The London Train (11 page)

Marek brought out Wiejska sausage and bread for their lunch and they ate it sitting in the front of the van with the doors open, washing it down with Coke or paper cups of tea from a café, laced with vodka, not enough to make them drunk, just enough to lift them exhilaratingly a fraction off the ground. They might have been all right if they were stopped. Anyway, Paul never asked Marek if he had any sort of licence to sell his stuff, so if they’d been stopped the drink would probably have been the least of their problems. Marek sometimes made Paul wait ten minutes in a residential street while he dropped in on ‘friends’. – It’s OK, Marek reassured him. – Only as a favour, little bit of weed. Nothing stupid. Paul seemed to slip back inside that past time when he was heedless and twenty, as though all his substantial life between then and now melted away. Catching sight of his reflection once in a shop window, carrying in a delivery, he was startled to see himself middle-aged.

Marek had found a lock-up to rent in a back lane in Kennington, where he stored the non-perishable goods. In contrast to the filthy noise and traffic, Paul felt when they visited the lock-up almost as if they were somewhere in the country, or in the past, with its red-brick walls, little overgrown back gardens, boarded-up artisan workshops. Pink valerian grew out of the bricks. Once while they were loading up, the van engine idling, Marek asked him about his younger daughters. Paul didn’t want to talk about them; whatever he said seemed compromised because he couldn’t adequately explain what was keeping him away from them, here in London. He tried not to picture them too vividly. He told himself he would go home soon, that he hadn’t been away any time at all, that they would hardly have noticed.

– You have all girls, Marek said. – Now I’ve made you a boy.

– Do you know it’s a boy?

– I know. I make boys. I have a son already in Poland, ten years old. He’s a nice kid. His mother tries to turn him against me, but he doesn’t listen. I don’t see him very often, it’s a shame, but what can you do? I’m here, I send money.

– Is Pia aware of this?

– She’s OK, she’s cool with it. This woman in Poland hates me. We’re never even married, she was married at the time to someone else. It’s all a big mistake. Except the kid: he’s fine.

He took out a photograph from his wallet. A skinny boy in shorts was on some climbing apparatus, grinning over his shoulder at the camera. He was very fair, but with his father’s black eyes and small skull, neat and round as a nut.

At the end of Paul’s first day’s work, Marek insisted on paying him, tucking folded notes into his shirt pocket. Paul saw that, as a point of honour, he must accept, although he tried to say that the work was in return for their letting him sleep on their sofa. As it happened, he really didn’t need money at that moment. When he’d visited the cash point, expecting to be overdrawn, he’d found he was several thousand pounds in credit; this could only mean that the money left over from his mother’s savings had gone through probate and been paid into his account. He had planned that he would give a couple of thousand of this to Pia at some point, to help with the baby, but he hadn’t said anything about it yet. He did his best to spend what Marek gave him on drink and food for the flat. Adding up the hours, he calculated that this delivery work probably paid him better than writing.

Paul called on Stella and John in Tufnell Park. At the door Stella had to wrestle with the dog, a tall overbred animal, all silky locks and nerves, which leapt on visitors in ecstatic welcome.

– She’s shameless, Stella apologised, tugging its collar. – She’s anybody’s. Come on in.

The dog’s nails skittered on the tiles in the big hall, which was elegantly untidy, doubled in a huge mirror in a crumbling gilt frame. A mounted stag’s head was a paperweight on top of a pile of issues of the
TLS
. Paul thought that Stella’s kiss on his cheek was tinged with reproach: no doubt she’d been talking to Elise and had concluded he was up to his old games. He recoiled for some reason from reassuring her that he wasn’t. Stella was diminutive and forthright, with dangling earrings and a pixie haircut: she had done Classics at university. She and John were his friends and not Elise’s; Elise said Stella reminded her of the head girl at school.

Paul passed the evening in his usual chair in Stella’s study, drinking John’s twenty-five-year-old Talisker; John was out with clients, he was a partner in a law firm. The dog subsided into hopeful repose on its rug, making efforts to hold its eyes open, folds twitching on its shallow forehead.

– Elise is in a state, Stella accused him. – She’s no idea where you are. You told her you were staying here: I felt awful when she rang and I didn’t know what she was talking about. What’s going on, Paul? Are you behaving like a shit again?

– It’s not what you think, he said vaguely.

– I don’t know what I think.

– I’m looking after Pia.

– She told me Pia’s pregnant. Is that where you are? The poor kid. Have you any idea what a disaster a baby would be, at Pia’s age? She’d be crawling up the walls with frustration.

Paul said that it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy.

– So who is this guy? Do you trust him?

There were original Eric Ravilious prints on the walls of the study, a Barbara Hepworth maquette on a table, on the bookshelves first editions of Hughes and Larkin. The room was intensely familiar to Paul, like a second skin; yet the smell of the van was also on his clothes – garlic sausage and petrol and hot rubber – and the traffic still seemed to be in his blood, surging round him in its abrupt stop-start rhythm. He got into an argument with Stella about education, Pia’s education in particular. He was surprised, hearing his own pent-up belligerence spilling over.

– It’s all a sham, the liberal fiction of enlightenment. Education’s a caste system, a narrow gate set up to process children. In order to pass through, they have to be broken, then put back together. Middle-class parents invest it with fetish value because they were tested and broken themselves, they pass on the hidden damage.

– What rubbish you’re talking, Stella said. – The trouble is, for Pia everything’s at stake here; it’s real, it’s not just you upsetting people at parties.

Eventually, even while they went on arguing, Paul relaxed, felt at home again, forgot about the raw new phase of his life at the flat. He thought affectionately about Stella, sitting opposite him straight-backed, earrings shaking in emphasis, the dog’s head lying in abjection in her lap. In long-ago Greenham days, she had been one of those who broke through the perimeter fence to spray the silos, and was repeatedly arrested. She was honourable and conscientious. At the end of the evening she persuaded him to call Tre Rhiw. Tactfully she left him alone with the phone and went to make coffee. He expected to get through to the answering machine. It shook him when he actually heard Elise’s voice, tentative at the other end of the line, even tremulous.

– Hello?

– Elise, it’s me.

His voice seemed to fall into the empty quiet of the house at night. She had not been watching television when he rang – he would have heard it in the background. He was surprised she was awake so late.

– Where are you?

– I’m at Stella’s.

– No, you’re not. I know you’re not, I rang her.

– I really am here tonight. I’m ringing on Stella’s phone: do 1471 afterwards if you want.

He explained that he was staying with Pia, that his mobile was out of battery, he had forgotten to bring the charger with him. He knew Elise must be listening for something else, for more than this. She ought to be fortifying herself against him, to punish him; and yet her voice in his ear was disconcertingly intimate, as if his call had caught her unprepared, before she could conceal herself.

– You could at least have spoken to the girls.

– I know. I’m sorry. I’ll ring them.

He waited for her to ask when he was coming home.

– Actually something’s up here, Paul. I think Gerald’s ill.

– What kind of ill?

She said she was worried he might be having some kind of breakdown. – Maybe it’s nothing, he just seems strange to me, he’s behaving strangely. I thought perhaps you ought to come back, that’s all.

– What do you mean by strange? Don’t you always think he’s strange?

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.