there came the same vagueness as last time. The doctors thought from the scan she was twenty-eight weeks, or something like that. Everything was fine.
– You see. I told you it was too late for a termination.
– And are you planning on keeping this baby? Or putting it up for adoption?
– I don’t know. We’ll see. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.
She said this as offhandedly as if she was choosing between subjects for her college course.
– Are you eating properly? Aren’t there vitamins and so on you’re supposed to take?
– Anna’s taking care of that.
– People are smoking in this flat. I’m sure you know how bad that is for a developing foetus.
– Oh, Dad.
– What?
– You smoked around me all the time when I was a kid. I used to beg and plead with you to stop.
– Did I? It’s not the same thing. Anyway, just because I was an idiot doesn’t mean you have to be one too.
Pia dressed in the bedroom while Paul drank his tea. She came out in a new stretch top she said Marek had bought her, grey with huge yellow flowers, pulled tightly across her stomach, showing it off, as was the fashion with pregnancy now. Then, sitting beside him on the sofa, she made up her face in deft accustomed movements, looking in a small hand-mirror, concentrating intently, putting on a surprising amount of stuff: colour on her skin to cover her blemishes, blue lines painted around her eyes, stiff blue on her lashes, colour on her lids, pale lipstick.
– What? she asked anxiously when she’d finished, putting bottles and tubes away in a zip bag. – Have I put on too much?
The mask of beauty painted on her face seemed precarious. When she stood up to brush her hair he was startled, as if there was someone new in the room between them. He imagined her days passing – sleeping late, tidying half-heartedly, dressing and painting her face, waiting for her lover to come home. When he asked if she wasn’t missing university work she shuddered, as if he’d reminded her of another life.
– God, no. I was so miserable there.
– It won’t be like this, he said, – if you have a baby. Getting up at three o’clock in the afternoon.
– You never trust that I will be good at anything.
He tried to say that this was not what he meant; he just didn’t want the baby to spoil her flight and bring her down to earth too soon. – And I have to tell your mother something. She’s out of her mind with worry, you can imagine.
– Tell her you’ve spoken to me and I’m all right. Tell her I’ll see her soon.
– Why won’t you see her? Just to put her mind at rest.
– It wouldn’t, would it? Her mind would be very much not at rest, if she had any idea what was going on. It would be hyperactive. You know her.
There was ignominy for Paul in keeping her secret, as if he was trying to score cheap triumphs over Annelies, fighting with her over their daughter’s confidence, where he hadn’t earned any rights, given his record. Pia’s resistance to her mother took him by surprise.
– She recognises you’re an adult, you’re free to choose what you want.
Tugging the brush through her hair, Pia looked round from the mirror. – This is what I want. And I’ll see her, but not yet.
As soon as Marek and Anna were in the flat, Paul saw that Anna was a force just as her brother was, and that Pia had been drawn to both of them, not just the man. Both moved with quick, contemptuous energy, crowding the place; Paul recognised that they were powerful, even if he wasn’t sure he liked them, and couldn’t understand yet what their link was to his daughter, or whether it was safe for her. Marek greeted Pia with the same gesture as last time, tugging affectionately at her hair; Pia slid into a daze of submission in his presence. In the flowered top, with her face painted, Paul could see how her languid fairness, freighted with the pregnancy, might be attractive.
Anna’s jeans and white T-shirt were moulded tightly to her slight figure: she probably wasn’t much older than Pia, but everything about her seemed finished and hardened. Her straight hair, dyed red-brown, was chopped off at her shoulders; her narrow face was handsome, boyish, with fine bruise-coloured skin under her eyes and a dark mole on one cheek. When they were introduced, Paul thought he might have known, from touching her hand alone, that she wasn’t British: under the fine-grained skin he seemed to feel lighter bones, a more delicate mechanism for movement. Her nails were painted with black varnish, there were nicotine stains on her fingers. Anna began scolding Pia: had she eaten properly? She was supposed to eat breakfast and lunch too. – What time did you get out of bed? Don’t sleep too much: you need exercise.
Pia defended herself half-heartedly, enjoying the fuss made of her.
– It’s a meeting of the family, isn’t it? Marek brought a bottle of clear spirits from the fridge in the kitchen, and three small glasses. – The new family. It’s good that we get together.
– Pretty good family, said Anna, – with no home to go to.
– Anna gets fed up with us, her brother said tolerantly. – Messing up all her nice, tidy space.
– I’m not surprised, Paul said. – It’s a small flat.
– Soon, soon, we’ll get a bigger one. We’ll be out from your hair, Anna, then you will miss us.
Pia said she was going back to work at the cafe, that would bring in some money. They needed more money than that, teased Marek affectionately, much more. The slivovitz, which Pia didn’t drink, was deliciously ice-cold in this room overheated by the low sun striking in through the windows. Paul had come to the flat intending to coax Pia home, at least for a while, to think things over; but he felt himself being drawn farther into her life here, without getting any of the explanations he ought to be asking for. No one seemed to think anything needed explaining. He had no idea whether the possibilities Marek and Anna discussed animatedly were realistic. They said they had been looking for shop premises, although they also seemed to have been approaching shopkeepers to supply them with goods. Marek asked Paul to explain leasehold, which he wasn’t able to, not knowing how it worked in any detail. Were these two really going to make money, and look after Pia? Both of them spoke English well, but sometimes they lapsed into Polish, and then Paul found himself looking from one to the other as if he was watching a film without subtitles, which might make sense if only he concentrated hard enough. What would Annelies think of him, seduced like this – or Elise? Marek refilled Paul’s glass several times.
Anna said she wanted to develop her own small business, an outlet for friends who made jewellery: ‘very original, good quality’. Lifting her hair, she showed Paul silver earrings, little jagged lightning strokes, set with tiny stones, the sort of thing you could buy at any market stall. With a qualm, Paul wondered if they were imagining he had money, calculating he might help them with their projects. For all he knew, Marek could be married, or at least have other women at home in Poland. He even asked himself once whether Anna was really Marek’s sister: but there was a trick of likeness between them, not obvious but unmistakable when you’d seen it, in how their dark eyes were set in their skin, so that their awareness seemed gathered behind their faces, looking out.
When he asked, they told him they came from Lodz, but didn’t seem interested in talking about their home. Paul had been twice to Poland, long ago, but his idea of it mostly came from the poets he had read. These two wouldn’t want him dragging out all those old associations, that old junk, they wouldn’t want to know he’d once worn a Solidarnosc badge to school. They were too young to remember life in the old Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, and he didn’t know much about life in the new one. For the moment anyway they were Londoners, absorbed in that, more at home in the metropolis than he was. When he eventually left the flat, remembering his train, he managed to pull Pia half outside the front door, onto the walkway. Probably she thought that he was drunk.
– You have to promise me something, he said in a low voice, urgently. – If they ask you to do anything you don’t like, you will call me straight away, won’t you?
He saw her eyes widen under their blue-painted lids. – I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. – Do you mean drugs?
– Whatever. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
He wasn’t clear himself about precisely what he feared, and was half-ashamed of where such imaginings came from. Was it only because the man Pia had chosen was a foreigner?
She shook off his hand from her arm, to go back inside. – I told you. This is what I want.
