oldest daughter to find her displaced here, when he had only ever known her insulated by her mother’s care: in this place, despite the entry phone and the concierge, she might not be safe. Even while he was concerned, he was also interested by the idea that she must have chosen this, in preference to safety. She swung the last door open. The concierge in his booth said something in a West Indian accent so strongly inflected Paul couldn’t understand him; Pia seemingly had no difficulty, she answered quickly, but as if she didn’t want to be drawn into conversation. Her tone made Paul wonder if perhaps she wasn’t supposed to be staying in this flat, and was avoiding awkward questions.
He was sure as soon as he saw her that it had been Pia on the platform at Paddington a few weeks ago. Her hair was tied in the same low-slung bunches on her shoulders, and this had the effect he remembered from that day, reminding him of girls in gritty Sixties films about the British working classes, with some wornness and marks of trouble on their young faces already, part of their sex appeal. Pia’s hair was clean, but her face was pale and not made up; she was wrapped in a shabby black cardigan with its belt dangling loose, which she kept in place, folding her arms over it. She looked years older than when he’d last seen her, when they went out to eat together and he was still thinking of her as a child. Although she might have been trying to cover herself up, he saw in his first glance that she was pregnant. Not hugely pregnant, but enough for it to show up against her angular thinness. He wouldn’t have seen it when he saw her on the platform in the Underground because there had been people standing in front of her.
He couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t thought of this, any of them.
Pia was shyly anxious, managing her father’s entrance through a prison-like sequence of heavy metal doors, grim stairwells. Chattering, covering up her nerves, she told him how this council block had been notorious in the Eighties for its drug users and its crime, and how it had been cleaned up in the Nineties, equipped with a security fence and a concierge entrance. Nothing was said yet about the pregnancy, though when Paul kissed her he felt the alien hard lump of it against him. She might even believe he hadn’t noticed it. He was embarrassed about how to begin, he was waiting until they had arrived somewhere and were properly alone. They stopped at a red-painted door, off a narrow concrete walkway two floors up. Pia had her keys in her cardigan pocket: just before she opened the door she whispered urgently to him, putting her mouth close to his ear.
– Remember, you promised not to tell anyone about all this.
It wasn’t the moment to protest that the promise had been exacted without his understanding the full circumstances. They stepped through a narrow hall space into a small living room, with windows all along one wall. Slatted blinds were drawn down, so that the light was dim, pierced by shafts of white brilliance here and there where the slats were broken or twisted. A big flat-screen television was switched on to twenty-four-hour news, a bed made up on a sofa had been slept in, but not tidied. The whole flat smelled of stale bedding, of cigarettes and strongly of marijuana. A door was ajar into what must be a bedroom, which was also dark: the bathroom and a kitchenette about as big as a cupboard opened off the hall. The bathroom door was off its hinges, balanced against the wall.
– It’s a bit of a mess, said Pia, as if she’d noticed for the first time.
She began picking up mugs and plates from the floor.
Paul was thinking that he must rescue her from here, it wasn’t a fit place for his daughter’s baby to be developing. He was about to say something about this when a man stepped out from the bedroom.
– This is Marek, Pia said. – This is my dad.
Marek held out his hand.
When he guessed that Pia must be living with a boyfriend, Paul’s imagination had supplied someone her own age, more like James Willis, or perhaps a fellow student who had dropped out from the university; he had not ever pictured an adult. This man wasn’t big, he was medium height with a slight build, but there was nothing boyish or incomplete about him. His slimness seemed packed tight with an energy and authority Paul was not at all prepared for. His hair was dark and curling, cut close to his skull like a tight cap of lambswool: in the dim light he looked at least thirty. He squeezed Paul’s fingers in a hard, quick hand and then dropped them; in his other hand he was balancing tobacco along a Rizla paper. Finishing rolling it, he licked the paper in a quick accustomed movement, then offered tobacco and papers to Paul.
– You smoke?
Paul said he hadn’t smoked for a long time.
– You don’t mind?
The man was lighting up, not waiting for permission: one cigarette more or less anyway wouldn’t make much difference in this room. If he was Polish – that was surely a Polish name? – then he might not have been lectured about the effects of smoking on an unborn child. Perhaps from a Polish perspective the whole scare seemed a frivolous fuss. Could this really be Pia’s lover? Someone after all had slept on the sofa. Paul might be misreading the whole situation.
– We don’t have milk. Pia was still hanging on to the dirty plates she’d collected. – But I could make coffee, if you don’t mind having it black.
– Make coffee, Marek said.
He was caressingly, insolently intimate: Pia smiled involuntarily. – It’s so hot in this flat! she said. She struggled with her free hand to pull a blind halfway up, then opened the window. – There’s supposed to be a roof garden out here. But nobody looks after it.
The city’s noise was suddenly inside with them, and a blanching light in which their faces were exposed as if they were peeled. Marek’s head was round and neat, and his handsome small features were strained in spite of his smile; his eyes weren’t large but very black, framed with thick lashes, dark pits in a pale complexion. Hanging at crazy angles on the wall were Jack Vettriano’s couple, dancing on a beach under an umbrella; also a photograph of giraffes in the savannah. There were rips in the fake tan leather of the sofa. The window overlooked a space for parking, and another wing of the housing block beyond it. Between two walkways a sunken area had been filled with earth; weeds had grown tall in it and then died, bleached dry in the heatwave.
– Is this your flat? he asked Marek.
– It’s my sister’s. She’s letting us stay here. When Pia moved out from her mother’s, I couldn’t take her to the place where I was living, it wasn’t nice.
– This is a very strange situation, said Paul. – My daughter appears to be pregnant. Or am I imagining things? What’s going on here?
Pia blushed and pulled her cardigan across her stomach awkwardly. – I didn’t know if you could tell.
– Make coffee, Marek said. – I’ll talk.
– And you’ve taken out that stud in your lip.
Pia nodded her head towards Marek. – He didn’t like it.
– I didn’t like it, Paul said. – But you didn’t take it out for me.
Marek laughed.
– I’d really like to talk to Pia alone, Paul said. – Why don’t you and I go out and find a place for coffee?
He felt the other two were exchanging covert communication in glances.
– It’s good here, Marek said. – She wants to stay here.
Paul followed Pia into the tiny kitchen, where pans and dishes were piled up unwashed in the sink, and a rubbish bin was too full to close. – We have mice, she said with her back to him, filling the kettle. – They’re really sweet.
– Can’t we go out somewhere? We need to talk.
– There’s no point, Dad.
– What’s happening here, sweetheart? What have you got yourself into?
– I knew you wouldn’t understand, she said. – But it’s what I want.
– Try me. Try and explain to me.
He couldn’t see her face; her shoulders were hunched in tension. He remembered her trudging after him on tired legs across expanses of glacial floor in the museums he used to take her to, submitting unwillingly to the flow of his knowledge, which must have seemed unending.
– OK, he said. – It’s OK, if it’s what you want.
The coffee she made was instant; she rinsed dirty mugs under the tap, rubbing the dark rings out of them with her finger. He asked if she’d seen a doctor yet, and she said she had, and that she was going next week with Anna, Marek’s sister, to an appointment at the hospital.
