The London Train (6 page)

– Try me. Try and explain to me.

He couldn’t see her face; her shoulders were hunched in tension. He remembered her trudging after him on tired legs across expanses of glacial floor in the museums he used to take her to, submitting unwillingly to the flow of his knowledge, which must have seemed unending.

– OK, he said. – It’s OK, if it’s what you want.

The coffee she made was instant; she rinsed dirty mugs under the tap, rubbing the dark rings out of them with her finger. He asked if she’d seen a doctor yet, and she said she had, and that she was going next week with Anna, Marek’s sister, to an appointment at the hospital.

– You don’t mean for a termination?

She was shocked. – No! It’s too late for that. Much too late!

It wasn’t clear, she said, exactly how far the pregnancy was advanced; there was confusion apparently about her dates. – They’re waiting for the scan. Then they’ll know.

She seemed to have handed herself over to this process – its dates and appointments and inevitabilities – in a dream of passivity: he wanted to shake her awake. During all this conversation, Marek could no doubt hear them from the other room, in this flat without any privacy. Paul felt he must tell Pia about her grandmother, but couldn’t bring himself to do it in front of a stranger. When they sat talking over the horrible coffee, in the living room amid all the mess of sheets and duvet and overflowing ashtrays, he tried to find out how Marek earned his living, and what kind of prospects he might have for supporting Pia and a child. All the time they talked, the television spewed its news: Iraq, the timing of Blair’s resignation, a rail worker killed in an accident on the line, the child snatched in Portugal still missing. It distracted Paul, but the others didn’t take any notice. He felt the absurdity of his playing the part of the offended protective father, given his own history with Pia; and it almost seemed as if Marek understood this, reassuring him to help him out, amused at him.

– There’ll be enough money, don’t worry. There’ll be a better place than this, much better. It will all be good.

He said he worked in business, import-export, Polish delicatessen. He was going to make money, with Polish shops opening in every city, every street. Was he a con man, or a fantasist? The condition of the flat hardly suggested a successful entrepreneur: unless he was peddling drugs, small-scale. Paul had spent time in rooms worse than this one, twenty years ago, when he was in that scene. Everything about the place and the situation made him fearful and suspicious on Pia’s behalf. And yet, as they talked, he could begin to imagine the power this man had to make her trust him. Smiling, with his cigarette wagging in his mouth, he gestured a lot with his hands, and was somehow amusing without saying anything particularly funny: at the same time he managed to have an air of serious competence, as if there was another message, poignant and melancholy, behind the improbable surface of the things he said.

They had met apparently through Marek’s sister. While she was still at the university, Pia had had a part-time job at a café where the sister worked. Paul remembered that Annelies had gone looking for Pia at that café, and that they’d said she had left. She had left, he learned now, because she was being sick all the time, in the early stages of the pregnancy.

– But I’ve got past that now, I’m feeling fine, I’m really well. I should start looking round for something.

Marek tugged her hair affectionately, as if he was showing something off to Paul, his role as the one who knows best. – I’d rather she just stays at home, look after herself, and make the place nice.

She didn’t seem to be doing all that well at making the place nice. But they had only just got out of bed. Perhaps things in the flat got better as the day wore on.

Paul asked Pia to come down to the gate with him when he left. He told her about her grandmother when they were out of sight of her front door, alone on one of the landings in the well of concrete stairs, with its whiff of cheap disinfectant. When she realised what he was saying, her mouth stretched in helpless, ugly crying. He thought how different she was from his other daughters. They seemed to have from their mother a finished, worldly awareness, like a gloss of complexity on their every gesture, on every detail of their appearance. Pia had grown up in the city, but she was raw and artless, with her thick fair hair like straw and big-knuckled hands. Her half-sisters loved her tenderly, perhaps because of this; they took great interest in her entry into grown-up life. Making an effort, she found a tissue in her sleeve and wiped her face.

– I’m all right now.

– I can’t leave you in this state. Won’t you come out with me, after all? We can buy a decent cup of coffee.

– It was just the shock, that’s all. Because I had no idea.

– We could hardly leave it as a message on your phone.

Could she authentically be so grief-stricken, over the death of an old woman she hadn’t visited for months? When she was a child she had wept bitterly over the deaths of her hamsters. Probably she was imagining this baby out of the same reservoir of ready emotion, as if it was a kitten or a doll for her to play with. He couldn’t persuade her to come out; they parted at the entrance to the block. At the last minute she clung onto him, pleading with him not to tell her mother. He couldn’t begin to imagine how Annelies would react if she knew the full story of her daughter’s situation. He quailed at the idea of involving her, or not involving her.

– Don’t tell her yet, please, just not yet. You promised you wouldn’t.

V

H
ome from his London visit, Paul found that his routines, which had seemed satisfying enough before he left – the hours working in his study, the long walks, the round of picking up the children from the bus stop after school, the language classes for foreign undergraduates at the university – had hollowed themselves out in one convulsive movement. He was restless, he couldn’t sit at his computer. Elise was working on a set of voluptuously dainty Edwardian dining chairs; crowded on the cobbles in her workroom, they seemed to be at their own debauched party, broken up into gossiping groups tilted towards one another, their insides spilling out of rips in the filthy old purple velvet.

– What’s the matter with you? She frowned at him, putting down the metal claw she was using to lever out the tacks. There were streaks of sweaty dirt on her face, the air in the workroom was greasy with dust pent up in the chairs for a hundred years. – What happened in London? Didn’t they like your idea for the radio programme?

– It’s not that.

For the moment he wasn’t saying anything about seeing Pia, though he would have liked to hand the problem over and be free of it. When Annelies telephoned, he told her only that Becky had spoken to her, Pia sounded fine. She was living with friends.

– Then why won’t she see me, Paul? What did I do that was so terrible?

Paul was going to visit Pia in London again the following week. He would have to tell her that he must speak to her mother, he couldn’t hold back any longer.

On the drive into Cardiff to see Gerald, the city’s scrappy approaches seemed bleached and exposed in the flat sunlight: corrugated mail-order storage sheds and the back end of new housing estates, a new red-brick budget hotel. Sometimes Paul wished they lived in the city, and thought it was a mistake, their having chosen the countryside. Gerald’s flat was at the top of a tall Victorian house beside one of the city parks. All the heat in the house rose up to his attic and beat in through the slates on the roof; his windows were wide open, but it was still stifling. While Gerald brewed tea, Paul stood at the window looking out into the shady spacious top of a copper beech, one in an avenue planted along the side of the park. A tinkers’ lorry, on the lookout for scrap metal, cruised past in bottom gear, and a boy sang out ‘Any old iron’, riding standing up among the rusting fridges and cookers. Paul said it was the last of the old street-cries, resonant and poignant as a muezzin. Although Gerald said the tinkers cheated old ladies out of their money, he couldn’t spoil Paul’s mood – excited and impatient. He was full of emotions arising out of the painful complications of the past. From his vantage point at the window he half-expected to see a girl he’d known and been involved with, who’d lived round here, and used to walk in this park. He remembered her near-religious attitude to literature; he seemed to see her, striding out below him on the path under the trees – tall and serious, handsome, with slanting, doubting brown eyes. But probably she’d sold her house by now, and moved away.

Gerald sat cross-legged to drink his tea and roll up, using for a flat surface a book he was reading, balanced across his knees. It was about the Neoplatonists of the early Christian era, Plotinus and Porphyry. He explained an idea from the book – how, in its work of imagination, inventing forms, the human mind replicates or continues the work of the world soul, inventing forms in nature. Paul didn’t smoke much dope these days – Elise didn’t like him doing it, she said it made him boring and made him snore – but this afternoon he needed it. The sleepy heat and the smoking brought back the years between his first and second marriages, when he was teaching in the language school. When Paul had moved to Paris, Gerald had followed him. The patterns of sleep Paul had developed in those days had been ‘disastrous’, so Elise said; he’d only had part-time hours at the school, often he’d stayed up reading, or talking with the little crowd of his friends, until three or four in the morning.

While Gerald talked, Paul found himself thinking about Pia’s pregnancy, not simply as a difficulty and a disaster. He had a vision of how dumbfounding it was, Pia’s originating as a tiny folded form invisible inside her mother, and now inside her unfolded realised self, starting the same thing over; forms folded within forms. How different it was to be male, to feel the unfolding come to an end in your biological self, which could not be divided. The role of the male in this endless sequence was an act of faith, however definite the science. A Frenchman had said to him once that the man’s role in making a child was about as much as ‘this’ – he’d spat on the pavement.

This train of thought may have all been a consequence of the dope.

– Your eyes are rolled up in your head, Elise told him when he arrived home. – That stuff Gerald smokes now is too strong for you, you’re not used to it.

James Willis came looking for Paul one afternoon when Elise was out at a sale with Ruth, and the girls were at school. Paul had been getting himself lunch in the kitchen – hunting in the fridge for an end of pâté, desultorily reading the
Guardian
, anything rather than sitting down again at his computer – when the boy was suddenly in the doorway, stooping, worrying about his dirty boots on the mat. In the barn, it had been too dark for Paul to take him in properly, his hunched awkward height, the adolescent hormonal shock still in his face, lips swollen with it, eyes bleary, hands hanging heavy. He was long and pale; when he spoke he addressed his feet. There was a stud in his lip, Paul saw, like the one Pia had taken out.

James said he’d come with a message from his father, who wanted them to cut back the aspen poplars on the border between their places. Willis’s next-door field was planted this year with elephant grass for biofuel. Apparently Willis thought that, because of the trees, the harvester wouldn’t be able to turn closely enough at the end of the field.

– If you don’t have a chainsaw, Dad said, he’ll loan you one.

– You’re joking, Paul said. – Your dad’s crazy, he’s really crazy. Those trees aren’t in the way of anything. Have you even looked at them?

The boy shrugged. – I’m just saying what he said.

– Tell him he’s crazy. And tell him not to dare to touch those fucking trees. They’re on my land.

– He says not.

Willis sending the boy with this message was a cruelty in itself; he must resent his son’s attachment, however tenuous, to an enemy household. Paul invited him in, fetched beers out of the fridge. Warily James stood drinking at the table.

– Your father’s really wrong, you know, about those trees. Whether they’re on his land or mine. There’s plenty of room for the harvester to turn.

– It’s a big machine.

Paul went on to explain why the biofuel was a bad idea in the first place. He caught a glint in the boy’s eye, of derision no doubt, at Paul’s citified perspective, the idea that his father would care about the ethics of a crop one way or another. Paul told him he’d seen Pia. James already knew this, he and Pia must have spoken on the phone.

– Do you know about this man: Marek? Paul said, taking a chance. – What do you think about him? Who is he?

James tipped up his bottle, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. – She’s told me about him, that’s all.

– Do you think she’s safe? Should we trust him?

– It’s not my business.

– No? Aren’t you two friends?

– It’s her business.

– And the other thing? D’you know about that too?

He was visibly startled. – I didn’t think she was going to tell you yet.

– It didn’t need any telling. It was plain as day.

– Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.

No wonder Pia had chosen a man in preference to this boy with his burden of suffering youth, blushing, stumbling over his own feet on his way out of the house, pushing his fists deep in his pockets, forgetting even to thank Paul for the beer. She probably imagined that her own youth had been taken off her hands, that she had given herself over to someone who would know how to manage whatever happened. The Willis boys had always been awkward, not fitting in with the other kids in the village. They affected an American twang in their accents and they stuck together, mucking about on the expensive quad bikes their father bought them. The oldest had written off his first car before he left, driving it when drunk into a tree. James at least didn’t have his brothers’ veneer of showy sophistication.