when the shops were closed. Some of them kept their windows shuttered even during the day. He picked up a few greetings, yes and no, some names.
Marek brought out Wiejska sausage and bread for their lunch and they ate it sitting in the front of the van with the doors open, washing it down with Coke or paper cups of tea from a cafe, laced with vodka, not enough to make them drunk, just enough to lift them exhilaratingly a fraction off the ground. They might have been all right if they were stopped. Anyway, Paul never asked Marek if he had any sort of licence to sell his stuff, so if they’d been stopped the drink would probably have been the least of their problems. Marek sometimes made Paul wait ten minutes in a residential street while he dropped in on ‘friends’. – It’s OK, Marek reassured him. – Only as a favour, little bit of weed. Nothing stupid. Paul seemed to slip back inside that past time when he was heedless and twenty, as though all his substantial life between then and now melted away. Catching sight of his reflection once in a shop window, carrying in a delivery, he was startled to see himself middle-aged.
Marek had found a lock-up to rent in a back lane in Kennington, where he stored the non-perishable goods. In contrast to the filthy noise and traffic, Paul felt when they visited the lock-up almost as if they were somewhere in the country, or in the past, with its red-brick walls, little overgrown back gardens, boarded-up artisan workshops. Pink valerian grew out of the bricks. Once while they were loading up, the van engine idling, Marek asked him about his younger daughters. Paul didn’t want to talk about them; whatever he said seemed compromised because he couldn’t adequately explain what was keeping him away from them, here in London. He tried not to picture them too vividly. He told himself he would go home soon, that he hadn’t been away any time at all, that they would hardly have noticed.
– You have all girls, Marek said. – Now I’ve made you a boy.
– Do you know it’s a boy?
– I know. I make boys. I have a son already in Poland, ten years old. He’s a nice kid. His mother tries to turn him against me, but he doesn’t listen. I don’t see him very often, it’s a shame, but what can you do? I’m here, I send money.
– Is Pia aware of this?
– She’s OK, she’s cool with it. This woman in Poland hates me. We’re never even married, she was married at the time to someone else. It’s all a big mistake. Except the kid: he’s fine.
He took out a photograph from his wallet. A skinny boy in shorts was on some climbing apparatus, grinning over his shoulder at the camera. He was very fair, but with his father’s black eyes and small skull, neat and round as a nut.
At the end of Paul’s first day’s work, Marek insisted on paying him, tucking folded notes into his shirt pocket. Paul saw that, as a point of honour, he must accept, although he tried to say that the work was in return for their letting him sleep on their sofa. As it happened, he really didn’t need money at that moment. When he’d visited the cash point, expecting to be overdrawn, he’d found he was several thousand pounds in credit; this could only mean that the money left over from his mother’s savings had gone through probate and been paid into his account. He had planned that he would give a couple of thousand of this to Pia at some point, to help with the baby, but he hadn’t said anything about it yet. He did his best to spend what Marek gave him on drink and food for the flat. Adding up the hours, he calculated that this delivery work probably paid him better than writing.
Paul called on Stella and John in Tufnell Park. At the door Stella had to wrestle with the dog, a tall overbred animal, all silky locks and nerves, which leapt on visitors in ecstatic welcome.
– She’s shameless, Stella apologised, tugging its collar. – She’s anybody’s. Come on in.
The dog’s nails skittered on the tiles in the big hall, which was elegantly untidy, doubled in a huge mirror in a crumbling gilt frame. A mounted stag’s head was a paperweight on top of a pile of issues of the
Paul passed the evening in his usual chair in Stella’s study, drinking John’s twenty-five-year-old Talisker; John was out with clients, he was a partner in a law firm. The dog subsided into hopeful repose on its rug, making efforts to hold its eyes open, folds twitching on its shallow forehead.
– Elise is in a state, Stella accused him. – She’s no idea where you are. You told her you were staying here: I felt awful when she rang and I didn’t know what she was talking about. What’s going on, Paul? Are you behaving like a shit again?
– It’s not what you think, he said vaguely.
– I don’t know what I think.
– I’m looking after Pia.
– She told me Pia’s pregnant. Is that where you are? The poor kid. Have you any idea what a disaster a baby would be, at Pia’s age? She’d be crawling up the walls with frustration.
Paul said that it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy.
– So who is this guy? Do you trust him?
There were original Eric Ravilious prints on the walls of the study, a Barbara Hepworth maquette on a table, on the bookshelves first editions of Hughes and Larkin. The room was intensely familiar to Paul, like a second skin; yet the smell of the van was also on his clothes – garlic sausage and petrol and hot rubber – and the traffic still seemed to be in his blood, surging round him in its abrupt stop-start rhythm. He got into an argument with Stella about education, Pia’s education in particular. He was surprised, hearing his own pent-up belligerence spilling over.
– It’s all a sham, the liberal fiction of enlightenment. Education’s a caste system, a narrow gate set up to process children. In order to pass through, they have to be broken, then put back together. Middle-class parents invest it with fetish value because they were tested and broken themselves, they pass on the hidden damage.
– What rubbish you’re talking, Stella said. – The trouble is, for Pia everything’s at stake here; it’s real, it’s not just you upsetting people at parties.
Eventually, even while they went on arguing, Paul relaxed, felt at home again, forgot about the raw new phase of his life at the flat. He thought affectionately about Stella, sitting opposite him straight-backed, earrings shaking in emphasis, the dog’s head lying in abjection in her lap. In long-ago Greenham days, she had been one of those who broke through the perimeter fence to spray the silos, and was repeatedly arrested. She was honourable and conscientious. At the end of the evening she persuaded him to call Tre Rhiw. Tactfully she left him alone with the phone and went to make coffee. He expected to get through to the answering machine. It shook him when he actually heard Elise’s voice, tentative at the other end of the line, even tremulous.
– Hello?
– Elise, it’s me.
His voice seemed to fall into the empty quiet of the house at night. She had not been watching television when he rang – he would have heard it in the background. He was surprised she was awake so late.
– Where are you?
– I’m at Stella’s.
– No, you’re not. I know you’re not, I rang her.
– I really am here tonight. I’m ringing on Stella’s phone: do 1471 afterwards if you want.
He explained that he was staying with Pia, that his mobile was out of battery, he had forgotten to bring the charger with him. He knew Elise must be listening for something else, for more than this. She ought to be fortifying herself against him, to punish him; and yet her voice in his ear was disconcertingly intimate, as if his call had caught her unprepared, before she could conceal herself.
– You could at least have spoken to the girls.
– I know. I’m sorry. I’ll ring them.
He waited for her to ask when he was coming home.
– Actually something’s up here, Paul. I think Gerald’s ill.
– What kind of ill?
She said she was worried he might be having some kind of breakdown. – Maybe it’s nothing, he just seems strange to me, he’s behaving strangely. I thought perhaps you ought to come back, that’s all.
– What do you mean by strange? Don’t you always think he’s strange?
