The London Train

by Tessa Hadley

  – It’s all a sham, the liberal fiction of enlightenment. Education’s a caste system, a narrow gate set up to process children. In order to pass through, they have to be broken, then put back together. Middle-class parents invest it with fetish value because they were tested and broken themselves, they pass on the hidden damage.

  – What rubbish you’re talking, Stella said. – The trouble is, for Pia everything’s at stake here; it’s real, it’s not just you upsetting people at parties.

  Eventually, even while they went on arguing, Paul relaxed, felt at home again, forgot about the raw new phase of his life at the flat. He thought affectionately about Stella, sitting opposite him straight-backed, earrings shaking in emphasis, the dog’s head lying in abjection in her lap. In long-ago Greenham days, she had been one of those who broke through the perimeter fence to spray the silos, and was repeatedly arrested. She was honourable and conscientious. At the end of the evening she persuaded him to call Tre Rhiw. Tactfully she left him alone with the phone and went to make coffee. He expected to get through to the answering machine. It shook him when he actually heard Elise’s voice, tentative at the other end of the line, even tremulous.

  – Hello?

  – Elise, it’s me.

  His voice seemed to fall into the empty quiet of the house at night. She had not been watching television when he rang – he would have heard it in the background. He was surprised she was awake so late.

  – Where are you?

  – I’m at Stella’s.

  – No, you’re not. I know you’re not, I rang her.

  – I really am here tonight. I’m ringing on Stella’s phone: do 1471 afterwards if you want.

  He explained that he was staying with Pia, that his mobile was out of battery, he had forgotten to bring the charger with him. He knew Elise must be listening for something else, for more than this. She ought to be fortifying herself against him, to punish him; and yet her voice in his ear was disconcertingly intimate, as if his call had caught her unprepared, before she could conceal herself.

  – You could at least have spoken to the girls.

  – I know. I’m sorry. I’ll ring them.

  He waited for her to ask when he was coming home.

  – Actually something’s up here, Paul. I think Gerald’s ill.

  – What kind of ill?

  She said she was worried he might be having some kind of breakdown. – Maybe it’s nothing, he just seems strange to me, he’s behaving strangely. I thought perhaps you ought to come back, that’s all.

  – What do you mean by strange? Don’t you always think he’s strange?

  There was silence, he thought she must be searching for the right words to describe what was worrying her. – How do you know this? Have you spoken to him?

  – Listen, it doesn’t matter. Take no notice of me, I’m probably imagining things.

  He forgot to ask whether Willis had been back for the rest of the trees.

  IX

  O ne morning Paul drove Marek to Heathrow for a meeting with one of his exporters, who had a few hours in London between flights. He was also apparently an old school friend: short and plump, with a shaved head and cherub mouth. Marek was always in jeans, but this man wore a business suit and a thin leather tie, carried a briefcase. With one arm round Paul’s shoulders and one round his friend’s, Marek introduced them.

  – Not only my driver, also father of my girlfriend Pia, who is very lovely, dear to my heart.

  Paul was pressed into the heat of this stranger, smelled on him the different spice of Warsaw, where he had woken and breakfasted that morning. They shook hands, the man’s eyes glittering and clever.

  – Marek, you’re become a family man?

  – I like family! Marek insisted. – The right family, I like it.

  Paul joked. – I’m sticking with him, to keep an eye on him.

  – And how is Anna?

  – You know Anna. Always on my case, we have to build the business up. She’s a slave driver.

  – It’s good for you! Without Anna you’re too happy, you’ll be lazy.

  Marek and his friend bought pints of lager at eleven in the morning, in a simulacrum of an old-world pub, panelled in stained wood, carved out of the vast vacancy of the airport. Paul left them to their planning and walked around; he had no role to play in their business, and knew anyway they would soon lapse into Polish. He loathed airports. He had not been in one for a couple of years – they had not had the money recently to travel abroad. Out of some superstition he’d inflicted on himself, he’d never eaten in an airport or an aeroplane, as if they were an underworld and he feared that if he tasted their fruit he’d leave something of himself behind. Today he let himself be washed along in the slow flow of people in transit, carried past the repeating loop of shops. Even the real things these shops sold – whisky, a book about the origins of the First World War – seemed degraded by the place into shadows of themselves. He bought himself a paper, but didn’t sit down to read it. Instead he found himself staring up at the departure boards.

  It occurred to him that he could go anywhere, right now. There were all those thousands sitting in his account, enough to buy himself a ticket; and his passport was – he checked – still in the back pocket of these trousers. On the way to Heathrow, he had had no thought other than returning with Marek into London after the meeting. But Marek could drive himself. Sooner or later, in the next week or so, Paul had meant to go back to Elise and the girls at Tre Rhiw: that was his real life. But what if he didn’t go back? What if his life continued somewhere else, and was real differently? The lettered shutters spelling out the place names on the board flickered over with their soft susurration: Dubrovnik, Rome, Odessa, Cairo, Damascus. His idea wasn’t cerebral; the assault of his desire for it, dropping through him like a current, unhinged him momentarily. He had enough money, even if he gave half to Elise, for a ticket anywhere, and a room when he got there. A room while he sorted himself out. Enough money to get by for a while because he knew how to live frugally.

  For ten or twenty minutes, while he dwelled inside this possibility, it was so real that he felt afterwards the unfinished gesture in his muscles, his clenched jaw; he had meant to walk over to the information desk, ask about last-minute tickets, find out where he could go, get out his card from his wallet, pay. He would have to take the van keys back to Marek. It was a door that stood open, through which he could walk lightly, carrying nothing. This was the sort of thing he used to do; something unfinished in him, which had been set aside and forgotten, stepped up to the adventure with fast-beating heart. He imagined himself walking out from a room somewhere else, in a few hours, into a different light: to buy clothes, toothbrush, razor, which he would not know the names for. He would find a bar to eat in, or buy food on the street. The place might be dirty and poor, it might have stone ramparts where the population strolled to take the air in the evenings, it might overlook the sea, it might not. Paul felt himself at a pivot in his life, swinging dangerously loose: if he moved, he would go over to the information desk and everything would follow on from there. He had only to keep still. If he went, he couldn’t be forgiven, or forgive himself – freedom would carve out an empty space in him for ever. A message drifted through his cells, from his bones, that he must keep still. Eventually Marek came to find him.

  Pia’s ankles swelled and the doctor told her she had to rest, take time off from work. She wasn’t sleeping well at night. Marek was solicitous, sat with her big white feet in his lap, massaging them. When Paul vacated the sofa in the mornings she settled herself there and switched on the television. Sometimes she didn’t even wait for him to clear away the bedding, didn’t bother to pull up the blinds. Listlessly uncomfortable, she kept shifting position. She made her face up by the artificial light.

  – Won’t you let me read to you? Paul asked one day not long after the Heathrow trip, when Marek hadn’t needed him, he was doing business somewhere else in the city. At a loose end, Paul h
ad even thought of going to the library and starting some work. He couldn’t bear the idea of Pia filling her head with the kind of drivel they put on television in the daytime. If he bought Great Expectations or Emma , perhaps he could abridge as he read, if he saw she was getting bored.

  – Read to me? Dad, have you forgotten I’m twenty years old?

  She was adamant, as if she suspected him of trying to smuggle in under cover some scheme for getting her back into education. All she would agree to was his borrowing DVDs from a local rental place, which they watched together in the afternoons. Her taste was not what he’d expected, not sentimental. She liked clever thrillers, Michael Clayton , No Country for Old Men . They began on the first series of The Wire together; she was much quicker than he was to pick up what was happening.

  – Aren’t you missing your friends? he asked her. – What about your old girlfriends from school? Or from the university.

  – I did see some of the girls from school at first, when I moved in here. Once I knew I was pregnant, I couldn’t go out drinking with them, and that’s all they ever want to do. I only miss James.

  – James Willis? Really? Isn’t he a bit of a clown?

  – James and me are soulmates. We think the same things at the same time. One of us says what the other was just about to. That’s why we never could go out together.

  – He’s always tongue-tied if I try to talk to him.

  – That’s because you’re you, Dad. You’re not the easiest person to talk to.

  He told her about Willis senior coming to cut down the poplars at Tre Rhiw.

  – Was James involved in this? He’s never mentioned anything about it.

  – He was the one wielding the fucking saw.

  She laughed, and he began to remember all the detail of that morning, which from this perspective in the flat seemed highly comical. When he told her about his quarrel with Elise, she took Elise’s side, she said it wasn’t worth making an enemy of Mr Willis for the sake of the trees. It was clear she couldn’t really remember which trees he was talking about, and she said they could always plant some more. Paul had wondered if she might take the opportunity of backing him against Elise. She hadn’t always got on with her stepmother. Elise could be blunt sometimes, and when Pia was younger, Elise had found her obstinate and unresponsive. Sometimes when she first came to stay with them, before Becky was born, she was patently sick with misery, away from her home; but however Elise coaxed her, she had insisted with a little false smile that she was fine, sitting on the edge of her bed, swinging her feet. There had been something heart-wringing, exasperating to Elise, in how she had unpacked her rucksack so neatly and arranged her trainers in pairs against the wall.

  The shape of Pia’s pregnancy as it grew was fearsome, a bloated dome; her belly button turned outwards, she stretched the cloth of her T-shirt across it to show it off to Paul. He wouldn’t lay his hand on her belly when she offered, if the baby was kicking; but sometimes unavoidably, at close quarters in the crowded flat, they knocked up against one another, he and his grandchild-to-be. Pia’s mood seemed to Paul to be changing as the pregnancy advanced. Her girlishness fell away, she was less capricious, more brooding. Once she said passionately that she wished her Nana could have seen the baby, and he realised then that he’d stopped dreaming about his mother since he came to the flat. She began to make a little collection of baby clothes. When he remembered her balancing her tray and patiently picking out cakes in the café, he wondered if she might after all be gifted for motherhood when it came. Perhaps the women who found it easiest were those who didn’t fight against relinquishing their own will.

  He tried to make the flat pleasant for his daughter to spend time in, buying flowers and bringing home fresh food, plenty of fruit. Marek commiserated over her being stuck on the sofa all day, but it was difficult to imagine him doing this sort of domesticated shopping. Instead he arrived back with pieces of equipment he had got at bargain prices: a complicated pushchair on three wheels, a baby alarm, something improbably called a baby gym. There wasn’t room to unpack these from their boxes.

  He called Tre Rhiw from a pay phone in Upper Street. While he waited for Elise to pick up he felt trepidation, half-expecting to be transplanted back inside their last conversation, with its intimate unguardedness, late at night. In the blaze of afternoon, however, her voice was quite different, brusque. She conveyed that any talk was snatched out of a day impossibly busy, between the pressure of orders in the workshop and looking after the children.

  – You’ve managed to find time to call, she said. – That’s good of you.

  He couldn’t argue with her outrage, didn’t try to defend himself. But it seemed laid on in thick strokes, like a mask over some other excitement. He fixated on the idea that she had been conspiring with Ruth against him; or with her sister Mirrie, who had been at Tre Rhiw for the weekend.

  Over the phone the girls sounded years younger. Becky was shy and he could hardly squeeze information out of her. He could picture her blushing behind her freckles, murmuring into the mouthpiece, holding herself still in concentration.

  – What are you doing in London, Daddy?

  He told her he was staying with her older sister. Becky seemed to know about the baby, giggling diffidently when she mentioned it; he explained this was why he was keeping an eye on Pia, to make sure everything was all right. Joni was perfunctory, as if she’d half-forgotten him already. She couldn’t wait to hand the phone to her mother.

  – Did Willis come back? he asked Elise.

  – He came back. She gave a hard, short laugh. – He offered to sell me back the trees cut into logs.

  – The man’s unbelievable.

  – Yes, well. I’ve had other things to worry about.

  He asked after Gerald, whether she’d had any contact with him. Elise didn’t appear to be anxious any longer that he was having a breakdown. – He’s been spending a lot of time out here, she said. – I think it’s good for him. He and Mirrie got on well together.

  This didn’t seem likely to Paul, but he didn’t comment.

  Anna called in after work to tell them Annelies had come looking for Pia at the café. Luckily, she said, no one had mentioned Pia’s connection with her, or given away that Pia was living in her flat. They would only give her Pia’s mobile number, which Annelies already had.

  – I’ll call her, Pia said. – I’ll go and see her. I really ought to.

  – You don’t have to. It’s your choice. Don’t let her blackmail you.

  Paul encouraged Pia to get in touch. Anna seemed lit up with hostility to the idea of Pia’s mother, as if Pia was a refugee from some oppression. Beside Anna, Pia seemed steady as a rock, calming. No doubt Annelies’s performance in the café – she hadn’t been happy with their non-cooperation, apparently – had given some flavour of how she might judge her daughter’s new friends, their rackety household, their prospects.

  Paul hadn’t yet met Anna’s Australian boyfriend. He was away for some time in Belfast, and then even when he was back, Anna didn’t mention him often. If she did, it was with a smothered impatience; was he too malleable, Paul wondered, or not malleable enough? Anna began spending more time at the flat again, and Paul knew he ought to go, to make room for her in her own place, although she never hinted at this and he believed she might not want it. In some crazy way they had accepted him as part of their improvised family. Marek teased him affectionately, calling him an intellectual, caricaturing him as an otherworldly idealist. In the evenings, or even in the afternoons if Anna wasn’t at work, Paul was aware that she and Marek were sometimes fuelling themselves, apart from all the dope they smoked, probably with pills or coke: they went off into the kitchen or the bedroom, claiming to be talking business, and came back wired and jumpy. They kept this stuff away from Pia with exaggerated protectiveness: and from Paul too, out of a kind of courtesy, touching and faintly insulting, as if they thought he was too innocent, or just too old.

  One evening
Marek took Pia out for a meal, because she had said she was going mad, stuck all day in the same place. While they were out, Anna talked to Paul about their troubles at home in Poland. The windows in the flat were all open, cool air was blowing in at last after a day when the heat had never moved. The orange sky outside was barred with shadows: clouds gathered on the horizon in the evenings, but didn’t come to anything. They sat without switching on the lights, Anna cross-legged on the sofa beside him, hair falling into her eyes, dabbing with the end of her cigarette in the brimming ashtray. She spoke in her usual abrupt sentences, fatalistic. Their father was ill, he had been diagnosed a year ago with bone cancer. She wondered if the diagnosis was accurate: it was well known that Polish hospitals made mistakes.

  – Will they give him the best care? I doubt it. I don’t trust them.

  He listened sympathetically, asking tactful questions. She said her father was a strong man, physically small but very strong, who had never had one day of illness in his life. He had been a supervisor in a factory making household cleansers, but now he had been off work for months. ‘Who knows what chemicals they used there, or if they gave him the right protection?’

  Their mother was alive, but their parents were separated. Paul began to understand while she was talking that she and Marek hadn’t seen their father since he’d been ill, or even spoken to him: and not for some considerable time before that, either. He didn’t ask why. What Marek paid him for a day in wages would have bought them a cheap flight home. Anna sat with her shoulders hunched almost to her ears: defiant, estranged. He was overwhelmed by his attraction to her, as if she was a miserable beautiful animal, huddled in captivity.

  She bent forwards to stub out her cigarette and in the orange light he could see the small mounds of her bare breasts inside her loose vest, surprisingly soft and plump against her skinny torso. He put out his hand and felt the hem on the neck of her shirt between his fingers, then touched her hot skin, reaching down inside the dark under the cloth, cupping his hand around one breast, feeling its nipple in his palm. Its soft flesh seemed quite separate from the rest of her: the softness seemed to send an unexpected, hopeful message. For a few seconds Anna didn’t pull away from him. But when he leaned forward to kiss her, she darted her head down and bit him on the inside of his forearm, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to make him yelp and jump back. She shook her finger at him, laughing and frowning.