The London Train

that we had gained more?

– Or lost more.

– What if extinctions in the natural world reflected the movement of time forwards in our human culture, extinguishing possibilities and qualities one by one, until there were fewer overall, far fewer?

– Shall we all go and top ourselves? said Ruth.

They all seemed to be angry with him, accusing him of nostalgia, of a regressive taste for everything old, of indifference to what had been unjust or caused suffering in the past.

– It’s another perennial, Ruth’s husband said. – Every generation thinks that what’s in the past was necessarily superior. When I was a boy you could leave your front door unlocked, the rock ’n’ roll was better, that sort of thing.

Paul couldn’t summon the energy to explain that he had only meant the past was precious because it was different, not better. When their guests had gone, Paul and Elise washed up in fatigued silence in the kitchen: they didn’t have a machine. He progressed stoically at the sink from glasses through plates to heavy pans that filled the washing-up water with floating rice and turmeric-yellow grease; Elise sorted leftovers, dried and put away dishes, returning the rooms to their daytime selves, shoving the heavy table noisily across the flagstones. Her clothes had wilted from their carefully prepared bloom: her red stretch dress sagged over her stomach, the skin of her cheeks was oily in the overhead light they had switched on when the guests went. Paul thought he acquitted himself honourably, considering how miserable he had felt all evening, in the flood of bright pointless chatter that no one would even remember the next day. Elise saw social life as a series of complex obligations, to please and be pleased, whereas he didn’t see the point of talking, if you didn’t say what you meant. The irony was that they had first met at a party, when Elise rescued him from an argument that almost became a fight. Why were women drawn to these resisting frictions in men, which they then set about smoothing away?

Hostile, exhausted, Elise turned her rump to Paul in bed. Usually he fell asleep pressed up against the landscape of her shape; cast off, he floated, detached, in the cold margin of the bed, not knowing how to comfortably arrange his limbs. Sometimes his wife seemed to him shrunken and caught out in vanity. At other moments she surrounded and surpassed him; he was smaller, his was the deficit, he was the lamed one. Perhaps he was wrong about the dinner parties. Perhaps kindness was all that mattered.

IV

P aul was trying to work in his study: something distracted him, blocking the light at the window. Becky, crouched on her haunches, was tapping on the pane, beckoning him urgently out into the garden. He thought she must want to show him something she’d made: she was good with her hands, like her mother. But she was pacing up and down on the grass, talking on the pink mobile she’d been given for Christmas in a deliberate voice as if she was imitating a grown-up, waving her hands, exaggerating her expressions. Paul hadn’t wanted to give her the mobile; she was surely too young for it.

– So how’s everything going with you? Becky asked genially into the phone.

Meanwhile she signalled to Paul with her eyes and her free hand, pointing at the mobile, mouthing something. – Cool, she said. – Where are you staying? Is it a nice place? D’you want to talk to Daddy? I could get him easily.

Paul realised this must be Pia.

– They are worried, Becky was explaining to Pia, – but in a nice way.

She beckoned Paul close and then pressed the phone quickly to his ear, as if they might lose her if they didn’t keep her trapped inside it. Paul was afraid for a moment that she had escaped. – Pia? Pia? Are you there?

He didn’t know what to say. Should he mention seeing her the other day, in the Underground? That might frighten her off, as if he was spying on her, omniscient. When she was younger he had gone for weeks without speaking to her: now the thickness of her silence down the line seemed precious, and he was afraid to put a word wrong.

– Are you there?

– Hello, Dad.

Behind the ordinariness of her voice, whatever place she was in sent back its unfamiliar echo. He put all his skill into coaxing her, not making too much of their contact. She reassured him she was all right, they didn’t mention her course, he didn’t ask who she was with or what her plans were, nor did he want to tell her over the phone about her Nana. Even while he soothed her he felt some of his old irritation at having to drag communication out of her: she spoke in short reluctant bursts of words, in the slangy accent middle-class children affected. – Funnily enough, he said, – I have to be in London anyway, on Thursday. (This wasn’t true, he invented it on the spot.) – Why don’t we meet up? We could meet wherever you like. Pia, are you still there?

– Only if you promise not to tell Mum. Or Elise, either.

Pia was an adult, he reasoned, and had a right to her secrets. – All right.

– I’ll call you again on Thursday then, she said.

Would she call him? He doubted it as soon as she’d rung off.

Becky asked if he and Pia were meeting and he told her that Pia was fine, but wasn’t ready for a meeting yet. Under her freckles Becky flushed pink, perhaps because she guessed he wasn’t telling the truth. If he wasn’t telling Elise, then he couldn’t tell Becky. If she didn’t turn up, then he’d tell.

– Was it a good thing I called you outside when I got through to her?

– Very good. He picked her up and kissed her. Her anxieties wrung his heart. – You were like a detective on the telly.

That night he dreamed again about Evelyn: they waited for hours together in a milling, faceless crowd, jostled and queuing for something they never reached, anxious they didn’t have the right papers. In the dream it dawned on him eventually that she was queuing to emigrate, that the black hulks, looming alongside the stone platform where they waited, were ships. When he woke he felt lonely, remembering their unconsidered companionable closeness in the dream.

He told Elise he was meeting Stella, which was plausible – she was an old friend who worked for the BBC, he had made several programmes with her. As soon as the train arrived, he phoned Pia. She answered it after the phone had rung for a long time.

– Dad, I don’t know if this is a good idea.

She sounded as if he’d woken her up, her voice sticky and slow with sleep. He had been awake for hours; the day to him seemed halfway over already.

– What about this thing you have to go to? she said. – Why don’t we meet after that?

– That’s later. This evening.

– The evening would have been better for me. I’ve got things I have to do today.

He didn’t believe her. – Where are you? Give me the address, I’ll come right now, I won’t stay long. I kept my part of the promise, I haven’t said a word to your mum, or to Elise.

She was too slow and sleepy to know how to deflect him; he scribbled the address on the margin of his newspaper. It was somewhere off Pentonville Road, and she told him he needed to get off the Tube at King’s Cross; after he’d rung off he bought an A - Z so that he could work out exactly where he was going. He was surprised that she was in central London, he had expected to have to go somewhere miles out. Eventually he found his way to a block of council flats, bleakly unlovely, rising on a built-up island out of the torrents of traffic that roared unrelentingly all round it. It was hot, the petrol fume rising off the vehicles was as thick in the air as a distorting glass, and it took him a few minutes to find the right system of crossings to use to arrive at the entrance. The block wasn’t a tower, only three or four storeys, and around it there was a high wall, which made it look somehow, in its blue and white paint, like a scruffy container ship out at sea.

There was an entry phone: Pia buzzed him in and told him to wait inside the door. A concierge in a little glassed booth, reading the Daily Mirror , took no notice of Paul. Fire doors clanged some way off, and he heard Pia’s footsteps approaching, resonant in the concrete stairwells. He was unexpectedly emotional, waiting for her. It shook his usual idea of his