Tessa Hadley - The London Train

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.

Paul had been like this when he was young: always drawn on by news from elsewhere, always wanting to be beginning again in a new place. But then he had changed his mind, and had wanted to be rooted instead.

He had to use the bathroom. The door hadn’t been fixed back on its hinges yet: he tried to pee as noiselessly as possible. Washing his hands, he grimaced at himself in the mirror. When he was a boy he had been pretty, he had had to fight off the interest of certain teachers. Now he was a couple of stone heavier, the flesh of his face had thickened and darkened, his hair had gradually been leached of its colour. Who knew how old he seemed to Anna? And yet it was a fact, it had almost a biological rightness, that men of his age often partnered with girls of her age.

He went out in the afternoon and walked around the streets. He had imagined himself getting away from home to concentrate with a new and cleaner passion on his writing, but now he hardly thought about it, as if he had left it behind in another life. He walked among the crowds and down the side roads until he was tired, bought smuggled cigarettes from a street vendor, then stopped at a bar in Upper Street that had tables on the pavement and read the newspaper over a couple of beers. When he called Elise, she wouldn’t pick up. He left a message, saying he was staying with his old friends Stella and John, he would be home in a few days. Stella was his BBC contact. The lie felt bland in his mouth, he shed it effortlessly.

T he days he stayed in the flat slipped into weeks. The first night, getting ready for bed in that tiny living room, it had seemed impossible; he had thought he would have to leave the next morning. He would never be able to sleep here. Pia said it was ‘weird’ having him stay. He could hear them undressing in the room next door, his daughter and this stranger who might or might not be good for her: they opened drawers, bumped furniture, communicated in intimate low voices that were only just uninterpretable. The plasterboard walls were a perfunctory divide, as if really they all slept promiscuously together, exposed to the sky. It never got dark: light and noise streamed in from the street outside. The traffic ploughed unendingly, only easing off somewhat towards morning. In contrast to this, his bed in Tre Rhiw was a den burrowed deep in the earth.