The London Train (9 page)

– Who is this man she’s with? What does he want with my daughter?

Paul found himself claiming that Pia and Marek loved one another. As soon as they’d come out of his mouth, he couldn’t believe he’d said the words. Annelies’s contempt was bruising. – You think that makes any difference to anything? What kind of love, if she doesn’t want to tell her mother? Just give me her address. Let me go to her. I beg you. Please.

One of the women suggested that if Pia was experimenting with her freedom, it might be best to respect that. Annelies pushed the idea away as if she was brushing off cobwebs. Paul wasn’t sure why he stuck it out so determinedly, refusing to tell her where Pia was staying. Perhaps he was afraid of her blundering into a situation more risky than he’d quite let her know. Because of her job, she was expert in the conditions migrant workers sometimes had to live in, and in itself the flat was not too bad. But she would react with passion against the mice and the mess and the dope, and Pia getting up in the middle of the afternoon, and the three of them spinning out improbable plans for the future, improvising recklessly.

He told Elise, the next day, as much as he’d told Annelies.

– You’ll have to give her the address, Elise said.

– Then Pia will refuse to see either of us.

– It’s her daughter, Paul! Imagine how I’d feel if it was Becky or Joni. I’d never, ever forgive you for holding that back from me.

– But Pia’s twenty.

– That’s not your reason. You’re up to something. I thought you were up to something, all those trips to London. I thought it might be a girl, and then it turns out just to be Pia. Pia, pregnant.

VII

L
ater that week, Paul woke in the morning to the whine and shriek of a saw, and the burned smell of cut wood floating in at the open window. Pulling on his dressing gown, he ran downstairs and outside to find that Willis had the first of the aspens half down already, in a blare of sawdust startling as blood, petrol fumes from the saw thick in the air. James was with him. Elise in her kimono was already out there; she had abandoned the girls at the breakfast table and now they were hovering in tears at the house door. She was shrieking at Willis, her usual aloofness trampled in her desperation. Paul saw in Willis’s expression – filtered through a flirting, quivering fan of the leaves of the murdered and half-fallen tree – that this was exactly what he was cutting down the aspen for: to have the pair of them out in their nightclothes, screaming at him absurdly across a wall on a fine morning, exposed as idly breakfasting while working men sweated. It was as if he were an exorcist and had forced them to appear in their true form at last.

This was an outrage, they ranted. The aspens didn’t belong to him, they were on Tre Rhiw land (this was debatable, it wasn’t clear from the deeds), it was illegal for him to touch them without their permission, which they would never give. They would sue, they would get an injunction. And anyway, why was he cutting them down in the first place? Willis made his claim that the trees were getting in the way of the farm machinery. – Bullshit, said Paul. – It’s pure fucking aggressive vandalism, that’s what it is.

James meanwhile leaned on the saw, smiling into the grass and sawdust around his feet, sharing the joke of it all with himself.

– But don’t you think these trees are beautiful? asked Elise rashly.

– Trees are just trees, said Willis.

He agreed eventually, reluctantly, to leave the rest of them at least for this one day: probably only because he wasn’t really sure either who owned them. When Paul came back from dropping the girls at the bus pick-up, Elise was still in her kimono at the kitchen table, nursing her cold coffee. He was surprised to see she had been crying; she didn’t often cry. Soggy tissue was wadded in her palm.

– They belong here and we don’t, she said. – No matter how long we live here.

– He doesn’t belong here, El. He’s English, he comes from outside. You told me yourself, he isn’t popular. The other farmers in the village aren’t like him: they love this land. And what he’s doing is a mistake, even in farming terms: the trees are windbreaks. The aspen suckers help consolidate the soil. He doesn’t need to cut them: he’s only doing it to get at us.

– But behind it, the reason is real: why he hates us and resents us. He works the land; what are we? We’re nothing, we’re only playing here. This place where he earns his living is only our pleasure ground. That’s what he knows, he knows we feel it. If we live here all our lives, we can’t earn that out.

Paul was furious at her fatalism because it was something he was susceptible to himself. – I’m not going to feel guilty, he insisted. – Aren’t we working here? Who says that it’s his kind of work, mostly poisoning and destroying wildlife habitat, that earns the right to cut down the trees? We taxpayers subsidise farmers like him, to be custodians of the countryside. I’m phoning a solicitor, to get an injunction against him.

– Please don’t. Don’t make this more horrible than it has to be. I don’t want to get in a feud with them. We can plant new trees. We’ll put in a new row, on our side of the wall. Ruth says he wants to make enemies of us.

– What’s Ruth got to do with this? Did you call her while I was out?

– She belongs to this place, she understands how things work here. We have to respect these country people. Don’t forget, it isn’t only Willis who’s English.

– I resent you bringing Ruth into something that only concerns us.

They rowed as they hadn’t done for a long time, their quarrel degenerating almost at once into an ancient idiotic riff over who did most in the house, who was working the hardest, who was having the worst time. While they argued Elise was clearing the breakfast things from the table, scraping Rice Krispies savagely into the compost bin, dashing leftover cold tea into the sink. No one had properly finished eating or drinking that morning. Paul felt excitement mounting, a kind of release. They got onto the dangerous subject of Elise’s family. He said he had never been able to work out what her mother used to do all day, apart from choosing clothes and ordering servants about.

– Don’t be ridiculous, we didn’t have ‘servants’, not the way you make it sound. Only while we were in Washington.

He claimed there was something unhealthy in how her family hung on to trunks full of papers: diaries and memoirs, souvenirs of dogs and horses, photographs of the houses they had lived in, home movies. Her sisters had hours of taped recordings of their parents reminiscing.

– Who are you keeping it for? Whoever d’you think will be interested?

– I’m shocked, she said. – When I told you about those tapes, I never dreamed you were thinking all this horrible stuff.

– I couldn’t care less about the tapes. But you’ve got to admit, your family carries a lot of heavy baggage.

– No: it’s just meanness in you. Something miserable, that wants to shrivel up what other people care about. Does the meanness come from your background, did you get it from your parents? Are you jealous, of all the memories we have?

– I can’t believe you’ve actually used that word: ‘background’. What are you, my fucking social worker?

– Don’t you
dare
bring politics into this.

Willis would have been gratified to hear them, Paul thought. Probably this was exactly how he imagined the intimate life of people like them, degraded because they had too much time to indulge themselves with thinking.

Elise said she had work to do, and went off to the barn. Paul stood for a while in the cramped tiny bedroom upstairs. The duvet was still heaped on the bed where he’d thrown it off when he heard the saw. Rage at Elise and rage at Willis’s assault on the tree were mixed painfully together. The bedroom seemed oppressively feminine, the dressing table with its bottles of perfume and cosmetics, the muslin curtains at the windows, the brass bed frame, the pink-striped duvet cover. How had he arrived at submitting to all this? Downstairs, Elise would be finishing the last of the little dining chairs. She had cut the fabric so that at the centre of each seat there was a single rose, black against a dark pink background. Ruth had found a buyer for the whole set of twelve, and someone wanted pictures of them for a lifestyle magazine, which would be good for business. Sometimes, preparing for one of these magazine photographs, Elise transformed one of the rooms in Tre Rhiw, painting its walls a different colour, purple or pink or green, bringing in furniture from the barn where it was waiting to be sold, whipping up new curtains on her machine. She was paid extra for all this. The hems on the curtains would only be pinned or roughly tacked, as if for a stage set, and she wouldn’t bother painting behind corner cupboards or a sofa. This set would become the frame of their real lives for months afterwards, until it was all changed for a new shoot.

Paul threw some clothes in a bag with a couple of books, put his passport out of long habit in his back pocket, his laptop in its carrying case, then left the house the front way, walking to the station on the road rather than using the path through the garden and along the river, so that Elise couldn’t see him go from her workroom. The raw gap of the aspen’s absence in the sky was a pulse of shock, a murder scene: its felled slender length stretched out along the red earth, new coppery-pale leaves still trembling and sprightly, its death not having reached them yet through the slow sap-channels. Should he have stayed, to phone the solicitors? But Elise was against him doing that anyway. He told himself it was futile to worry about a few trees, when the extreme weather this year was so full of signs of disaster. They were all of them sleepwalking to the edge of a great pit, like spoiled trusting children, believing they would always be safe, be comfortable.

On the train he was devoured inexplicably by the same excitement as on the two occasions he had pursued other women, since he’d been with Elise. Elise only knew about one of these, the last one – the Welsh one, the park girl. He hadn’t done anything of that sort for three years, was not planning on it now, but he couldn’t read his book; his heart raced uncomfortably. While the train crawled, scarcely advancing, through the outer London suburbs, he took in the complicated man-made wilderness around the track with intensity, as if it had some message of freedom for him: black-painted walls chalked with white numbers and festooned with swags of wiring, willowherb and buddleia flourishing in the dirt, a padlocked corrugated-iron shed, door ripped off its hinges. The beauty of the massive old stonework and rusted ancient machinery roused a nostalgia sharp as a knife for the old world of industrial work that his parents had belonged to.

There were various friends who wouldn’t mind putting him up for a night or two, but he didn’t want to see them yet: instead he went straight to the flat where Pia was staying. He told himself this was only a postponement, not a destination. All the way there, he was borne up by the conviction that today his luck was in, he would find them at home, even though when he last spoke to Pia, a few days ago, she had been at work. In the background behind her voice he had heard the noises of a café, the rattle of crockery and chatter. He had rung her to let her know that he’d told Annelies about at least part of the situation she was in. – I know, Pia had said. – She called me. She went fairly ballistic, like I knew she would. She tried to be calm at first, then she lost it. It’s all right. It’s better she starts getting used to the idea.

It was Marek’s sister who picked up the entry phone. When he said he was Paul, she sounded blank.

– Pia’s father.

– Oh, Pia’s not here.

– Can I come in? I’d like to talk to you.

After a moment’s hesitation she buzzed him in, and he found his own way up to the flat. The girl was waiting, holding the door open for him. At first he thought she was not as attractive as he had remembered. She was wearing jeans again, and a sleeveless T-shirt with the logo of an athletics team from some American university. One of her front teeth was cracked and discoloured, she was really very thin; he wondered again about drugs. Inside, she offered him a cigarette, and he enjoyed pulling the smoke down into his lungs. She perched cross-legged, lithe, at one end of the sofa.

– I’m in London for a few days, Paul explained.

– You want to stay here?

It was what he wanted, though he hadn’t known that until she offered it. But there was surely no room; in fact the flat seemed more cramped even than the last time he’d been in it, because boxes that must be something to do with Marek’s import venture were stacked up everywhere against the walls. The Polish writing gave him no clue as to what was inside. Was Anna imagining that while she slept on the sofa, Paul would stretch out beside her on the floor? He remembered his dream about her.

– It’s easy. I stay with my boyfriend.

It didn’t matter if she had a boyfriend, it was better. He had never imagined anything else. – I’d like to stay. Only for a couple of days.

– OK, it’s fine. You can be close to Pia.

Anna wasn’t beautiful exactly, but her movements were sinuous and fierce at once; nothing in her was made coarsely, her wrists and the collar bones visible under her loose shirt fine as porcelain, the beauty spot on her cheek precise as a mark on the mask of one of those nocturnal animals, a lemur or a loris. She explained that she couldn’t give him a key to the flat. The keys were given out by the council, only to tenants named in the agreement; it wasn’t possible to get them copied. He’d have to call, to make sure someone was there to let him in.

– They watch us coming and going, she said. – We don’t know if they will report us to the council, that Marek and Pia are living here. Maybe we’ll get turned out: who cares? Soon, we’ll be getting a better place.

Anna said Marek was looking for a lock-up to rent, to store the boxes. There had been more problems with the concierge about these. Apparently there were biscuits inside, and Lech beer and jam; Anna said they had got a ‘very good deal’. While they were waiting for their business to take off, she was working again at the café, along with Pia; he had only caught her at home because this was her afternoon off. Paul asked whether her boyfriend was Polish; he wasn’t, he was Australian, he sold computer software to the retail industry, he did a lot of work in Northern Ireland. – Belfast is a nice place, she said. – Maybe I’m thinking about moving there.