So, are you a poet? she asked him.

Do I look like one?

What is this physiognomy thing with you? There's no art, you know, to read the mind's construction in the face.

s.h.i.t! I forgot, you're an English teacher.

What have you got against English teachers?

Nothing, he said with exaggerated gloom. Someone has to do it. A quotation for every occasion.

Don't you think it's a wonderful thing: opening up young minds to the possibilities of literature?

Oh, that. Do you really do any of that?

Not much, she admitted. I work with young adults with literacy problems. But I do like it. And I do read to them sometimes, good difficult things. You'd be surprised how much they can take in. You see, they're made to stumble, because their reading is stumbling. So everyone gets the wrong idea, that they're not interested in what's in books. But just because they can't read for themselves doesn't necessarily mean their minds aren't capable of following a sophisticated text. Some of them. I mean, I wouldn't want to exaggerate. I wouldn't want to claim I was reading them Henry James.

No one reads Henry James these days, he said. Do they? Not after they've been made to at university. The shelves in the bookshops are full of them, people buy them because of the t.i.tles and the nice pictures on the covers, they think it's going to be fun like a costume drama on telly, but they don't actually read them, not to the bitter end, surely they don't?

The Golden Bowl is my favourite novel. I reread it every couple of years.

Well, you're one, he said. You're the one. You're a rarity. You're the rare, exceptional reader that the book was looking for. It found you, across the years. Rather you than me. I'm not sure I'd want to be found by The Golden Bowl.

He wasn't really listening to what she said, he was watching her: or, he saw what she said as if it was an attribute, part of her quality, not an idea separate from herself. She felt herself laid open in the bleaching light of his attention. What he liked, she understood, weren't her liberal ideas on education, but her hardness, which was personal and newly, after the last two years had something finished and ruthless in it. He was not taking advantage of her desperation; it met something in him, he reciprocated it. And also, of course, he was drawn by how she looked; he couldn't help it and she couldn't help drawing him after her. She began to feel herself enveloped in that rich oil of s.e.x attraction, so that she moved more fluently, knew there was something gleaming and iridescent in how she turned her head away or smiled at him. The sensation of his physical closeness mingled with her awareness of herself, as if there'd been brandy in the coffee they drank: the ripe blend in his face of softness cheeks and skin and mouth and hard hooded eyes, the deliberate slow changes in his expression, as if each thought she offered dropped into a cave inside him, lit up with ironies. She would not have wanted to belong to any mere club of desperate people, if there hadn't been s.e.x and beauty in it.

In the past, she had always tried to deflect any attention to her looks onto something else, as if in itself it wasn't worthy of her. She had insisted on being loved for her qualities or her ideas; but she might put those aside, for this moment. Dizzy, she was confused about what she was supposed to be arguing for; somehow they had got onto the subject of cla.s.s. He was insisting that Marx was sentimental, deluded with hope on the subject of the proletariat. When Cora had to get up to use the toilet she looked around dazedly at the other occupants of the carriage, suddenly returned inside herself and self-conscious about their conversation how loud had they been? as if instead of coffee they really had been drinking alcohol. Making her way back to him, balancing between the seat ends, after the unnerving swaying toilet and its complicated locking, she saw the cooling towers of Didcot power station float past the windows, the squat, fat pillows of their steam half-quenched in drizzle. The sight lifted her back into the surrounding routines of her life they would be in London in less than an hour, she needed to shop before she got back to the flat as if she was surfacing from somewhere underwater. When she reached their seats, he had picked up his book again and was reading as if he was reconciled with it. They had lost their momentum and sat in silence, restored to their separate existences. Cora thought coldly that their little exaltation had all been nothing, a false flurry.

I don't even like him very much, she thought, embracing emptiness with relief. If I saw him talking to someone else, I'd think he was opinionated, and preoccupied with his own inner life, blind to other people. Physically, he's not my type, with that face that will grow into pouches and folds as he ages, like an actor in a Bergman film. I prefer someone with sharper bones, leaner. Not that Robert has sharp bones exactly.

She looked out of the window, repudiating Vogue, taking in the pleasure boats disoriented on the flooded upper reaches of the Thames, then the outer sprawl of the capital, its usual intricate mica-glitter extinguished in the rain, stretching out in its flat plain in every direction like a plan of itself, punctuated with green, with the poignant ruins of the old factories. They were swallowed between the backs of office blocks. As they stood up to leave the train at Paddington, they said goodbye.

It was nice talking to you, he said.

Yes, wasn't it? she idiotically replied, and then blushed furiously at her mistake, which he obviously noticed and took so unfairly for the last word on her vanity and self-satisfaction.

In the crowd hurrying along the platform he was ahead of her, taking long oblivious strides. They were borne forward, apart, in the tide of the combined purposes of so many anonymous others, all moving in uncanny swift unison without speech, only to the sound of their steps. The great station gave out its roaring exhalation of echo. She hadn't even asked him what he was coming up to London for. Dirty pigeons flapped like derision under the vast arch of the roof. Following, faced with his back, Cora was suddenly desperate at the idea of letting this unknown man go into the crowd where she would never find him again; she convinced herself that she might not be the whole of what she could be, without his knowing her. Hurrying behind, she willed him to turn round. And beyond the automatic barrier where they fed in their tickets, he did. He stopped in his tracks.

He was wearing she noticed properly for the first time a slightly ridiculous blazer, grey linen with a light stripe, like something a woman might have bought for him but had meant him to wear in the sunshine.

Cora almost fell into him.

Oh, h.e.l.lo, he said. It seems a shame, not to see you again. After we got on so well. Didn't we? When are you next in Cardiff?

That was Paul: Paul, although she didn't know his name yet he forgot to tell her, forgot to ask hers. Or perhaps didn't forget. They didn't exchange phone numbers either. They were bound together, for the moment, only by the slenderest thread of an arrangement, an hour, a place (not her parents' house, but a cafe near the park).

When the day and the hour came round, Cora was almost too busy putting on white undercoat in the upstairs bathroom. By the time she got all round the window frame she was already late, and then when she changed out of her decorating clothes she realised that she smelled of white spirit and there was paint in her hair and under her nails. This seemed a doomed and desperate condition in which to seek out a love-affair. In the mirror she saw a caricature of herself, lips bloated, eyes bloodshot, charcoal eyeliner smudged. Fatalistically she almost changed her mind again and didn't go, only she couldn't bear the idea of the hours pa.s.sing after she hadn't. Crossing the park under her resisting, buffeted umbrella, she felt the louring sky and sodden, thrashing trees were her own blemish, a weight she had to carry on her shoulders.

As soon as she came into the busy, noisy, steamy place, putting down the umbrella and shaking it out of the door behind her, he stood up from the table where he'd been waiting and came over and put his hands on her, holding her while she unb.u.t.toned her wet mac, kissing her right cheek, left as if they knew each other well. Her mind was still in the chaos of wind and rain in the park. They were both breathing hard. There might be people in the cafe who recognised her, had known her parents: she didn't care. All the shops and cafes in Cardiff were poignant to her in that moment, suffused with a fond idea of home and the past.

Oh, he said into her neck, I thought you wouldn't come.

He smelled of cigarettes.

I'm sorry I was late. I was painting.

Pictures?

No, the bathroom window.

When they had got coffee and were sitting down he brought out a notebook and pen. His hands shook, but she remembered they had shaken on the train, even before he noticed her. Listen, he said. I can't ever let you go again, English teacher, Henry James lover. Married to the senior civil servant. What's your name? What's your number?

She had forgotten everything about this man; it was like meeting a stranger all over again. He seemed more compact than she had remembered, more sleek, he might have had his hair cut in between their meetings, he was less like her idea of a poet. His eyes were grey-blue she hadn't remembered that and slightly prominent, the sleepy lids lifted as if he were shocked awake. She could hear traces of a Midlands accent now in his voice, which was deliberate, strong, lazy. He contemplated her steadily, drinking her in, swallowing her, so that she had to look away, down into her coffee. Sometimes she thought afterwards of the man on the train as if he had been someone else, whom she'd never seen again after that first time.

Cora had no notebook with her. Paul wrote down his name and mobile number on a sc.r.a.p of paper he found screwed up in his pocket, and she put it in her purse, still thinking she could throw it away later, or put it through the shredder when she got back to London. He took her hand, hot from nursing her coffee cup, in both of his, unfurled her palm and kissed it, pressed his knees hard against hers under the table. She thought: this works, it's his system, he's done this with women before. It's not a trick or anything, but he's worked out that if you prevaricate too long, you pa.s.s a point where you can't get back to the truth of what you really want from the other person, and you wind round and round each other in tedious games, which are for children. So if you want s.e.x, you might as well be plain about it, seize the possibility that's flowering at once, before it pa.s.ses. That's all this is.

Cora. I made up names for you. But none of them was as good as that.

This is ridiculous. We don't know one another.

I don't want to know you. Not so that you're familiar, filmed with familiarity, so that I forget the shock of you.

You might not like me if you knew me.

I like you. But that's the least of it.

What would she think of him, she wondered, if she was watching this from a cold distance, if she wasn't herself? Her nostrils tightened for a moment in disgust. She didn't want to be one of those women with hardened faces, joking about s.e.x, lighting up at the idea of s.e.x like an old, tired torch when the contacts are pressed, expert in techniques and devices.

But then, Paul Paul, she savoured the name, as though she had always kept it ready, empty, as a mansion prepared for him Paul wouldn't have wanted one of those women.

She thought: isn't it what I came for? Aren't I glad, that he is shameless? She didn't pull her knees away.

Where can we go? Paul said.

The house smelled of paint and damp plaster, it was coldly unfriendly. The men had gone home: Mark the plasterer who had been finishing the walls in the new front room, Terry the builder who had been putting in the units in the kitchen. Ladders were propped along the hall, cloths were spread out across the floors, the empty rooms resonated as Paul and Cora walked around them, stepping over the mess. If Terry or Mark had still been in the house, she would have made Paul tea and then sent him away, and she would have shredded his note. Everything they touched was thick with plaster dust; she seemed to feel it coating her tongue.

I'm an idiot, bringing you home with me like this. Like one of those desperate women who get murdered. I don't know anything about you.

Cora, he said. It's all right.

But he must be thinking the same thing, anxious suddenly that she would bore him, or cling to him. Now they were alone together, they must both be full of doubt. She was coldly ready to let him go, and at the same time frantic at the idea of it. After he went, what would she have left?

Here, there were two poky rooms, she was explaining. I've knocked through.

He was bored, desperately bored, his eyes slid away from what she showed him. She took him upstairs, but only to show him the paintwork in the bathroom. He must be imagining that under the veneer of her caring for poetry, this was her secret self, devoured by the cult of home improvement.

There was an awful old suite in here. You know, face-powder pink? Anyway, I ripped that out.

She could not help herself processing round the rooms, explaining the plan of the old house, which was disappearing under the emerging shape of the new. She even showed him the airing cupboard and the new boiler, hearing herself mention constant hot water, knowing she sounded quite mad. They opened the door and went into her parents' bedroom. She had had the fitted wardrobes taken out and the floor sanded, got rid of most of the furniture. The room was a light, white box, rain washing down the curtainless window.

My mother died in here, Cora said, surprising herself. In this bed.

When she had opened the door, the whole scene had been laid out in front of her for a moment like a tableau, shaking her violently: she had seen it in a new perspective from the doorway, herself at a distance standing bent over her mother, the nurse on the other side of the bed, perhaps preparing a syringe, with her back turned. At a certain moment, without warning, something like thick black blood had gushed from her mother's mouth, choking her, flooding over her nightdress and the bedclothes. She had met her mother's eyes, seemed to read full awareness in them, protest and shame and terror. The next moment the nurse had turned round and cried out in surprise. 'Oh, she's gone.'

Cora had run downstairs and out into the garden in the dark, unbelieving.

How long ago was this? Paul asked. Were you with her?

He looked where she was looking, as if he might see something.

The room was empty.

In Cora's room, he closed the door behind them.

In here too it was almost empty, there was just her bed and a chair, no curtains at the windows, a few books. She slept in here when she stayed over.

At last, I've shut up, she said, lifting her face to be kissed.

At last, you've shut up.

It was funny, when I insisted on showing you the boiler.

Sssh.

She remembered his hands holding the book on the train, as if he might tear it in half. Those same hands, hard and precise, now took possession of her the hands first. They were determined, he knew what he was doing, he didn't fumble over her b.u.t.tons or her zip. She gave herself up to them, to the dangerous sensation of being possessed. When it came to her skirt, he told her to step out of it, and laid it on the chair. Her skin as he uncovered it goosefleshed in the unheated room; her nakedness was changed, because this stranger saw it with new eyes. He reached round with both hands behind her to unhook her bra, without looking; did it easily, and pulled it free. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s spilled out against his shirt front.

Oh, he said, and staggered, losing his poise.

She staggered too, they fell onto the bed together, then he had to scramble out of his clothes, pushing trousers and boxers down and kicking them off his feet, tearing his half-unb.u.t.toned shirt off over his head. Their love-making was clumsy, this first time, because they didn't know one another yet, they were too desperate for one another. He actually still had his socks on the whole time, which was something people joked about as unromantic. The violence of Cora's sensations afterwards she lay unsatisfied against him, too shy to ask, with her wet thigh over his, and then had to finish her climax alone in the bathroom, avoiding the wet paint was something new. She had only made love with one boyfriend before she married Robert. Both her lovers, before Paul, had been deferential, grateful, careful, eager to please her; she had never shaken off knowing that they found her lovely. She had not known whether to believe in this grabbing, grunting, flaunting, heedless s.e.x, when she had seen it on television and in films.

I like this rain, Paul said, after the storm of s.e.x had pa.s.sed.

He didn't seem in a hurry to go anywhere; she didn't know how long he was able to stay. They lay listening to it: spilling over the rim of the gutter, drizzling into the street, bringing the exterior acoustic suggestively inside the room. The tyres of pa.s.sing cars pressed, hissing, through surface water on the tarmac, footsteps smacked in pools collected in the hollows of the old pavings. This bedroom seemed somewhere Cora had never existed in before, as if she'd gone through the mirror into the reflection of the place she'd known. The veiled grey light, the pearly shadows blooming and moving on the walls, made her think it must be about seven o'clock, evening: but evening as an infinite sea to sink into, not the couple of short hours between afternoon and night. Back from the bathroom, she had not known how to lie down beside Paul, because she didn't know yet what their intimacy was. She arranged herself on her side, not touching him, looking at him lying on his back, smoking a cigarette; she'd brought him a paint-pot lid to use as an ashtray. From where he lay hieratic, thoughtful, outward-borne, he skewed down his glance to take her in, his eyes sliding over her naked shoulders, b.r.e.a.s.t.s slipped sideways, mound of her hip under the duvet in a slow retrospective satisfaction, which ran like oil over her skin.

Cora, Paul said, relishing her name. Cora. Was this your bedroom when you were a child?

She said it was, but hardly believed it as she said it.

Then where are all your things?

Before she started decorating, she explained, she had put all her old toys and children's books in a skip. She had given away the desk at which she used to do her homework, and her clarinet.

I'm doing the place up to sell, I had to get rid of all the old junk.

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 succ.u.mbed, experiencing herself opened out and pressed flat, against the white background, liberated from possession of herself.

Cora kept the sc.r.a.p 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.