with fishing rods, and their own plans. His picture was made in the mould of himself and his own siblings, and from the phase of childhood he had enjoyed most (when he was at prep school, and had spent summer holidays with his parents and siblings – apart from Frankie, not born yet – in a house at the top of steeply wooded cliffs in Devon). He had believed too, without acknowledging it to himself, that children would seal the bond of his marriage with Cora, which otherwise, even after all this time, he thought of as provisional and precarious. She might, if there weren’t children, remove herself one day as arbitrarily as she had thrown herself at him in the first place.
So, three years ago, they had found themselves in the waiting room of a clinic in a handsome Georgian house in Wimpole Street, on the brink of their first appointment with the fertility doctor. Robert had made discreet enquiries of the right people, and found this was the place that got the best results. It was a close, wet June day, rain blowing in a warm mist in the streets, the pavements greasy with it. Cora, who had hardly noticed for months what clothes she put on in the morning, had dressed with feverish care for this appointment, as if she needed to seduce the doctor, not consult him. Now she was suffering because her Betty Jackson satin print blouse, with a bow at the neck, was stained with damp, and anyway was surely wildly inappropriate, making it appear that she wasn’t serious about the whole process. She couldn’t look at the other couples waiting with them. Afterwards, she wondered if she had hallucinated the fact that the walls of this room were covered, every square foot, with photographs of babies, of smiling mothers and couples with babies. It seemed too manic to be probable; and wouldn’t it be an insensitive message, anyway, to blare at those who might, after all efforts, still fail to conceive?
Robert beside her was a dark mass, in suit and tie because he’d come from work to meet her here. Chairs in any public place always seemed too small for him, and it was surprising to see him reduced to a client or a patient in a queue like everyone else, as if all his body language by this time involuntarily exuded authority and control. He didn’t give any sign, however, of minding waiting, or of wanting to be anywhere different. She wondered what he’d told Elizabeth about why he was leaving the office: nothing, she was sure, that would have given away Cora’s business here, or her failure, or her desperation. Nonetheless, she burned with those things, just as if Elizabeth knew about them – and everyone knew. She wished Robert had nothing to do with the whole process, and that she could have come by herself, in secret. Wasn’t he only consoling her, playing along with one of her whims? She couldn’t remember them ever discussing fertility treatments at a point before it would have been a subject charged with importance for her, but as they sat in silence she attributed to him a masculine disdain for them, a stoical preference for letting nature take its course, for the discipline of accepting whatever life sent. His views would be based on a long perspective, taking into account world population growth, viewing the cult of baby-making as a kind of sentimentality only available to those in the advanced economies.
She was in fact quite wrong about what Robert thought, but she seemed to hear these opinions uttered in his reasonable, reluctant, rather growling voice, which never ran on unnecessarily, but chopped and cut to minimise wasted words, always holding something back. The judgements she attributed to him threw her into an agitated dismay, so that she longed to get up and walk around the room, but didn’t want to give herself away to the others waiting. Robert fetched her a drink of water from the cooler. Cora had some idea of the humiliations that awaited them, after the doctor had turned his doubtless considerable charm on them, although she wasn’t sure whether they would happen today, or at a second appointment. It didn’t matter if she was pushed and pulled about like a doll, and probed, she didn’t care. But she scalded at the idea of the affront to Robert, shut in a little room, perhaps even a toilet, with magazines, to produce a sample. How could she allow it? This place and everything about it was a mistake, she was suddenly sure. There must be a way out from it, in which she was true to herself, didn’t betray her deepest instincts.
She cast around, remembering the last days of her mother’s illness. How had she summoned then that strength beyond herself, to act well? She remembered how at a certain point when she might have allowed herself to sink in suffering, the thought had come to her like an instruction: bite on the bitter pill. Bite hard. She had bitten hard, and the flood of strength that came had even had a savage joy in it. Now, too, she was carried away, in a suffering beyond her control. Cora stood up, the receptionist and the strangers in the waiting room looked at her, Robert looked.
– I’m just stepping outside, she said loudly, picking up her mac and her bag. – For a bit of fresh air.
In the street, the rain blowing at her was a balm; she lifted her face into it. Robert came hurrying after her, with the silk scarf she’d forgotten.
– No, she said definitively to him, gripping his forearms. – It isn’t what I want.
– Then that’s all right, he said. She imagined he was relieved, although this wasn’t in the least true, he was only trying to cover up his regret, so that she didn’t feel she’d failed at anything. He was disappointed that what had seemed a way out of Cora’s sorrows was a dead end.
– Let’s go somewhere and have lunch, he said.
– Do you want to go back and tell them?
He was indifferent to the administrative hiccups at the clinic when they discovered that one set of clients had fled. It must have happened before. – I’ll phone them later.
– Don’t you have to be back in the office?
– I told them I’d be away for a couple of hours. They won’t expect me back till two. We’ve got till then.
She had wanted him to say that the office didn’t matter.
II
C ora, three years ago, on the train from Cardiff to Paddington.
It was a few weeks since she’d run away from the fertility clinic, almost six months since her mother died. Her teaching had more or less finished for the summer, and she was throwing herself furiously into the transformation of the Cardiff house, telling Robert she wanted to do it up to sell it. No matter what difficulties came up, how the builders found dry rot, or messed up the French windows in the extension, she encouraged herself: bite the bitter pill. She had got her force back, even if she didn’t know what to do with it, and was only pressing mightily up against an invisible resistance. She had chosen a wood-burning stove, she had scoured the reclamation yards for antique tiles for the bathroom, for lovely old pink bricks. Now, outside the train windows, the afternoon landscape fumed with rain, the green fields and woods were secretive, withdrawn around their own dense history, pressed under a lead-coloured lid of sky. The train wasn’t full; she sat at a table by herself. Dark drops rolled sideways along the window glass. For no reason, her heart was beating thickly, as if she was expecting something, though she wasn’t, she mustn’t look forward, because there was nothing ahead, nothing.
A man stopped beside her, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee from the buffet, a briefcase slung on a strap across his shoulder.
– Do you mind if I sit here? I’m escaping from an idiot with a mobile phone.
– How do you know I’m not one?
He glanced at her, taking her in quickly. – You don’t look like an idiot.
– You’re safe, she said. – Mine’s turned off.
– Good girl.
Half-heartedly she was offended by his calling her a girl. Sitting down in the window seat opposite her, he got out a book from his briefcase and started to read. It was a book of poetry, by someone Cora hadn’t heard of. She was embarrassed that she was reading
He scowled into his book, gripping it as if he might tear it apart at the spine. Cora always looked at people’s hands when she met them (Robert’s were huge, with soft hollows in the palms and unexpectedly delicate finger ends). This man’s hands were long and tanned and tense, slim as a woman’s though he wasn’t effeminate, one finger nicotine-stained, the nails naturally almond-shaped; when he took a mouthful of coffee she noticed that they shook. He wore a wedding ring. She thought he might be precious, or pretentious; there was something dissatisfied in his ripe, full mouth, although he was attractive, subtle-looking, only just beginning to lose his hair – which was the colour of silvery washed-out straw – at the temples. Under the hooding curved lids, she seemed to see the quick movements of his eyes as he read; he was a hawk, jabbing into his book for its meanings with an unforgiving
