The London Train

clean underclothes. Ruth said I ought to get a doctor. I was frightened of him doing some harm to himself.

– El, you should have told me how bad it was. I’d have come home.

– I did try to tell you, when you phoned from Stella’s.

– Not the full story, not like this.

– I asked him if I should get a doctor, and he said it would help if he had his antidepressants, so I drove into Cardiff to pick them up from his flat. You never told me what that place was like. It’s a horror.

At the thought of the flat, the full coffee pot seemed to quake for a moment in her hand.

– And did they help?

– Did what help?

– The antidepressants.

– Oh, yes, I think they did. Anyway, he’s much better than he was. Tell him the coffee’s ready, would you?

– He’s gone. I watched him leave five minutes ago. I guess he didn’t really want coffee.

– Who’s gone? Gerald? Where?

– He walked down the garden, I presume in the direction of the station.

Elise ran out into the yard, then halfway down the garden, and stood shading her eyes with her hand, looking for Gerald; but he was out of sight. She rushed back into the kitchen, pulling off her apron, as if she was going to go after him. – My God, you have no idea! What were you thinking of, to let him go? You have no idea how serious things have been here.

– He seemed all right to me. He’s a free man: if he wants to catch a train home, that’s his business. You said he was better.

– But does he have money for the train? Does he have his keys?

– If he doesn’t, then I suppose he’ll have to come back.

Elise came at him with her fists upraised. – Everything’s been so uncertain. And then you come blundering back into it, with no comprehension.

She hit blows on Paul’s shoulders and chest that were only slightly painful, distracting because he had to hold his face away from them while he tried to catch hold of her wrists. Then she smacked him hard across his cheek, which hurt more, so that he pushed her and she fell against the draining board. Crockery smashed into the sink.

Becky and Joni, roused from their television slump, watched from the door.

– Where’s Gerald? Becky asked, as if appealing for the one sane person in all this mess.

– He’s gone, Elise said, sounding blank, bereft.

She picked up a tea towel to wipe tears from her face, then reached out for one of the rock cakes cooling on the wire rack. – I shouldn’t eat these. The calories will only go straight to my thighs.

Paul poured the coffee and made the girls milkshakes. They all four sat subdued around the table, eating cake.

Gerald didn’t come back.

In the afternoon Elise played Leonard Cohen in her workroom, while she worked on dismantling and repairing a broken old lacquer box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, that Ruth had bought in a country sale. Paul went through his post, which Elise had piled on the desk in his study, and his emails.

Something had happened between Gerald and Elise while he was away. Elise wouldn’t talk about it.

– If you mean sex, she said, emphasising the word contemptuously, – then you’re barking up the wrong tree. I know how your mind works. But he isn’t like you.

Paul tried to be reasonable. – All right then, it wasn’t sex. I’m glad it wasn’t.

– How dare you? How dare you take yourself off and disappear to London without any warning or explanation, and then come back and think you can call me to account, that you’ve got any right to know about my private life?

– I haven’t got any right. I’m not asking you because of right.

When he said he loved her, she only sobbed furiously, carrying the plastic tub into the yard to hang out the washing. Paul guessed she had thrown herself at Gerald, and he had rebuffed her. Or that she had been planning on throwing herself, just about the time when he arrived home, spoiling everything. He found himself imagining in detail her going in to Cardiff to fetch Gerald’s antidepressants, parking the car beside the grassy city recreation ground, looking for the number on the tall gloomy old house, using Gerald’s keys to let herself into his flat: a busy competent woman, on a charitable errand. She would have been shocked by the mess; she must have saved up examples to exclaim over to Ruth afterwards: mouldy pitta breads in the fridge, the crack in the wall, the stained toilet. Perhaps she even washed some dishes. In his mind’s eye, she wasn’t in a hurry. He saw her closing the door behind her when she first arrived, leaning for a long time with her back against it, taking in everything. Before she even started looking for the pills, he imagined she sat down in one of Gerald’s broken old armchairs, holding her bag on her lap, closing her eyes, laying her cheek against the greasy ancient chintz, just breathing in the empty space, the stale hot air. In his pictures she had her hair fastened in the new way.

– Gerald’s different, Elise said. – He lives more truthfully.

Paul was miserably perturbed and jealous, he tried to argue with her that truthful wasn’t enough. It was one of the fixtures of their life together, that Elise found Gerald comical, and disapproved of his indifference to material things. But now she was suffering with a breathless excitement, she jumped whenever the phone rang, and sometimes Paul knew she had been crying. Paul slept in the cubbyhole. There was bedding already folded away on the sofa, which must have been Gerald’s. In the middle of the night he woke up stifling, and had to go walking around outside in the grass, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, afraid of ticks on his bare legs. The stars shone brilliantly, the goats detached themselves, pale forms, from the surrounding dark, they came trotting over to the fence, eager with curiosity to watch whatever he was up to. An owl hunted in the fields nearby. He missed London.

Elise asked him about Pia’s flat, but as if she couldn’t make herself properly interested in his life there.

– How’s Pia then? What’s this boyfriend of hers like?

He described Marek cautiously, making him out to be somewhat more sensible and businesslike than he really was, never mentioning the existence of Anna. He waited for Elise, who managed their bank accounts, to notice the missing money, but she didn’t say anything, so either she didn’t register it or didn’t care. Perhaps she assumed he’d given it to Pia. When he spoke to Pia on the phone she said everything was fine. The swelling in her ankles had gone down, they were pleased with her at the hospital. She had been to visit Annelies, it hadn’t gone too badly.

Paul took over watering the new trees. The drought was supposed to end soon, according to the weather forecast. James Willis delivered the logs cut from the old trees, and Paul paid for them, stacking them in the outhouse, even though when he looked it up he found that poplar wood wasn’t supposed to burn well. One evening they all went out with Ruth to watch for otters: apparently there was a family of them living further up the river. Ruth’s husband had seen them playing in the moonlight. Elise shivered in her sleeveless dress, because they’d left home in the late sunshine and she’d forgotten to bring a cardigan. Ruth warned the girls that the otters were shy, they probably wouldn’t put in an appearance. She showed them a dusty depression on the bank that might be where the otters slept by day, and their spraints nearby, blackish messes of fish scales and fragments of bone, probably eel bones. They watched from behind a screen of hazel stems on the opposite bank; the moon rose out of sight, its glow seeping into the sky from behind the hill, then sailed overhead.

Paul was touched by the girls’ obedience and patience; he felt the discipline in their little bodies huddled against him. Elise wrapped one of the blankets she’d brought to sit on around her shoulders – they waited for more than an hour, but didn’t see anything. Becky pleaded for them to stay longer. She was sure she had spotted something in the water, ‘a little ripple, like a nose poking up’, but Elise complained she was going numb with cold. She tried to keep her voice perky and joking, but Paul could hear the effort in it. On the way back Becky sulked; Joni whined and was tired, and Paul carried her. It was the first time she’d let him pick her up since he’d been home. She laid her head on his shoulder, her fine baby hair tickled his cheek. That morning at breakfast she hadn’t allowed him to cut off the top of her egg; pouting, she had said she wanted Gerald, ‘Instead of you.’

Paul began writing something new: not a memoir exactly, but a recollection of his earliest interest in nature. He tried not to think too hard about it, but felt hopeful that it might come to something. At junior school he had won as