The London Train (12 page)

– Read to me? Dad, have you forgotten I’m twenty years old?

She was adamant, as if she suspected him of trying to smuggle in under cover some scheme for getting her back into education. All she would agree to was his borrowing DVDs from a local rental place, which they watched together in the afternoons. Her taste was not what he’d expected, not sentimental. She liked clever thrillers,
Michael Clayton
,
No Country for Old Men
. They began on the first series of
The Wire
together; she was much quicker than he was to pick up what was happening.

– Aren’t you missing your friends? he asked her. – What about your old girlfriends from school? Or from the university.

– I did see some of the girls from school at first, when I moved in here. Once I knew I was pregnant, I couldn’t go out drinking with them, and that’s all they ever want to do. I only miss James.

– James Willis? Really? Isn’t he a bit of a clown?

– James and me are soulmates. We think the same things at the same time. One of us says what the other was just about to. That’s why we never could go out together.

– He’s always tongue-tied if I try to talk to him.

– That’s because you’re you, Dad. You’re not the easiest person to talk to.

He told her about Willis senior coming to cut down the poplars at Tre Rhiw.

– Was James involved in this? He’s never mentioned anything about it.

– He was the one wielding the fucking saw.

She laughed, and he began to remember all the detail of that morning, which from this perspective in the flat seemed highly comical. When he told her about his quarrel with Elise, she took Elise’s side, she said it wasn’t worth making an enemy of Mr Willis for the sake of the trees. It was clear she couldn’t really remember which trees he was talking about, and she said they could always plant some more. Paul had wondered if she might take the opportunity of backing him against Elise. She hadn’t always got on with her stepmother. Elise could be blunt sometimes, and when Pia was younger, Elise had found her obstinate and unresponsive. Sometimes when she first came to stay with them, before Becky was born, she was patently sick with misery, away from her home; but however Elise coaxed her, she had insisted with a little false smile that she was fine, sitting on the edge of her bed, swinging her feet. There had been something heart-wringing, exasperating to Elise, in how she had unpacked her rucksack so neatly and arranged her trainers in pairs against the wall.

The shape of Pia’s pregnancy as it grew was fearsome, a bloated dome; her belly button turned outwards, she stretched the cloth of her T-shirt across it to show it off to Paul. He wouldn’t lay his hand on her belly when she offered, if the baby was kicking; but sometimes unavoidably, at close quarters in the crowded flat, they knocked up against one another, he and his grandchild-to-be. Pia’s mood seemed to Paul to be changing as the pregnancy advanced. Her girlishness fell away, she was less capricious, more brooding. Once she said passionately that she wished her Nana could have seen the baby, and he realised then that he’d stopped dreaming about his mother since he came to the flat. She began to make a little collection of baby clothes. When he remembered her balancing her tray and patiently picking out cakes in the café, he wondered if she might after all be gifted for motherhood when it came. Perhaps the women who found it easiest were those who didn’t fight against relinquishing their own will.

He tried to make the flat pleasant for his daughter to spend time in, buying flowers and bringing home fresh food, plenty of fruit. Marek commiserated over her being stuck on the sofa all day, but it was difficult to imagine him doing this sort of domesticated shopping. Instead he arrived back with pieces of equipment he had got at bargain prices: a complicated pushchair on three wheels, a baby alarm, something improbably called a baby gym. There wasn’t room to unpack these from their boxes.

He called Tre Rhiw from a pay phone in Upper Street. While he waited for Elise to pick up he felt trepidation, half-expecting to be transplanted back inside their last conversation, with its intimate unguardedness, late at night. In the blaze of afternoon, however, her voice was quite different, brusque. She conveyed that any talk was snatched out of a day impossibly busy, between the pressure of orders in the workshop and looking after the children.

– You’ve managed to find time to call, she said. – That’s good of you.

He couldn’t argue with her outrage, didn’t try to defend himself. But it seemed laid on in thick strokes, like a mask over some other excitement. He fixated on the idea that she had been conspiring with Ruth against him; or with her sister Mirrie, who had been at Tre Rhiw for the weekend.

Over the phone the girls sounded years younger. Becky was shy and he could hardly squeeze information out of her. He could picture her blushing behind her freckles, murmuring into the mouthpiece, holding herself still in concentration.

– What are you doing in London, Daddy?

He told her he was staying with her older sister. Becky seemed to know about the baby, giggling diffidently when she mentioned it; he explained this was why he was keeping an eye on Pia, to make sure everything was all right. Joni was perfunctory, as if she’d half-forgotten him already. She couldn’t wait to hand the phone to her mother.

– Did Willis come back? he asked Elise.

– He came back. She gave a hard, short laugh. – He offered to sell me back the trees cut into logs.

– The man’s unbelievable.

– Yes, well. I’ve had other things to worry about.

He asked after Gerald, whether she’d had any contact with him. Elise didn’t appear to be anxious any longer that he was having a breakdown. – He’s been spending a lot of time out here, she said. – I think it’s good for him. He and Mirrie got on well together.

This didn’t seem likely to Paul, but he didn’t comment.

Anna called in after work to tell them Annelies had come looking for Pia at the café. Luckily, she said, no one had mentioned Pia’s connection with her, or given away that Pia was living in her flat. They would only give her Pia’s mobile number, which Annelies already had.

– I’ll call her, Pia said. – I’ll go and see her. I really ought to.

– You don’t have to. It’s your choice. Don’t let her blackmail you.

Paul encouraged Pia to get in touch. Anna seemed lit up with hostility to the idea of Pia’s mother, as if Pia was a refugee from some oppression. Beside Anna, Pia seemed steady as a rock, calming. No doubt Annelies’s performance in the café – she hadn’t been happy with their non-cooperation, apparently – had given some flavour of how she might judge her daughter’s new friends, their rackety household, their prospects.

Paul hadn’t yet met Anna’s Australian boyfriend. He was away for some time in Belfast, and then even when he was back, Anna didn’t mention him often. If she did, it was with a smothered impatience; was he too malleable, Paul wondered, or not malleable enough? Anna began spending more time at the flat again, and Paul knew he ought to go, to make room for her in her own place, although she never hinted at this and he believed she might not want it. In some crazy way they had accepted him as part of their improvised family. Marek teased him affectionately, calling him an intellectual, caricaturing him as an otherworldly idealist. In the evenings, or even in the afternoons if Anna wasn’t at work, Paul was aware that she and Marek were sometimes fuelling themselves, apart from all the dope they smoked, probably with pills or coke: they went off into the kitchen or the bedroom, claiming to be talking business, and came back wired and jumpy. They kept this stuff away from Pia with exaggerated protectiveness: and from Paul too, out of a kind of courtesy, touching and faintly insulting, as if they thought he was too innocent, or just too old.

One evening Marek took Pia out for a meal, because she had said she was going mad, stuck all day in the same place. While they were out, Anna talked to Paul about their troubles at home in Poland. The windows in the flat were all open, cool air was blowing in at last after a day when the heat had never moved. The orange sky outside was barred with shadows: clouds gathered on the horizon in the evenings, but didn’t come to anything. They sat without switching on the lights, Anna cross-legged on the sofa beside him, hair falling into her eyes, dabbing with the end of her cigarette in the brimming ashtray. She spoke in her usual abrupt sentences, fatalistic. Their father was ill, he had been diagnosed a year ago with bone cancer. She wondered if the diagnosis was accurate: it was well known that Polish hospitals made mistakes.

– Will they give him the best care? I doubt it. I don’t trust them.

He listened sympathetically, asking tactful questions. She said her father was a strong man, physically small but very strong, who had never had one day of illness in his life. He had been a supervisor in a factory making household cleansers, but now he had been off work for months. ‘Who knows what chemicals they used there, or if they gave him the right protection?’

Their mother was alive, but their parents were separated. Paul began to understand while she was talking that she and Marek hadn’t seen their father since he’d been ill, or even spoken to him: and not for some considerable time before that, either. He didn’t ask why. What Marek paid him for a day in wages would have bought them a cheap flight home. Anna sat with her shoulders hunched almost to her ears: defiant, estranged. He was overwhelmed by his attraction to her, as if she was a miserable beautiful animal, huddled in captivity.

She bent forwards to stub out her cigarette and in the orange light he could see the small mounds of her bare breasts inside her loose vest, surprisingly soft and plump against her skinny torso. He put out his hand and felt the hem on the neck of her shirt between his fingers, then touched her hot skin, reaching down inside the dark under the cloth, cupping his hand around one breast, feeling its nipple in his palm. Its soft flesh seemed quite separate from the rest of her: the softness seemed to send an unexpected, hopeful message. For a few seconds Anna didn’t pull away from him. But when he leaned forward to kiss her, she darted her head down and bit him on the inside of his forearm, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to make him yelp and jump back. She shook her finger at him, laughing and frowning.

– Naughty, naughty.

He remembered how his boy’s desire had stirred for the robber maid in Hans Andersen’s
Snow Queen
, who tickled the throat of her pet reindeer with her knife. The bruise Anna made on his arm stayed in his skin for weeks.

He dreamed he was in Willis’s yard. In the dream something in its blanched, clean-swept order was uncanny, its light like the thick honey stillness before a storm. Willis’s horses were dipping their heads to dash away flies above their half-doors, and he could hear their hooves shifting on the cobblestones out of sight. There seemed to be some kind of whitewashed arcade around the yard, like a cloister (this was only in the dream, not at the real Blackbrook). Paul was aware at the edge of his attention of a figure moving in and out of its intense shadows: working stiffly, bending her long back. A metal bucket clanged against stone flags, a mop was sopped in water. He couldn’t see his mother’s face, but he knew for sure it was her; he recognised an old nylon dress she used to wear for housework: white zigzags on navy, slubbed and limp-pleated. Even in the dream he thought how this dress had lain neglected at the bottom of his memory, and was excited by rediscovering it. Who knew what other discoveries were waiting for him, if only he could push farther inside the yard?

That was all, nothing else happened. He only remembered the dream at all because he was woken in the middle of it by some kind of disturbance in the flat. He sat up abruptly, sweating, throwing off the duvet, thinking he’d been roused by sounds of violence. It might be the schizophrenic upstairs: had he started trouble? There was banging from somewhere. Before Paul had collected himself completely out of the dream, he shouted out for his daughter, to see she was all right. Then there was silence, only not empty, more like a wakeful aftermath. He identified too late the noise of lovemaking that had broken through his sleep: banging probably because their bed was cheap and pushed right against the wall, perhaps noises forced out from between the lovers’ clenched jaws, however Pia may have tried to keep them from her father’s ears. No wonder this thrilled in the air as violence. Paul had been embarrassed to wonder, the first nights he slept in the flat, whether his presence behind these flimsy walls might be inhibiting for his daughter and Marek; he had reassured himself vaguely, when he never heard them, that they might not be making love anyway, in her advanced state of pregnancy, or that the walls were soundproof after all.

The bedroom door opened, Pia came out in her nightshirt, closing the door behind her. He thought she was very angry.

– Dad? You shouted.

– I’m sorry. I think I woke up out of a dream. A nightmare.

He was sitting up on the sofa with the duvet pulled across his lap. In the light from the street lamps her shirt was fairly transparent, so that he saw her distended shape – long legs, mounded stomach, breasts growing heavy – almost as if she stood there naked, intimidating. The pregnancy appeared to him for the first time as the blatant outward sign of his daughter’s secret sexual life.

– How long are you going to be staying, Dad? Because there isn’t really room here. Isn’t there anywhere else that you could go? This really isn’t working out.

He took out two thousand pounds at the bank, which they gave to him in a brown envelope. When he went to say goodbye to Anna at the café, he pressed the envelope into her hand.

– Please take it, he said. – I got some money unexpectedly. You’ll have a lot of extra expenses over the next few months, with your father’s illness and everything.

The place was busy, humming. At several tables people were waiting to have their orders taken.