The London Train

or talking with the little crowd of his friends, until three or four in the morning.

While Gerald talked, Paul found himself thinking about Pia’s pregnancy, not simply as a difficulty and a disaster. He had a vision of how dumbfounding it was, Pia’s originating as a tiny folded form invisible inside her mother, and now inside her unfolded realised self, starting the same thing over; forms folded within forms. How different it was to be male, to feel the unfolding come to an end in your biological self, which could not be divided. The role of the male in this endless sequence was an act of faith, however definite the science. A Frenchman had said to him once that the man’s role in making a child was about as much as ‘this’ – he’d spat on the pavement.

This train of thought may have all been a consequence of the dope.

– Your eyes are rolled up in your head, Elise told him when he arrived home. – That stuff Gerald smokes now is too strong for you, you’re not used to it.

James Willis came looking for Paul one afternoon when Elise was out at a sale with Ruth, and the girls were at school. Paul had been getting himself lunch in the kitchen – hunting in the fridge for an end of pate, desultorily reading the Guardian , anything rather than sitting down again at his computer – when the boy was suddenly in the doorway, stooping, worrying about his dirty boots on the mat. In the barn, it had been too dark for Paul to take him in properly, his hunched awkward height, the adolescent hormonal shock still in his face, lips swollen with it, eyes bleary, hands hanging heavy. He was long and pale; when he spoke he addressed his feet. There was a stud in his lip, Paul saw, like the one Pia had taken out.

James said he’d come with a message from his father, who wanted them to cut back the aspen poplars on the border between their places. Willis’s next-door field was planted this year with elephant grass for biofuel. Apparently Willis thought that, because of the trees, the harvester wouldn’t be able to turn closely enough at the end of the field.

– If you don’t have a chainsaw, Dad said, he’ll loan you one.

– You’re joking, Paul said. – Your dad’s crazy, he’s really crazy. Those trees aren’t in the way of anything. Have you even looked at them?

The boy shrugged. – I’m just saying what he said.

– Tell him he’s crazy. And tell him not to dare to touch those fucking trees. They’re on my land.

– He says not.

Willis sending the boy with this message was a cruelty in itself; he must resent his son’s attachment, however tenuous, to an enemy household. Paul invited him in, fetched beers out of the fridge. Warily James stood drinking at the table.

– Your father’s really wrong, you know, about those trees. Whether they’re on his land or mine. There’s plenty of room for the harvester to turn.

– It’s a big machine.

Paul went on to explain why the biofuel was a bad idea in the first place. He caught a glint in the boy’s eye, of derision no doubt, at Paul’s citified perspective, the idea that his father would care about the ethics of a crop one way or another. Paul told him he’d seen Pia. James already knew this, he and Pia must have spoken on the phone.

– Do you know about this man: Marek? Paul said, taking a chance. – What do you think about him? Who is he?

James tipped up his bottle, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. – She’s told me about him, that’s all.

– Do you think she’s safe? Should we trust him?

– It’s not my business.

– No? Aren’t you two friends?

– It’s her business.

– And the other thing? D’you know about that too?

He was visibly startled. – I didn’t think she was going to tell you yet.

– It didn’t need any telling. It was plain as day.

– Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.

No wonder Pia had chosen a man in preference to this boy with his burden of suffering youth, blushing, stumbling over his own feet on his way out of the house, pushing his fists deep in his pockets, forgetting even to thank Paul for the beer. She probably imagined that her own youth had been taken off her hands, that she had given herself over to someone who would know how to manage whatever happened. The Willis boys had always been awkward, not fitting in with the other kids in the village. They affected an American twang in their accents and they stuck together, mucking about on the expensive quad bikes their father bought them. The oldest had written off his first car before he left, driving it when drunk into a tree. James at least didn’t have his brothers’ veneer of showy sophistication.

Paul told Ruth’s brother about the Willises and the chainsaw; when he and Gerald walked over one evening for a pint at the pub in the village, Alun was at the bar. He laughed and said Willis was a nutter, but that if the trees were on Willis’s land, there wasn’t much Paul could do about it, a trim wouldn’t do them any harm. He was friendly, but Paul felt Alun always kept him at a deliberate distance, perhaps because of things Ruth told him, perhaps just because of what he would imagine was Paul’s type: English, opinionated, arrogant. He wouldn’t quite come out on Paul’s side against Willis.

Alun was small and broad-chested, handsome; he kept liquorice-coloured sheep on the hills and a small beef herd on the red soil in the better fields; they had a farm shop where his wife sold the fruit from their orchards. Although Paul and Ruth didn’t get on, Paul liked her brother’s decency and shyness; from the first when they’d moved down here he’d identified him with the landscape and the place, which was probably romantic. Gerald thought he romanticised. Gerald had also grown up on a farm, on the North Yorkshire moors. He had been grateful to leave it behind and didn’t have any particular thing about farmers, although it turned out – to Paul’s surprise – that he could talk to Alun in an easy way Paul couldn’t, mostly about money, money and machinery, how impossible it was for the hill farmers, the endless setbacks that seemed to make up the rhythm of their life. Now there was anxiety about the drought.

Paul really did have to go up to London the following week, to record an interval talk he’d written for Radio 3. In the late afternoon, after he’d finished, he made his way to Pia’s; he’d called to remind her he was coming, but she hadn’t answered. Pressing the button on the intercom on the forbidding exterior gate, he was relieved to hear the crackle of her voice responding, suspicious and uncertain.

– Pia, it’s Dad.

– Shit, Dad. I’m not ready. It’s not a good time.

At his exposed back, traffic roared around the island-block. This place really was his idea of hell: the remorseless, ceaseless pressure of vehicles travelling onwards to destinations that in the aggregate were absurd, each under its atomised separate compulsion, brought together in this filthy flow, poisoning the air with fumes and noise.

– But I’m here now. Let me in.

There was a pause; then resignation. – I’ll come down.

When she appeared she was in the same black cardigan as last time, over a pink nightshirt and slippers. Her face was pasty and she hadn’t brushed her hair, which was pulled out of its bunches and loose on her shoulders; he guessed she had come straight from bed. From under the nightdress her swollen belly poked assertively.

– I forgot you were coming today.

As he followed her up to the flat, something about the place elated him, even while he was intent on getting Pia out of it. He was bracing himself for encountering Marek again, reading him more deeply, for better or worse: when he realised there was no one home besides Pia, he was almost disappointed. She said they had gone out.

– They?

– Marek and Anna.

The television was switched on, inevitably. The place looked a bit better than last time: at least the spare bedding was folded in a pile on the floor, the blinds pulled halfway up. The smell of dope was pungent, though the windows were open. Perhaps Pia hadn’t been in bed, but tidying: in the kitchen there was crockery piled in a fresh bowl of soapy water, and while she waited for the kettle to boil to make tea, she did rinse a few plates and propped them on the draining board. Paul asked about her pregnancy, her appointment at the hospital: into her expression