The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  – 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 c
hance. – 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.

  Paul told Ruth’s brother about the Willises and the chainsaw; when he and Gerald walked over one evening for a pint at the pub in the village, Alun was at the bar. He laughed and said Willis was a nutter, but that if the trees were on Willis’s land, there wasn’t much Paul could do about it, a trim wouldn’t do them any harm. He was friendly, but Paul felt Alun always kept him at a deliberate distance, perhaps because of things Ruth told him, perhaps just because of what he would imagine was Paul’s type: English, opinionated, arrogant. He wouldn’t quite come out on Paul’s side against Willis.

  Alun was small and broad-chested, handsome; he kept liquorice-coloured sheep on the hills and a small beef herd on the red soil in the better fields; they had a farm shop where his wife sold the fruit from their orchards. Although Paul and Ruth didn’t get on, Paul liked her brother’s decency and shyness; from the first when they’d moved down here he’d identified him with the landscape and the place, which was probably romantic. Gerald thought he romanticised. Gerald had also grown up on a farm, on the North Yorkshire moors. He had been grateful to leave it behind and didn’t have any particular thing about farmers, although it turned out – to Paul’s surprise – that he could talk to Alun in an easy way Paul couldn’t, mostly about money, money and machinery, how impossible it was for the hill farmers, the endless setbacks that seemed to make up the rhythm of their life. Now there was anxiety about the drought.

  Paul really did have to go up to London the following week, to record an interval talk he’d written for Radio 3. In the late afternoon, after he’d finished, he made his way to Pia’s; he’d called to remind her he was coming, but she hadn’t answered. Pressing the button on the intercom on the forbidding exterior gate, he was relieved to hear the crackle of her voice responding, suspicious and uncertain.

  – Pia, it’s Dad.

  – Shit, Dad. I’m not ready. It’s not a good time.

  At his exposed back, traffic roared around the island-block. This place really was his idea of hell: the remorseless, ceaseless pressure of vehicles travelling onwards to destinations that in the aggregate were absurd, each under its atomised separate compulsion, brought together in this filthy flow, poisoning the air with fumes and noise.

  – But I’m here now. Let me in.

  There was a pause; then resignation. – I’ll come down.

  When she appeared she was in the same black cardigan as last time, over a pink nightshirt and slippers. Her face was pasty and she hadn’t brushed her hair, which was pulled out of its bunches and loose on her shoulders; he guessed she had come straight from bed. From under the nightdress her swollen belly poked assertively.

  – I forgot you were coming today.

  As he followed her up to the flat, something about the place elated him, even while he was intent on getting Pia out of it. He was bracing himself for encountering Marek again, reading him more deeply, for better or worse: when he realised there was no one home besides Pia, he was almost disappointed. She said they had gone out.

  – They?

  – Marek and Anna.

  The television was switched on, inevitably. The place looked a bit better than last time: at least the spare bedding was folded in a pile on the floor, the blinds pulled halfway up. The smell of dope was pungent, though the windows were open. Perhaps Pia hadn’t been in bed, but tidying: in the kitchen there was crockery piled in a fresh bowl of soapy water, and while she waited for the kettle to boil to make tea, she did rinse a few plates and propped them on the draining board. Paul asked about her pregnancy, her appointment at the hospital: into her expression there came the same vagueness as last time. The doctors thought from the scan she was twenty-eight weeks, or something like that. Everything was fine.

  – You see. I told you it was too late for a termination.

  – And are you planning on keeping this baby? Or putting it up for adoption?

  – I don’t know. We’ll see. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.

  She said this as offhandedly as if she was choosing between subjects for her college course.

  – Are you eating properly? Aren’t there vitamins and so on you’re supposed to take?

  – Anna’s taking care of that.

  – People are smoking in this flat. I’m sure you know how bad that is for a developing foetus.

  – Oh, Dad.

  – What?

  – You smoked around me all the time when I was a kid. I used to beg and plead with you to stop.

  – Did I? It’s not the same thing. Anyway, just because I was an idiot doesn’t mean you have to be one too.

  Pia dressed in the bedroom while Paul drank his tea. She came out in a new stretch top she said Marek had bought her, grey with huge yellow flowers, pulled tightly across her stomach, showing it off, as was the fashion with pregnancy now. Then, sitting beside him on the sofa, she made up her face in deft accustomed movements, looking in a small hand-mirror, concentrating intently, putting on a surprising amount of stuff: colour on her skin to cover her blemishes, blue lines painted around her eyes, stiff blue on her lashes, colour on her lids, pale lipstick.

  – What? she asked anxiously when she’d finished, putting bottles and tubes away in a zip bag. – Have I put on too much?

  The mask of beauty painted on her face seemed precarious. When she stood up to brush her hair he was startled, as if there was someone new in the room between them. He imagined her days passing – sleeping late, tidying half-heartedly, dressing and painting her face, waiting for her lover to come home. When he asked if she wasn’t missing university work she shuddered, as if he’d reminded her of another life.

  – God, no. I was so miserable there.

  – It won’t be like this, he said, – if you have a baby. Getting up at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  – You never trust that I will be good at anything.

  He tried to say that this was not what he meant; he just didn’t want the baby to spoil her flight and bring her down to earth too soon. – And I have to tell your mother something. She’s out of her mind with worry, you can imagine.

  – Tell her you’ve spoken to me and I’m all right. Tell her I’ll see her soon.

  – Why won’t you see her? Just to put her mind at rest.

  – It wouldn’t, would it? Her mind would be very much not at rest, if she had any idea what was going on. It would be hyperactive. You know her.

  There was ignominy for Paul in keeping her secret, as if he was trying to score cheap triumphs over Annelies, fighting with her over their daughter’s confidence, where he hadn’t earned any rights, given his record. Pia’s resistance to her mother took him by surprise.


  – She recognises you’re an adult, you’re free to choose what you want.

  Tugging the brush through her hair, Pia looked round from the mirror. – This is what I want. And I’ll see her, but not yet.

  As soon as Marek and Anna were in the flat, Paul saw that Anna was a force just as her brother was, and that Pia had been drawn to both of them, not just the man. Both moved with quick, contemptuous energy, crowding the place; Paul recognised that they were powerful, even if he wasn’t sure he liked them, and couldn’t understand yet what their link was to his daughter, or whether it was safe for her. Marek greeted Pia with the same gesture as last time, tugging affectionately at her hair; Pia slid into a daze of submission in his presence. In the flowered top, with her face painted, Paul could see how her languid fairness, freighted with the pregnancy, might be attractive.

  Anna’s jeans and white T-shirt were moulded tightly to her slight figure: she probably wasn’t much older than Pia, but everything about her seemed finished and hardened. Her straight hair, dyed red-brown, was chopped off at her shoulders; her narrow face was handsome, boyish, with fine bruise-coloured skin under her eyes and a dark mole on one cheek. When they were introduced, Paul thought he might have known, from touching her hand alone, that she wasn’t British: under the fine-grained skin he seemed to feel lighter bones, a more delicate mechanism for movement. Her nails were painted with black varnish, there were nicotine stains on her fingers. Anna began scolding Pia: had she eaten properly? She was supposed to eat breakfast and lunch too. – What time did you get out of bed? Don’t sleep too much: you need exercise.