The London Train (15 page)

These anxieties circled round and round in his mind, but he also experienced a certain exhilaration: here he was, flying through the night towards his daughter when she needed him. This rescue seemed a simplifying and cleansing thing; a pure demand that he could meet and live up to. On the motorway he found himself, even at this late hour, backed up behind slowed traffic at some point after he’d crossed the bridge into England, funnelled into one lane. At least the traffic never stopped moving, and it didn’t take him too long to reach and pass the cause of the delay: there had been an accident, long enough ago for an ambulance to have arrived and for the police to be in charge. Two small cars were slewed across the road, facing the wrong direction altogether; the barrier along the central reservation was buckled, debris and broken glass strewn everywhere. Superstitiously, and out of respect, Paul didn’t look to see if anyone was badly hurt; he was aware that among the fluorescent jackets of the rescue services a few dazed young people stood around, woken up out of their lives into this disaster. He accelerated into the emptiness of the motorway ahead. When his phone buzzed, he pulled over onto the hard shoulder, more scrupulous after seeing the accident than he might have been. Pia texted that she was at Strensham services, and Paul answered that he’d be with her in less than an hour.

At that time of night the service area was ghostly: the staff outnumbered the customers, they looked around in the foyer from where they were grouped together, talking, when he walked in. One man was pushing a bucket on a wheeled trolley, washing the floor. Paul saw Pia in the café at once, bundled up in a windcheater with her back to him, her hair in two bunches, rucksack propped against the table beside her. The sight of her alone there, so intensely familiar, pierced him, and he hurried forward to claim her. When she turned around he saw that she had put the stud back in her lip. She was very pale. She hadn’t made up her face, and her sulky expression reminded him of her childhood.

– God, I couldn’t have waited here another moment, she said. – They’re all staring at me.

– I expect they’re only concerned about you. A pregnant young woman waiting here alone, late at night. You’re a bit of a mystery. And what were you thinking of, hitch-hiking? You should have called me, right away.

– I had a lift with a guy in a lorry, but he was turning off here. It’s better if you’re pregnant, they don’t try anything.

– I didn’t realise you’d hitch-hiked before.

She shrugged. – Well, I never told Mum when I did it, obviously.

When he bent down to put his arms round her, she leaned her head submissively against his jacket.

– What’s happened with Marek? Why have you left?

– Nothing happened.

– But you’re all right? He hasn’t hurt you?

She pushed her empty cup angrily across the table, and he didn’t ask anything more about it for the moment.

– Do you want another coffee, or anything to eat, before we set out?

Pia only wanted to get going. In the car she rifled through the CDs in the glove box and announced he hadn’t got anything decent to play; she put on the radio, which he had tuned to classical music, then turned it off again. Restless and uncomfortable with the seat belt round her, she arched her back and shifted in the seat; he remembered Elise doing this when she was pregnant. He felt triumphant, driving home with Pia sitting beside him – as if it completed whatever mission he had begun weeks and months ago, when he first went to look for her. He was bringing his daughter home, he would look after her.

– Don’t get the wrong idea, Pia said, shifting again, as if the accusation erupted out of her physical irritation. – Nothing happened.

– Something must have happened.

– I changed my mind. That’s all.

– Something must have happened to make you change your mind.

She turned her face away from him to stare out of the window. This stretch of motorway was lit, the tall stems of the lamps flicking past and the hanging veils of light giving the space an empty grandeur, cathedral-like. Then they came out on the bluff above the flat estuary valley, and saw ahead the two lit bridges coiling over the water into Wales. Paul was careful not to speak, in case he deflected whatever was coming. If she had found out something shameful, she wouldn’t want him to have guessed at it.

– It was me, she said. – It was my fault.

As if he had asserted something different, she insisted that Marek was a good man, he and Anna were kind, generous people. And Marek really loved her. She was sure that he wanted to have a family with her, he meant it.

– I don’t know why I did what I did.

– What did you do?

It was so stupid, Pia said. She had pretended that the baby was Marek’s.

That wasn’t really as bad as it sounded. When they first got together she hadn’t had any idea she was pregnant. She had liked Marek, he used to come into the café to see Anna; she liked his way of making a fuss of her, it seemed romantic. He was different from the English boys she was at university with, grown-up compared to them. And he was the first one to realise why she was being sick; he asked her about her periods and everything. As soon as she understood, she knew Marek wasn’t the father, because she’d been feeling these things for a few weeks before anything had happened with him. But he had taken it for granted that the baby was his, naturally enough. And she hadn’t put him right. At first she’d thought if she was going to get rid of it anyway, there wasn’t any point in putting him right. But then she hadn’t got rid of it. The dates they’d given her at the hospital had confirmed what she already knew; she had lied to Marek and Anna about these.

A momentary spatter of rain made Paul switch the windscreen wipers on.

– So, who is the father?

– Who d’you think? James, of course.

– Oh. Paul considered this. – Does James know that he is?

She shook her head. No.

He drove without saying anything for a while. They passed the site of the accident he had seen on his way over: there was still single-file traffic past it, but the emergency services had all gone and men were manoeuvring the smashed cars onto a breakdown truck.

– You’re mad at me, Pia said. – I knew you’d be mad at me.

– I’m not mad at you.

But he did feel obscurely hurt, and disappointed. He had been ready to feel outraged by Marek and Anna, and now instead he felt uncomfortable and guilty, as if he was implicated in Pia’s deception of them. She had seemed steady – a steady, fair English girl – and she had not been. He had imagined her given over in good faith to her adventure; now he couldn’t help picturing their surprise, or disgust, or distress, when they read the note she said she’d left behind. Pia said they wouldn’t know how to find her – they didn’t have her mother’s address, they only knew Paul lived somewhere in Wales. She would change her mobile. She had never told them anything about James. And anyway, they wouldn’t want to find her.

Her voice was small and bleak.

– I want to feel free. I just want to be my own person again.

On the approach road to the village, she asked him to drive her to Blackbrook and drop her off there. It had not occurred to Paul that she wouldn’t be coming with him to Tre Rhiw, at least for this one night. At the idea of arriving home without her he lost his temper, stopping the car, pulling it into the grass verge so that shoots of bramble grazed along the window on his side.

– You’re being unreasonable, he said. – It’s two o’clock in the morning. We can’t wake them up at this time. There’s nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.

– We can ring the bell on the extension. Only James will hear. I’ve tried his phone but he’s got it turned off.

– I think you ought to listen to me, after I’ve driven you this far.

Pia undid her seat belt and opened the car door, clambering out heavily. A blast of night air disrupted the warmth inside the car; the drift of fine rain passing over, damping the baked earth, had roused a rank vegetable stink. Paul knew where they were: beyond the dense invisible hedgerow of hazel and blackthorn, the green shoots were standing a foot high in Willis’s fields.

– I know my way from here, Pia said. – It’s easy.

– Don’t be ridiculous. It’s pitch dark.

– I have to talk to James.

– Talk to him in the morning.

She set out walking ahead of the car along the road, visible in his headlights, encumbered, obstinate, her back set in resistance to him, then stumbling over something, a pothole or a stone. Cruising after her, he wound his window down.

– What about your rucksack?

– I’ll get James to come for it tomorrow.

– OK, I give in. Pia, get in the car. I’ll take you.

She was breathing heavily when she climbed back in. He thought she was crying; she wound the window down on her side, and pressed her face out into the night. Where the drive forked at Blackbrook, Paul took the lower track, leading towards the converted outbuildings where James had his room. As he drew up outside, a security light clicked on and a dog barked up above them, at the main house. Paul thought how he hated Willis’s conversion, featureless and glaring with its new ceramic roof tiles and plastic windows, the old barn’s soul exposed and dissipated.

– This is a really bad idea, he said.

– Don’t worry.

– You know Willis is a nutcase. And he hates me.

– Everything isn’t always about you, Dad.

They got out together and Pia pressed the doorbell. They waited while she pressed it twice more, hearing it ring inside. Crouching at the level of the letter box, knees apart, she called through in a voice that she tried to make subdued and penetrating at once.

– James! James!

Someone inside thudded down an uncarpeted wooden staircase. Pia only just scrambled up in time before the door swung inwards; Paul saw how, expecting James, she sagged forward in relief. But it was Mrs Willis instead who stood behind the door: stout, stubby, grey-black hair cut short so that it stood up on her head like a brush. She didn’t look her best, roused from sleep presumably, glaring and defensive, in an incongruously feminine pink nightdress.

– What’s up?

– I’m really sorry, Susan, Pia said. – I didn’t think you’d be sleeping over here. I didn’t want to wake you. I wanted James.

– Did you now!

The woman’s intelligence came awake behind her eyes and darted between Paul and Pia’s face blotched with tears, her swollen shape. Behind Susan Willis the hallway and staircase had the neutrality of a holiday let, with no comforting accretion of belongings or mess.

Paul was helpless to stop himself sounding English and effete. – I tried to persuade Pia that it was an unreasonable hour. But she was adamant.

Adamant wasn’t a word he even used.

– Is he here? Pia persisted, desperate.

At that moment James appeared on the stairs in boxers and saggy T-shirt, bare legs fuzzy with blond hair, face bloated and blinking from sleep, missing a couple of steps in his fuddled state and only just saving himself from falling headlong by grabbing the handrail. Susan Willis was still staring at Pia, calculating, bemused – but not preparing to be outraged or devastated, Paul thought. He’d only seen her in passing before; he’d spoken to her once or twice when he was sent to buy ice-cream and she was serving in their shop. He hadn’t recognised then this reserve of irony in her. Perhaps she was sleeping in the annexe to be apart from her husband.

– She says she wants to talk to James, Paul said. – But we could come back in the morning, if you’d rather she didn’t stay.

– She can stay if she likes, said Susan warily. – If it’s what James wants.

– What? James said. – What’s she doing here?

– She wants to talk to you. It looks like you might have something to talk about.

– It’s nothing to do with me, said James.

– No, it is, Pia said.

– This is what she told me, Paul said, – in the car on the way down here.

– I pretended it wasn’t to do with you. I almost came to tell you the truth once. I bought the ticket at Paddington and then I didn’t get on the train. I got on and got off again, at the last minute.

– I don’t believe you, James said.

He was rubbing his fists in his eyes, shocked out of his deep adolescent sleep, doubting and resistant. Pia looked shocked too, as if the revelation wasn’t going the way she had pictured it in advance.

– It’s a girl, she said shyly. – Apparently it’s a girl.

When Paul was born, his mother had been expecting a girl, they had had a girl’s name ready. There was some old wives’ tale: you dangled a ring on a thread over the unborn child, watching to see if it spun clockwise or anticlockwise. So much for old wives’ tales. Evelyn hadn’t been disappointed, she’d been relieved. She’d said to him once when he was still living at home that she hadn’t wanted a daughter, to be born into drudgery. A son could get away into a different life. Perhaps she had felt otherwise about it later, when Paul in his different life had left her behind – didn’t visit often enough, didn’t know how to turn over on the phone with her the interminable, essential detail of her everyday. A daughter might have been a better bet.

Paul sat for a while in his car after Pia had been swallowed up inside the Willis’s house. Evelyn, when she was alive, would have hated the idea of Pia pregnant and unmarried; she wouldn’t have understood why they were all taking it so calmly, as if it wasn’t momentous. The world turned and the old forms, which had seemed substantial as life itself, were left behind and forgotten. There wasn’t any place he could go now to remember his mother. Perhaps her name was written in a book in the crematorium – or did they only do that in churches? – name after name in neat black calligraphy, with an embroidered bookmark on the opened page, furred with dead moths and dust. He preferred to think about her in the dark. She had been visiting him again, since he came home – but with less ferocity than at first. In her dead self, in his dreams, she could even seem forgiving, the knots of her anxious fearfulness loosened. Paul was so tired, he almost fell asleep there in the car. He didn’t want to drive the last quarter of a mile.