The London Train (4 page)

Shuffling in the crowd towards the exit from the Tube at Paddington, he glanced across to the opposite platform and suddenly, extraordinarily, was sure he saw Pia waiting there, standing out tall above the people in front of her, staring into the distance from where the train was coming, pale hair fastened into bunches on her shoulders, black jacket zipped to the neck. If he had not known her, he would have seen a serious and dreamy girl, not unattractive but old-fashioned, somehow vulnerable and raw. Paul shouted her name, disrupting the queue for the exit, forging towards the platform edge to attract her attention, waving his arm. He thought she turned and looked towards him – but then everyone looked, and at that moment the train roared in, swallowing up his sight of her, probably to carry her away; he was left cut off with his conspicuousness, the object of everyone’s idling attention.

In case she had waited, for a different train or for him, he hurried over to the opposite platform, but of course by the time he got there the train was gone, and Pia with it, if she had ever been there. He began at once to doubt that he had seen her. It must have been some other girl, blonde and tall as Pia was, appearing at the right moment to collaborate with his fears. He was agitated by his exaggerated response and his disappointment, which translated as he recovered into a loop of worry, circling round and round. All the way home on the train, a woman in a seat nearby, not visible to him, talked into her mobile at full volume, filling up every crevice of his privacy, so that he couldn’t concentrate on his book. – I think that’s a beautiful feeling . . . you said before you wanted to move on . . . for any person growing emotionally . . . it’s a different sort of painful, it’s the healing kind . . .

When he arrived back at Tre Rhiw the last sunshine was still on the back garden, slanting obliquely, burnishing the grass and shrubs as if the light was yellow oil. The spell of fine spring weather was holding, everyone’s pleasure in it tinctured with nervousness, because of climate change. The girls were playing with their goats in the field, feeding them leftover vegetables. Joni was fearlessly familiar with animals: she crooked her arm around the goats’ necks and nuzzled their ears, kissing their pink grey-spotted lips, with a sense of the impudence and effect of her own performance. Becky was more circumspect, anxious for the goats’ feelings, holding her hand out carefully flat to offer them food, as she had been taught. The animals tolerated them, businesslike they munched on, beards wagging, alien eyes cast backwards as if they were unwilling witnesses to visions. Elise was sitting out in her sunglasses, tinkling the ice in a Campari, on one of the deckchairs she had covered in leftovers from the fabrics she used in her work; a fantastical vine seemed to wind out of the top of her head, drooping with fruit. She waved her drink at Paul, told him to bring another deckchair from the house. When he said he thought he’d seen Pia at Paddington, Elise believed it was possible: she did wear a black jacket, she could have been on her way back from south Wales, she might have been visiting her friends in the village.

– Without letting us know she was here?

– Perhaps, if she doesn’t want us to know what she’s up to. She doesn’t want you pressuring her to go back to college.

– What friends, anyway?

– She likes the Willis boy.

– How can she?

Paul didn’t get on with the Willis family.

– They’re rather alike, don’t you think? Elise said. – Pia and James?

She reassured him that he didn’t need to be anxious. – I’m sure Pia’s OK. She needs some space to herself, I expect. Annelies can be a bit overwhelming, bless her.

Elise pulled up the skirt of her dress a few inches to give her thighs to the sun, liberating her feet from her flip-flops, stretching her strong brown toes, nails painted vermilion. – Aren’t you worrying because you feel guilty, after all those years when I had to remind you even to phone Pia?

Paul went to make himself a drink. In the long, low stone-flagged kitchen, built like a fortress against the weather, the dark was thickening while light still blazed at the deep-recessed windows; an orange sliced on the table scented the air. He tried not to think about how he had neglected Pia: it was pointless, a self-indulgence, no use to her. In his study he poked around in the boxes he had brought from Evelyn’s room. Certain objects as he lifted them out brought back the strong flavour of his childhood: a china biscuit barrel with a wicker handle, a varnished jewellery box that played a tune when the lid was opened. These had been set aside from use in their sitting room at home, almost like religious icons, in a cabinet with glass-fronted doors; packed together in the box, they still seemed to hold faintly the smell of the green felt that had lined the cabinet shelves, though the cabinet had been left behind years before, when Evelyn first moved.

At the bottom of one box were copies of his own books – the one on Hardy’s novels, which had been his PhD thesis; the one on animals in children’s stories; his last one, on zoos. He had given them to his mother as they were published, and she had displayed them proudly on her shelf, assuring him that she read them, although he could only imagine her processing the pages dutifully before her eyes, relieved when she reached the end as if she had completed some prescribed course of improvement, opaque to her.

The land behind Tre Rhiw sloped down to the river: first the garden, then the scrubby bit of meadow where the goats were fenced in and Elise kept her chickens and grew some vegetables. When they had first moved in, their property had bordered three small fields belonging to a couple who had grown too old for farming: they only kept a couple of superannuated horses and a donkey, to eat down the grass. Those old fields were mounded with the ancient hemispherical ant heaps found on land not broken by heavy machinery, their clumps of hazel scrub were cobwebbed with lichen, the tussocky grass blew with toadflax and cranesbill and cornflowers in spring and summer.

When the old man died, and the woman moved to live with her daughter in Pontypool, their house with its land was bought up by Willis, a farmer on the other side of the village, who ripped up whole lengths of ancient hedgerow to make the three fields into one, ploughing up the hazel scrub and the ant heaps. Paul had confronted him, ranting, threatening him with legal action, although there were probably no laws against what had been done. Elise said it was a fait accompli, they might as well let it go, there was no point in getting on the wrong side of Willis, they all had to live together. Nothing anyway could ever restore the hedges that had gone, which had probably been centuries in the growing. Since then, Willis seemed always to be spreading chicken shit on the field, or spraying with weed-killer, whenever they had a summer party out of doors: Elise was sure he only did it because Paul had hassled him. Apparently he wasn’t popular in the village. Willis was English, he had married a local girl.

Elise said Paul should ask Willis’s son whether Pia had been in contact. He put it off for a few days, but when there was still no news of her, reluctantly one morning he walked over to Blackbrook. It had been a mouldering old place among ancient overgrown apple trees, mossy roof slates thick as pavings, the rooms inside unchanged in half a century. Willis had stripped it back to the stone, put in new windows with PVC frames, replastered ceilings tarred nicotine-brown from cigarette smoke, cemented white sculptured horse-heads on the gateposts, fixed his Sky satellite-dish high on the wall. Its blandness and nakedness made it seem unreal to Paul, like a building in a dream or a film. As he crossed the concreted expanse of the yard, he saw that Willis was running the engine of a tractor, down from the air-conditioned cab, absorbed in listening to it: a sandy, stocky, huge-handed man, features almost obliterated under his freckles.

– There’s a snag in the bastard, he said. – It’s catching somewhere.

– Is James around?

– What’s he supposed to have done?

– He hasn’t done anything. I want to ask him a favour.

Willis tipped his head at the interior of the huge corrugated barn. – Hosing down. Don’t spoil your shoes. He doesn’t do me any favours.

Picking his way past dungy water streaming in the concrete runnels, Paul headed for the sound of the pressure hose; the barn was dark, after the brilliance outside, and the animal stink overwhelming. The boy turned off the hose as he came near, his eyes adjusting to the murk; James was sandy and freckled like his father, but taller, and skinny, hunched over his work, stiff with reluctance.

– How was Pia when you last saw her?

– Why?

– We’re worried about her.

He shrugged. – She seemed all right.

– When was this? Have you been to London to see her? Has she been down here?

The boy turned on the hose again, aiming its jet of water into the corners of the pens. – Can’t remember when.

– Did you know she’d dropped out of her university course?

– She may have said something about it. I can’t remember.

He asked if James knew where they could contact her, but he said he only had her mobile number.

Pia had gone to the Willises at first to play on their PlayStation. She had been bored when she came to stay in the country, she didn’t like reading or going for walks: Paul and Elise were pleased that she was making friends, at least. As she got older, Elise thought there must be something going on between her and James, or that Pia had a crush on him, but Pia had denied it flatly, convincingly: she didn’t fancy him, they were just friends, they understood one another. It was true that if you came upon them idling around the lanes together, or sprawled watching television, they appeared at ease as if they were siblings: their loose, rangy bodies companionably slack, not strung on sexual tension. Paul couldn’t imagine what they talked about. James seemed fairly monosyllabic, lost in thickets of resentment. They caught the train together into Cardiff to go clubbing, or Pia spent evenings at Blackbrook. Willis had converted a barn into a sort of annexe where his sons could live independently, with a games room and a kitchen; in the summer their mother organised this for holiday lets, now that the two older sons had left the farm. Willis had apparently wanted them to stay on, to help develop the business (as well as farming, they made ice-cream and sold Christmas trees, employing several people from the village); there were stories going round about the rows these boys used to have with their father. And the boys had gone.

Elise arranged a dinner party. – Is that all right? She massaged hard muscles in his neck and shoulders. – Are you ready to be sociable yet?

He thought he was ready, but when the party came he wasn’t in the mood for it. They were Elise’s friends and not his (she’d said no to Gerald. – I love Gerald, but he’s not quite house-trained, d’you know what I mean? Not good at the social give and take). Ruth and her husband came, and another couple they’d got to know while waiting for the school bus. Most of the people they knew in the village were incomers, but Ruth was born here, her brother had inherited the farm she grew up on. She was small and capable, with neat pretty features and curling dark hair tied back; Paul found her constrained and puritan. He and she had argued viciously once about the Welsh language. He was sure Elise complained to Ruth about his absorption in his books and his writing, and about his failure to do his share of domestic duties, even though Elise’s work contributed more to the family income than his did.

Elise had warned him he mustn’t ‘spoil everything’ at the party, he was supposed to join in and help the conversation along; but he found it boring, a social music running up and down as accompaniment to the food. All of them around the table, men and women, were somewhere in their early forties; Paul couldn’t help seeing on their faces the first signs of their ageing, little lapses of their flesh around the mouth and jaw, puffiness under the eyes, the beginning of the crumpling and crumbling that would turn them into their disintegrated older selves. They discussed costume dramas on television. Someone said that nothing really changes, that wherever you look you find underneath the wigs and dresses the same old patterns playing out, the same human nature. Paul said he thought this was only because the television dramas tried to persuade you of this sameness, that it was a consoling illusion, a sham.

A muscle tightened in Ruth’s cheek, bracing against him, as she prodded at her rice with her fork. – What do you mean?

– Human cultures move forward in time as if through a valve that permits no return. The substance of experience is altered over and over with no possibility of return or recovery. History’s the history of loss.

– But there are gains, Elise insisted.

– Like human rights, and the treatment of women. The abolition of slavery.

– And contraception.

– Does it follow, Paul said, – that the sum necessarily balances out, gains against losses? Who could decide that we had gained more?

– Or lost more.

– What if extinctions in the natural world reflected the movement of time forwards in our human culture, extinguishing possibilities and qualities one by one, until there were fewer overall, far fewer?

– Shall we all go and top ourselves? said Ruth.

They all seemed to be angry with him, accusing him of nostalgia, of a regressive taste for everything old, of indifference to what had been unjust or caused suffering in the past.

– It’s another perennial, Ruth’s husband said. – Every generation thinks that what’s in the past was necessarily superior. When I was a boy you could leave your front door unlocked, the rock ’n’ roll was better, that sort of thing.

Paul couldn’t summon the energy to explain that he had only meant the past was precious because it was different, not better. When their guests had gone, Paul and Elise washed up in fatigued silence in the kitchen: they didn’t have a machine. He progressed stoically at the sink from glasses through plates to heavy pans that filled the washing-up water with floating rice and turmeric-yellow grease; Elise sorted leftovers, dried and put away dishes, returning the rooms to their daytime selves, shoving the heavy table noisily across the flagstones. Her clothes had wilted from their carefully prepared bloom: her red stretch dress sagged over her stomach, the skin of her cheeks was oily in the overhead light they had switched on when the guests went. Paul thought he acquitted himself honourably, considering how miserable he had felt all evening, in the flood of bright pointless chatter that no one would even remember the next day. Elise saw social life as a series of complex obligations, to please and be pleased, whereas he didn’t see the point of talking, if you didn’t say what you meant. The irony was that they had first met at a party, when Elise rescued him from an argument that almost became a fight. Why were women drawn to these resisting frictions in men, which they then set about smoothing away?