The London Train Part 14

No one watched her paying off the taxi outside her old home, although she felt conspicuous returning: the street had its usual air of privileged absence, withdrawn and clean behind its railings, flights of worn stone steps, broad Regency front doors. Out of habit she checked for the beloved glimpse of park trees at the road's end: she had seen those trees thrash, but today they stood motionless under the m.u.f.fling cloud. Their flat Robert's flat was on the first, best floor, with a balcony they had never used, because its publicity was too theatrical for the deep discretion of the street. Cora had sometimes imagined the Prince and Charlotte sitting out on it in The Golden Bowl, watching Maggie bringing her baby from the park, although she knew their house didn't even begin to be grand enough for those characters. She hadn't been back for months. It was odd to ring the bell: there was a door key somewhere in Cardiff, but she hadn't stopped to look for it. Frankie was at first suspicious over the intercom.

Thank goodness it's you. That SPAD's threatening to come round, he wants to look at Robert's computer. I've said he can't, it's private.

The two women embraced, with more feeling than when they'd last parted in Cardiff: separating, both were faintly tearful, relieved; each had feared that the other might hold out against her.

Frankie, don't think it's my fault, will you?

Don't be an idiot. Bobs is a grown-up. He'd never forgive me if I blamed you. It's just awful not knowing whether there's anything to worry about or not.

Frankie was satisfied that Cora was stricken, which was all she needed to see. Walking round, Cora took in how the flat had altered since she had lived in it. Robert hadn't actually changed any of the furniture, but everything was in a subtly altered and less attractive arrangement, probably not moved deliberately, but only having drifted. He must never have shared her vision of how it all worked together or he hadn't cared about it after she'd gone. She hadn't cared much either, in the months before she left. Cora had found the place before they were married, in the first strange flush of having money (not only Robert's salary, but money he'd inherited not enough to buy the flat outright, but enough to make mortgage repayments possible); inside its old sh.e.l.l, it had been smart and bright and modern. Twelve years on, it looked used up and dated. Chairs, pulled away from around the table, or from the sociable huddles Cora had used to arrange them into, were piled up with newspapers and papers from work, which the cleaner hadn't touched. Cus.h.i.+ons were ranked in straight lines along the sofa back, and everything ornamental on the white marble mantelpiece was pushed to one end for easy dusting: photographs, yellow feathers from the Adirondacks and striped stones from a beach in Angus, a Dresdenware flautist that had been Robert's mother's, a Banglades.h.i.+ silver teapot Cora had bought in a junk shop. A suit still in its bag from the dry cleaner's was hung on the open kitchen door. A laptop was open, but switched off, on the gla.s.s-topped dining table, where Johnny and Lulu were colouring. The toothbrush and shaving gear weren't gone from Robert's bathroom. Magnus was asleep in the bedroom in his pushchair.

I tried to ring him, but he didn't answer, Cora said. I'm glad you're all here. It would seem very empty. Perhaps it seems this empty when he's here on his own.

Don't let's get soppy, said Frankie. I'm making soup.

Soup?

We'll need to eat. Children are just engines really, running on the fuel parents put in at one end. So I bought vegetables and b.u.t.ter and bread on my way here at that little organic shop round the corner. He's such a lovely man, and the bread's good, but did you know everything in there costs at least three times as much as it does in the supermarket?

This is that part of the world. Everybody has three times as much money.

Ten times as much.

Probably a hundred times as much, some of them.

Some of them bathe in a.s.ses' milk. The shop probably sells it.

Johnny and Lulu were colouring fanatically, and only glanced up for a moment to recognise Cora. Frankie said she'd set them a compet.i.tion: to stop them running round the rooms, in case there was a clause against it in Robert's lease. She would have to choose between their pictures eventually, which would be tactically difficult. Lulu, as she chose felt pens, sucked one lock of chestnut hair in absorbed meditation; Johnny, filled with the burden of being better because he was older, stood nervously to work, s.h.i.+fting from foot to foot, grimacing grotesquely at what he'd made.

They touched the keys of the laptop warily.

Should we turn it on? Cora said. There might be clues, but we wouldn't know what to look for.

Anyway, it's none of our business. And we don't have his pa.s.sword.

We have to trust him.

He might come in at any moment. He might ring.

Frankie said she'd phoned their sister Oona and was keeping her updated, but they'd decided not to tell their brother in Toronto anything yet. Soup simmered in a pan on the spotless hob. When Cora looked for it, the liquidiser was still in its place in the cupboard where she had left it. The two women sat down in the kitchen at the breakfast bar the estate agent's awful name had stuck; Cora had never known what else to call it. All the kitchen surfaces were solid oak. Frankie poured them wine out of a bottle from Robert's rack; between them her phone loomed portentously silent. She said she had wanted to call in the police yesterday, Wednesday, but Robert's office said they had already spoken to a Met senior and didn't think the matter needed escalating further. So she hadn't known what else to do. She'd rung everybody she could think of.

They really, really don't want the press to know. I've picked up that much. I suppose it's embarra.s.sing, losing a senior civil servant.

You don't think that he could have gone to Bar? Cora said.

Bar? G.o.d, no. To be honest, the idea of her never crossed my mind. Why ever would you imagine . . . ?

Probably nothing. Only that we mentioned her the last time we met.

Bar was fearsome. Not the sort of person you're involved with twice. Anyway, surely she's married to somebody else by now?

That's what he thought, Cora said. If he's just taken off by himself on an impulse, then I'm glad.

Me too.

Who couldn't want him to get out as a human being from under all this? It's as if he didn't belong to himself.

Though we have to remember that mostly he likes it. It suits him.

The Special Adviser when he turned up was improbably good-looking, a youth from a Caravaggio painting, long-faced, long-bodied, dead-pale, black hair curling on his collar, thumb-print smudges under fatigued eyes, hollow belly under s.h.i.+rt half-untucked from his jeans, double-jointed fingers. He was carelessly charming, bestowing the favour of himself, wis.h.i.+ng he was at a more interesting party. Cora felt with a shock that she was growing old, and would be shut out from beauty. He told them, when they insisted, that his name was Damon.

Shepherd boy, Frankie said.

Damon agreed without interest. Briskly his observation roved the flat behind them. Any news?

I'm Robert's wife, Cora explained.

He took her in. D'you have any idea where the auld fella's got to?

For a moment she thought he was really Irish, then realised he was putting on an accent. Damon gave off impatient contempt for the nuisance this middle-aged senior was making of himself. This is how it is when someone falls from power, Cora thought, though it was too soon to know if Robert had fallen anywhere. There's a shudder when they hit the ground, then everyone steps over them, humiliating what they were, resentful of their own past subservience.

Frankie said they hadn't heard anything. We're starting to panic. What's going on? Is it to do with the inquiry about the fire?

What do you know about that?

Nothing.

Is he going to make a scene or something? It doesn't look good for him: he should have stayed to take the flak.

What flak? What scene?

But he wouldn't tell them. Magnus cried in his pushchair and Frankie brought him into the kitchen to feed him; uneasily Damon ignored her bringing out her breast, which in the same room as him seemed voluminous. Frankie altogether the curvaceous untidy bulk of her seemed made on a different scale to Damon's. He asked Cora if she could think of anywhere Robert might have gone, and she said she couldn't; he asked if she'd tried calling him and she said she had, but he wouldn't pick up. She was aware how she stood around awkwardly in Robert's rooms, not wanting to pretend she belonged to them; the SPAD probably knew all about the break-up of her marriage. Frankie was much more at home in the flat. Her brood brought into it the noisy solidity it had needed. When Cora lived there with Robert they had both worked late, they had often hurried out again in the evenings the place had worn thin and dissolved in their absence. Lulu and Johnny ran into the kitchen with their pictures; Damon graciously adjudicated, knowing how nice it made him look, preferring Lulu's.

Take it like a man, hey . . . He ruffled Johnny's red hair. Frankie privately thanked G.o.d Lulu wasn't sixteen. Lulu draped herself in an att.i.tude anyway against Damon, adoring him.

Mind if I look around?

We do rather.

You can't have the laptop, Cora said.

I can, he said regretfully. I'm afraid it's one of ours.

Frankie's phone was beside her on the table where she sat, pulling her blouse across to hide the baby's working head; every so often Magnus twisted round to stare at the interesting intruder, tugging away from the nipple, which sprayed a fine thread of milk after him. When the phone bleeped, she glanced quickly at it, but said it was only Drum calling to see where they were. Damon packed up the laptop into its case and carried it off with him, after a cursory look around the rooms, which Cora begrudged him, following him everywhere. He eyed the second computer in the study, but couldn't have carried it, even if she'd let him have it. It really isn't a big deal, he said, not rea.s.suring but diminis.h.i.+ng the women. We aren't really that bothered.

It was Robert, Frankie said excitedly as soon as he was gone. The text was from Robert.

What does he say?

He says he's all right, that's all. But at least we know he hasn't been kidnapped or knocked down or lost his memory or anything. Text him now on your phone, ask him where he is.

After Cora had texted, they waited for more communication, but none came. They were subdued, as well as relieved, by the a.s.surance that Robert was all right, wherever he was; their crisis had subsided. They ate Frankie's soup with the expensive bread from the organic shop. Cora found coffee, and boiled the kettle. Apart from the coffee, and the milk and b.u.t.ter Frankie had bought, there wasn't much else in Robert's fridge: a tube of tomato puree and a square of Cheddar drying out, ancient jars of mustard and pickle that dated surely from when it was her kitchen. Frankie said she would take the children home in a taxi after supper, there didn't seem much point in staying on any longer; Cora said she would sleep over in the flat, just in case.

Just in case what? Come back with us. I don't like the idea of you all on your own in here. Although you'll probably get a better night's sleep.

Once she had imagined it, Cora wanted to have time to herself in the flat: alone, she might be able to find any signs Robert had left behind him. She could sleep in the spare room. Frankie was spooning soup into Magnus in his pushchair; Cora, on her hands and knees under the table, was sweeping breadcrumbs into the dustpan.

Were you praying that Robert was all right? she asked Frankie, sitting back on her haunches with the brush in her hand. I mean really praying to G.o.d, not just the usual phrase that people use.

Opening her mouth wide and making baby noises to encourage Magnus, Frankie was wary. Do you hate that idea?

No, I don't hate it. I'd hate it if I did it, because it would be fake. But I suppose if you believe in it, praying is what you're bound to do.

Not in the sense of asking for favours, like asking for a bike for Christmas. Otherwise the believers would win all the football matches. Believing would just be a kind of cheating.

These comic-book ill.u.s.trations bikes and football matches made Cora think Frankie sounded like a vicar already, evasive and jollying.

So you're not allowed to ask G.o.d to bring Robert back?

You can ask G.o.d to keep him safe. That's not the same. You know he might not.

Then what's the point? Johnny demanded reasonably.

Believing doesn't make everything all right, you know. It just fills out the way things are, it expresses our longings.

Frankie was thinking there was something newly intransigent in Cora's expression as she knelt there with the dustpan, tickling Magnus's feet with the brush so that he lifted them delightedly, distracting him from his soup. She was losing her old resplendence she was restless and too thin. She was wearing more make-up than she ever used to. Cora said that she just didn't feel what Frankie felt. She had used to feel it sometimes, but now when she reached for it, nothing was there. Although she said this as though she regretted it, Frankie could also hear a kind of triumph: who could want false consolations, once you had seen past them?

Then unexpectedly Cora put her head in Frankie's lap for an awkward, odd moment. The gesture was enigmatic afterwards, Frankie blamed herself terribly that she hadn't responded to it, and she searched in herself for hidden reasons. She had been taken by surprise; but she should have stroked Cora's hair at least. Of course she had been feeding Magnus, holding the bowl in one hand and the spoon in the other. But she could easily have put the bowl down. She had only laughed, disconcerted. It didn't matter how much you thought about charity, and thought you were prepared for the way the requirement for charity would present itself, you missed the occasion when it actually flowered in your own lap, you even recoiled from it. In the next moment, as though it had only been a joke, Cora picked herself up and got on with the sweeping.

She went downstairs to see them off in their taxi. As soon as it turned a corner and she was left alone in the street, Cora regretted staying, and was reluctant to go back inside. The flat was full with Robert's absence. She took off her shoes so as not to make any sound, walking from room to room as if she might surprise something; for a long time she didn't switch on the lights. From the window of the bedroom they used to sleep in, looking along the gardens to the park, she watched a last brooding storm-light, mauve and silver, drain from behind a magisterial horse chestnut. The night outside completed, she turned back to the interior darkness, asking herself what she was doing here. She had no business trying to find where Robert was, now that they knew he wasn't hurt, or dead. He and she were no longer connected. It was wholly understandable that he had called Frankie, but hadn't wanted to respond to the text that Cora sent. Reluctantly she went round putting on the lamps, hands remembering where to find each switch as easily as if she still lived here. The place flared into visibility. She tidied the mantelpiece, put back the chairs. In the last months of her living here, disenchanted, these remnants of an elegant older London hadn't seemed gentle or nostalgic to her, more like the command centre of an ageing imperium, sclerotic and corrupt. Yet Robert wasn't corrupt.

She turned on the computer in his study and googled his name, but got only the routine link to the department. Letters, opened and unopened, lay around everywhere, but there was nothing personal or even interesting that she could see, only bills and bank statements and junk mail. There were no messages on the answerphone except a couple from Elizabeth, and one from Frankie. Slipping her hands inside Robert's jacket pockets in the wardrobe, she didn't even know what she was looking for; finding nothing, she opened drawers and went through them. He must have been taking his clothes to a laundry, the s.h.i.+rts were beautifully ironed. She couldn't tell whether anything was missing. At the bottom of one drawer, underneath his socks, was the little black-bordered packet of his dead father's rings, and a supermarket bag with her letters inside the ones she had written from Leeds so many years ago, out of such childish certainty. Even the sight of her own handwriting on the envelopes repelled her, and she shoved them back in their bag and out of sight. She would have liked to throw them away or shred them, but they didn't seem hers to dispose of, she hardly felt connected to the girl who wrote them.

It had occurred to her naturally to wonder whether Robert could be reacting because he'd found out somehow about Paul; but the idea shamed her as soon as it presented itself. Robert wouldn't be overthrown by s.e.x, any more than he cried in restaurants. Anyway, when she thought about it now, she believed that Robert had always known: not all the details, but that there had been something. He might even have worked it out, about the miscarriage. It was part of her character, she thought, grinding upon herself in condemnation, to think of whatever had happened to Robert now as if it must have to do with her. Of course it didn't. She shouldn't even be here, inside his privacy, poking around in it.

Her phone rang and she answered eagerly, but it was only Frankie, checking she was OK. You could still come over.

No, I'm really fine here, I'm thinking.

That's what worries me.

Constructively. But I haven't found anything.

Cora said she thought she'd go back to Cardiff in the morning, if nothing had happened, and Frankie agreed that now they knew he was all right, there was no point in Cora hanging round. As she talked to Frankie, standing at the dining table, Cora was flicking through Robert's bulging ancient leather address book, which was losing its pages and so fragile it wasn't surprising he hadn't taken it with him wherever he'd gone. If he'd wanted addresses from it he'd have copied them out he used to do that. Idly she turned the pages over and found Bar: Barbara. An original Norfolk address had been crossed out, who knew when, replaced with one in Tiverton, Devon. Cora said goodbye to Frankie and put Bar's address and number into her own phone, hardly knowing why she did it. Then she poured herself some of Robert's whisky and curled up in his chair to watch the news, smelling his hair on the upholstery.

An item on the report on the removal-centre fire came low down the programme running order; someone from the Refugee Council was asked to comment. Was there any embarra.s.sment for the government in the contents of the report? There ought to be, the woman said, if people read between the lines of the report, if they went inside these places, to see for themselves how men and women had to live, in the midst of plenty in a rich country, deprived of their hope. There ought to be embarra.s.sment for all of us. She spoke about the Iranian who died, and they showed a blurry black and white photograph of someone surely too young: handsome, bearded, the photograph flattening black hair and white flesh into stark contrast, making the eyes black smudges. Cora had remembered that the man was middle-aged; according to Robert, in the last years he had drunk too much and suffered from ill health, he had let himself go. Which could have happened anywhere. Everywhere people grew old, if they didn't die.

Checking to see if there were sheets on the bed in the spare room, Cora saw the same photograph, reproduced on the back cover of a paperback pressed open on the bedside table. The bed was made up; under the cover roughly pulled across, the sheets were rumpled and the pillow dented. Glancing in this room earlier, in her search around the flat, she hadn't taken in that it had been used; it was always the s.p.a.ce least stamped with their occupation, carved off the end of the sitting room running across the front of the house, furnished merely for use when they had guests, neutral as a nice hotel. Robert must have been sleeping in here, and he had been reading the Iranian's collection of stories. He could have found the book on AbeBooks, where Cora hadn't thought of looking for it; for the first time she got hold of the writer's name properly, seeing it spelled out. No wonder he had looked too young in his picture on television; weren't these stories published in the Eighties? Picking the book up, she sank down onto the side of the bed, starting in on the page where Robert had left off. Beginning in the middle of the story, it was impossible to pick up what was at stake, except that it wasn't what Cora had expected: not pa.s.sionate protests over life under tyranny (which tyranny anyway? she had for a moment to mentally run over dates), but a man who seemed to be quarrelling with his wife, about her mother. The writing was on an intimate scale: deadpan and absurd, comic. It was rather dry, in a spa.r.s.e terse style, without atmospherics, or much description of people or places. Cora was relieved; she had expected the stories to accuse her of her privilege, living in the indifferent west. After reading a couple of pages she put the book down again for later, when she went to bed.

Could she sleep in Robert's sheets, or should she change them? She put her head down experimentally, from her sitting position, on the pillow he had used. From her new position she could see through the window out to where the branches of a lime tree agitated, seemingly without sound, against a street lamp diffusing its cold light mistily. Robert might have watched this; like her, he had preferred to sleep with curtains and blinds not drawn, windows open. It would be comforting to sleep inside his shape, in the untidy bed, and he need never know she'd done it. He must have taken refuge in this room, from their old lives crowding the rest of the flat; he had not wanted to sleep in their marriage bed. Cora understood all that. Her phone bleeped, and she started up to answer it: but it was only a text from her friend Valerie, saying she had got them tickets for Orfeo.

Cora hadn't ever met Bar. When first she had fixated on Robert all those years ago, she had interrogated Frankie about her brother and found out that there was a girlfriend, off and on, but that she was not in his siblings' opinion satisfactory. Frankie said this before she ever knew Cora wanted him. Bar was a bit of a family joke, she had explained: the daughter of friends of their parents, very county. She rode in point-to-point, drank with the men though she couldn't stand feminists, and sometimes wore a flat cap like a jockey. When they were children, Robert and Bar had apparently always been paired up together, like head boy and head girl, because they were strong and sane and knew how machinery worked.

I'm afraid of him settling with Bar eventually, Frankie had said, out of sheer kindness.

Robert at Frankie's graduation had been patiently bored, and at first Cora had watched him because he was unexpected, with his clumsy bear-shamble and courteous, impenetrable reserve. Frankie and her sister Oona were a noisy, clever show, by contrast. Robert was remote, yet a light flared from inside a dark cave when something amused him. He wouldn't even have seen that Cora noticed him: his nature wasn't put on for anyone to watch. When he took the two girls out to dinner after graduation with a few of their friends, and paid for it all, he was the gravitational centre of their shrilling and planning and tearful parting, without saying much himself, except that he had talked at some point to Cora about his own degree in anthropology, and how he couldn't think of a better preparation for politics.

Cora asked what Bar looked like, and Frankie tried to explain how she wasn't pretty, but s.e.xy nonetheless. You can see why people like her.

The flat cap.

Horsey. No, not horsey, that's cheap. Staggy. Stag at bay: bony head, and rolling eyes, backing off if you get too near her, treading sideways. Not that I've ever seen a stag at bay, except in paintings. She looks like one of those paintings.

Cora had written to Robert the day after she met him at graduation, asking if she could visit him in Whitehall, pretending she was interested in the Civil Service. He had written back helpfully, offering to take her out for lunch. Later, she had seen photographs of Bar, though not many: Robert wasn't the photograph type. He hadn't bothered to get rid of Bar's photos either, only put them away out of decency in the drawers of his desk once he had broken with her: including an old studio portrait of her in a frame, which she must have given him. Cora wasn't exactly jealous of these pictures, but she had searched for them and studied them when Robert wasn't around, to work out what their relations.h.i.+p had been. If she interrogated Robert about it, he wouldn't give her anything to go on ('she was an old friend of the family'). Bar in the photographs was blurry, blonde, lean-jawed, urgent: on a yacht, on a horse, on Robert's arm in an improbably glittering ball gown, slit to the thigh, in which she was somehow more sporting than tarty. If Frankie hadn't suggested it, Cora would never have thought of a stag, but it was true Bar was nervy and leggy, and with a slight cast in one eye, not unattractive. Only in the portrait done when she was very young was she revealed as her mythic self, in ardently dreamy profile, gazing into the black of the studio background. Cora had felt about this picture as poignantly as if Bar had been dead.

She didn't sleep well in the spare bed, although the mattress was expensive, better than the one in Cardiff. Her dreams were shallow, and she woke up several times to lights crawling across the ceiling as cars pa.s.sed in the street. It was strange then to realise where she was, and why she was here. In the dark, Robert's having gone missing seemed less explicable, more ominous; horrible possibilities unravelled in her thoughts until eventually they drifted into dreams again. She was relieved when it was morning and she could get up. After her shower, she poured the milk down the sink and tidied away any signs of her occupation of the flat, dropping rubbish in a bin outside. Then she bought breakfast in a steamy cafe in Paddington, ringing Annette to tell her she would be back at work on Monday morning.

She had no idea in her head except getting the next train back to Cardiff. Obediently she waited under the oracle of the departure boards, showed her ticket and found her seat when the time came. Rain blew against the train window, and Cora couldn't concentrate on the Guardian she had bought. She had the book of Iranian stories with her too: she had put them in her bag at the last minute, thinking she didn't want Damon to find them if he came back. But she couldn't read those either, she couldn't read anything. Travelling away from London on a Friday always had a gravitational inevitability, like machinery winding down into torpor for the weekend: every nerve in her seemed set against this. She imagined the book, with its significance beyond itself, smouldering in the dark, jumbled in among her pyjamas and sponge bag and yesterday's underwear. Then she stood up abruptly when the train pulled into Bristol Parkway, pulling her bag and umbrella from the overhead rack, hurrying off, asking at Information when there was a train to Tiverton.

It matched her mood that Parkway was hardly a real place at all, hardly a building: bolted together out of steel at some point on a map, outside the city. Time wore away in the perfunctory waiting room, or stalking up and down the platform. For some reason she had fixated on the idea that Robert might be wherever Bar was; though it wasn't any business of hers any longer, she told herself, whether he was or not. By the time she arrived in Tiverton it was afternoon and grey, though not actually raining. The station was outside the town. She thought about telephoning Bar to warn her she was coming, then changed her mind. A taxi driver looked at the address and explained that this wasn't in Tiverton at all, but half an hour's ride away; Cora said she didn't care how much it cost, and took out more money from the cash point. En route she involved herself, with genuine sympathy, in the taxi driver's feud with his son-in-law, the tussle over the grandchildren, their wronged mother, the son-in-law's jealousy, indefensible after his own transgression. The taxi burrowed into a countryside thickly green, intricately settled, mostly wealthy. Big fields swept up to woods crowning round, wide hills. They had to stop on several occasions to consult a map, then to ask at a pub.

At the moment of paying and parting, pulled up on the gravel outside the house that was supposed to be Bar's a shabby early-Victorian box, dark under trees, distinctive in just how blank it was, with half its shutters closed, a muddy concrete forecourt piled with junk, an old bed frame, bikes, a rusting harrow they were suddenly too intimate, and couldn't look one another in the eye. Cora muddled her percentages, tipping what she thought was generously much, realising too late it was too little. In her flurry, she forgot to ask the driver to wait for her, in case there was no one at home. As the noise of the retreating car subsided, her mood sank and she felt herself absurd. The house was obviously empty. She had imagined finding a thriving stables, or a farm. Even if it wasn't empty, she had no business here. She had penetrated to the heart of nothing. Robert and Bar had been out of touch for years, why had she ever thought he would have her up-to-date address?

Anyway, now that she had come, she might as well try the door: broad, black paint flaking, at the top of a couple of stone steps set with an iron boot sc.r.a.per muddy with sc.r.a.pings, flanked by damp pillars. A bell pull yanked on dead air, so she used the knocker. There was an old Vauxhall estate, she noticed then while she waited, parked beside an overgrown yew hedge, stained, spattered with needles and berries, but not derelict, though it was hardly the gleaming four-by-four she had prepared for. Just as she gave up and prepared to face the idiotic consequences of her impulse, coming here footsteps sounded beyond the door, and then it swung open. Behind the woman who peered out, hostile, a rectangle of daylight from the doorway was reflected in a gilt-framed mirror at the back of a dim hallway. A weakly lit energy-saving bulb dangled at the end of its flex, unshaded. An old dog plodded out of the dimness, dutifully roused from sleep.

Barbara?

Yes.

It's Cora. Robert's wife. I'm so sorry. I know this is awful, turning up here without warning. Can I talk to you?

She couldn't tell how Bar reacted to her announcing herself. Cora would not have recognised Bar if she hadn't been braced to see her. She looked nothing like her old photographs: she had bulked out, which made her seem shorter, and her long hair, turning grey, had thickened and coa.r.s.ened. Incongruously girlishly, it was pulled back from her face at the temples and tied on top of her head in a floppy ribbon, like Alice in Wonderland. Only the long nose and disdainful slight squint were traces of the old sporty urgency: around them her face had sagged into ambiguously expressive folds. Swags of flesh under her eyes were thunder-coloured she looked older than fifty. She was wearing a filthy linen smock over jeans, and held up a piece of toast and marmalade out of the dog's way. Cora had not calculated for her turning out eccentric: her hope wilted, and she wondered if she had energy for any struggle with Bar. She had imagined deflecting a will resilient and bright and impervious.

Bar persisted, planted stubbornly in the doorway. I haven't even started work yet. You know, I guard my work time very fiercely.

I should have called from the station. I'm sorry, this was a stupid idea. It's all my fault. And now I've let my taxi go. I'm a complete idiot. If you give me the number for a local firm, I'll call another cab.

She thought that if she could get inside the house she'd know whether Robert was around. Bar sighed theatrically, frowning, taking a bite of toast. Now you're here, you might as well see the stuff, I suppose. D'you want coffee? I just made a pot. I like it strong, I warn you.

What stuff? Cora wondered.

Following through the house after Bar and the dog several rooms, then a pa.s.sage, then a cold kitchen Cora could only take in that its neglect and chaos were gargantuan, and that it was furnished with wonders to match: a carved sideboard vast as a s.h.i.+p, a gla.s.s case of stuffed hummingbirds, a jukebox ('my husband's, it works'), baronial fireplace, stone angel, rotten Union Jack hanging in rags from a ceiling. There were bikes in better condition than the ones outside, a big telly, a PlayStation, child-drawings stuck up with Blu-tack. Walls and shelves were crammed with art, night-dark Victorian oils (cows in a river? horses?) alongside expressionism, collages, a ceramic torso in fetish gear. Cora's own displays of art at home appeared to her at once as what they were, primly bourgeois. Everywhere smelled of dog. On the kitchen table there was an open bottle of brandy alongside a packet of sliced bread and a full cafetiere.

Not as bad as it looks, Barbara said. Just a swig in my coffee, to get me started. Want some? I ought to work normal hours, but in the day I just stall miserably, I only get going when everybody else is in bed. Afternoons in the studio I tinker around, tidy up, decide whether to sc.r.a.pe off everything I've done the night before. Until my son gets home.

She was cranky and rather barking and abrupt, but her performance of her character was unapologetic as if it was often required of her to produce it, even exaggerate it. Cora said yes to the brandy. Barbara's hands were bleached pink, thick-fingered, with naked nails. The coffee was thick and bitter, Cora spooned sugar into it. You've got a son? That's nice. How old is he? Do you have any other children?

Only Noggin who's Noah really. He's nine. Ten, ten of course. Christ, if you make those sort of mistakes at the school gate, they alert social services. That's why I usually send my husband to pick him up.