Tessa Hadley - The London Train

– Remember, you promised not to tell anyone about all this.

It wasn’t the moment to protest that the promise had been exacted without his understanding the full circumstances. They stepped through a narrow hall space into a small living room, with windows all along one wall. Slatted blinds were drawn down, so that the light was dim, pierced by shafts of white brilliance here and there where the slats were broken or twisted. A big flat-screen television was switched on to twenty-four-hour news, a bed made up on a sofa had been slept in, but not tidied. The whole flat smelled of stale bedding, of cigarettes and strongly of marijuana. A door was ajar into what must be a bedroom, which was also dark: the bathroom and a kitchenette about as big as a cupboard opened off the hall. The bathroom door was off its hinges, balanced against the wall.

– It’s a bit of a mess, said Pia, as if she’d noticed for the first time.

She began picking up mugs and plates from the floor.

Paul was thinking that he must rescue her from here, it wasn’t a fit place for his daughter’s baby to be developing. He was about to say something about this when a man stepped out from the bedroom.

– This is Marek, Pia said. – This is my dad.

Marek held out his hand.

When he guessed that Pia must be living with a boyfriend, Paul’s imagination had supplied someone her own age, more like James Willis, or perhaps a fellow student who had dropped out from the university; he had not ever pictured an adult. This man wasn’t big, he was medium height with a slight build, but there was nothing boyish or incomplete about him. His slimness seemed packed tight with an energy and authority Paul was not at all prepared for. His hair was dark and curling, cut close to his skull like a tight cap of lambswool: in the dim light he looked at least thirty. He squeezed Paul’s fingers in a hard, quick hand and then dropped them; in his other hand he was balancing tobacco along a Rizla paper. Finishing rolling it, he licked the paper in a quick accustomed movement, then offered tobacco and papers to Paul.

– You smoke?

Paul said he hadn’t smoked for a long time.

– You don’t mind?

The man was lighting up, not waiting for permission: one cigarette more or less anyway wouldn’t make much difference in this room. If he was Polish – that was surely a Polish name? – then he might not have been lectured about the effects of smoking on an unborn child. Perhaps from a Polish perspective the whole scare seemed a frivolous fuss. Could this really be Pia’s lover? Someone after all had slept on the sofa. Paul might be misreading the whole situation.

– We don’t have milk. Pia was still hanging on to the dirty plates she’d collected. – But I could make coffee, if you don’t mind having it black.

– Make coffee, Marek said.

He was caressingly, insolently intimate: Pia smiled involuntarily. – It’s so hot in this flat! she said. She struggled with her free hand to pull a blind halfway up, then opened the window. – There’s supposed to be a roof garden out here. But nobody looks after it.

The city’s noise was suddenly inside with them, and a blanching light in which their faces were exposed as if they were peeled. Marek’s head was round and neat, and his handsome small features were strained in spite of his smile; his eyes weren’t large but very black, framed with thick lashes, dark pits in a pale complexion. Hanging at crazy angles on the wall were Jack Vettriano’s couple, dancing on a beach under an umbrella; also a photograph of giraffes in the savannah. There were rips in the fake tan leather of the sofa. The window overlooked a space for parking, and another wing of the housing block beyond it. Between two walkways a sunken area had been filled with earth; weeds had grown tall in it and then died, bleached dry in the heatwave.

– Is this your flat? he asked Marek.

– It’s my sister’s. She’s letting us stay here. When Pia moved out from her mother’s, I couldn’t take her to the place where I was living, it wasn’t nice.

– This is a very strange situation, said Paul. – My daughter appears to be pregnant. Or am I imagining things? What’s going on here?

Pia blushed and pulled her cardigan across her stomach awkwardly. – I didn’t know if you could tell.

– Make coffee, Marek said. – I’ll talk.

– And you’ve taken out that stud in your lip.

Pia nodded her head towards Marek. – He didn’t like it.

– I didn’t like it, Paul said. – But you didn’t take it out for me.

Marek laughed.

– I’d really like to talk to Pia alone, Paul said. – Why don’t you and I go out and find a place for coffee?

He felt the other two were exchanging covert communication in glances.

– It’s good here, Marek said. – She wants to stay here.

Paul followed Pia into the tiny kitchen, where pans and dishes were piled up unwashed in the sink, and a rubbish bin was too full to close. – We have mice, she said with her back to him, filling the kettle. – They’re really sweet.

– Can’t we go out somewhere? We need to talk.

– There’s no point, Dad.

– What’s happening here, sweetheart? What have you got yourself into?

– I knew you wouldn’t understand, she said. – But it’s what I want.

– Try me. Try and explain to me.

He couldn’t see her face; her shoulders were hunched in tension. He remembered her trudging after him on tired legs across expanses of glacial floor in the museums he used to take her to, submitting unwillingly to the flow of his knowledge, which must have seemed unending.

– OK, he said. – It’s OK, if it’s what you want.

The coffee she made was instant; she rinsed dirty mugs under the tap, rubbing the dark rings out of them with her finger. He asked if she’d seen a doctor yet, and she said she had, and that she was going next week with Anna, Marek’s sister, to an appointment at the hospital.

– You don’t mean for a termination?

She was shocked. – No! It’s too late for that. Much too late!

It wasn’t clear, she said, exactly how far the pregnancy was advanced; there was confusion apparently about her dates. – They’re waiting for the scan. Then they’ll know.

She seemed to have handed herself over to this process – its dates and appointments and inevitabilities – in a dream of passivity: he wanted to shake her awake. During all this conversation, Marek could no doubt hear them from the other room, in this flat without any privacy. Paul felt he must tell Pia about her grandmother, but couldn’t bring himself to do it in front of a stranger. When they sat talking over the horrible coffee, in the living room amid all the mess of sheets and duvet and overflowing ashtrays, he tried to find out how Marek earned his living, and what kind of prospects he might have for supporting Pia and a child. All the time they talked, the television spewed its news: Iraq, the timing of Blair’s resignation, a rail worker killed in an accident on the line, the child snatched in Portugal still missing. It distracted Paul, but the others didn’t take any notice. He felt the absurdity of his playing the part of the offended protective father, given his own history with Pia; and it almost seemed as if Marek understood this, reassuring him to help him out, amused at him.

– There’ll be enough money, don’t worry. There’ll be a better place than this, much better. It will all be good.

He said he worked in business, import-export, Polish delicatessen. He was going to make money, with Polish shops opening in every city, every street. Was he a con man, or a fantasist? The condition of the flat hardly suggested a successful entrepreneur: unless he was peddling drugs, small-scale. Paul had spent time in rooms worse than this one, twenty years ago, when he was in that scene. Everything about the place and the situation made him fearful and suspicious on Pia’s behalf. And yet, as they talked, he could begin to imagine the power this man had to make her trust him. Smiling, with his cigarette wagging in his mouth, he gestured a lot with his hands, and was somehow amusing without saying anything particularly funny: at the same time he managed to have an air of serious competence, as if there was another message, poignant and melancholy, behind the improbable surface of the things he said.