The London Train (14 page)

Paul began writing something new: not a memoir exactly, but a recollection of his earliest interest in nature. He tried not to think too hard about it, but felt hopeful that it might come to something. At junior school he had won as a school prize a book on exploring the countryside, which had set out all the different animal footprints diagrammatically, as neatly labelled black ink blots: badger, fox, roe deer, red deer, and so on. He had dedicated himself to learning them, along with the animal droppings, the leaf shapes and the different nuts and berries, as if nature was a kind of code, like learning Latin; if he only worked hard enough at breaking the code, he believed he could break through to the mythic world of beauty he intuited behind it. He borrowed more nature books from the central library in Birmingham, catching the bus into town to change them on Saturday mornings. Afterwards he used to meet his father, who knocked off on Saturdays at midday, outside the corrugated-metal gates of the screw factory where he worked. If Paul got there early, then he started in on the pages of the first book, leaning with his back against the gates in the cobbled street whose walls were the windowless back ends of factories. It hadn’t occurred to him to look for nature anywhere in the world around him. The books were safe in their nylon string bag between his feet. In those days, even at weekends, he would have been wearing ankle socks and his school lace-ups, his skinny knees would have been bare below his shorts.

– Go and make sure he’s all right, Elise said, meaning Gerald.

It was first thing in the morning, she was in the bathroom still in her nightdress, cleaning her teeth, spitting into the sink, watching Paul in the mirror.

– You go.

He had come upstairs from his sofa in the cubbyhole, needing to pee; he wasn’t sure whether, the way things were between them, he should go ahead while she was in the room.

Her eyes fixed him. Wordless, she scrubbed vigorously behind her back molars.

– He’ll be fine. We’d have heard if he wasn’t.

She spat again. – All right then. I’ll go, she said.

– Of course he might not be there. In the summer he spends a lot of time at his parents’.

She ran the tap in a fierce spurt.

Later that morning he heard her drive off in the car. He walked around the place, having it all to himself for the first time since he’d been back. He tried the drawers in the lacquered box Elise was fixing, used the hose to water the trees, and then the vegetables and the borders and tubs, though it was the wrong time of day for this. Inside, invading the suspended stillness of the house, he looked for more to do, but Elise had washed the breakfast dishes, so he tidied up vaguely, straightened the duvets on the girls’ beds. It was already hot in the rooms upstairs, where the sun beat through the roof. His study was cool. He sat reading through a book on ecology and elegy that he’d been sent for reviewing. After a couple of hours he heard the car come back. Elise walked quickly through the house to her workroom, heels scraping on the flagstones in the yard. She must have put on her dressy shoes to go out. He followed her.

– How was Gerald?

She was wearing eye-shadow and lipstick, and a new silky shirt, printed with lilac-coloured flowers, which he hadn’t seen before. It was more or less an hour’s drive into Cardiff: she couldn’t have spent any time with Gerald, even if she saw him.

Squinting at the sewing machine, trying to thread the needle without her glasses, sucking the thread and coaxing it to a point, she claimed she didn’t know what he was talking about, that she’d been out with Ruth to look at a dresser for sale on one of the farms. He didn’t believe her. Perhaps she’d gone looking for Gerald and he’d been out. Or perhaps she’d found him, and he’d closed himself against her.

– OK, I just thought you said you were worried about him.

– He’s your friend, Paul. You’re the one who should be worrying.

They ate leftovers for lunch together, under the umbrella in the yard; Elise said they ought to invite people round for a barbecue the next day, before the weather broke.

– If you like.

He heard her telephoning round.

– I left a message on Gerald’s phone, she said. – But why don’t you try him? Try and persuade him to come. It would be good for him.

Paul tried dutifully. Gerald’s phone was switched off; he left another message.

Elise spent the next day preparing food: marinated chicken and fish and vegetables for the barbecue, little deep-fried Middle Eastern patties, a cheesecake topped with nut brittle, home-made prune ice-cream. Paul thought she was doing too much for an impromptu occasion, but she turned on him angrily when he tried to say so, her face hot from the frying. She sent him to Abergavenny in the morning with a shopping list, mainly for drinks; he drove all the way into Cardiff instead, and called in on Gerald, half-expecting he wouldn’t answer the door because it was still too early. If Gerald was surprised to see him – possibly Paul stood just where his wife had stood the day before and not been invited in – then he only hesitated for one moment, puzzling, swaying slightly on his feet (small, like his ears), before he turned without a word, as was usual, and preceded Paul through the dank old air of the three flights of stairs to his lair under the roof.

Inside the flat, black plastic bags of waste paper and kitchen rubbish lay open on the floor, the hose of a vacuum cleaner plugged in at the wall snaked on the carpet; the windows were thrown up high and the plum-dark leaves of the copper beech outside were bruised and brooding in the wind that was supposed to herald different weather. Neither of them commented on the cleaning in progress; Paul felt uncomfortably as if he’d stumbled into his friend’s privacy. Gerald made tea, meticulous in his measuring and stirring. He said he was trying to give up smoking, and was baking his dope instead into chocolate brownies made from a packet mix; bringing some in a cake tin from the kitchen, he offered them to Paul, who wasn’t tempted. The brownies looked dry. Gerald munched through two with an air of despatching a necessary routine. He asked after the little girls, and then showed Paul a book he was reading, about the variations among different cultures in the language used to categorise emotion.

– The Ilongot in the Philippines have a word to describe a reaction to the violation of a community norm.

– Don’t we have words for that in English?

– Can you think of any?

Paul could only think of words that weren’t emotions, like ‘respectable’ and ‘scapegoat’.

– And
toska
, in Russian, Gerald said, – means ‘how one feels when one wants some things to happen and knows they cannot happen’.

– Very Russian.

– That’s the point.

Paul invited him to the party that evening, suggesting they could drive back together now; Gerald said he was busy in the afternoon. – I’ll let you know. I might come over later.

– Elise worries about you. She thinks you’re in a bad way.

– I was in a bad way. I’m feeling better. Elise persuaded me to wash, which was a place to start, for which I’m grateful. And she drove over here when I was at your place, to get my pills for me.

Paul pretended he hadn’t known this. – She came in here?

– She dropped something actually. Will you take it for her?

Gerald hunted through the heaps on his desk until he found a printed silk scarf Paul recognised. It smelled of Elise.

– Did the pills work?

– They did what they do. Under the nuanced cultural variation, the blunt chemical truncheons. It’s not a fine science.

Elise complained that he’d been gone for hours; Paul didn’t explain where he’d been. It was his job to get the fire going in the big barbecue that Elise had built out of stones from one of the ruined outhouses, the grill made by the local blacksmith. Becky and Joni arrived home with the first contingent of guests, children and parents from the school. The gang of children was soon running wild, looping around the house and garden, a few tiny ones staggering after them, down to the river where Becky womanfully scooped up the babies to safety and Joni swung from the branch of a tree to show it was hers, kicking out her legs over the water. Then they ran back again. Their parents shouted warnings and prohibitions.

Elise had made a summer punch, with mint and borage and strawberries floating in it, served in a glass jug frosted from the freezer. She had showered and washed her hair, and looked composed and demure in the new flowered shirt. He heard her tell the otter story as if it was funny, that he and the girls had wanted to stay on, staring at nothing in the dark, while she was frozen stiff. At first he could tell she was careful not to drink too much, because she had to manage heating the patties up in the oven and getting them onto serving plates, while keeping watch over the barbecue; once everyone had had something to eat, she allowed herself to be more reckless. One or two of the smallest children had fallen asleep by this time and been put into the beds upstairs; the rest were playing hide-and-seek all round the house and garden and in the fields. Light was withdrawing behind mauve bars of cloud on the horizon; a fume of shadow spread under the old apple trees in the meadow, the children’s skulking or speeding forms indistinct in it, their noises amplified: a thud of footsteps if they were going for home, or the sudden yelp and relinquishment of defeat. The older children were organising this game, one of Ruth’s boys and a girl. Joni didn’t grasp the rules, or refused to play by them; she kept on running and squealing even after she’d been touched.

– I needed this, Elise said, swallowing mouthfuls of the punch thirstily, relaxing, dropping against the back of her cane chair. – I’ve been looking forward to this drink all day. Isn’t this perfect? What a perfect evening!

Perfect food too, everyone agreed.

Paul was talking to Carwen, a friend who was the education officer for the nearby conservation area, about what he’d been reading that afternoon, in the book on elegy, about the asymmetry in complex systems – how painstakingly long it took to construct them, and how almost instantaneously they could be destroyed: as true of social and cultural systems as it was of living organisms.

– It’s tragedy, built in to the very structure of things.

– You could choose to look at it like that, Carwen said. – But if I’m allowed to be a brutal scientist, destruction is also cleansing, it liberates the way for new systems.

– Isn’t that how tyrants have justified their wars? asked Ruth.

– We can’t afford to see it in that time scale, Paul said.

– Don’t you hate that word tragedy? said someone else. – Everything’s a fucking tragedy nowadays. They use ‘tragedy’ when they just mean an accident, or anything sad.

– Don’t spoil things, Paul, Elise said. – Don’t be all doom and gloom.

But in fact he was enjoying himself. He was buoyed up by his hopes for his new book. And he felt affectionate towards these people, even some of them he didn’t know very well, even Ruth. Ruth looked pretty, she was wearing some kind of long patterned smock over jeans and it made her seem less buttoned-up, more girlish. She had been nice to him since their vigil waiting for the otters – as if she withdrew somewhat from her solidarity with Elise, and felt sorry for him.

He took a call on his mobile, hurrying farther down the garden, where the signal was better. Elise tensed in her seat when she heard it ring, and he knew she was distracted from her own conversation, trying to work out who it was: afterwards he beckoned her to come over, so they could talk. Unsteady on her high heels when she stood up, she slipped out of the shoes and came in her bare feet across the grass. Bats were sketching their flight across the grey air. In the dusk her face was blurred, he could only clearly see her pale clothes, the dark of her cleavage where the top button of her shirt was undone.

– Who was it? Was it Gerald? Is he coming?

Her speech wasn’t slurred, but aggressive; some layer of concealment had been stripped from between them. Where their feet bruised it, the grass sent up its yearning green smell, tugging at his emotions. He seemed to guess how Elise felt, eaten up as if something essential was passing and she was prevented from reaching it, so that all she had to give, all her bloom, was going to waste.

– It’s Pia, he explained. – I have to go. Something’s up, I don’t know what, I don’t know exactly where she is, but she’s left the flat, she needs me to drive and pick her up.

– Oh, shit, Paul. Shit! You can’t drive anyway. You’re drunk.

– I’m not. I’ve only had a couple of glasses.

– Why can’t she go to Annelies?

– She’s already somewhere on her way here. She was hitching, she’s at a service station but she doesn’t know which one, she’s going to phone me back.

– Can’t she get a bus or something?

– She’s pregnant, El. And I don’t even know what’s happened, to make her leave. I’m afraid for her.

– All right. OK.

– I’ll come and make my excuses to everyone.

XI

B
efore he started the car, he checked his phone for messages from Pia. He saw that he had missed a text from Gerald, saying he was on his way to the party. He didn’t see any need to pass this on. Gerald would be there in person soon enough.

Paul was sure he was all right to drive, although he had probably had more than the couple of glasses he’d owned up to. He liked night-driving. The empty roads weren’t banal as they were in the day – drawing the cover of darkness around them, they were transformed as if he was speeding through a different landscape, charged with mystique. He was full of apprehension for Pia. He had no idea what the matter was. She had refused to go into detail over the phone, she had been tearful, terse, desperate. Had she found out something about Marek, which she couldn’t live with? Perhaps he had been arrested, or they were going to deport him; perhaps it was something private, worse, some worm of deviancy or cruelty that he, Paul, had lived alongside and not detected. Perhaps Marek had only waited until Paul was out of the way to reveal himself. When he tried to imagine the man he had liked, he came up against the locked door of Marek’s unknown life. Already the time in that London flat was receding as if it had never belonged to him. When he thought about it from his perspective at Tre Rhiw, he was shocked at the casual drug-taking, the unfocused future, the lack of any genuine preparations for the baby’s arrival.