The London Train

– Commendably unsentimental.

– I’m not sentimental.

– Good, for an English teacher.

She thought that he saw through and through her: to the filthy stricken sessions she had spent clearing the house of her parents’ things, dreadful as scrabbling in a mausoleum. Robert had tried to help, and Frankie; they had tried to persuade her to keep stuff, when she had wanted to throw everything out or give it away.

– Are you an only child? Paul asked her.

– How can you tell?

– Me too. That’s why we understand one another. Two onlys. We want too much.

She hardly knew how he earned a living, she didn’t know where he was born. As they talked, she seemed to perceive the outlines of his character as if they were drawn in ink, in clean lines on the air. He was interested in his own ideas, not very interested in hers, though he wasn’t oblivious of her: he addressed himself to her intelligence, so that she moved ahead of him, agile, to meet him. He was anxiously gloomy, disappointed with what he’d done in his life (he wrote critical books, he taught, he had once hoped to write a novel, he had tried and failed). And yet he was springing with energy, much of it negative. He tried to explain a book he was reading, which was filling him up: on commodity and singularity, and the control of knowledge in commerce between the rich and poor nations. She didn’t dare tell him that Robert worked in immigration; she could guess what he would think of that. She liked his thick strong chest, not muscled, but not soft with fat. When she put her hand over his heart, on his hot skin, she seemed to feel his personality bounding and burning there.

– I can’t leave my little girls, he said. – Can you forgive me for that? I have to tell you right away.

This moment wasn’t really right away. But Cora only shook her head as if an insect buzzed; she had not even been sure he would want to see her again, let alone imagining a future in which she might make any claim on him. They agreed they were desperate for a pot of tea. Cora hadn’t got any food in the house, only biscuits and bread. Paul said he was ravenous, he would like toast, but then when she made a move to get up from the bed, he put his arm around her and kept her.

– Don’t go. I can’t part with you yet.

– I’m only going downstairs, I’ll come back.

– But not the same. You won’t be exactly the same as you are now.

– Don’t be ridiculous, she laughed, settling down under his arm, tasting cigarette on his skin, in his mouth, wet sweat in the fine tangle of hair on his breast.

– You’re grieving for your mother. Of course you are. Good girl.

– Is your mother alive?

– She’s frail, lives in a flat where there’s a warden on call. But she’s beginning to be confused. She may need full-time care.

– Are you close to her?

– We’re friendly, Paul said. – We get on well. We were very close, once, but I changed. I grew away from her.

– I don’t know how people go on walking around, after their mother dies. I don’t know how they keep getting up in the morning.

– But you’re walking around.

– No. Not really, she said. – Really, I’m not.

He only nodded, taking her seriously. Pushing the duvet off onto the floor, he knelt beside her on the bed, taking her in intently where she lay naked on her back on the sheet, as if the grief she had confided in him was dispersed around her body, not her mind. She succumbed, experiencing herself opened out and pressed flat, against the white background, liberated from possession of herself.

Cora kept the scrap of paper with Paul’s name and telephone number scribbled on it, though she soon knew it off by heart. The paper grew soft with folding and unfolding. She left it in her address book where Robert could easily have found it, and might have asked whose name it was, although he might not.

– You’re wearing more make-up, Robert once commented, and she thought for a moment that he knew.

– Am I? Don’t you like it?

He considered carefully. – I think it means you’re feeling stronger, which is good.

– But you don’t like it.

– I like your real face.

She couldn’t answer. She carried these words round with her like a hot coal, hardly knowing how to take hold of them. Did he know about Paul? Had he guessed? He never gave any other sign. How dared he think he knew her, that he could judge what her real face was? She felt contempt for his schoolboy puritanism, disapproving of women wearing make-up. Treasuring them up, she thought of the words Paul used to her, shamelessly, for parts of her body and for what they did together. Robert never used those words, he never even used them for cursing. But then what Robert said about her make-up surprised her again. It wasn’t like him. Ordinarily it was in his nature to be vigilant against just such a loaded remark, with its knife-twist of appearing-love. Did that mean he knew? Was he striking at her, to hurt her? But there was never any other sign.

When Cora did her face in her bathroom in the flat – she and Robert had a bathroom each, hers was all mirror glass and white tiles – she painted her eyes elaborately in defiance of him, put on blusher and lipstick. Then she scrubbed it all off and began again. She put together a separate make-up bag to keep in Cardiff, but often didn’t bother with it. Paul didn’t care what make-up she wore. She asked – calculating carefully so that she didn’t sound needy – whether he liked her better with make-up or without, and he said both.

The scrap of paper where Paul had written his number was a compliments slip from the London Review of Books . Cora began to buy the Review , looking out for articles by him, but never found any. When she asked him about it, he told her some long, complicated story about how he had offered to review something for them, then got stuck and couldn’t do it, and now they were offended with him and wouldn’t give him anything else to write about. There were a number of such stories about his relationship with various kinds of authorities, fraught with offence and resentment; she wasn’t able to judge yet whether his account of them was to be trusted, or whether the feuds were in his imagination. He was relentlessly critical of power. His explanations of politics – of the war in Iraq, for instance, or of the credit boom – were illuminating, he sliced away the slack of lazy language, and always seemed to have access to facts and insights that weren’t common knowledge. She found it difficult to argue with him. Sometimes, thinking of the difficulties of Robert’s daily work, Cora wanted to ask him: but how would you do it better, if you were them?

– It isn’t so easy, she said, – to put everything right.

He said any ambition to put things right was subject to the doom of unintended consequences; she experienced his pessimism as a force, clean of the contaminations of privilege and duty. He came from a working-class family and had studied hard to get into Cambridge, and then been unhappy there; he got away to London to do his PhD, and then spent years in France. He let slip to her once that his wife – his second wife, mother of the little girls – had been to boarding school, and although Cora pretended to hardly notice this, she seized on the information as if it set the two of them apart, connected through their modest backgrounds. When she told him about her grandfather working in a coal mine and going to fight in Spain, she could see it moved him, even though the episode in Spain wasn’t particularly edifying: her grandfather had become sick with dysentery as soon as he arrived, then injured his hand in an incident while training, and had to come home. Cora’s dad had used to tell it as a funny story.

She never, ever searched for Paul’s name on the Internet; it was a superstition with her that everything would be spoiled if she unleashed into their secret intimacy the world’s promiscuous noise, its casual judgement of him. Or it might have been worse if she’d not found anything, apart from the listings for his books. He insisted he was no one, he had no public profile, no one cared what he thought: but surely that was disingenuous, as he had a publisher, and readers? She heard him once giving an interval talk on Radio 3: completely by chance, because he hadn’t mentioned it, and she never looked at the radio listings. At home in the Regent’s Park flat, she had been half-listening to a concert of piano music, half-reading the paper: then suddenly Paul’s voice was loud in the room, uninhibited, talking about Georges Sand and Chopin, blasting her with dismay and joy. The traces of his Birmingham accent came over more distinctively in his recorded voice. All the time it was on, Robert was working at his desk,