following a sophisticated text. Some of them. I mean, I wouldn’t want to exaggerate. I wouldn’t want to claim I was reading them Henry James.
– No one reads Henry James these days, he said. – Do they? Not after they’ve been made to at university. The shelves in the bookshops are full of them, people buy them because of the titles and the nice pictures on the covers, they think it’s going to be fun like a costume drama on telly, but they don’t actually read them, not to the bitter end, surely they don’t?
–
– Well, you’re one, he said. – You’re the one. You’re a rarity. You’re the rare, exceptional reader that the book was looking for. It found you, across the years. Rather you than me. I’m not sure I’d want to be found by
He wasn’t really listening to what she said, he was watching her: or, he saw what she said as if it was an attribute, part of her quality, not an idea separate from herself. She felt herself laid open in the bleaching light of his attention. What he liked, she understood, weren’t her liberal ideas on education, but her hardness, which was personal and – newly, after the last two years – had something finished and ruthless in it. He was not taking advantage of her desperation; it met something in him, he reciprocated it. And also, of course, he was drawn by how she looked; he couldn’t help it and she couldn’t help drawing him after her. She began to feel herself enveloped in that rich oil of sex attraction, so that she moved more fluently, knew there was something gleaming and iridescent in how she turned her head away or smiled at him. The sensation of his physical closeness mingled with her awareness of herself, as if there’d been brandy in the coffee they drank: the ripe blend in his face of softness – cheeks and skin and mouth – and hard hooded eyes, the deliberate slow changes in his expression, as if each thought she offered dropped into a cave inside him, lit up with ironies. She would not have wanted to belong to any mere club of desperate people, if there hadn’t been sex and beauty in it.
In the past, she had always tried to deflect any attention to her looks onto something else, as if in itself it wasn’t worthy of her. She had insisted on being loved for her qualities or her ideas; but she might put those aside, for this moment. Dizzy, she was confused about what she was supposed to be arguing for; somehow they had got onto the subject of class. He was insisting that Marx was sentimental, deluded with hope on the subject of the proletariat. When Cora had to get up to use the toilet she looked around dazedly at the other occupants of the carriage, suddenly returned inside herself and self-conscious about their conversation – how loud had they been? – as if instead of coffee they really had been drinking alcohol. Making her way back to him, balancing between the seat ends, after the unnerving swaying toilet and its complicated locking, she saw the cooling towers of Didcot power station float past the windows, the squat, fat pillows of their steam half-quenched in drizzle. The sight lifted her back into the surrounding routines of her life – they would be in London in less than an hour, she needed to shop before she got back to the flat – as if she was surfacing from somewhere underwater. When she reached their seats, he had picked up his book again and was reading as if he was reconciled with it. They had lost their momentum and sat in silence, restored to their separate existences. Cora thought coldly that their little exaltation had all been nothing, a false flurry.
I don’t even like him very much, she thought, embracing emptiness with relief. If I saw him talking to someone else, I’d think he was opinionated, and preoccupied with his own inner life, blind to other people. Physically, he’s not my type, with that face that will grow into pouches and folds as he ages, like an actor in a Bergman film. I prefer someone with sharper bones, leaner. Not that Robert has sharp bones exactly.
She looked out of the window, repudiating
– It was nice talking to you, he said.
– Yes, wasn’t it? she idiotically replied, and then blushed furiously at her mistake, which he obviously noticed and took – so unfairly – for the last word on her vanity and self-satisfaction.
In the crowd hurrying along the platform he was ahead of her, taking long oblivious strides. They were borne forward, apart, in the tide of the combined purposes of so many anonymous others, all moving in uncanny swift unison without speech, only to the sound of their steps. The great station gave out its roaring exhalation of echo. She hadn’t even asked him what he was coming up to London for. Dirty pigeons flapped like derision under the vast arch of the roof. Following, faced with his back, Cora was suddenly desperate at the idea of letting this unknown man go into the crowd where she would never find him again; she convinced herself that she might not be the whole of what she could be, without his knowing her. Hurrying behind, she willed him to turn round. And beyond the automatic barrier where they fed in their tickets, he did. He stopped in his tracks.
He was wearing – she noticed properly for the first time – a slightly ridiculous blazer, grey linen with a light stripe, like something a woman might have bought for him but had meant him to wear in the sunshine.
Cora almost fell into him.
– Oh, hello, he said. – It seems a shame, not to see you again. After we got on so well. Didn’t we? When are you next in Cardiff?
That was Paul: Paul, although she didn’t know his name yet – he forgot to tell her, forgot to ask hers. Or perhaps didn’t forget. They didn’t exchange phone numbers either. They were bound together, for the moment, only by the slenderest thread of an arrangement, an hour, a place (not her parents’ house, but a cafe near the park).
When the day and the hour came round, Cora was almost too busy putting on white undercoat in the upstairs bathroom. By the time she got all round the window frame she was already late, and then when she changed out of her decorating clothes she realised that she smelled of white spirit and there was paint in her hair and under her nails. This seemed a doomed and desperate condition in which to seek out a love-affair. In the mirror she saw a caricature of herself, lips bloated, eyes bloodshot, charcoal eyeliner smudged. Fatalistically she almost changed her mind again and didn’t go, only she couldn’t bear the idea of the hours passing after she hadn’t. Crossing the park under her resisting, buffeted umbrella, she felt the louring sky and sodden, thrashing trees were her own blemish, a weight she had to carry on her shoulders.
As soon as she came into the busy, noisy, steamy place, putting down the umbrella and shaking it out of the door behind her, he stood up from the table where he’d been waiting and came over and put his hands on her, holding her while she unbuttoned her wet mac, kissing her – right cheek, left – as if they knew each other well. Her mind was still in the chaos of wind and rain in the park. They were both breathing hard. There might be people in the cafe who recognised her, had known her parents: she didn’t care. All the shops and cafes in Cardiff were poignant to her in that moment, suffused with a fond idea of home and the past.
– Oh, he said into her neck, – I thought you wouldn’t come.
He smelled of cigarettes.
– I’m sorry I was late. I was painting.
– Pictures?
– No, the bathroom window.
When they had got coffee and were sitting down he brought out a notebook and pen. His hands shook, but she remembered they had shaken on the train, even before he noticed her. – Listen, he said. – I can’t ever let you go again, English teacher, Henry James lover. Married to the senior civil servant. What’s your name? What’s your number?
She had forgotten everything about this man; it was like meeting a stranger all over again. He seemed more compact than she had remembered, more sleek, he might have had his hair cut in between their meetings, he was less like her idea of a poet. His eyes were grey-blue – she hadn’t remembered that – and slightly prominent, the sleepy lids lifted as if he were shocked awake. She could hear traces of a Midlands accent now in his voice, which was deliberate, strong, lazy. He contemplated her steadily, drinking her in, swallowing her, so that she had to look away, down into her coffee. Sometimes she thought afterwards of the man on the train as if he had been someone else, whom she’d never seen again after that first time.
Cora had no notebook with her. Paul wrote down his name and mobile number on a scrap of paper he found
