The London Train

There was silence, he thought she must be searching for the right words to describe what was worrying her. – How do you know this? Have you spoken to him?

– Listen, it doesn’t matter. Take no notice of me, I’m probably imagining things.

He forgot to ask whether Willis had been back for the rest of the trees.

IX

O ne morning Paul drove Marek to Heathrow for a meeting with one of his exporters, who had a few hours in London between flights. He was also apparently an old school friend: short and plump, with a shaved head and cherub mouth. Marek was always in jeans, but this man wore a business suit and a thin leather tie, carried a briefcase. With one arm round Paul’s shoulders and one round his friend’s, Marek introduced them.

– Not only my driver, also father of my girlfriend Pia, who is very lovely, dear to my heart.

Paul was pressed into the heat of this stranger, smelled on him the different spice of Warsaw, where he had woken and breakfasted that morning. They shook hands, the man’s eyes glittering and clever.

– Marek, you’re become a family man?

– I like family! Marek insisted. – The right family, I like it.

Paul joked. – I’m sticking with him, to keep an eye on him.

– And how is Anna?

– You know Anna. Always on my case, we have to build the business up. She’s a slave driver.

– It’s good for you! Without Anna you’re too happy, you’ll be lazy.

Marek and his friend bought pints of lager at eleven in the morning, in a simulacrum of an old-world pub, panelled in stained wood, carved out of the vast vacancy of the airport. Paul left them to their planning and walked around; he had no role to play in their business, and knew anyway they would soon lapse into Polish. He loathed airports. He had not been in one for a couple of years – they had not had the money recently to travel abroad. Out of some superstition he’d inflicted on himself, he’d never eaten in an airport or an aeroplane, as if they were an underworld and he feared that if he tasted their fruit he’d leave something of himself behind. Today he let himself be washed along in the slow flow of people in transit, carried past the repeating loop of shops. Even the real things these shops sold – whisky, a book about the origins of the First World War – seemed degraded by the place into shadows of themselves. He bought himself a paper, but didn’t sit down to read it. Instead he found himself staring up at the departure boards.

It occurred to him that he could go anywhere, right now. There were all those thousands sitting in his account, enough to buy himself a ticket; and his passport was – he checked – still in the back pocket of these trousers. On the way to Heathrow, he had had no thought other than returning with Marek into London after the meeting. But Marek could drive himself. Sooner or later, in the next week or so, Paul had meant to go back to Elise and the girls at Tre Rhiw: that was his real life. But what if he didn’t go back? What if his life continued somewhere else, and was real differently? The lettered shutters spelling out the place names on the board flickered over with their soft susurration: Dubrovnik, Rome, Odessa, Cairo, Damascus. His idea wasn’t cerebral; the assault of his desire for it, dropping through him like a current, unhinged him momentarily. He had enough money, even if he gave half to Elise, for a ticket anywhere, and a room when he got there. A room while he sorted himself out. Enough money to get by for a while because he knew how to live frugally.

For ten or twenty minutes, while he dwelled inside this possibility, it was so real that he felt afterwards the unfinished gesture in his muscles, his clenched jaw; he had meant to walk over to the information desk, ask about last-minute tickets, find out where he could go, get out his card from his wallet, pay. He would have to take the van keys back to Marek. It was a door that stood open, through which he could walk lightly, carrying nothing. This was the sort of thing he used to do; something unfinished in him, which had been set aside and forgotten, stepped up to the adventure with fast-beating heart. He imagined himself walking out from a room somewhere else, in a few hours, into a different light: to buy clothes, toothbrush, razor, which he would not know the names for. He would find a bar to eat in, or buy food on the street. The place might be dirty and poor, it might have stone ramparts where the population strolled to take the air in the evenings, it might overlook the sea, it might not. Paul felt himself at a pivot in his life, swinging dangerously loose: if he moved, he would go over to the information desk and everything would follow on from there. He had only to keep still. If he went, he couldn’t be forgiven, or forgive himself – freedom would carve out an empty space in him for ever. A message drifted through his cells, from his bones, that he must keep still. Eventually Marek came to find him.

Pia’s ankles swelled and the doctor told her she had to rest, take time off from work. She wasn’t sleeping well at night. Marek was solicitous, sat with her big white feet in his lap, massaging them. When Paul vacated the sofa in the mornings she settled herself there and switched on the television. Sometimes she didn’t even wait for him to clear away the bedding, didn’t bother to pull up the blinds. Listlessly uncomfortable, she kept shifting position. She made her face up by the artificial light.

– Won’t you let me read to you? Paul asked one day not long after the Heathrow trip, when Marek hadn’t needed him, he was doing business somewhere else in the city. At a loose end, Paul had even thought of going to the library and starting some work. He couldn’t bear the idea of Pia filling her head with the kind of drivel they put on television in the daytime. If he bought Great Expectations or Emma , perhaps he could abridge as he read, if he saw she was getting bored.

– Read to me? Dad, have you forgotten I’m twenty years old?

She was adamant, as if she suspected him of trying to smuggle in under cover some scheme for getting her back into education. All she would agree to was his borrowing DVDs from a local rental place, which they watched together in the afternoons. Her taste was not what he’d expected, not sentimental. She liked clever thrillers, Michael Clayton , No Country for Old Men . They began on the first series of The Wire together; she was much quicker than he was to pick up what was happening.

– Aren’t you missing your friends? he asked her. – What about your old girlfriends from school? Or from the university.

– I did see some of the girls from school at first, when I moved in here. Once I knew I was pregnant, I couldn’t go out drinking with them, and that’s all they ever want to do. I only miss James.

– James Willis? Really? Isn’t he a bit of a clown?

– James and me are soulmates. We think the same things at the same time. One of us says what the other was just about to. That’s why we never could go out together.

– He’s always tongue-tied if I try to talk to him.

– That’s because you’re you, Dad. You’re not the easiest person to talk to.

He told her about Willis senior coming to cut down the poplars at Tre Rhiw.

– Was James involved in this? He’s never mentioned anything about it.

– He was the one wielding the fucking saw.

She laughed, and he began to remember all the detail of that morning, which from this perspective in the flat seemed highly comical. When he told her about his quarrel with Elise, she took Elise’s side, she said it wasn’t worth making an enemy of Mr Willis for the sake of the trees. It was clear she couldn’t really remember which trees he was talking about, and she said they could always plant some more. Paul had wondered if she might take the opportunity of backing him against Elise. She hadn’t always got on with her stepmother. Elise could be blunt sometimes, and when Pia was younger, Elise had found her obstinate and unresponsive. Sometimes when she first came to stay with them, before Becky was born, she was patently sick with misery, away from her home; but however Elise coaxed her, she had insisted with a little false smile that she was fine, sitting on the edge of her bed, swinging her feet. There had been something heart-wringing, exasperating to Elise, in how she had unpacked her rucksack so neatly and arranged her trainers in pairs against the wall.

The shape of Pia’s pregnancy as it grew was fearsome, a bloated dome; her belly button turned outwards, she stretched the cloth of her T-shirt across it to show it off to Paul. He wouldn’t lay his hand on her belly when she offered, if the baby was kicking; but sometimes unavoidably, at close quarters in the crowded flat, they knocked up