The London Train Read online

  – How long do you think it is since you last saw Pia? Annelies demanded as soon as he picked up the phone.

  – I was going to telephone you, he said. – I have some news. Mum died yesterday.

  He tried not to be glad that he cut her righteousness off in mid-flow.

  – Ah, Paul. That’s sad. How sad. I’m so sorry. Pia will be upset, she loved her Nana.

  Paul had used to drive Pia to Birmingham, to visit her grandmother in the Home. It was one of the ways he filled the time he spent with his oldest daughter, and it was true that she had seemed genuinely attached to Evelyn. She had surprised him; he did not think of Pia as resourceful, but she had been full of patience, not minding the old lady’s repetitions, having her hand squeezed in emotion, over and over.

  – Should I talk to her?

  – She isn’t here. This is why I was telephoning you.

  – You mean she’s out?

  – No. I mean she’s gone. Taken her stuff and gone. Not all of it, of course. Her room’s still one hell of a mess.

  – Gone where?

  – I don’t know.

  Pia had left home after an argument with her mother about a week ago. There was no point in raising any alarm, going to the police, because Pia had phoned Annelies twice, to tell her she was safe. She said she was staying with friends.

  – Then I suppose she’s all right. She’s old enough. She’s free to go where she likes.

  – But which friends, Paul? Is it too much to want to know where she is?

  Pia was supposed to be in the first year of a degree at Greenwich, in subjects he was never precisely sure of: media, culture and sociology? Paul had taken her out for a meal when he was last up in London, a few weeks ago. He tried hard now to remember what they had talked about. Instead he remembered a new steel stud that she’d had fitted in her lower lip: she had sucked at this stud whenever their conversation dried up, which it often did, stretching her top lip down to pull at it in a way that was nervous and unattractive. He had tried to get out of her some spark of interest in what she was studying, but she spoke about it all with the same obedient flatness. Her mouth with its full, pale lips and strong shape was like his own, he knew that: Pia was supposed to look like him, she was tall and fair and thin as he was, her skin was susceptible to flares and rashes, like his when he was adolescent. In spirit she couldn’t have seemed farther from how he was at her age: he had been consumed in the cold fire of politics and ideas, she was anxiously shy, wrapped up in the tiny world of her friends and their fads, devoid of intellectual curiosity.

  – She’ll soon be back, he reassured Annelies. – As soon as she realises she has to do her own washing and buy her own food.

  Annelies came to the funeral, in a black suit that fitted too tightly. She was almost matronly these days; Elise beside her seemed light and elastic on her feet as a girl, even though she was the older of the two. Elise had said black didn’t matter any more, she had let Becky and Joni wear their party dresses: the little girls scampered, vivid as sprites in the sunshine, among the ugly monuments of the crematorium. Elise and Annelies had never been rivals; Paul’s first marriage had been over for several years when he met Elise. Elise had made a point of winning over his forthright, abrupt first wife. Now the two women borrowed tissues and whispered confidences, squeezing and touching one another in the way women did. He felt remote from Annelies. She was beginning to look like her mother, a stout, sensible Dutch primary-school teacher.

  During the perfunctory service Paul couldn’t take in what he ought to. The minister was a stranger who had been supplied with a few platitudes: Evelyn had worked hard all her life, much of it at Wimbush’s bakery; she had devoted herself also to her family; in her retirement she had enjoyed travelling all over Britain and Ireland, and farther afield too. Paul had had no idea, when asked, which were his mother’s favourite hymns. She had never been a churchgoer, although she had been coyly, almost flirtatiously, interested in religious ideas. He had guessed at a couple of things from his childhood: ‘There Is a Green Hill’ and ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. At the end of the service net curtains were pulled jerkily on a rail around the coffin before it was shunted off.

  Paul’s cousin Christine had offered to have a little gathering after the funeral at her place, which wasn’t too far from what she called, with ghoulish familiarity, ‘the crem’. There were plenty of family at the service and the party, which touched him, although Evelyn had been the last of her generation, and there was probably no one here he would come back to visit once today was over. Chris made a point of sitting squeezing his hands in a chair with her knees touching his. He liked her plain, long face with glasses, her grey hair cut tidily short, the silk scarf she hadn’t quite got right, thrown over her shoulder; she was confident and funny. Most of the cohort of cousins in his generation had done well for themselves, they had made the archetypal baby-boomer move out of their parents’ class, they were in local government or in hospitals, or worked in middle management. Chris was a school secretary, her husband a manager in a company servicing photocopiers. Their house was comfortable, lovingly done up.

  Paul and Chris hadn’t much else to talk about except to reminisce over the old days. Her memories of the family were much fuller than his, as if despite appearances she had only ever moved a step away from that world: she wasn’t nostalgic for it, but she talked as if it was something she had not yet finished with, even though her own parents were long dead. She could remember sharing an outdoor toilet in the back yard, and eating off a table spread with newspaper. Her family had moved when she was nine out from the centre of town, in the slum clearances, as his parents had too, when he was a baby. In their council house on one of the new estates, Chris’s mother had suddenly produced tablecloths, curtains, carpets: she had been saving them, wrapped in their polythene, because they were too good to use. Chris told the story in a kind of rage of amusement, even after all these years, at the waste of life, ‘doing without’, ‘saving for later’.

  In the days after the funeral, Paul sat fruitlessly in his study for hours, ostensibly working on his review, writing and then deleting, pretending to himself that he was making a breakthrough and then recognising each breakthrough in turn as another dead end. After a while he would cross the yard and go into Elise’s workshop. She had converted the old tumbledown barn into a studio when they first moved in to Tre Rhiw; she could do bricklaying and plumbing and plastering, and had taken electricity into all their outhouses. She had been surprised, when they were first together, at his practical incompetence: hadn’t his father been a manual worker? Her father had been a general in the army, then a military adviser in Washington. Paul had explained that his father, a tool-setter in a screw factory, had never done anything in the house, he wouldn’t touch anybody else’s job. A specialism so narrow as his – one machine, one product – didn’t teach transferable skills. The Swiss machines he oversaw in his last years at work had been fully automated, in any case.

  Huge glass doors were let into the side wall of the barn, to give the maximum light: beyond them a row of pliant, graceful aspen poplars ran up beside the house from the river to the road at the front, breaking up the glare of the sun – or, more usually, breaking the force of wind and rain against the house. In the barn, planes of yellow sunshine swam with motes of dust from the cloth Elise was using to cover an early Victorian chaise longue, a raspberry velvet with a fine pattern in it, like tiny leaves. Her business partner, Ruth, scoured the sales and auction rooms for unusual pieces, found buyers for their finished products, and delivered them; Elise repaired and upholstered and French-polished as necessary. They had a genius for spotting derelict bits of junk and seeing how they could be made enchanting: the pieces always looked as if they were smuggled out from Alice in Wonderland , thick with mockery and magic. Tre Rhiw was full of treasures: after a while the plump-stuffed love-seats and misty mirrors and little spindly bureaux Paul had got used to disappeared, sold on to customers, and new oddities
took their place.

  Elise paused in her heaving of fabric through her sewing machine, taking off the glasses she was beginning to need for close work, smiling and wiping her face on her sleeve. – Why don’t you make coffee? she suggested consolingly.

  He didn’t want to talk to her about how he felt, but heard it spilling out of him nonetheless. – I’m dry. I’ve dried up.

  – Why don’t you write about Evelyn? You know, about her life, all the stuff about how she nearly emigrated, and then working in the bakery, and so on. Isn’t that all really interesting?

  He hated the idea of turning his mother’s life into material, garnering for himself the glamour of the proletarian hardship in his background, when the truth had been that he had left her determinedly behind, casting off her way of life. He wouldn’t even argue with Elise. It wasn’t the first time she had suggested this. He supposed the social milieu he came out of – the working class of a great manufacturing city – seemed as alien and exotic to his wife as her background did to him: show jumping and boarding school and a house in France. It had excited them, when they were first together, to play out their class roles as though they had been born in another century: he would have been her servant, she would have been his mistress, finding his accent and uncouthness an impassable divide, deeper than all the efforts of sympathy and imagination.

  – No, I wouldn’t, Elise had insisted. – I wouldn’t have been like that. Not everyone was like that, there were always feelings that transgressed those boundaries.

  The weather was hot and fine. He went out with his friend Gerald, for one of their usual walks in the countryside. They followed the Monnow downstream; it hurried noisily over the lip of boulders and pebbles washed smooth, bulging under the thick lens of water. The path first hugged its bank, then meandered away from it across small fields with hedgerows dense with birdsong, bee-drone; blossom was snowed over the stumpy bitter blackthorns, the beeches’ slim buds were fine tan leather, the still-bare ash dangled its dead keys. One of the great patriarchal beeches had come down across the path in a high wind only a few weeks before, its roots nakedly upreared, the buds at its far extremity still glistening with deluded life, a woodpecker’s neat secret hole exposed at eye level, a raw crack in the wood of the massive trunk where it had hit the earth. They had to climb over it, admiring the thick folds in the beige hide where the limbs pushed their way out.

  Paul said he had been thinking about the old model of human time as a succession of declining ages, each approximating less and less to the intensity and quality of the original life-force. Cultures gained through time in technical sophistication, but in adopting increasingly complex forms, the primordial force expended and exhausted itself, lost density and beauty.

  – And then what? Gerald said.

  – The Stoics thought that, like growth from a seed, at the end of a phase all life dies back inside itself, the form is annihilated, the force remains alone. We’re living at the end of something, using something up.

  – It’s more likely that life on earth will just ramble on and on farther ahead than we can see, inventing new kinds of messes, undergoing all sorts of horrors and then patching up again, changing the shape of things out of all recognition. Each generation insisting, this is it, we’ve really done for it, this really is it this time.

  Gerald was delicately intelligent, sceptical, huge, with a craggy pockmarked face, massive jaw, long hair tucked behind his ears. He had a fractional post (all he wanted) teaching French literature at the University of Glamorgan, and he lived alone in a disordered flat in Cardiff, his carpet stained brown with tea from the huge pot he was always topping up. The place reeked of marijuana, he lived on hummus and pitta bread and Scotch eggs; utterly undomesticated, he was able to keep his own times and lose himself in whatever labyrinths of reading or thought he strayed into. Paul and he were working together, fitfully, on translations of Guy Goffette, a Belgian poet. Sometimes Paul thought that Gerald’s freedom was what he wanted most and was deprived of, because of the distractions of his family. But he shrank from it too; what bound him to the children seemed to him life-saving. He thought of them as his blessing, counterbalancing the heady instability of a life lived in the mind.

  Paul lamented some of the renovations in the valley, ugly barn conversions for holiday lets. Cottages that were once the homes of agricultural labourers fetched stockbrokers’ prices now, as if the countryside was under some sick enchantment, in which the substance of things was invisibly replaced with only a simulacrum of itself. Gerald told him his regret was romantic; he asked Paul if he wanted back the unsanitary homes of the rural poor.

  – Did you and Gerald talk? Elise asked later. She was cleansing her face in front of the mirror in the bedroom, sitting in the long T-shirt she wore for bed.

  – About what?

  – About Evelyn, what you’re feeling. I suppose that’s improbable. You two never talk about real things.

  – They are real.

  She was pulling the faces she made to stretch the skin while she scoured it with greasy cotton-wool balls; her hair was scraped out of the way behind a band. When she was finished, she stood over him where he sat on the side of the bed, raking his hair with her fingers away from his brow, frowning into his frown, interrogating him.

  – Tell me how you’re feeling, she said. – Why don’t you tell me?

  – I’m all right.

  In the night he woke, sure that his mother was close to him in the bedroom. The pale curtains at the window were inflating and blowing in the night wind; he had a confused idea that he was sick and had been brought in to sleep in her bed, as had happened sometimes when he was a child. Evelyn would wake him, moving around late at night in the room and undressing, quietly in charge. He seemed to smell the old paraffin heater. He struggled to sit up, clammy and guilty, breathless. Elise slept with her back turned, a mound under the duvet, corona of hair on the pillow. Light from the landing slipped through the crack where the catch was broken and the door never quite closed; the dressing-table mirror picked it up and shone like flat water.

  When he was a teenager, he had thought his mother an exceptional, unique woman, thwarted only by her limited life and opportunities from becoming something more. She was physically clumsy, good-looking, but inept in her relations with other people, shyly superior. As if it explained something, she had always told the story of how she had been on the point of emigrating to Canada, after her parents died: she had been a dutiful daughter, nursing both of them through long illnesses. She had filled out all the papers, she said. Then instead, at the last minute, in her late thirties, she had married his father and had Paul, long after she had given up hope of having a child of her own. When he was a boy she used to hold his face between her hands, and he had read in her look the promise of himself, surprising and elating her, the giftedness she could not account for.

  III

  P ia didn’t come home. She was still calling her mother, insisting she was all right, but when Annelies contacted the university, they said she had dropped out of all her classes. Paul went up to London, not knowing what he ought to do to help. Annelies had lived for years in a terraced street off Green Lanes road in Harringay: he could have believed himself in Istanbul or Ankara, the shop signs unintelligible to him, the heaped-up luscious excess of fruit and vegetables lit by electric lamps under green plastic awnings, the cafés with baklava and brass coffee-makers set out in their windows, everything still open for business at seven in the evening, rich with the smells of lamb and garlic from the restaurants. Annelies’s little house was over-stuffed and airless, sweat glistened on the tanned, freckled skin across the top of her breasts. She wore a sleeveless flowered dress; the brassy glints in her curls were beginning to be mixed with grey. They sat in the kitchen and she opened a bottle of Gewürztraminer, which he 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 h
e 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.