Part 15 (1/2)

So you're a painter, then.

Puzzling, Barbara peered at her more closely, finis.h.i.+ng her toast. If you're not sure, what are you doing here?

I'm Robert's wife. I'm looking for him.

How disappointing. I thought you were going to buy a picture. My agent had mentioned she was sending someone, I a.s.sumed you were them. Robert who? You're not a wronged wife, are you? She gave a shout of laughter. I haven't had one of those come calling for a long time. I warn you, Gummo bites, if anything turns nasty. We've had a whole succession of dogs, named after the Marx Brothers. The name's got nothing to do with her missing any teeth.

I'm not wronged, Cora said.

She explained which Robert she meant.

G.o.d almighty: that Robert! But I haven't seen him in years. So you're Cora! But didn't you b.u.g.g.e.r off? Someone told me you had.

We're separated, Cora said. The word seemed carping and finicky, as she used it. But because he's gone missing, I've got involved in trying to find him. I don't know why I thought he might be here.

Nor do I. What do you mean, 'missing'?

Cora explained. A copy of the Telegraph was still in its polythene packet on the breakfast table. Barbara tore it open while Cora was talking, laid it flat while she spread another piece of cold toast, turned through the pages noisily.

Oh look, here it is, she said. Poor old Bingo.

Bingo?

Robert, Bobby, Bobby Bingo. There's even a picture of him. Calls for his resignation. 'Lax regime,' it says. What nonsense. It's a miracle these places don't go up in flames more often, if they're so full of terrorists. Nothing about him having done a runner.

There was also the usual picture of the dead man. Robert in his photograph was on his way into the inquiry, so it must have been taken within the last few weeks. Cora searched the picture for any signs of distress; but he was remote from her, competent, locked up inside his public role, only glancing accidentally and obliquely towards the camera. Smiling, he was pa.s.sing some remark to a colleague it made him look blithely insensible to the seriousness of the case.

He's kept more hair than some of my old boyfriends, Barbara said. I used to think he'd get awfully stuffy, if he stayed on in the Service too long. Has he got stuffy? Is that why you're separated?

No, said Cora stiffly, nothing like that. Robert's got a very independent mind. I can't imagine why he's disappeared. It's not like him: even if this inquiry's blown things out of all proportion. He takes everything in his stride. What would he be afraid of? He would face things out.

Anyway, he isn't here.

I made a stupid mistake.

Bar suggested that Cora might as well see her pictures, now she'd come. Perhaps she hoped she could still make a sale. She was completely stony broke, she said they were in danger of having the house repossessed. Her husband was a landscape artist, away at present working on a commission on Fair Isle, building a causeway. Photographs of a row of stakes in shallow water, a path of white stones winding round a hill, must be his work. Bar's studio was in a long attic conversion, cleaner and brighter than the rest of the house. Cora was ready to dislike the pictures, but they weren't what she had expected, less forthright, more fantastic: skirts and petticoats of real cloth were dipped in pinkish-yellow plaster and then embedded in a dark paint surface where they dried to caked stiffness. Touches of over-painting added what might have been embroidery, or rusty bloodstains. How surprising that this brusque, barking woman was making art about femininity, which Cora thought of as her prerogative. Bar seemed to forget Cora had only come to the house to look for Robert, and talked about processes as if she must be fascinated.

Cora said she hadn't known Bar was an artist, Robert had never mentioned it.

For years I mucked around, not doing anything seriously. Then, would you believe, the same month I was signed by Hyman's, I discovered I was up the duff. h.e.l.l! Talk about a late developer.

Cora was suffering, she was crushed. This was the world Robert really belonged to; where they all had nicknames for one another Bingo and Bobs and Bar. Everything they did came to have importance somehow, even if they started out in life caring only for horses and hunt b.a.l.l.s. Bar was vague about prices, but found a list from an old exhibition, where they were way out of Cora's reach. If Bar asked her what she did, she thought she wouldn't mention the library, she would say that she taught literature.

With a yelp Barbara remembered Noggin.

Do I smell of brandy? They think I'm the mother from h.e.l.l. Also, that I'm old enough to be his grandmother. They've probably already got their eye on a suitable foster family.

She offered to take Cora to the station, if she didn't mind going via the school, which was in the next village. Cora was grateful, wanting only to escape. Gummo curled up behind the front pa.s.senger seat, diffusing a bad smell like old cooked vegetables into the close quarters of the car. Bar drove fast, braking violently in the single-lane roads when she met anything coming the other way, cursing and reversing expertly. Cora had to open her window. Then after all they were early, and had to sit waiting outside the school in a queue of parked cars, because Bar couldn't face the playground.

It's a ghastly microcosm, isn't it?

Cora said she wouldn't know, she didn't have children.

Well out of it. Other parents look to see if you're using the wrong was.h.i.+ng powder, or giving your children laudanum to make them sleep. If only I could get my hands on some. Nog's out of control because his dad's not here. He rampages. I'm lucky if he's in bed before midnight. And I can't get started on my work till he's out of the way.

The school was Victorian, with twin doorways for Boys and Girls, behind a venerable church; those were the days, Bar said. Then she sat slumped behind the steering wheel with her eyes closed, suggesting the performance of her personality was exhausting. Opening them, she talked about Robert as if they'd never left the subject.

His cutting out like this isn't so untypical, actually. From what I remember. He's rather an Olympian, you know. Well, I expect you know. High-handed. Like when after he left school he was so absolutely set on going into the army which I thought lunacy then something or other happened in the early stages of training to make him change his mind, and he just walked away.

Stonily Cora stared forward through the windscreen, jealous of Bar's claim to prior knowledge of Robert. She hadn't known any story about him wanting to be in the army.

Literally walked away. Set out on the road, and came home. Well, I expect he caught a bus or something. But straight home. Except they didn't really have a home, of course, after their parents smashed. So to my parents' house in Devon actually, of which he used to be very fond. He was in all kinds of trouble for absconding; people had to run around after him, pulling strings so that he got away with it. I don't remember the details. When he's finished with something, he just drops it, tramples it on his way to the next thing. I should know. Bingo was my dearest, bestest friend when we were kids. It's a shame. We should never have got in the sack together. f.u.c.ks everything up, always. Avoid the sack. Too late of course for you. But good advice. And not much of a lover anyway. You won't mind me saying that, as you're separated.

Noggin when he appeared, borne on a tide of children, was small and pale, with swags of shadow under his eyes to match his mother's. Shoving a couple of drawings indifferently at her ('Nog, these are utterly splendid'), he slung his bag across the back seat and announced like a gloomy little prince that he would get car-sick if he wasn't in the front. Cora didn't offer to change places. It was difficult to imagine him rampaging.

Gummo stinks the place out, he complained.

Barbara dropped Cora off at the station.

Did you think of looking for him at our old place near Ilfracombe? she suggested at the last minute, leaning out of the car window. As I said, he used to be fond of it. They stayed there, even before their parents died. My brother and I still keep it up can't afford it, but you know, it's our childhood. Bing had lots of happy holidays there.

Where is that?

Bar explained to her how to find it, and then Cora remembered having spent a few days in the house once, when she and Robert were first together. I hadn't realised it belonged to you.

It's just like him not to tell you.

But Cora decided not to go to Ilfracombe. If Robert was there, it must mean he didn't want her to find him.

On the train, when Cora opened the Guardian supplement, she found a piece by Paul: a double spread about his childhood reading. Trapped in her window seat a woman beside her tapped her keyboard inexorably Cora gasped for a moment for air, crumpling the pages down in her lap, drinking in help from the landscape that was still and cooling beyond the window gla.s.s; a green hill, a little stand of birch trees. His picture come upon so unexpectedly was a blow. She'd never had any photograph of him apart from the out-of-date one on the back flap of his books. She looked again. He was in quarter-profile, staring sombrely in black and white, outlined against bookshelves. Painfully, Cora had to begin to supply him with a study in his house somewhere in the Monnow Valley. She couldn't read the blurry t.i.tles on the spines of the books. Paul's hair was untidy and she thought that his air of spiritual, troubled absorption was contrived for the camera. He had become already not quite the man she'd known, changed by whatever had happened to him since they parted: the set of the full, pale lips was more definite, the grain of the complexion thicker, the jaw fleshed more heavily. He had never belonged to her.

There was a childhood picture too, which was almost more wounding the socks pulled tightly up, the skinny chest thrust forward as if at attention, the too-beaming offer of himself to his mother or whoever pointed the camera. Cora didn't know if she could bear to read the article and then she read it. Paul remembered borrowing books about nature from the Birmingham central library when he was a boy. His idea of nature at that time, he wrote, had been as a Platonic intimation of a more real reality outside the built-up cave of his city present: the lists of bird names and diagrams of animal spoor were symbols of a transcendent elsewhere. That library building had replaced the Victorian reference library, demolished in the Sixties, and had itself been replaced since. He said that since his mother had died, the last link to his past in the old city had been broken.

So his mother had died.

And his oldest daughter must have had a baby; he was a grandfather, which seemed extraordinary. This daughter must be living with them now, or near them, because he implied that he saw his granddaughter every day.

It was as if Cora read these things about a stranger.

Once, Cora had believed that living built a c.u.mulative bank of memories, thickening and deepening as time went on, shoring you against emptiness. She had used to treasure up relics from every phase of her life as it pa.s.sed, as if they were holy. Now that seemed to her a falsely consoling model of experience. The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew into desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something.

Robert felt the afternoon outside without looking at it: mildly grey, unimportant. A flossy indefinite light made everything seem to keep still, out of indifference; summer was over, foliage wasn't miraculous any longer, only a plain fact. Footsteps approaching in the street, and pa.s.sing, didn't rouse him. He was in Cora's house in Cardiff, sitting with his back to the window, at the wooden table in the front room she used as a desk (but didn't use much), writing a letter on her laptop, painstakingly picking out the letters with his right hand because his left (he was left-handed) was bandaged, and in a sling. The air of the house was vaguely stale around him he had been there now for two days, waiting for her, and he hadn't opened any windows, or got round to was.h.i.+ng any of the dishes he'd used, which were piled in the kitchen sink, though he fully intended to attack them sometime soon (his excuse to himself was that the bandage made ch.o.r.es bothersome). He hadn't gone out once since he arrived, in case he missed Cora, but there had been food in her freezer, home-cooked and meticulously labelled in her big clear hand. Defrosting and heating soup and shepherd's pie in her microwave, he had felt himself in a kind of comical, tenuous connection with her, though only through his theft; eating her food alone, the illusion of their connection failed him. He did not know what she would think of his invading here, making himself at home among her things. He had run out of milk this morning and was drinking his tea and coffee black.

Deliberately, Robert hadn't once turned the television on. He didn't want to know whether they were making any fuss about him or not, as was more likely (he didn't flatter himself on the subject of his importance). He had not opened up the computer either, before he sat down to write this letter; nor had he spoken on the telephone until twenty minutes ago, when Frankie called him on his mobile. He hardly knew what he had done with all the hours that had pa.s.sed since he got here. At first, of course, he had expected Cora back at any moment. When he'd arrived yesterday he hadn't had any idea of entering the house without her permission; however, when he turned into the little concreted area in front of the house, he'd seen at once that her keys were hanging from the lock in the closed door. Robert rang the bell and knocked, but no one came; Cora must have opened the door in a hurry and then gone out again later, not noticing that she hadn't retrieved her keys. From her key ring there dangled as well as an ornamental knot of beads and ribbon, tarnished from being tumbled around in the bottom of her bag other keys beside the Yale stuck into the lock, including a mortise Robert guessed was for their London flat. It was lucky he had come along before anyone else saw them. He had hesitated before letting himself in. But it would have been too ostentatiously tactful to hover outside, waiting to present the keys when Cora appeared, so that she could open her own door. He hoped she wouldn't imagine that in rescuing them he meant to be reproachful, or gloating.