Tessa Hadley: The London Train

P aul was trying to work in his study: something distracted him, blocking the light at the window. Becky, crouched on her haunches, was tapping on the pane, beckoning him urgently out into the garden. He thought she must want to show him something she’d made: she was good with her hands, like her mother. But she was pacing up and down on the grass, talking on the pink mobile she’d been given for Christmas in a deliberate voice as if she was imitating a grown-up, waving her hands, exaggerating her expressions. Paul hadn’t wanted to give her the mobile; she was surely too young for it.

– So how’s everything going with you? Becky asked genially into the phone.

Meanwhile she signalled to Paul with her eyes and her free hand, pointing at the mobile, mouthing something. – Cool, she said. – Where are you staying? Is it a nice place? D’you want to talk to Daddy? I could get him easily.

Paul realised this must be Pia.

– They are worried, Becky was explaining to Pia, – but in a nice way.

She beckoned Paul close and then pressed the phone quickly to his ear, as if they might lose her if they didn’t keep her trapped inside it. Paul was afraid for a moment that she had escaped. – Pia? Pia? Are you there?

He didn’t know what to say. Should he mention seeing her the other day, in the Underground? That might frighten her off, as if he was spying on her, omniscient. When she was younger he had gone for weeks without speaking to her: now the thickness of her silence down the line seemed precious, and he was afraid to put a word wrong.

– Are you there?

– Hello, Dad.

Behind the ordinariness of her voice, whatever place she was in sent back its unfamiliar echo. He put all his skill into coaxing her, not making too much of their contact. She reassured him she was all right, they didn’t mention her course, he didn’t ask who she was with or what her plans were, nor did he want to tell her over the phone about her Nana. Even while he soothed her he felt some of his old irritation at having to drag communication out of her: she spoke in short reluctant bursts of words, in the slangy accent middle-class children affected. – Funnily enough, he said, – I have to be in London anyway, on Thursday. (This wasn’t true, he invented it on the spot.) – Why don’t we meet up? We could meet wherever you like. Pia, are you still there?

– Only if you promise not to tell Mum. Or Elise, either.

Pia was an adult, he reasoned, and had a right to her secrets. – All right.

– I’ll call you again on Thursday then, she said.

Would she call him? He doubted it as soon as she’d rung off.

Becky asked if he and Pia were meeting and he told her that Pia was fine, but wasn’t ready for a meeting yet. Under her freckles Becky flushed pink, perhaps because she guessed he wasn’t telling the truth. If he wasn’t telling Elise, then he couldn’t tell Becky. If she didn’t turn up, then he’d tell.

– Was it a good thing I called you outside when I got through to her?

– Very good. He picked her up and kissed her. Her anxieties wrung his heart. – You were like a detective on the telly.

That night he dreamed again about Evelyn: they waited for hours together in a milling, faceless crowd, jostled and queuing for something they never reached, anxious they didn’t have the right papers. In the dream it dawned on him eventually that she was queuing to emigrate, that the black hulks, looming alongside the stone platform where they waited, were ships. When he woke he felt lonely, remembering their unconsidered companionable closeness in the dream.

He told Elise he was meeting Stella, which was plausible – she was an old friend who worked for the BBC, he had made several programmes with her. As soon as the train arrived, he phoned Pia. She answered it after the phone had rung for a long time.

– Dad, I don’t know if this is a good idea.

She sounded as if he’d woken her up, her voice sticky and slow with sleep. He had been awake for hours; the day to him seemed halfway over already.

– What about this thing you have to go to? she said. – Why don’t we meet after that?

– That’s later. This evening.

– The evening would have been better for me. I’ve got things I have to do today.

He didn’t believe her. – Where are you? Give me the address, I’ll come right now, I won’t stay long. I kept my part of the promise, I haven’t said a word to your mum, or to Elise.

She was too slow and sleepy to know how to deflect him; he scribbled the address on the margin of his newspaper. It was somewhere off Pentonville Road, and she told him he needed to get off the Tube at King’s Cross; after he’d rung off he bought an A - Z so that he could work out exactly where he was going. He was surprised that she was in central London, he had expected to have to go somewhere miles out. Eventually he found his way to a block of council flats, bleakly unlovely, rising on a built-up island out of the torrents of traffic that roared unrelentingly all round it. It was hot, the petrol fume rising off the vehicles was as thick in the air as a distorting glass, and it took him a few minutes to find the right system of crossings to use to arrive at the entrance. The block wasn’t a tower, only three or four storeys, and around it there was a high wall, which made it look somehow, in its blue and white paint, like a scruffy container ship out at sea.

There was an entry phone: Pia buzzed him in and told him to wait inside the door. A concierge in a little glassed booth, reading the Daily Mirror , took no notice of Paul. Fire doors clanged some way off, and he heard Pia’s footsteps approaching, resonant in the concrete stairwells. He was unexpectedly emotional, waiting for her. It shook his usual idea of his oldest daughter to find her displaced here, when he had only ever known her insulated by her mother’s care: in this place, despite the entry phone and the concierge, she might not be safe. Even while he was concerned, he was also interested by the idea that she must have chosen this, in preference to safety. She swung the last door open. The concierge in his booth said something in a West Indian accent so strongly inflected Paul couldn’t understand him; Pia seemingly had no difficulty, she answered quickly, but as if she didn’t want to be drawn into conversation. Her tone made Paul wonder if perhaps she wasn’t supposed to be staying in this flat, and was avoiding awkward questions.

He was sure as soon as he saw her that it had been Pia on the platform at Paddington a few weeks ago. Her hair was tied in the same low-slung bunches on her shoulders, and this had the effect he remembered from that day, reminding him of girls in gritty Sixties films about the British working classes, with some wornness and marks of trouble on their young faces already, part of their sex appeal. Pia’s hair was clean, but her face was pale and not made up; she was wrapped in a shabby black cardigan with its belt dangling loose, which she kept in place, folding her arms over it. She looked years older than when he’d last seen her, when they went out to eat together and he was still thinking of her as a child. Although she might have been trying to cover herself up, he saw in his first glance that she was pregnant. Not hugely pregnant, but enough for it to show up against her angular thinness. He wouldn’t have seen it when he saw her on the platform in the Underground because there had been people standing in front of her.

He couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t thought of this, any of them.

Pia was shyly anxious, managing her father’s entrance through a prison-like sequence of heavy metal doors, grim stairwells. Chattering, covering up her nerves, she told him how this council block had been notorious in the Eighties for its drug users and its crime, and how it had been cleaned up in the Nineties, equipped with a security fence and a concierge entrance. Nothing was said yet about the pregnancy, though when Paul kissed her he felt the alien hard lump of it against him. She might even believe he hadn’t noticed it. He was embarrassed about how to begin, he was waiting until they had arrived somewhere and were properly alone. They stopped at a red-painted door, off a narrow concrete walkway two floors up. Pia had her keys in her cardigan pocket: just before she opened the door she whispered urgently to him, putting her mouth close to his ear.