The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  Pia defended herself half-heartedly, enjoying the fuss made of her.

  – It’s a meeting of the family, isn’t it? Marek brought a bottle of clear spirits from the fridge in the kitchen, and three small glasses. – The new family. It’s good that we get together.

  – Pretty good family, said Anna, – with no home to go to.

  – Anna gets fed up with us, her brother said tolerantly. – Messing up all her nice, tidy space.

  – I’m not surprised, Paul said. – It’s a small flat.

  – Soon, soon, we’ll get a bigger one. We’ll be out from your hair, Anna, then you will miss us.

  Pia said she was going back to work at the café, that would bring in some money. They needed more money than that, teased Marek affectionately, much more. The slivovitz, which Pia didn’t drink, was deliciously ice-cold in this room overheated by the low sun striking in through the windows. Paul had come to the flat intending to coax Pia home, at least for a while, to think things over; but he felt himself being drawn farther into her life here, without getting any of the explanations he ought to be asking for. No one seemed to think anything needed explaining. He had no idea whether the possibilities Marek and Anna discussed animatedly were realistic. They said they had been looking for shop premises, although they also seemed to have been approaching shopkeepers to supply them with goods. Marek asked Paul to explain leasehold, which he wasn’t able to, not knowing how it worked in any detail. Were these two really going to make money, and look after Pia? Both of them spoke English well, but sometimes they lapsed into Polish, and then Paul found himself looking from one to the other as if he was watching a film without subtitles, which might make sense if only he concentrated hard enough. What would Annelies think of him, seduced like this – or Elise? Marek refilled Paul’s glass several times.

  Anna said she wanted to develop her own small business, an outlet for friends who made jewellery: ‘very original, good quality’. Lifting her hair, she showed Paul silver earrings, little jagged lightning strokes, set with tiny stones, the sort of thing you could buy at any market stall. With a qualm, Paul wondered if they were imagining he had money, calculating he might help them with their projects. For all he knew, Marek could be married, or at least have other women at home in Poland. He even asked himself once whether Anna was really Marek’s sister: but there was a trick of likeness between them, not obvious but unmistakable when you’d seen it, in how their dark eyes were set in their skin, so that their awareness seemed gathered behind their faces, looking out.

  When he asked, they told him they came from Lodz, but didn’t seem interested in talking about their home. Paul had been twice to Poland, long ago, but his idea of it mostly came from the poets he had read. These two wouldn’t want him dragging out all those old associations, that old junk, they wouldn’t want to know he’d once worn a Solidarność badge to school. They were too young to remember life in the old Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, and he didn’t know much about life in the new one. For the moment anyway they were Londoners, absorbed in that, more at home in the metropolis than he was. When he eventually left the flat, remembering his train, he managed to pull Pia half outside the front door, onto the walkway. Probably she thought that he was drunk.

  – You have to promise me something, he said in a low voice, urgently. – If they ask you to do anything you don’t like, you will call me straight away, won’t you?

  He saw her eyes widen under their blue-painted lids. – I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. – Do you mean drugs?

  – Whatever. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.

  He wasn’t clear himself about precisely what he feared, and was half-ashamed of where such imaginings came from. Was it only because the man Pia had chosen was a foreigner?

  She shook off his hand from her arm, to go back inside. – I told you. This is what I want.

  VI

  E lise’s bedtime routine was intimately known to him: the yawns, the cleanser, the glass of water she only rarely touched, the pillow she liked to drag under her cheek, her alarm clock set inexorably for the following morning. One new detail was the glasses she had begun to need to read with. These gave Paul mixed feelings: on the one hand, a chill from the middle age into which she advanced always just a little ahead of him; on the other, a frisson of affection, making him think of a character in one of those mid-period Bergman movies, women struggling to take possession of themselves, their past and sexuality. Was that what Elise was doing? She kept a pile of modern novels by her bed that he rarely looked into; they seemed to him pretty much interchangeable – what people called ‘women’s fiction’. The trouble with cohabitation seemed to be that you were gripped in some struggle for vindication so convoluted that you couldn’t afford to imagine things impartially from the other one’s centre.

  She would abandon reading with a little sigh, smiling apologetically, but giving out a hum of sensuous submission as she slipped under into sleep, leaving him high and dry, beached in her wake. It was too hot these nights to wrap himself around her from behind; her breasts, if he put his hand on them, seemed scalding; she brushed him away without even waking properly, murmuring a protest. Curled with his back to her at the other edge of the bed, he’d taken to trying to get to sleep by going round and round in his mind the rooms of his childhood home, remembering their obscure corners, which had once seemed banal in their ultra-familiarity and now held the deepest mystery for him. There was no one else to remember them. He inventoried drawers and cupboards: the hairgrips and elastic bands and dust, the crumbling bath cubes, books half full of Green Shield savings stamps. Pins and needles were stuck into shiny paper in a folded card shaped as a flower basket. An old cut-throat razor, with a bone handle, hung around for years after his father had taken to using an electric one. The house itself was gone now, he’d looked for it on Google Earth and, although most of the road still stood, there was a gap where they must have demolished four or five of those mean houses, built shoddily of compressed ash only sixty years ago, as the answer to Birmingham’s inner-city slum problem. He had hated the place, but the discovery of its non-existence was a blow, as if he’d been cheated of something.

  One night he woke, groaning loudly, out of a nightmare that his mother was dying in hospital, alone, strapped to her sheet in a bed like a metal cot with bars, twitching in violent convulsions, tubes and monitors bristling all over her body. His groaning woke Elise too.

  – It won’t have been like that, she reassured him, putting her arms around him, cradling him. – They know how to do it, how to ease them out with morphine, making them as comfortable as they can. When Dad was dying the nurses knew just how to prop him up, moisten his lips and hold his hand and speak to him. They know these things.

  He didn’t believe her, but he was grateful and hungry for her comforting, which turned into love-making, affectionate and familiar. Into that, taking Paul by surprise, came images of the Polish girl: her air of tough disdain, the mole on her cheek, her sloe-dark eyes, young breasts under her tight T-shirt. He imagined the girl carried away in sexual excitement, breaking out in pleading exclamations in her language that he couldn’t understand: it was a rough, slightly degrading scene, as if he was punishing her, or proving something. It had not even occurred to him, all the time he was in Anna’s real presence, that anything like this was at work in him, saving itself for later. The middle-aged cliché shamed him, his fantasising about one of his own daughter’s friends, probably not much older than Pia was herself. He tried to conjure up instead the girl from the past, the one he’d seemed to see from Gerald’s window – but she eluded him, her features were blurred.

  Paul sat to watch nature programmes with the girls in the little cubbyhole where they kept the television, a room without a window between the hallway and the kitchen; they curled up together on an old broken-backed sofa. If Joni wasn’t interested in the programme she stretched herself along the top of the sofa back, biting her comfort b
lanket and scuffing with her stretched-up foot along the wall, kicking at the edge of a poster for a Lucian Freud exhibition. Becky was driven to distraction by her sister’s insouciance; they would fight after she had been patient for long ages, rolling over one another, squealing and hissing and pinching. Separating them, Paul felt their heat, intense and intimate as cubs in a den.

  Some of these programmes distressed him, with their casually apocalyptic language. He wanted to protect the girls from hearing that all the beauty of the world was spoiling, its precious places being built over or cut down, its animal life poisoned with pollution. The girls seemed sanguine enough, taking it all in. Perhaps they were hardened through over-exposure; but perhaps a terrible nihilism was being implanted in them, to lie in wait for when they were adult and would understand how to despair. Paul could remember learning in a geography lesson at school about the layered living of the equatorial forest – his imagination had soared at the idea of animals that spent their entire lives in its canopy, never needing to come down to ground level. He had not wanted particularly to travel to the forest and see for himself; the knowledge that it existed was like a reserve in his spirit, a guarantee that spacious beauty existed somewhere.

  – I shouldn’t worry about it, Elise said. – They seem to cope all right. Isn’t education the best hope for change? This generation ought to grow up passionate environmentalists. The programmes try not to be gloomy, but they have to tell the truth to the children, don’t they? You couldn’t want to deceive them that everything was all right.

  – I’m afraid it makes them helpless. You need such complex contexts, to grapple with the information they’re getting.

  – Do you? It seems straightforward enough to me. Thank goodness things aren’t all left up to the people who understand the complex contexts. If it was up to them, perhaps nothing would ever get done.

  Gerald often ate with them in the evenings. Elise didn’t mind having him there as long as it wasn’t a dinner party. In fact she fussed over him, cooking the things he said he liked, teasing him about how he didn’t look after himself properly. Paul had told her about the Scotch eggs and hummus. – Do you ever clean anything? she asked. – Gerald, have you ever cleaned your lavatory? The girls were gloating and giggling, enjoying the game. Gerald said he had bought some toilet cleanser once, and sometimes squirted it in. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Paul was sure he was exaggerating, playing along with their joke; he didn’t remember the toilet being so very bad. Gerald told them he had a theory, that after a certain point the rooms never got any dirtier: they didn’t get cleaner, but they didn’t get any worse.

  Elise pretended to be appalled. – Won’t you let me come round and clean up for you? It will only take a couple of hours. I won’t touch any of your precious books, I promise.

  It was a joke, but Paul saw with surprise that she half-meant it, too. She didn’t care about the cleaning, but she was intrigued by the idea of Gerald’s flat, where she’d never been, and she wanted to get a look inside it. Joni wrapped her skinny arms around Gerald’s knees, wheedling. – We want to come, we want to come to your smelly flat!

  Gerald said he would love to invite her over for tea, he’d get in cake and crumpets specially. – As long as you’re not afraid of the spiders.

  – Spiders? No… Joni was hesitant. – Are they big ones?

  – How about bats?

  – He hasn’t! Becky squealed delightedly, not certain.

  – Or cockroaches?

  He convinced them that he lived with a menagerie of animals, confessing to Paul and Elise later that the cockroaches were for real. After dinner he helped Elise water the vegetables: he was strong as an ox, could easily carry two full watering cans. Paul thought of him when he was a boy, baling out hay from the back of a tractor trailer in winter, or trimming the overgrowth of their sheep’s feet with a paring knife. He had told Paul he used to think up the solutions to maths problems while he worked. To save water, Elise had fixed up a barrel that collected waste from the kitchen sink and the bathroom, to reuse on the garden; after a few trips with the cans, Gerald put in a hose running from the water butt to the vegetable patch. She was delighted with him. They all three sat out with chinking glasses of gin and tonic in the late sunshine, when the chores were done and Becky and Joni were feeding the goats.

  – Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Gerald? Elise asked.

  – It’s probably the cockroaches.

  – No, seriously. Although I don’t suppose the cockroaches help. What happened to Katherine? She was nice.

  – She was nice. Gerald was smoking surreptitiously, holding the spliff between drags out of sight under his deckchair, so the girls wouldn’t spot it.

  – And Martine, the one from Heidelberg. She was nice too.

  – Went back to Heidelberg.

  Elise laughed as if he was impossible, but also as if it gratified her, that he wouldn’t be drawn into making much of those girls, giving anything away.

  – Why doesn’t he stay the night ever? she asked Paul when Gerald had gone to get his train. – It must be awful for him, going back to that dismal flat.

  – It isn’t dismal. It’s how he likes it. He likes to keep his own hours, read as late as he wants, make tea in the middle of the night if he wants to.

  – He could do that here, we wouldn’t mind.

  Gerald had told Paul once that he got panicky in a place where other people were asleep – he had a problem with imagining their breathing or something. This must be part of the story with the girlfriends. If you lived alone for too long, the effort of breaking all your forms of life, to recast them with someone else, might be just too tremendous. Those girls, Katherine and the others, were shaken when they came back from throwing themselves at Gerald with such innocent enthusiasm. There was a cruelty in the blank side he turned to them, when he needed to cut them out.

  – It’s restful working alongside him, Elise said. – At first it feels funny not saying anything, then you settle into it. I used to think he wouldn’t talk to me because I wasn’t intellectual.

  Paul lied that he needed to go up to London again, to see his agent. He winced at the lie – Elise hadn’t absolved him yet, over the lies he’d told at the time he was seeing that girl in Cardiff – but at least it wasn’t for his own advantage, only Pia’s. Without warning Pia he was coming, he went straight to the flat. All the way there, on the train looking out at the yellowing landscape, and then on the Underground, he was rehearsing how he would persuade his daughter to come home with him. She ought to be looking after herself in her pregnancy, she ought to think responsibly about the future, she ought to be with her family who would love and cherish her best. He might be able to persuade her to pack a bag and leave with him there and then: he would take her home to Annelies, or back with him to Tre Rhiw, whichever she wanted. The idea of restoring her triumphantly made him emotional. His mission sealed him apart from the crowds around him in the Underground, their babble of languages silenced as they swayed together in the heat, strap-hanging, bodies indifferently intimate, faces closed against curiosity.

  Arriving at the block, he buzzed the entry phone. Someone seemed to pick up in the flat, but when he spoke into it no one answered, and after a moment it cut off. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of this when he was on his way: that there might be no one at home, or no one who wanted to see him. He rang again, and this time no one picked up. Pia’s mobile was turned off when he tried it. It was absurd that he hadn’t prepared for this eventuality; now he was at a loss. He read the paper for an hour in a dubious café somewhere off Pentonville Road, then tried the mobile and the entry phone again. He made efforts to persuade the concierge to let him in. ‘I’m sure they’re at home. Perhaps the phone isn’t working.’ The concierge tried for himself. ‘It working. No one in the place.’

  Paul spent the day in the British Library, returning to the block in the evening as the sun dropped and the brilliant daylight thickened and dimmed
. As he approached he tried to work out which flat was Anna’s: one on the second floor with its lights on had its blinds skewed at angles halfway up the windows in a sequence he seemed to recognise, but he wasn’t sure it was in the right relationship to where the entrance was, or to the roof garden, whose dead stubble poked above a parapet, a fringe outlined against a sky of deepening royal blue. Again, no one picked up when he tried the entry phone. The traffic roared behind him, a broad river devilish in its night-blare, streams of red and white lights. He crossed to look up from the other side of the road at the lit-up flat. Someone was moving about in there, passing and repassing behind the blinds as if they were tidying up, or getting dressed to go out. If this was the right flat, it could be Pia; but he couldn’t attach his feeling to that shadow, in case it was only a stranger’s. Or it could be Anna, or her brother. It could have been the shadow of a slight young man.

  Paul had forgotten about rescuing Pia; instead he only felt shut out from wherever she was, whatever they were doing. He hadn’t been bitten by this anxiety for years, he thought he’d left it behind him with his youth: wanting to be part of something happening, and feeling excluded. He didn’t want to go home from here to the quiet of the country. And yet nothing was happening. No one went into the block of flats, or came out of it, while he watched.

  Going to Annelies’s house seemed preferable to catching the train home; he thought he would tell her finally about Pia. It was about time. Perhaps if she hadn’t eaten, he would take her out to one of the Greek places in Green Lanes road. When he arrived, though, she was in the middle of some kind of social occasion. He could smell food as soon as she opened the front door, and hear women’s voices and laughter from the room where she had her dining table. He was sorry when he saw what Annelies thought it meant, his turning up unannounced on her doorstep: she braced herself, as if for some dreadful assault.