disputes against his desire, always, to give her the whole picture if she asked, which was his kind of truth-telling. Despite their relatively easy ride, however – he went on – he wasn’t sanguine about the outcome. She mustn’t repeat this, of course. But there was something in the air that made him think the press wouldn’t let it go. The Iranian who died turned out to have been someone, and the story was starting to make waves.
– What d’you mean, someone? Everyone’s someone, you know.
– I do know. All I meant was the kind of someone the press can attach a label to, if he comes to a sticky end.
The Iranian was a journalist, he’d been living in London for years, not bothering to renew his visa; some of his short stories had even been published in translation by a small press over here, in the Eighties. He’d been touted around the usual literary festivals and readings for a while. He should never have been refused asylum, it had clearly been an error, by their own criteria – the adjudicators could be idiots, that was often half the problem. It would have worked against him that he hadn’t done anything about the visa until he was picked up. The man had been depressed, he’d had a drink problem for years, everyone had forgotten who he was, probably he hadn’t even looked presentable when he came up in front of the tribunal. It seemed he’d managed to alienate his lawyer and ended up representing himself – he’d made a bit of a mess of it, ranting and not making a lot of sense.
– And then he died.
– He had a dodgy heart. It could have happened at any moment, anywhere.
– But it happened there. He had to die in one of those places.
– It was a bad way to go. There are worse ones.
Cora was determined not to row with him; she didn’t point out that a journalist and writer might have met one of those worse ones precisely in Iran, where Robert had been trying to send him. Sometimes she was tired of herself, pushing against his reasoning, chipping away at it, as if he was in her path like an immovable rock. It had been the same before he moved to immigration, when he was in prisons. She baulked at the detail of what he oversaw; he said that someone had to oversee it, so long as the government had an immigration policy, or wanted to lock people up. He said he’d rather do it himself than someone else, who would do it worse. Delivered with his authority, that sounded like an unassailable defence of what he did; but so were her qualms unassailable, they came from deep inside her nature, she couldn’t learn to suppress them, or want to, although she had tried when they were first together and she was very young.
– What were the things the inquiry commended? she asked.
Robert explained that his team was working on a new scheme, whereby within a few days of application each asylum seeker would be allocated a ‘case owner’, who would manage their case through every stage, from the initial interview through to integration into the UK. Or deportation, if necessary.
– Was this your idea?
– My recommendation, in a Review.
– It sounds like a good one. For them to have a continuous point of human contact.
He couldn’t let her plaster him with good intentions. – It should be more efficient. Speed things up, help move the backlog.
The waitress brought the pudding menu.
After her mother died, three years before, Cora had been in a bad way.
Through the last months of her mother’s illness, she had made a good nurse, resourceful and resilient. Robert had been moved to find that the wilful girl he married, with her strong gift for pleasure, had this patience in her. When, after a spell in hospital, Rhian had come home to die, Cora had risen to the occasion as if it were a test, like other tests she’d always passed with flying colours. She hid her own desperation from her mother; she worked as if she was part of the team of doctor and cancer nurses who came to the house, and they had praised her steady, unsqueamish caring. – Whatever happens, I will be with you, she had said to her mother calmly, and her calm had seemed to help. Rhian had been querulous in life, but was rather stoical at the conclusion of it. Near the end, Cora had seemed to know how to make the dying woman more comfortable on her pillows, lifting her so gently and exactly.
Carelessly, Robert had presumed – without thinking about it – that this new strength would be part of Cora permanently. However, as the months passed after Rhian’s death, she was hardly recognisable as that capable nurse, wise instinctively about entrances and exits. Her old energy seemed irrecoverably broken. She wouldn’t talk to him about her parents; wrung with pity for her, he wondered uncharacteristically if counselling would help, but she insisted she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Drooping from her usual straight height, she complained of period pains, nursed a hot-water bottle to her stomach, went to bed early, watched television in the day. If they made love, it forced tears out of her eyes, which she tried to hide from him. He imagined her collapse as though she had drawn too deeply upon subterranean reservoirs of her nature that, once tapped, couldn’t be replenished by any ordinary process of rest and recuperation. Her spirit seemed darkened and poisoned, and Robert suffered because he felt himself inadequate to clearing it.
Rhian had died in February; after Easter, Cora insisted on going back to teaching. At least it meant she had to get dressed in the mornings, and she had to prepare for her classes and mix with her colleagues and students. But he was afraid it was too soon. One evening when he came in late from work, he found her sitting on the side of their bed in her coat with her knees together and a grey face, as if she had dropped there when she came in and hadn’t moved since. Her heavy case, crammed full of books and marking, was at her feet.
– How long have you been sitting here?
– I don’t know. What time is it?
Unwisely, kneeling to take off her shoes and help her out of her coat, he reopened a suggestion he had made before, and which she had fiercely rebuffed. Why didn’t she give up teaching at the FE college? A friend of his had contacts at a private school, the conditions there would be so much easier, she could take on part-time hours to begin with, the kids were eager to learn.
Cora shrugged her arm out of her coat sleeve, pushing him away.
– Why can’t you get it into your head that I wouldn’t work for a place like that, if it was the only school left on earth? I actually happen to prefer the kids I teach. They don’t have much of a chance in life, I don’t pretend I can do much to alter that. But at least I’m more useful, teaching them basic literacy skills, than cramming pampered brats for Oxbridge. And I don’t have discipline problems. I’m an experienced teacher. Where do you get your ideas of what goes on in a place like ours: from the
– But look at you. You’re desperate with fatigue. You owe it to yourself to take it easy. Just for a few months, till you’re feeling better.
– I suppose you’re blaming my principles now, for me not getting pregnant?
He was slow to rearrange his insights in the light of this new element; he must have shaken his head, he thought afterwards, like the bewildered ox he was.
– Getting pregnant? Is that what you want?
– Oh, Robert: how could you not know?
– But aren’t you having those injections?
She said she had stopped having the injections two years ago: he was astonished, but didn’t question that she hadn’t discussed this with him at the time, or ever told him. She said that she had ‘wanted it to be a surprise’. He accepted that in this area of experience women had a natural primacy, and must make up the rules according to their own mysterious intimations.
In two years, nothing had happened. This last week, she had been hopeful, but when she got home tonight, her period had come.
– I suppose that Rhian knew about it?
Not only Rhian, it turned out, but Alan too. Part of Cora’s grief was that they had been cut off without ever knowing their grandchildren.
Without having gone through the long build-up, with its slow cycles of anticipation and disappointment, Robert was plunged suddenly into the extreme end of the angst of childlessness. But he put himself entirely at Cora’s disposal. He would do whatever was necessary, if it would make her happy. Anyway, without thinking about it much, he had also always wanted to have children, at some indefinite future point. That seemed the right inevitable shape of their family, if they were a family: between the two of them, the vaguely sketched-in graduated sequence of their children, two or three – never babies when he imagined them, but sturdy children in shorts and sunhats,
