Tessa Hadley: The London Train

Elise put her arms around Paul, and kissed his neck. – It’s so sad. I’m sorry, darling.

– I wish I could have been with her. It doesn’t seem as if anything real has happened.

– Did you see her?

He shook his head. – They had already taken her away.

– That’s awful. You should have seen her.

After she had hugged him for a while, she took the kettle to the sink, filled it from the noisy old tap that squealed and thundered, lifted the cover of the hotplate on the Rayburn.

– I don’t know what to do with all this stuff, he said.

– Don’t worry. Think about it later. It will be good to have her things around, to remind us of her.

Paul carried the boxes down into his study. This was at the opposite end of the kitchen to Elise’s workroom, built into an old outhouse sunk so low into the steep hillside that the sloping front garden crossed his window halfway up; on the other side, he had a view of the river. The walls were eighteen inches thick; he liked the feeling that he was at work inside the earth.

When the girls came home they were briefly subdued and in awe of what had happened to their Nana; they cried real tears, Becky shyly hiding her face against her mother. She was nine, with a tender sensibility; shadows had always chased across her brown freckled face. Ten minutes later they had forgotten and were playing outside his window in the front garden. He could see their feet and legs, Becky jumping her skipping rope, Joni the six-year-old stamping and singing loudly: ‘Bananas, in pyjamas, are coming down the stairs.’

A t the end of all the other transactional calls he had to make the next day, Paul meant to telephone Annelies, his first wife. Before he could get round to it, Annelies telephoned him, which was not usual; often they did not speak for months at a time. She sounded as if she was offended with him, but he was used to that: it had been their mode together, the contest of hot offence and cold repudiation, ever since they first found themselves in this awkward relation, strangers bound together by the thread of their child – his oldest daughter, who was now almost twenty. He had not been much older than that himself when she was born.

– How long do you think it is since you last saw Pia? Annelies demanded as soon as he picked up the phone.

– I was going to telephone you, he said. – I have some news. Mum died yesterday.

He tried not to be glad that he cut her righteousness off in mid-flow.

– Ah, Paul. That’s sad. How sad. I’m so sorry. Pia will be upset, she loved her Nana.

Paul had used to drive Pia to Birmingham, to visit her grandmother in the Home. It was one of the ways he filled the time he spent with his oldest daughter, and it was true that she had seemed genuinely attached to Evelyn. She had surprised him; he did not think of Pia as resourceful, but she had been full of patience, not minding the old lady’s repetitions, having her hand squeezed in emotion, over and over.

– Should I talk to her?

– She isn’t here. This is why I was telephoning you.

– You mean she’s out?

– No. I mean she’s gone. Taken her stuff and gone. Not all of it, of course. Her room’s still one hell of a mess.

– Gone where?

– I don’t know.

Pia had left home after an argument with her mother about a week ago. There was no point in raising any alarm, going to the police, because Pia had phoned Annelies twice, to tell her she was safe. She said she was staying with friends.

– Then I suppose she’s all right. She’s old enough. She’s free to go where she likes.

– But which friends, Paul? Is it too much to want to know where she is?

Pia was supposed to be in the first year of a degree at Greenwich, in subjects he was never precisely sure of: media, culture and sociology? Paul had taken her out for a meal when he was last up in London, a few weeks ago. He tried hard now to remember what they had talked about. Instead he remembered a new steel stud that she’d had fitted in her lower lip: she had sucked at this stud whenever their conversation dried up, which it often did, stretching her top lip down to pull at it in a way that was nervous and unattractive. He had tried to get out of her some spark of interest in what she was studying, but she spoke about it all with the same obedient flatness. Her mouth with its full, pale lips and strong shape was like his own, he knew that: Pia was supposed to look like him, she was tall and fair and thin as he was, her skin was susceptible to flares and rashes, like his when he was adolescent. In spirit she couldn’t have seemed farther from how he was at her age: he had been consumed in the cold fire of politics and ideas, she was anxiously shy, wrapped up in the tiny world of her friends and their fads, devoid of intellectual curiosity.

– She’ll soon be back, he reassured Annelies. – As soon as she realises she has to do her own washing and buy her own food.

Annelies came to the funeral, in a black suit that fitted too tightly. She was almost matronly these days; Elise beside her seemed light and elastic on her feet as a girl, even though she was the older of the two. Elise had said black didn’t matter any more, she had let Becky and Joni wear their party dresses: the little girls scampered, vivid as sprites in the sunshine, among the ugly monuments of the crematorium. Elise and Annelies had never been rivals; Paul’s first marriage had been over for several years when he met Elise. Elise had made a point of winning over his forthright, abrupt first wife. Now the two women borrowed tissues and whispered confidences, squeezing and touching one another in the way women did. He felt remote from Annelies. She was beginning to look like her mother, a stout, sensible Dutch primary-school teacher.

During the perfunctory service Paul couldn’t take in what he ought to. The minister was a stranger who had been supplied with a few platitudes: Evelyn had worked hard all her life, much of it at Wimbush’s bakery; she had devoted herself also to her family; in her retirement she had enjoyed travelling all over Britain and Ireland, and farther afield too. Paul had had no idea, when asked, which were his mother’s favourite hymns. She had never been a churchgoer, although she had been coyly, almost flirtatiously, interested in religious ideas. He had guessed at a couple of things from his childhood: ‘There Is a Green Hill’ and ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. At the end of the service net curtains were pulled jerkily on a rail around the coffin before it was shunted off.

Paul’s cousin Christine had offered to have a little gathering after the funeral at her place, which wasn’t too far from what she called, with ghoulish familiarity, ‘the crem’. There were plenty of family at the service and the party, which touched him, although Evelyn had been the last of her generation, and there was probably no one here he would come back to visit once today was over. Chris made a point of sitting squeezing his hands in a chair with her knees touching his. He liked her plain, long face with glasses, her grey hair cut tidily short, the silk scarf she hadn’t quite got right, thrown over her shoulder; she was confident and funny. Most of the cohort of cousins in his generation had done well for themselves, they had made the archetypal baby-boomer move out of their parents’ class, they were in local government or in hospitals, or worked in middle management. Chris was a school secretary, her husband a manager in a company servicing photocopiers. Their house was comfortable, lovingly done up.

Paul and Chris hadn’t much else to talk about except to reminisce over the old days. Her memories of the family were much fuller than his, as if despite appearances she had only ever moved a step away from that world: she wasn’t nostalgic for it, but she talked as if it was something she had not yet finished with, even though her own parents were long dead. She could remember sharing an outdoor toilet in the back yard, and eating off a table spread with newspaper. Her family had moved when she was nine out from the centre of town, in the slum clearances, as his parents had too, when he was a baby. In their council house on one of the new estates, Chris’s mother had suddenly produced tablecloths, curtains, carpets: she had been saving them, wrapped in their polythene, because they were too good to use. Chris told the story in a kind of rage of amusement, even after all these years, at the waste of life, ‘doing without’, ‘saving for later’.