not at each other.
– Was it because he refused to go for IVF or something?
– He didn’t.
– Oh, really? I didn’t know…
– It was nothing to do with that. Frank, I don’t want to talk about it. Even with you, I can’t, not yet. You were just wrong, about us being balanced together. That was just your wishful thinking, like the religious-dimensions thing. You weren’t wrong about Robert, but you were wrong about me.
Frankie put her arm around her friend, having to make a little effort at forgiveness and empathy, because Cora had always thought she was free to slash around destructively in her friend’s sacred places (‘wishful thinking’ she had called her faith), whereas Frankie knew she had to be more circumspect in Cora’s. Frankie thought this had to do with Cora’s having been the only child of devoted parents, used to them tiptoeing round her inner life, as if it was a perpetual wonder. Frankie and Robert’s parents (there were two more siblings between them), who had been often absent anyway, and had sent their children to boarding school, were killed in an accident in a private plane in Tunisia when Frankie was sixteen. Her father had been advising the government there. It had made an added complexity to Cora’s marrying Robert that, in the years after their parents’ death, her older brother had played the role for Frankie of something like a father. There had been an inward upheaval for her when she first began to guess what Cora wanted, as if at the broaching of a taboo: who knew what dangers would follow? She did not know whether Cora had ever registered the struggle it had been for Frankie to adjust to seeing the new shape of things – love, between her brother and her friend – cleanly, without prejudice. Now, she had to adjust all over again.
She thought she could remember having something like the same argument about religion with Cora when they were twenty-ish, except that they had adopted opposite positions to the ones they took now. Cora had been mysterious, Frankie had been the debunking rationalist. In those days, too, Cora had worn the same look of suffering sensibility, maddening and touching; only then, behind her look, she had been buoyant, expectant, full of appetite. Now, she submitted to Frankie’s hug, stiffly. Then someone shunted into Lulu on the slide and Frankie had to get up to go and rescue her.
After the disruption of Frankie’s visit, it was a relief to Cora to feel the atmosphere of the library close again over her head: its greenish light, high peeling pink walls and subdued hush, altered by little blares of different sound, reminders from outside, when anyone pushed open the outer door. At other moments, she wanted Frankie to come back, so that she could manage things better, be more kind to her friend; definitely, she hadn’t been kind about her plan to go into the Church. She lifted her eyes sometimes in the midst of whatever she was busy with, to where there were encouraging panes of stained glass – blue and yellow squares with red diamonds – above the issue desk, in a strip around the base of a glass dome, where dead wasps collected in dingy heaps. No doubt the architect had had in mind a library as it might have existed in a Burne-Jones painting: dreaming members of the public opening their minds in a jewelled light to Tennyson and Keats, rather than to Large Print Family Sagas and True Crime.
Cora had been afraid that seeing Frankie might spoil her time at the library; she had a horror of discovering that this new respite she had found, at the bottom of the deep place she had fallen into, was only another thin skin of self-deception. But as soon as she was making her usual round of checks on Monday morning, poking into the escallonia and Rose of Sharon bushes in the small wedge of garden for non-existent needles, she fell back into weightlessness, buoyed up by the unhurried current of routines outside herself. She had left Frankie behind at the house, packing the children’s clothes and toys chaotically into huge plastic Ikea bags. On Sunday evening they had put the children to bed and watched a detective series on television; Frankie was asleep, startling occasionally at her own soft snores, long before the murderer was exposed. In the morning, making their farewells, they had embraced exaggeratedly but almost perfunctorily, covering up something that hadn’t happened between them. ‘It’s been lovely.’ ‘It was lovely having you.’ They had smiled too much, eager to be rid of one another, feeling the strain in the present of their old closeness.
Because of the public coming and going, the library could never have the airless inwardness of an office workplace; there was always something desultory about their hours passing, not because they didn’t all work reasonably hard, but because in the end all their work was in the service of the mystery of reading, which was absorbed and private. Cora imagined herself in an outpost of culture, far removed from the hub, like a country doctor in a Chekhov story, ordering books from Moscow. One of their regulars, a petite sprightly woman with dyed black hair and a mask of thick make-up, brought in a painting done in an art class, wrapped in a black bin-liner, to show them: a clown juggling with stars against a purple background. Cora helped an Iraqi man search online for a news article on an American bombing raid on Fallujah, and when he had printed it off, he said emotionally that ‘This was what I came to your country for’, although she wasn’t sure whether he was grateful for the free access to accurate information, or incensed at British involvement in the massacre of his countrymen. She developed a benign fantasy about an elderly man who wore a silk scarf and had a suffering, distinguished face like Samuel Beckett’s; he borrowed European art films on DVD – Visconti and Chabrol and Fassbinder – and Cora imagined that he recognised a fellow spirit in her, although they never exchanged anything more than the change for his payments of ?2.50.
After school, as well as a rush of mothers with younger children, a group of teenage girls in blue uniform shirts and trousers and headscarves came in from the local comprehensive, ostensibly to do their homework together, putting their mobiles out on the table in front of them and texting frequently, conferring and confiding in strained whispers that never grew raucous, although Brian occasionally hushed them. Brian was meticulous and waspish, he did the cryptic crosswords and read French and German novels in the original; he was Senior Library Assistant and added up the cash at the end of the day. Brian and Annette, the full-timers, had been in libraries for years, and displaced a lot of their frustrations into the arcane politics of the library service; they were haunted by the threatened introduction of RFID machines, which would check out books automatically. The other library assistants were more like Cora, they had fallen into the job for one reason or another, and might not stay: a boy who was involved in amateur dramatics, a woman who’d given up her teaching job while her children were small, a shy girl with a shaved head and piercings, who took out all her nose- and lip-rings whenever she came to work, though no one had ever asked her to. Cora had realised at some point – she always realised it too late – that she had roused the resentment of the other assistants because she was too friendly with Annette, or because of things in her manner that she couldn’t help; they thought she was bossy, or high-handed. Annette said not to worry what anyone thought, she never worried.
– People have to put up with me, she said. – They have to like me or lump me.
Cora took her lunch into the cemetery next door, strolling between the scuffed trunks of the pines that lined the avenues, stopping to read the inscriptions on the gravestones: Protestants, Catholics, Welsh, Poles, Irish, Italians. Sometimes she had to make way for the white van of the cemetery workers, but she had the place pretty much to herself; there were hardly any new burials here and not many people visited the old ones. ‘Of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul of Mary Hanrahan.’ A sub-lieutenant ‘
On a bench, with her face lifted to the sunshine, Cora felt like a convalescent put outside to build up her strength from day to day; only she didn’t like to ask herself what she was building it for. There was a circularity in her recovery: if she was happy she was bound to look to the future – but she could only be happy in the present. Saving herself from having to think, she took her book into the cemetery to read while she ate her sandwiches. She wasn’t reading anything strenuous these days: women’s novels, commercial novels, some of which, she and Annette agreed, were remarkably well written, better than much so-called literary fiction, more true to life. She hardly ever thought now about what she had learned when she did her English degree. Her imagination was crammed with women’s stories, most of which began with a collapse like hers, some loss of faith or love, losses
