right-to-buy scheme was still operative, so the council couldn’t move him anywhere. Marek didn’t mind Paul arguing with him. He would listen to him attentively, almost fondly; somehow this had to do with his feelings for him as Pia’s father, as if their relationship through her pregnancy required him to treat Paul with special consideration, conciliation. He tore open one of the boxes and got out a bottle of vodka flavoured with something he didn’t know how to translate; Paul worked out from a picture on the label that they must be rowan berries. Pouring, Marek would patiently explain again how Paul was wrong, how if you were too soft with people they didn’t thank you for it, but turned on you in the long run, how if your welfare system was too generous it would only attract a whole underclass of criminals and no-goods, waiting to take advantage.
– I myself will take advantage of it, he said disarmingly, – if you allow me. You must not allow me.
The conventional things Marek said, and his doctrine that could have come straight out of the tabloids, somehow weren’t alienating, in the stream of his good nature and boundless energy. He talked about how difficult things would be when the baby was born, but Paul knew he didn’t believe this really, his confidence in himself was unfaltering. Whatever Marek said seemed protected behind a habitual humorous irony. His curiosity was restless, he was a repository of information, he picked up quickly whatever he wanted to learn (he had found out all about leasehold, for instance, since he last saw Paul, and was keenly interested in the regeneration work going on at King’s Cross).
It was only when Paul had been in the flat for several days that he took in that there were no books in it, none, apart from a tatty dictionary and a couple of recipe books. There were DVDs, most of them Hollywood, along with a few Polish films that looked like thrillers – no Kieslowski or Wadja. He had always had a superstitious fear of being shut up somewhere without books; now that it had happened he hadn’t even consciously noticed. Long ago, when he was a student and went home for the summer to work in the brewery, he had built his books almost into a rampart in his bedroom, against the bookless house. Staying over with Pia, he didn’t care. He had brought something with him from Tre Rhiw to read on the train, but hadn’t opened it. Nor had he unzipped the bag with his laptop in it.
Pia got up early in the mornings to go to the cafe. Paul buried his face deeper in the sofa cushions while she stepped around in the chaos in the living room, finding the things she needed for work. She was light on her feet in spite of the pregnancy. He was aware of her making breakfast obediently in the kitchenette, because Anna insisted she must eat it. Usually Marek went out not long after Pia. When they were both gone and the door pulled shut behind them, the return of stillness in the flat was a guilty luxury into which Paul sank, chasing the tail end of dreams that seemed exceptionally vivid and important. He got to know the way the light advanced across the floor of the flat, split into laths by the blinds, the day’s noise and heat building in the room until he couldn’t ignore them. Sometimes when he was dressed he made efforts to tidy the place, not only stowing his bedding in the bedroom, but attacking whatever mess was left in the kitchen from the night before, soaking pans and rinsing plates. It never looked very different when he’d finished. Even with the windows as wide open as they would go, it was always hot, there was always a sweet smell of something rotting, inside the flat or floating in from outdoors.
Several times he visited the cafe where Pia worked, a place in Islington that specialised in patisserie. The first time he came across it by chance, walking the streets going nowhere in particular; he only recognised where he was when he caught sight through a plate-glass window of Pia in her long white apron, clearing tables. When he had imagined the two girls working together, he had pictured Pia as a clumsy apprentice performing under Anna’s tutelage. Surely his daughter, who had been so protected and had never had to work for a living, would not know how to submit to a work discipline? She had failed at university, which should have been easy. But he saw now that she was good at this work in her own right, steady and capable. She carried the heavy tray of crockery between tables without faltering, then returned to take orders, waiting with her pen and little pad, explaining patiently to the customers the array of cakes that rose above the counter, rank upon rank: pink and beige meringues, macaroons, tarts filled with fruit or custard, chocolate truffles sifted with cocoa. The women eyed them with hungry desire, delaying choosing. He could see they were touched by Pia’s swollen pregnancy. It wasn’t the sort of place Paul would ordinarily have stopped, it was fashionable and expensive, with chunky long tables of oiled wood, cream enamel lamps. The clientele were handsome, well dressed, loud.
While he watched through the window, Pia felt his gaze on her and lifted her head; a smile broke the surface of her absorption in her work, and she beckoned to him to come inside, brought him coffee and tried to persuade him to have a cake. He didn’t want cake, but the coffee was good, and he didn’t mind sitting there reading the paper, aware of his daughter passing backwards and forwards among the tables behind him, using the tongs to pick out cakes, ringing up bills on the till. When he went in another time, she was making the coffee, using the Gaggia machine, banging out the old grounds and tamping in the new, making shapes in the foam on the cappuccinos. She got used to him, and forgot to be flustered if he was watching. He recognised that he had overlooked, in Pia’s childhood, this capacity of hers for steady, graceful work; he had overridden it with his own certainties.
Anna in the cafe was quite different. Occasionally she came round to talk business with Marek in the evenings, but after the first day, he hadn’t seen much of her in the flat. At work she was unsmiling, fierce, effective, a little frown pulled taut between her plucked eyebrows. Her hair was scraped back from her face, and she was disconcertingly lean under the apron tied around her waist: her hard young body seemed in itself a challenge, a form of contempt. Paul saw how the customers were drawn to her as if they wanted to woo her, coax and soften her, and how she played on this, winding the sexual tension tight without giving anything away. Meanwhile she was kind to him as if they were in a conspiracy, undercharging him, bringing him cake to eat that he hadn’t asked for and only left on the plate. – Have it, it’s good, she said. – Eat. They charge too much. I see the invoices, I know what goes on here. Take it home, eat it tonight.
Anna’s default position towards authority was suspicious and derisory, but for some reason – because of Pia – Paul had been excepted. Like her brother she watched scrupulously over him, as if he needed cajoling and swaddling. He asked himself whether there could be anything sinister behind this, but couldn’t find it. They knew he didn’t have money. The longer he slept on their sofa, the more they must know for certain that he didn’t have power. Really, their generosity could only be superstitious and romantic. They must believe in the mystery of the coming child, and how it bound them all together in one improbable shaky family.
– It’s nice for you, Anna said to Pia, – to have your father round. It’s good.
He did not know what Anna would think of him, the grandfather-to-be, if she knew he was dreaming about her at night. Perhaps she guessed. These dreams occurred at the margins where deliberate fantasy slipped over into sleep, so he wasn’t altogether responsible. In one dream he made love to her in a hotel room, horrible like the one at the Travelodge in Birmingham. Anna came from the shower, her hair still sopping; cold water soaked into the sheets and pillows on the bed. She lay with her back to him, he put his mouth to the knobs of her vertebrae, standing out under her skin the colour of pale coffee, cold to the touch and goosefleshed. He ran his hand across her ribs, down her flat stomach, to her gaunt pelvis. In the dream the hot weather had broken and it was raining outside, the windowpanes blurred with running water, the room full with its rushing noise, its gargling in the gutters. The implications of it all were infantile, humiliating. Yet imperceptibly and against all reason, the dreams also began to bind him to the real girl, as if they meant he knew her.
Marek borrowed a van from a friend, a dirty dented white Vauxhall Combo, to take round the boxes of biscuits and beer and try to sell them. Paul had worked driving a van in London more than twenty years ago, before Pia was born: he offered to help, he hadn’t anything else to do. Marek didn’t like driving. Paul was pleased to fill his days with the kind of work that tired him out without requiring him to probe his inner life. The van handled badly, the steering was shot and the engine hunted in first gear, but he got on top of it and found his way round the old routes, baulked only by changes to the one-way system, or by having to avoid entering the congestion-charge zone. Marek explained to him why the charge was a terrible idea and didn’t work. Paul didn’t care, didn’t bother to argue.
He and Marek were well suited to working together. For long periods of time they didn’t talk, then Marek would erupt into a kind of absurd humour, which Paul remembered belonged to this fragmented experience on the road, tangling momentarily in the crazy complexity of local lives and then torn out again. When he closed his eyes at night he sometimes thought he was still driving, carried bodily along, hurtling into the dark. Everyone they met seemed funny. Marek imagined he was a good mimic, although Paul told him all his imitations simply sounded Polish. There were so many Polish shops, and they made sales in Asian and Middle Eastern groceries too. He got used to the special atmosphere of these places, some better, some worse – their stale sour smell, the shelves crowded with faded goods displaced from their natural habitat, pale gherkins floating in cloudy brine, dark rye bread, blue flashes from the insect zappers, the sound of the Polish voices, the metal shutters drawn down over windows and doors
