you and what everyone said, I always believed you were one of those truly balanced couples, really good together.
– What did everyone say?
– Oh, you know, the usual: the gap in ages. The difference in sensibility: he was too sober for you, that sort of thing.
Cora saw a balanced couple, as in some idealising old painting: the wife’s hand, with her one glove off, held – almost as if they didn’t notice it – in the husband’s; he stood behind where she sat, they smiled out of the frame,
