Tessa Hadley: The London Train

– There’s a snag in the bastard, he said. – It’s catching somewhere.

– Is James around?

– What’s he supposed to have done?

– He hasn’t done anything. I want to ask him a favour.

Willis tipped his head at the interior of the huge corrugated barn. – Hosing down. Don’t spoil your shoes. He doesn’t do me any favours.

Picking his way past dungy water streaming in the concrete runnels, Paul headed for the sound of the pressure hose; the barn was dark, after the brilliance outside, and the animal stink overwhelming. The boy turned off the hose as he came near, his eyes adjusting to the murk; James was sandy and freckled like his father, but taller, and skinny, hunched over his work, stiff with reluctance.

– How was Pia when you last saw her?

– Why?

– We’re worried about her.

He shrugged. – She seemed all right.

– When was this? Have you been to London to see her? Has she been down here?

The boy turned on the hose again, aiming its jet of water into the corners of the pens. – Can’t remember when.

– Did you know she’d dropped out of her university course?

– She may have said something about it. I can’t remember.

He asked if James knew where they could contact her, but he said he only had her mobile number.

Pia had gone to the Willises at first to play on their PlayStation. She had been bored when she came to stay in the country, she didn’t like reading or going for walks: Paul and Elise were pleased that she was making friends, at least. As she got older, Elise thought there must be something going on between her and James, or that Pia had a crush on him, but Pia had denied it flatly, convincingly: she didn’t fancy him, they were just friends, they understood one another. It was true that if you came upon them idling around the lanes together, or sprawled watching television, they appeared at ease as if they were siblings: their loose, rangy bodies companionably slack, not strung on sexual tension. Paul couldn’t imagine what they talked about. James seemed fairly monosyllabic, lost in thickets of resentment. They caught the train together into Cardiff to go clubbing, or Pia spent evenings at Blackbrook. Willis had converted a barn into a sort of annexe where his sons could live independently, with a games room and a kitchen; in the summer their mother organised this for holiday lets, now that the two older sons had left the farm. Willis had apparently wanted them to stay on, to help develop the business (as well as farming, they made ice-cream and sold Christmas trees, employing several people from the village); there were stories going round about the rows these boys used to have with their father. And the boys had gone.

Elise arranged a dinner party. – Is that all right? She massaged hard muscles in his neck and shoulders. – Are you ready to be sociable yet?

He thought he was ready, but when the party came he wasn’t in the mood for it. They were Elise’s friends and not his (she’d said no to Gerald. – I love Gerald, but he’s not quite house-trained, d’you know what I mean? Not good at the social give and take). Ruth and her husband came, and another couple they’d got to know while waiting for the school bus. Most of the people they knew in the village were incomers, but Ruth was born here, her brother had inherited the farm she grew up on. She was small and capable, with neat pretty features and curling dark hair tied back; Paul found her constrained and puritan. He and she had argued viciously once about the Welsh language. He was sure Elise complained to Ruth about his absorption in his books and his writing, and about his failure to do his share of domestic duties, even though Elise’s work contributed more to the family income than his did.

Elise had warned him he mustn’t ‘spoil everything’ at the party, he was supposed to join in and help the conversation along; but he found it boring, a social music running up and down as accompaniment to the food. All of them around the table, men and women, were somewhere in their early forties; Paul couldn’t help seeing on their faces the first signs of their ageing, little lapses of their flesh around the mouth and jaw, puffiness under the eyes, the beginning of the crumpling and crumbling that would turn them into their disintegrated older selves. They discussed costume dramas on television. Someone said that nothing really changes, that wherever you look you find underneath the wigs and dresses the same old patterns playing out, the same human nature. Paul said he thought this was only because the television dramas tried to persuade you of this sameness, that it was a consoling illusion, a sham.

A muscle tightened in Ruth’s cheek, bracing against him, as she prodded at her rice with her fork. – What do you mean?

– Human cultures move forward in time as if through a valve that permits no return. The substance of experience is altered over and over with no possibility of return or recovery. History’s the history of loss.

– But there are gains, Elise insisted.

– Like human rights, and the treatment of women. The abolition of slavery.

– And contraception.

– Does it follow, Paul said, – that the sum necessarily balances out, gains against losses? Who could decide that we had gained more?

– Or lost more.

– What if extinctions in the natural world reflected the movement of time forwards in our human culture, extinguishing possibilities and qualities one by one, until there were fewer overall, far fewer?

– Shall we all go and top ourselves? said Ruth.

They all seemed to be angry with him, accusing him of nostalgia, of a regressive taste for everything old, of indifference to what had been unjust or caused suffering in the past.

– It’s another perennial, Ruth’s husband said. – Every generation thinks that what’s in the past was necessarily superior. When I was a boy you could leave your front door unlocked, the rock ’n’ roll was better, that sort of thing.

Paul couldn’t summon the energy to explain that he had only meant the past was precious because it was different, not better. When their guests had gone, Paul and Elise washed up in fatigued silence in the kitchen: they didn’t have a machine. He progressed stoically at the sink from glasses through plates to heavy pans that filled the washing-up water with floating rice and turmeric-yellow grease; Elise sorted leftovers, dried and put away dishes, returning the rooms to their daytime selves, shoving the heavy table noisily across the flagstones. Her clothes had wilted from their carefully prepared bloom: her red stretch dress sagged over her stomach, the skin of her cheeks was oily in the overhead light they had switched on when the guests went. Paul thought he acquitted himself honourably, considering how miserable he had felt all evening, in the flood of bright pointless chatter that no one would even remember the next day. Elise saw social life as a series of complex obligations, to please and be pleased, whereas he didn’t see the point of talking, if you didn’t say what you meant. The irony was that they had first met at a party, when Elise rescued him from an argument that almost became a fight. Why were women drawn to these resisting frictions in men, which they then set about smoothing away?

Hostile, exhausted, Elise turned her rump to Paul in bed. Usually he fell asleep pressed up against the landscape of her shape; cast off, he floated, detached, in the cold margin of the bed, not knowing how to comfortably arrange his limbs. Sometimes his wife seemed to him shrunken and caught out in vanity. At other moments she surrounded and surpassed him; he was smaller, his was the deficit, he was the lamed one. Perhaps he was wrong about the dinner parties. Perhaps kindness was all that mattered.