Tessa Hadley - The London Train

As he got used to the noise over the nights that followed, he began to imagine it was a tide, and that in the small hours the block slipped its moorings, floating out. Pulling the duvet over his head, he smelled on it the tang of Anna’s sweat, her musky perfume. He thought he would never sleep, and then night after night fell into hours of velvety oblivion, waking at three or four in the morning to the trucks outside and the sodium light, not knowing where he was, excited and afraid. Once, the people next door put on loud music suddenly at dawn: probably they’d arrived back from a party they didn’t want to be over. Marek came out without hesitation from the bedroom, buttoning his jeans as he went. They heard him pounding with his fist on the neighbours’ door, not even bothering to try the bell. Then there was shouting, then silence. There was never any trouble from them again.

On the whole the neighbours in the block weren’t bad, Pia said. They were pretty quiet. One tenant upstairs apparently had ‘mental problems’, as she put it. Mostly he was OK, as long as he was taking his medication, but he had twice left the tap running in his sink with the plug in, and water had poured down into their flat below. If confronted, he got argumentative and violent: they had the number of his social worker to call in an emergency. Marek said it was pointless, people like him being allowed out into the community, to spoil things for everyone else. – If he doesn’t want to look after himself, why should we? Paul argued about the cruelty and futility of the old asylum system. He said society had a duty of care towards its weaker members.

– You’ve seen him? Marek asked. – He’s not so weak.

In fact, the schizophrenic was a huge man, with broad podgy shoulders and waist-length ginger hair, benign-seeming enough when Paul met him a couple of times on the stairs. Apparently he had bought his flat when the right-to-buy scheme was still operative, so the council couldn’t move him anywhere. Marek didn’t mind Paul arguing with him. He would listen to him attentively, almost fondly; somehow this had to do with his feelings for him as Pia’s father, as if their relationship through her pregnancy required him to treat Paul with special consideration, conciliation. He tore open one of the boxes and got out a bottle of vodka flavoured with something he didn’t know how to translate; Paul worked out from a picture on the label that they must be rowan berries. Pouring, Marek would patiently explain again how Paul was wrong, how if you were too soft with people they didn’t thank you for it, but turned on you in the long run, how if your welfare system was too generous it would only attract a whole underclass of criminals and no-goods, waiting to take advantage.

– I myself will take advantage of it, he said disarmingly, – if you allow me. You must not allow me.

The conventional things Marek said, and his doctrine that could have come straight out of the tabloids, somehow weren’t alienating, in the stream of his good nature and boundless energy. He talked about how difficult things would be when the baby was born, but Paul knew he didn’t believe this really, his confidence in himself was unfaltering. Whatever Marek said seemed protected behind a habitual humorous irony. His curiosity was restless, he was a repository of information, he picked up quickly whatever he wanted to learn (he had found out all about leasehold, for instance, since he last saw Paul, and was keenly interested in the regeneration work going on at King’s Cross).

It was only when Paul had been in the flat for several days that he took in that there were no books in it, none, apart from a tatty dictionary and a couple of recipe books. There were DVDs, most of them Hollywood, along with a few Polish films that looked like thrillers – no Kieslowski or Wadja. He had always had a superstitious fear of being shut up somewhere without books; now that it had happened he hadn’t even consciously noticed. Long ago, when he was a student and went home for the summer to work in the brewery, he had built his books almost into a rampart in his bedroom, against the bookless house. Staying over with Pia, he didn’t care. He had brought something with him from Tre Rhiw to read on the train, but hadn’t opened it. Nor had he unzipped the bag with his laptop in it.

Pia got up early in the mornings to go to the café. Paul buried his face deeper in the sofa cushions while she stepped around in the chaos in the living room, finding the things she needed for work. She was light on her feet in spite of the pregnancy. He was aware of her making breakfast obediently in the kitchenette, because Anna insisted she must eat it. Usually Marek went out not long after Pia. When they were both gone and the door pulled shut behind them, the return of stillness in the flat was a guilty luxury into which Paul sank, chasing the tail end of dreams that seemed exceptionally vivid and important. He got to know the way the light advanced across the floor of the flat, split into laths by the blinds, the day’s noise and heat building in the room until he couldn’t ignore them. Sometimes when he was dressed he made efforts to tidy the place, not only stowing his bedding in the bedroom, but attacking whatever mess was left in the kitchen from the night before, soaking pans and rinsing plates. It never looked very different when he’d finished. Even with the windows as wide open as they would go, it was always hot, there was always a sweet smell of something rotting, inside the flat or floating in from outdoors.

Several times he visited the café where Pia worked, a place in Islington that specialised in patisserie. The first time he came across it by chance, walking the streets going nowhere in particular; he only recognised where he was when he caught sight through a plate-glass window of Pia in her long white apron, clearing tables. When he had imagined the two girls working together, he had pictured Pia as a clumsy apprentice performing under Anna’s tutelage. Surely his daughter, who had been so protected and had never had to work for a living, would not know how to submit to a work discipline? She had failed at university, which should have been easy. But he saw now that she was good at this work in her own right, steady and capable. She carried the heavy tray of crockery between tables without faltering, then returned to take orders, waiting with her pen and little pad, explaining patiently to the customers the array of cakes that rose above the counter, rank upon rank: pink and beige meringues, macaroons, tarts filled with fruit or custard, chocolate truffles sifted with cocoa. The women eyed them with hungry desire, delaying choosing. He could see they were touched by Pia’s swollen pregnancy. It wasn’t the sort of place Paul would ordinarily have stopped, it was fashionable and expensive, with chunky long tables of oiled wood, cream enamel lamps. The clientele were handsome, well dressed, loud.

While he watched through the window, Pia felt his gaze on her and lifted her head; a smile broke the surface of her absorption in her work, and she beckoned to him to come inside, brought him coffee and tried to persuade him to have a cake. He didn’t want cake, but the coffee was good, and he didn’t mind sitting there reading the paper, aware of his daughter passing backwards and forwards among the tables behind him, using the tongs to pick out cakes, ringing up bills on the till. When he went in another time, she was making the coffee, using the Gaggia machine, banging out the old grounds and tamping in the new, making shapes in the foam on the cappuccinos. She got used to him, and forgot to be flustered if he was watching. He recognised that he had overlooked, in Pia’s childhood, this capacity of hers for steady, graceful work; he had overridden it with his own certainties.