Tessa Hadley - The London Train

Paul called on Stella and John in Tufnell Park. At the door Stella had to wrestle with the dog, a tall overbred animal, all silky locks and nerves, which leapt on visitors in ecstatic welcome.

– She’s shameless, Stella apologised, tugging its collar. – She’s anybody’s. Come on in.

The dog’s nails skittered on the tiles in the big hall, which was elegantly untidy, doubled in a huge mirror in a crumbling gilt frame. A mounted stag’s head was a paperweight on top of a pile of issues of the TLS . Paul thought that Stella’s kiss on his cheek was tinged with reproach: no doubt she’d been talking to Elise and had concluded he was up to his old games. He recoiled for some reason from reassuring her that he wasn’t. Stella was diminutive and forthright, with dangling earrings and a pixie haircut: she had done Classics at university. She and John were his friends and not Elise’s; Elise said Stella reminded her of the head girl at school.

Paul passed the evening in his usual chair in Stella’s study, drinking John’s twenty-five-year-old Talisker; John was out with clients, he was a partner in a law firm. The dog subsided into hopeful repose on its rug, making efforts to hold its eyes open, folds twitching on its shallow forehead.

– Elise is in a state, Stella accused him. – She’s no idea where you are. You told her you were staying here: I felt awful when she rang and I didn’t know what she was talking about. What’s going on, Paul? Are you behaving like a shit again?

– It’s not what you think, he said vaguely.

– I don’t know what I think.

– I’m looking after Pia.

– She told me Pia’s pregnant. Is that where you are? The poor kid. Have you any idea what a disaster a baby would be, at Pia’s age? She’d be crawling up the walls with frustration.

Paul said that it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy.

– So who is this guy? Do you trust him?

There were original Eric Ravilious prints on the walls of the study, a Barbara Hepworth maquette on a table, on the bookshelves first editions of Hughes and Larkin. The room was intensely familiar to Paul, like a second skin; yet the smell of the van was also on his clothes – garlic sausage and petrol and hot rubber – and the traffic still seemed to be in his blood, surging round him in its abrupt stop-start rhythm. He got into an argument with Stella about education, Pia’s education in particular. He was surprised, hearing his own pent-up belligerence spilling over.

– 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.

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.