The London Train Part 9

Inside the library the noise from the roads was m.u.f.fled, like the light through the wavering greenish gla.s.s of the windows. If it was raining outside, or if the sky grew dark, then the intimate atmosphere intensified around the clacking of the computer keyboards, the bleeping of the scanner. Strip-lights were suspended from the ceiling by chains. After stamping and putting out the newspapers in English and Urdu and Arabic, Cora would print off the 'holds' list of books requested by other libraries all over the county, then begin to work through it, locating these books on the shelves, scanning them and fastening labels to them with elastic bands, ready for collection; she would be interrupted every so often by borrowers wanting something at the issue desk. The librarians conferred together in murmured voices.

In her teaching job at a further-education college in London, Cora had been active and forceful; she had worn herself out preparing cla.s.ses and marking, standing up for her students, fighting threats from bureaucracy. Yet she'd always felt that this work, which in anyone's eyes could have amounted to a real career, was provisional, while she waited to do something real with her life. In her job in the library, which paid less than half as much and hardly began to use her capacities, she could imagine herself growing old. But she tried not to let her imagination run away with her. She knew how you could deceive yourself, falling into one of those pockets of stasis, where you could not see change building up behind its dam.

The weather stayed fine for Frankie's visit. Making up extra beds in the spare room on Sat.u.r.day morning, Cora heard their car draw up outside and the familial tide spilling out, Frankie's chivvying and encouragement, whimpers from the baby. Cora dawdled downstairs through the house's last held breath of emptiness and quiet, waiting on the bottom stair until one of them actually rang the bell 'Let me do it' pus.h.i.+ng open the letter box in a scuffle of excitement, peering through 'Is she in?' then poking in small hands and turning them to and fro in the hall's dimness, as if it was water. When she did open the door, they were suddenly shy on the doorstep, both of them stripped down to their shorts in the heat, skinny torsos pale: Johnny the eldest, her G.o.dson, red-headed, shuffling behind his dark-haired sister, shoving her forward as if she was an exhibit.

Cora, look! he said.

Lulu held up her arm to show off pink plastic bracelets, making them fall one way, then the other.

h.e.l.lo, you two.

Hugging and exclaiming over them, it was as if she pushed herself with an effort out of her adult solitude; this had not happened when she saw the children all the time in London and must be another aspect of her new life. Frankie struggled in last, laden with bags, the baby on her hip. She had given up trying to keep her shape, after this last birth, and wore whatever loose clothes she pulled first out of the high-piled ironing basket sometimes her husband Drum's s.h.i.+rts over tracksuit bottoms. Cora was self-consciously aware of the summer dress she'd chosen, after trying on other things in front of the mirror.

s.h.i.+t, it's hot! Frankie said. The motorway was a nightmare. I've been dreaming of your nice bathroom. Hold him, will you, while I use it?

Magnus had been woken up out of his sleep. Red-cheeked, strands of auburn hair darkened with sweat and pasted to his head, smelling of regurgitated milk, he squirmed in Cora's arms, opening his mouth to bawl. She walked into the kitchen and then on into the garden to distract him, kissing the top of his head and talking encouraging nonsense. The linen dress had been the wrong choice; it would soon be crumpled and look like a rag. The other two were getting drinks from the tap, standing on a chair, spraying water everywhere because they had turned it on too hard. The baby was transfixed by the sight of next door's cat on the wall; then he screwed his head round to stare with serious scrutiny at Cora's face, taking her in. She seemed to see for a moment that he looked like Robert: surrounded by her husband's family, she was ambushed.

In their time at university together, it had been Cora and not Frankie who was sure she wanted children. Frankie was clever, she had got a First, she had been set on a career as an academic; this was a surprise to people when they first met her, because her looks were sporty and unsubtle: round, pink, handsome face, messy chestnut curls, calves that in those days didn't have any spare fat on them, but were as substantial as young tree trunks. She had dyed her hair black, painted kohl round her eyes, taken drugs, but all her efforts couldn't eradicate the glow of sanity and good health. When Cora fell in love with Robert, she thought she might lose her friends.h.i.+p with Frankie: it had been one of the elements of her old life that she had been calmly ready to trample underfoot in order to have him. But the friends.h.i.+p had only grown gnarled and tangled, woven around all the complications and surprise developments in their lives since. There were so many sensitive spots to beware of that they hardly bothered to try.

After lunch, Frankie fed the baby, the light gleaming on the skin of her breast where the tension tugged and puckered it. Cora wiped surrept.i.tiously with a cloth around the sticky chair backs and edges of the table where the children had been sitting.

Are you supposed to drink coffee? she asked.

h.e.l.l, I don't care, Frankie said. I do everything. I shouldn't eat this, for a start; look at the size of me.

As well as brown bread, Cora had made courgette cake, which was still warm. Johnny and Lulu carried slices into the garden on their palms. Johnny nibbled at his like a bird, dipping his head to it; Lulu tried to coax the cat to eat hers. Frankie sighed, relaxing, admiring the cake and her cake plate and her coffee mug, white china with a pattern of blue leaves.

You've got everything so nice here. Don't think I've changed my opinion about the awful mistake you're making, leaving Bobs. But I'm jealous too. Everything here's deliciously calm and organised. London's vile.

It isn't exactly that I've left him. We both agreed to try living apart for a while.

Rubbish, he's desperate. You left him. Just because he's an inhibited stick doesn't mean he isn't in torment.

He keeps trying to give me money, Frankie. He turned up the other evening, waiting in the park to catch me on my way home, with a briefcase full of forms and papers. He wants to make over half the flat to me. That's how he thinks about relations.h.i.+ps. It's horrible. As if the whole thing in the first place had been like arranging a contract or a piece of legislation. It didn't occur to him to ask me how I was feeling.

It shows how he's suffering, that's just what he would do. Don't pretend you don't know him.

I told him I wouldn't touch anything. I don't want any of it.

Frankie groaned. You think you're so high-minded, but you're both just as bad as each other.

Open-mouthed, the baby fell asleep, away from her nipple, milk trickling at the corner of his mouth; she lowered him cautiously into his car seat. By the way, I've got a new life-plan too, she said. You're going to hate it. But you have to tolerate it, if I'm tolerating yours. At least mine's virtuous. I'm going to train for the ministry.

Which Ministry?

Cora was thinking politics.

The ministry. You know, the jolly old C of E. To be a vicar. Can't you just see me in a dog collar?

You aren't serious. You don't even believe in G.o.d. You used to be a Marxist. You used to hate the establishment.

The Church can be fusty, agreed. But behind the facade there's all this anarchic stuff about truth and social justice. We need that.

Reasonably, Frankie explained that if she'd been born in Baghdad she'd be a Muslim, or a Baha'i or a Jew, but the revelation most naturally to hand was the one she was born into, however imperfect and incomplete, because it was woven into her history and culture.

So I love Protestantism. I sort of love it, romantically. The whole strenuous wrestling-for-grace thing, inside the individual soul. That does it for me.

But you don't believe in the impossible bits, like Jesus dying and rising again?

Frankie's face sometimes took on a certain expression of tactful patience if she thought Cora was showing her ignorance, or failing to understand a difficult idea. Well, I do, though I'm not sure it's helpful thinking about believing or not believing it, in that kind of either/or way. I don't suppose I believe in the Resurrection literally. For me it's a way of expressing the mystery of renewal, as a narrative.

Cora felt her own face stiffening in hostility, false sympathy. Apparently Frankie had been going to church off and on since Lulu was born. She had spoken to her parish priest, and then to a Vocations Adviser; they had told her she could do her training part-time, so she thought of beginning when Magnus started nursery. If Cora tried to imagine what Frankie meant by grace, a kind of ash seemed to settle inside her, sinking down through her chest like a blight. She didn't feel any longer that she had a soul, and she thought then that she hardly knew her friend, they were only connected out of habit. Love is a kind of comfortable pretence, she thought, m.u.f.fling everyone's separation from one another, which is absolute. Probably she had more in common with embittered Annette at the library than with Frankie.

What does Drum think about it?

Drum, Frankie's husband, worked for the campaigns-and-policy division in a major charity.

Well, of course he's a militant atheist. But I think he thinks it'll keep me happy. Or at least he thinks it'll keep me off his back.

Cora offered to put suncream on the children playing in the small back garden. She had eradicated from inside the house every trace of her parents and their long lives here, almost zealously, as if she couldn't bear to be reminded of it; and yet she had never dreamed of touching the garden, apart from where the new extension encroached into it. Otherwise it was still laid out just as her mother had it: low walls overgrown with roses; a crazy-paving path meandering in the gra.s.s; a dwarf pear tree, which was blossoming now. Only Cora didn't have Rhian's gift for gardening. Nothing grew quite as well as it used to: diseases rioted among the plants, slugs ate them, the roses were arthritic and blighted with black spot, the lawn was full of dandelions, she forgot to water things in pots. Sometimes she knew they needed watering, and obstinately put off doing it. Every time she stepped into the garden, even while it soothed her, she also suffered from her failure.

Later in the afternoon Cora and Frankie and the children processed across the road and along beside the iron railings to the park gate, bearing as well as the baby blankets and cus.h.i.+ons, shrimping nets, picnic supper, plastic cricket ball and tennis ball, a bottle of rose and gla.s.ses. Both women knew they must look like an idyll from the kind of old-fas.h.i.+oned children's book they used to read. Other sections of the long park that ran through this eastern part of Cardiff for more than a mile were given over to cultivated beds, bowling greens, a rose garden; at its far end there was a lake with a clock tower built as a little lighthouse commemorating Scott's expedition to the Pole, because the Endeavour had set out from Cardiff docks. Opposite Cora's house the park's ambitions were less strenuous: winding paths, gra.s.s worn thin under the spreading trees, dusty shrubbery. Older children were already in possession. Johnny eyed them warily: bikes dropped on their sides in the gra.s.s, a football game in progress, goals marked with T-s.h.i.+rts stripped off in the heat, girls paddling calf-deep in the brook. Cora had played in this park all through her childhood, felt as if it was yesterday the ooze of the stony brook between her toes, her mother's dread of broken gla.s.s and lockjaw.

They had forgotten the corkscrew and she went back for it; the others watched her summer dress flickering past the far side of the railings, her unhurried long stride with head held high. She waved to them, but Frankie, throwing the ball at Johnny's bat he could hit it if she threw from about a yard away was annoyed and alarmed at how unreachable Cora was these days. Always she had had a surface poise like a thick extra skin, which Frankie had admired and envied; she supposed you had to be beautiful to acquire it, as Cora was. It had something to do with being so much looked at, deflecting an excess of attention, to protect yourself. But in the past she had been pa.s.sionately available to her friends, beyond the act of herself; in fact she had used to seem to Frankie uncomplicated, in the best sense admirably not opaque. Now, her spontaneity was extinguished. You knew about disillusion, but you didn't really believe in it as a tangible force, or anyway not in its coming on so soon after all, they were only in their mid-thirties. In Cora's expression, it was as if a shutter had dropped with a crash, one of those dismal metal ones that shopkeepers install in areas of high crime. Frankie felt disappointed in her brother and Cora; she thought they should have had more resilient imagination than to have let their relations.h.i.+p collapse. They shouldn't have given up so easily on being happy, even if it was about not having children, which it might be, though Cora denied it.

Frankie crouched businesslike over the rose when Cora brought back the corkscrew; both friends felt the strain at the idea of the weekend stretching out ahead of them to be filled. It was the first time Frankie had come to stay since Cora had moved to Cardiff ten months before; both had looked forward to it and now they were both thirsty for the first kick of alcohol, as if they might otherwise run out of things to talk about, which had never used to happen.

Before you say anything, I know I'm not supposed to drink this, either, while I'm breastfeeding.

He's such a feeble baby, you can see it's taken its toll.

Huge Magnus, on his back on a shaded corner of blanket, slept with clenched stout fists, reminding Cora of a pink plastic doll she'd had whose eyelids closed when you tipped it. They talked about the library, and although Frankie pretended to be sympathetic to what Cora described, the peaceful routines and absorption in administrative tasks, Cora was as defensive as if her friend had voiced the conventional pieties: that she was wasting herself, in a job where she wasn't using her brains or her education. Cora wished she was alone; one of the girls in the choir had offered her a spare ticket for something at the theatre it didn't matter what. Yet the suns.h.i.+ne and the children's noise and the playful sc.r.a.p of breeze, riffling the pink candles in the horse chestnut, made out of the park an image of blissful leisure.

Bobs thinks, Frankie said, drinking down fast, that you can't forgive him for the fire at the immigration removal place. But I said you couldn't be that irrational. How could you think it was his fault? He has to take responsibility, in the chain of command, that's how things work in government. But it's not personal. It's not morally his fault, in a way anyone could blame him for. You couldn't think that.

I thought you were the one going into the Church. Your idea of conscience seems pretty flexible.

So you do blame him.

Of course not, Cora said. I know he's an impeccably good man. Good in a way I'll never be. But those centres are unspeakable, it's a horror that they even exist. I can't talk about it, it's too awful.

What do you mean, good in a way you'll never be?

Nothing. She added I can't imagine Robert saying that, about me blaming him for the fire. Whatever he thought, he wouldn't actually say it.

Perhaps not in so many words.

You shouldn't make the words up, Frank. They're important.

You're right, I'm sorry.

It's OK.

Only I did know what he was thinking. He is my big brother.

You never could know, not for absolutely sure.

They s.h.i.+fted positions on the blanket, each dissatisfied with the other, Frankie unpacking hard-boiled eggs and yoghurts from a cool-bag, Cora stretching out on her back and pulling up the skirt of her dress in a semblance of sunbathing. Lulu wandered out from the shrubbery to sit astride her, showing her an earthworm in a seaside bucket.

Look at my snake.

Don't bounce on your Auntie Cora.

She's not my auntie.

I don't mind, Cora said. She isn't bouncing very hard.

But Frankie lifted Lulu by the armpits and swung her away, protesting, skinny legs bicycling wildly. Only the memory of the contact with her heated little life remained across Cora's pelvis and flat stomach for a few moments, vivid and distracting as when, the other week, Cora had had to pick up a starling that flew by mistake into the house and dazed itself, flas.h.i.+ng round the ceilings and against the windows its racing metabolism had seemed to leave its trace in her hands for hours afterwards.

There had been no loss of life during the fire at the immigration removal centre, but a detainee in his fifties, an Iranian, had died of a heart attack a day later, which was why the ombudsman had been asked to conduct a private inquiry. Recent inspections had reported a somewhat improved regime at the centre since the scandals of the early days, and the local fire chief had been paying regular visits. The usual decision had been made against installing sprinklers too p.r.o.ne to being activated in the event of detainee protest but Robert didn't think this would const.i.tute a significant criticism, the ground having been gone over so thoroughly in previous inquiries. It wasn't clear that sprinklers would anyway have made a significant difference to the spread of the fire. Building design defects a failure to plan for the need to isolate sections of the centre in an emergency were much more likely to crop up, but blame for those could hardly be laid at his door, as the centre had been operative for two years before he came into his present role. The problem came back to the perpetual tension between allowing the detainees to a.s.sociate they weren't supposed to be under prison discipline and the difficulty of managing large-scale protest, or controlling them safely in any emergency.

It shouldn't be too bad for us, Robert had rea.s.sured Frankie. He'll say, of course, in the report that these aren't very nice places. How could anyone imagine they might be nice? We can only be required to try to make them function as humanely as possible in the circ.u.mstances. It could have been so much worse. Staff followed procedures pretty well, the disturbances that started the whole thing were quelled rapidly, the individual who set the fires had a history of instability and had only been brought in the night before, there was a model evacuation, even the damage to the buildings had been limited. The couple of detainees who did abscond were picked up within hours.

This fire had happened a year ago, when Cora was still living with Robert in London, in Regent's Park; he hadn't told her right away that it had implications for him, not because he was hiding anything from her, but because she seemed at that point to have stopped taking an interest in his work. (She had stopped watching the news, as well, and reading the papers.) He thought she must still be grieving for her mother, but this didn't rea.s.sure him, he felt himself helpless to put up any argument against the blind force of her feelings, where he couldn't follow her. Also, he noticed that she had started avoiding undressing in front of him in the bedroom, turning her back so that he couldn't see her nakedness when she stripped off her top or stepped out of her knickers, hurrying on her pyjama top before she'd even taken off her skirt. He turned his eyes away from her, he went into the bathroom and took his time cleaning his teeth, he became scrupulous to protect her privacy, took her inhibition inside himself. It began to be their routine that he stayed up late, working on papers, long after Cora had finished whatever marking and preparation she had to do. Almost always she would be asleep, or pretending to be asleep, by the time he turned in.

Eventually Cora had learned from Frankie about the fire. When Robert arrived home in the flat from work one evening, Cora was already in bed. She said she was ill, she couldn't stop her legs trembling; she must have a fever or something.

He was still in his suit jacket and loosened tie, skin sticky and gritty from his Tube journey. Why don't you take a break from teaching? he said. You're putting yourself under too much strain.

Is that what you think it is? she said bitterly from where she was huddled, clasping her knees in her pyjamas with her back to him, staring at the window. The late suns.h.i.+ne showed as s.h.i.+fting yellow rectangles on the thin muslin curtains.

I don't know. What is it?

I told you, I'm ill.

He put a hand on her shoulder and it was true that she was burning hot, scorching him through the thin cotton.

I saw Frankie, she said. I went round there after my last cla.s.s.

Frankie was pregnant at the time with Magnus, having some medical problems.

How is she?

She told me about the fire at the removal centre, and the inquiry.

He knew at once it had been a mistake to keep this from her. Nothing would convince her now that he hadn't been hiding it.

You don't have to worry about that. I'm confident it's going to be all right. Some effective work's been done in those places since the early days.

He tried to rea.s.sure her that no one had been hurt, that the man who died had a pre-existing heart condition, which was in his records. The curtains at that moment were blowing into the room, lifted on a breeze from outside. Cora uncurled herself onto her back, gazing at him.

Robert, you frighten me sometimes. What does it feel like, to say those things?

Under her scrutiny he felt himself transparent, hollowed out.

Sorry: am I talking civil servant? It's an occupational hazard.

I don't blame you for anything, she said. Only you use this calm and steady language about things that aren't steady.

No, of course they're not.

Things that are horrors really. Filthy and b.l.o.o.d.y.

I suppose it's force of habit.

Someone has to do it, I know that, she said heavily. I know that, in comparison, I don't do anything.

When for a while Cora had visited Thomas, the Zimbabwean detainee, he had been at a removal centre in an old building outside Brighton, converted from a private school, with a spreading cedar left over from the past still in the garden, where the detainees were not allowed. Even as a visitor, she had been body-searched and made to leave her fingerprints. The shaming details of the place Thomas had told her that when they brought him in they used fabric leg-restraints, so he couldn't run still recurred, not in her dreams, but when she was defenceless, alone with herself, skewered by her guilt (she had been his only contact in the outside world, and after eighteen months she had stopped visiting). Robert's fire, however, had been at one of the new purpose-built centres: brick buildings on brownfield sites, as blandly featureless from the outside as mail-order depots or units on an industrial estate. The brutality of Victorian prisons had a negative moral weight, pressing heavily on the earth; this modern apparatus for punishment stood lightly and provisionally in the landscape, like so many husks, or ugly litter. The appearance of the buildings, Cora thought, was part of the pretence that what was processed inside them was nothing so awful or contaminating as flesh and blood. The buildings made possible the dry husks of language in the reports that Robert read, and wrote.

Frankie was going to drive back to London on Monday morning when Cora went off to work. Sat.u.r.day night was rather a flop. The two women had promised themselves hours of talk once the children were asleep, but by the time Cora came downstairs from reading Johnny his story, Frankie, who had put things in the dishwasher, was yawning and ready for bed.

G.o.d, I'm so pathetic. It was the wine in the suns.h.i.+ne. It's the b.l.o.o.d.y baby. Literally, I'm dozing on my feet: look!

She presented her moon-face for inspection broad nose, big cheeks, thick dark brows pegging her eyelids up with her fingertips; her girlish looks were gaining gravitas, personality stamping on them strongly as a mask. Cora began to believe in her as a vicar. As soon as Frankie had taken herself upstairs, Cora felt excessively wide awake; resentment dispersed like a fog lifting, and affectionately she tidied away her visitors' mess, thinking she would have made a more organised mother than Frankie. Pouring herself another gla.s.s of rose, she stalked round the ground floor of the house in her bare feet, thirsty for contact and explanation now there was no one to explain to. Her lovely rooms, unappreciated, wasted their charm on the warm evening air; the windows were open, and footsteps pa.s.sing in the street sounded unexpectedly close. The dishwasher churned in the kitchen. The usual quiet of the house was thickened by the sleeping children in it, their restlessness and rustling and little cries: inexperienced, she stopped at each new noise, listening anxiously.

As it grew dark, she lit the candles meant to enchant Frankie, then met herself accidentally in the mirror above the fireplace in the front room, ghost in her own house, with a shocked hostile look, unlike the carefully prepared scrutiny she usually allowed herself. In the mornings, or before she went out, she put on her make-up and arranged her clothes satisfactorily, as if she existed as a mannequin outside herself, whose beauty must be served. Catching herself unawares now, she seemed to see something that she had squandered, and had to answer for, and couldn't. Her face wasn't broad and dreamy, suited to quiet work at the library, as she liked to feel it from inside: the weight had fallen off her jaw and cheek bones, she looked questing and thwarted. The mirror was old, foxed, an antique, divided in portions like a triptych, in a thin cracked gilt frame. In the empty grate beneath, a fan of folded gold paper was arranged with some pinecones sprayed gold.

She did not want to see herself, or think about herself. The appet.i.te for communication, which Frankie had roused and then frustrated by going to bed, broke in dangerously on the steady rhythm that her days had fallen into. Tamping down her restlessness, Cora put on the television, with the sound turned low. She remembered watching a different television in the childhood room that had occupied this same s.p.a.ce, where she had once known how to possess herself confidently. That sitting room had been poky and papered in her mother's cautious stab at 1970s taste stylised pink flowers on a mud-green background. Now that it was gone, Cora regretted that she had not kept even one sc.r.a.p of this paper, which must have been one of the first things she opened her eyes on; although when she was a teenager, she had complained to her mother that it made her feel like a frog in a pond. But she had begun work on the house in a kind of frenzy, wanting to alter everything after her parents' deaths, which she had not foreseen, and which had struck her terribly. She had always thought they would come into their own in old age, they would have a talent for it. Dad's fatal heart attack, however, had come only two months after he took early retirement from teaching mining engineering at the University of Wales Inst.i.tute; a year later, Mum was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. Cora had taken six months off work to nurse her.

Magnus cried several times in the night (poor Frankie, who was trying to get him to sleep through), and on Sunday morning Johnny and Lulu woke up early. Cora dozing in her own bed heard them, excited and tentative, testing the freedom of the downstairs emptied of adults, conferring in miniature voices, Johnny chiding and bossy: 'You mustn't touch, Lulu!' She gambled that they wouldn't break anything, and wondered idly what it would mean to have a sibling to explore with. They would be stepping with bare feet where the sun, on another fine day, crept its long, low, early light along the blond floorboards, warming them: Cora liked doing that too. If this long spell of lovely weather was unnatural, she could hardly make herself care. They would be entranced as well by the next-door cat, meowing through the gla.s.s from where it waited every morning on the sill outside, though she determinedly wasn't feeding it.

Luxuriantly she turned over under the cotton sheet that was all she needed these warm nights, closing her eyes, floating at the edge of the dream she had woken from, of a long pillared hall like a temple, sloping down out of sight. Sometimes sleeping alone, after twelve years of marriage, was a huge relief; it was blissful to stretch her limbs across an empty s.p.a.ce, weightless and free. In her memory, sometimes, Robert beside her in the bed had been a brooding and oppressive ma.s.s in those last months, weighing down the mattress on his side until she had to cling to her edge so as not to roll into him. She had lain tensed in the cramped margin, his s.e.xual need gnawing at her ('s.e.xual need' had been her mother's ashamed phrase for it), though she obstinately ignored it, and he never tried to touch her if she didn't want him to. At other times in her new life, however, Cora was so scalded by her solitary nights, sodden with dreams and longing, that she crawled downstairs to sleep sitting up in one of the armchairs. Then, her empty bed seemed ignominious, as if she was an old woman already, having lost everything.

After breakfast Frankie took the children to the little church along the road where Cora was married, while Magnus slept and Cora listened out for him. She made a picnic, thoughtfully putting in wet wipes and kitchen paper, bibs and nappies and changing kit. 'You're a genius,' Frankie exclaimed, and Cora saw how she almost went on to say that Cora was gifted for motherhood, and would have taken to it naturally, but stopped herself in time. Returned from her immersion in spirit, or whatever it was, Frankie looked washed with some new s.h.i.+ne that made her impermeable to Cora. She had actually put on eye make-up and lipstick, combed out her mop of hair. Church had made the children momentarily big-eyed and solemn. Lulu was sucking her fingers wrapped in the skirt of her dress; the three of them composed a picture of wholeness and grace. Some great-uncle or other of Robert and Frankie's had been a bishop; Frankie's Drum belonged to that world too, his family had a big house and land in Scotland somewhere. These patterns were remembered in the blood, Cora thought sceptically. It didn't even spoil the picture of wholeness when Johnny flung a door open in Lulu's face and there were howls, Frankie shouted that he was an 'absolute b.l.o.o.d.y idiot'. Long ago, when they first met in Leeds, Cora had felt the difference of cla.s.s background as an uneasy terrain dividing her from Frankie, in crossing which Frankie must somehow make the first move, propitiatory. Cora had been brought up a socialist. Her father's father had been an electrician in a coal mine and had volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. She had used to burn with a sense of the wrongs done to her forefathers in history.

The friends got on more easily on this second day of their weekend together, because they'd stopped expecting too much. They drove up to the folk museum at St f.a.gans; almost carelessly, they let slip the old strenuous habits of their intimacy, and were nice to one another instead, even polite. Their lagging progress round the Welsh farmhouses and cottages done up in the styles of different periods, with smoking hearths or fumy gas-lamps, gave adequate shape to an aimless day; they bought flour from the water mill, rode in the horse-drawn cart. There were goats for Lulu to love and dread, and their picnic was blessedly wasp-free. Cora took them backwards down the row of tiny terraced houses from Merthyr Tydfil, furnished as a historical sequence: starting in the 1970s, they retreated to the early nineteenth century, because that was the only way she could bear to do it when she was a romantic girl, pa.s.sionate against modern degradation, besotted with a purer past. Now, the past choked her, its tiny stuffiness, antimaca.s.sars and flat irons, rag rugs and faded photographs of dignified a.s.semblies of Baptists, all men. Frankie peeked, when an attendant wasn't looking, into a ma.s.sive old Bible in Welsh, which Cora couldn't read although her mother's family had been Welsh-speakers. Discreetly, neither of them mentioned religion when they stepped into the Unitarian chapel, with its democratic pulpit in the midst of the congregation, its clear light from windows of plain gla.s.s.

The longed-for idea of children was always remote from the reality of hours that Cora actually spent with Johnny and Lulu and Magnus. Caught up for the day in their clamour and tangled joys and crises, her skin printed with the hot impress of little bodies, it hardly occurred to her to feel the old cruel twist of her own lack. She couldn't want somebody else's children. She would be relieved however much she liked them when somebody else's were put to bed at the end of the day; she couldn't yearn after these completed persons, who belonged to themselves. Frankie's children only made her envious when they were absent, reduced to an idea; and in any case, the lack that had used to be savage pain was flattening into a duller wincing, in the more general ruin of her life. The great thing was to carry it off, so that no one pitied you. Cora knew that she was naturally good at this. Walking round with Lulu on her hip, explaining things to Johnny without overburdening him, she was aware she made a picture of a clever aunt, or a favourite school teacher. An uncompromised adulthood could make a clearer air for children, sometimes, than foggy mothering. Once, when Frankie had taken Johnny in search of toilets and Lulu tripped, Lulu was not inconsolable, accepting Cora's comforting as second best. That would have to do. Other families, pa.s.sing their little group burdened with pushchair and bags, would not be able to tell immediately which one was the mother.

Frankie found herself explaining, while the children were on the slide in the playground and Magnus slept, how our modern sensibility, deprived by scientific rationalism of a mythic dimension, was floundering in darkness. We've subjected religious beliefs to the wrong kind of scrutiny, as if they needed to be true in a scientific sense. So we're desolated by our cleverness, in an empty universe. We need the symbols and stories that embody the idea of another dimension, beyond the one we actually inhabit.

But just because we need them, that doesn't make them true. Maybe there isn't any other dimension.

No: the fact that we need them is what makes them true. We bring that dimension into existence, our imagination in creative collaboration with the life-forces outside us and the mysteries of physics, which otherwise have no outlet into being known. Those forces are incomplete without our faith as we're incomplete without their existence beyond us.

Cora wasn't interested, she was drawing with the toe of her sandal in the bark chippings of the playground.

Have you left Bobs for somebody else? Frankie suddenly asked. Is there anyone else?