didn’t like, but drank because there wasn’t anything else. Hearts were stencilled on the kitchen walls and on the painted bench at the table. There were hearts everywhere he looked: fridge magnets, postcards, tea towels, even heart-shaped pebbles picked up from the beach. Annelies worked for the Refugee Council, helping asylum seekers appeal against deportation. Beside this, in her house, Paul’s half-realised writing career seemed a shoddy equivocation.
– What are we going to do, Paul? Have you spoken to her?
– She won’t answer her phone when she sees it’s me. I asked Becky to text her; she texted back the same stuff – she’ll be in touch soon, not to worry.
– But she’s given up her college course: how can I not worry? How is she feeding herself, I’d like to know? How will she pay the rent, wherever she’s living? When she telephones, she won’t answer any of these questions! You should hear her, Paul, she doesn’t sound like herself. Something’s wrong, I know it. I beg her to tell me where she is; she cuts me off.
Privately Paul thought that Pia’s giving up the course didn’t matter much. It might even be good for her, to have a taste of the world outside the routines of education and the safety of her mother’s house; she was one of those girls who got through school drawing perfect margins and underlining their headings in red biro, cutting and pasting projects from the Internet. But he felt sorry for Annelies, in her distress shaken out of the normal pattern of her relationship with him. Usually she would never appeal to him, or allow him to see she was afraid. She seemed disoriented, in this home where signs of Pia were everywhere around them: her childish drawings framed on the wall, photographs of her at every age on the pinboard, teenage jewellery hung over the cup-hooks, red high heels that could not possibly belong to Annelies in a corner. His daughter seemed to him to flavour the house more distinctively in her absence than she had when she lived here.
He asked about the argument they’d had.
– It was nothing. I came into her bedroom without knocking, that’s all. What is she doing in there, that she needs to hide it? She was only playing with her make-up, I could see. I asked her, doesn’t she have college work to get on with?
Annelies saw no need for locks on bathroom doors; when she was married to Paul she used to look over his shoulder when he was writing, hadn’t understood why he raged at this. And at first it had been what he had loved, how she had stripped off for him fearlessly; holidaying in Sweden, she had dived without a qualm into freezing water off the stony islands they rowed out to, while he was still picking his way painfully across the rocks.
– I’m liberal, she said now, – you know that. But what about drugs, sexually transmitted diseases? There must be a boyfriend involved, I’m sure, someone Pia doesn’t want me to meet.
– She’s not stupid, she’s a sensible, sound girl. We have to trust her, it’s all we can do. I’ll talk to student services at Greenwich, though I don’t suppose they’ll know anything. I’ll see if I can find some of her friends.
In her absence, he felt he hardly knew Pia, although those hours they spent together in her childhood, when he had looked after her at weekends, had sometimes seemed to stretch out to a punitive length, so that he longed to get back to his work, his books. He would surely have stirred – even in those days, as a reluctant father, much too young – in response to a child who was spirited, suggestible, haunted: he had looked to see if any of this was in Pia, but he had not found it, or she had resisted his finding it. Determinedly she had made herself stolid, sulky, unyielding. She had dragged flat-footedly after him round the museums, the National Gallery, raising her eyes to the paintings when he told her to look, but refusing to see what was in them. She had not read the books he bought her. In the museum shops she had yearned over soft toys with cartoon animal faces: she had seemed to care more about buying things than seeing things or knowing them.
He stayed the night with friends and went to Greenwich the next day, thinking he might do better in person than on the telephone: but they weren’t allowed to give him any information. Not even about her timetable, so that he could ask after her among her classmates? The young woman looked at him with patient hostility.
– I know it’s difficult for parents, she said. – But the students are adults. If you were on a course here, you wouldn’t want us giving out your personal data to anyone who asked.
– You told her mother, though, that Pia had dropped out of her classes.
– I don’t know who gave out that information.
He was shocked to find himself closed out; he had counted on the power of his confident concern, and the charm he had turned on this doughy-faced girl in glasses. Talking to Annelies the night before, he had not taken her anxiety seriously. Now, making his way back to Paddington, the crowds pouring along the streets and into the entrances of the Underground station seemed an infinite stream: the mind, he thought, was not naturally equipped to conceive of the multiplication of all these lives heaped up together in a metropolis, mountain upon mountain of life-atoms. Slipped away from them into this, Pia was lost – if she chose to be. Her mobile was the only slender link they had to her: what if she stopped calling, or lost her phone? How could they hope to trace her then?
Shuffling in the crowd towards the exit from the Tube at Paddington, he glanced across to the opposite platform and suddenly, extraordinarily, was sure he saw Pia waiting there, standing out tall above the people in front of her, staring into the distance from where the train was coming, pale hair fastened into bunches on her shoulders, black jacket zipped to the neck. If he had not known her, he would have seen a serious and dreamy girl, not unattractive but old-fashioned, somehow vulnerable and raw. Paul shouted her name, disrupting the queue for the exit, forging towards the platform edge to attract her attention, waving his arm. He thought she turned and looked towards him – but then everyone looked, and at that moment the train roared in, swallowing up his sight of her, probably to carry her away; he was left cut off with his conspicuousness, the object of everyone’s idling attention.
In case she had waited, for a different train or for him, he hurried over to the opposite platform, but of course by the time he got there the train was gone, and Pia with it, if she had ever been there. He began at once to doubt that he had seen her. It must have been some other girl, blonde and tall as Pia was, appearing at the right moment to collaborate with his fears. He was agitated by his exaggerated response and his disappointment, which translated as he recovered into a loop of worry, circling round and round. All the way home on the train, a woman in a seat nearby, not visible to him, talked into her mobile at full volume, filling up every crevice of his privacy, so that he couldn’t concentrate on his book. – I think that’s a beautiful feeling… you said before you wanted to move on… for any person growing emotionally… it’s a different sort of painful, it’s the healing kind…
When he arrived back at Tre Rhiw the last sunshine was still on the back garden, slanting obliquely, burnishing the grass and shrubs as if the light was yellow oil. The spell of fine spring weather was holding, everyone’s pleasure in it tinctured with nervousness, because of climate change. The girls were playing with their goats in the field, feeding them leftover vegetables. Joni was fearlessly familiar with animals: she crooked her arm around the goats’ necks and nuzzled their ears, kissing their pink grey-spotted lips, with a sense of the impudence and effect of her own performance. Becky was more circumspect, anxious for the goats’ feelings, holding her hand out carefully flat to offer them food, as she had been taught. The animals tolerated them, businesslike they munched on, beards wagging, alien eyes cast backwards as if they were unwilling witnesses to visions. Elise was sitting out in her sunglasses, tinkling the ice in a Campari, on one of the deckchairs she had covered in leftovers from the fabrics she used in her work; a fantastical vine seemed to wind out of the top of her head, drooping with fruit. She waved her drink at Paul, told him to bring another deckchair from the house. When he said he thought he’d seen Pia at Paddington, Elise believed it was possible: she did wear a black jacket, she could have been on her way back from south Wales, she might have been visiting her friends in the village.
– Without letting us know she was here?
– Perhaps, if she doesn’t want us to know what she’s up to. She doesn’t want you pressuring her to go back to college.
– What friends, anyway?
– She likes the Willis boy.
– How can she?
Paul didn’t get on with the Willis family.
– They’re rather alike, don’t you think? Elise said. – Pia and James?
She reassured him that he didn’t need to be anxious. – I’m sure Pia’s OK. She needs some space to herself, I expect. Annelies can be a bit overwhelming, bless her.
Elise pulled up the skirt of her dress a few inches to give her thighs to the sun, liberating her feet from her flip- flops, stretching her strong brown toes, nails painted vermilion. – Aren’t you worrying because you feel guilty, after all those years when I had to remind you even to phone Pia?
