B y the time Paul got to the Home, the undertakers had already removed his mother’s body. He protested at this, it seemed done in indecent haste. He had set out as soon as they telephoned him; surely they could have waited the three or four hours it had taken him to get there (the traffic had been heavy on the M5). Mrs Phipps, the owner of the Home, guided him into her office, where whatever scene he might make wouldn’t upset the other residents. She was petite, vivacious, brown-skinned, with traces of a South African accent; he didn’t dislike her, he thought she ran the Home to a good standard of care, his mother had seemed to resign herself gratefully to her efficiency and brisk baby-talk. Even at this moment, however, there was no sign that the taut, bright mask of Mrs Phipps’s good humour, respectfully muted in the circumstances, ever gave way to any impulse of authentic feeling. Her room was pleasant; an open sash window let in the afternoon spring sunshine from the garden. On the wall behind her desk was pinned a colourful year planner, almost every square scribbled over with busyness and responsibility: he imagined a space on the planner where his mother’s occupation of her room abutted abruptly onto blankness.
If he wanted to see his mother, Mrs Phipps said, putting the right nuance of sorrowful tact into her voice, she could telephone the undertakers, he could go to see her there. Paul was aware of the hours ahead as requiring scrupulous vigilance; he must be so careful to do the right thing, but it wasn’t clear what the right thing might be. He said he would take the undertakers’ address and number, and Mrs Phipps gave it to him.
– I ought to let you know, she added – because I wouldn’t want you to find out in any roundabout way, that Evelyn made another of her bids for freedom last night.
– Bids for freedom?
He thought that she was using an odd euphemism for dying, but she went on to explain that his mother had got out of bed at some point in the evening, and gone into the garden in her nightdress. There was a place they always looked when they couldn’t find her: Evelyn’s little den in the shrubbery.
– I’m sorry that it happened. But I did warn you that we simply aren’t able to provide twenty-four-hour supervision of residents when they fall ill. The girls were in and out of her room all evening, checking on her. That was how we realised she had got out. To be frank with you, she was so weak none of us had imagined she was even capable of getting out of bed. She can only have been out there for ten to fifteen minutes before we found her. Twenty at the most.
They had brought her inside and put her back to bed. She had had a good night; she only deteriorated after breakfast this morning.
Mrs Phipps was worrying that he might make a complaint, Paul realised.
– It’s all right. If that’s what she wanted to do, then I’m glad she was able to get out.
She was relieved, although she didn’t understand his point. – Of course we were worried about her body temperature, these spring nights are treacherous. We wrapped her up warmly and made her a hot drink, we kept an eye on her all through the night.
Paul asked if he could sit in his mother’s room for a while. They had already stripped her bed and pulled up over the mattress a clean counterpane in the standard flowered material that was everywhere in the Home: there were no signs he could see of what had taken place in here. Mrs Phipps had reassured him that his mother had ‘gone very peacefully’, but he took this as no more than a form of words. He sat for a while in his mother’s armchair, looking round at her things: the last condensed residue of the possessions that had accompanied her from her home to her small flat in sheltered accommodation and then to this room. He recognised some of them only because he had moved them for her each time; others were familiar from his childhood and youth: a majolica fruit bowl, a blue glass girl who had once been fixed on the side of a vase for flowers, the red Formica coffee table that always stood beside her chair, with its built-in ashtray on a chrome stem.
When Paul left the Home, he drove to the undertakers and sat in his car in their small forecourt car park. He had to go inside and talk to them about arrangements for the funeral; but there was also the issue of seeing his mother’s body. He was his parents’ only child. Evelyn had absorbed the brunt of his father’s death twenty years ago, when Paul was in his twenties: now all the lines met in him. Of course his wife would be sorry, and his children too; however, because for the last few years Evelyn’s mind had wandered farther and farther, she had become a distant figure to the girls, and he had only brought them to visit her every so often. She still recognised them, but if they went into the garden to play, or even if they went to the toilet, or moved round to the other side of her chair, she would forget she had already seen them; each time they returned she would greet them again, her face lighting up with the same delight.
His father had died in hospital after a heart attack; Evelyn was with him, Paul had been living in Paris at the time and had not arrived until the next day. The possibility of seeing the body had not arisen; in his concentration then on his mother’s bereavement, it probably hadn’t seemed important. Now he did not know whether this was important or not. He peered into the undertakers’ shop window with its kitsch discretion, urns and pleated silks and artificial flowers. When eventually he got out of his car to go inside, he realised it was past six o’clock. There was a closed sign hanging on the shop door, with a number to contact in case of emergency, which he didn’t write down. He would come back in the morning.
He had got into the habit of using the Travelodge, if ever he needed to stay overnight in Birmingham when he came to visit his mother; conveniently, there was one only ten minutes’ drive from the Home. He unpacked his few things, a clean shirt and socks, toothbrush, a notebook, the two books of poetry he was reviewing – he had not known when he set out in the morning how long he would need to stay. Then he telephoned Elise.
– She’d gone by the time I got there, he said.
– Oh, poor Evelyn.
– Mrs Phipps said she went very peacefully.
– Oh, Paul. I’m so sorry. Are you all right? Where are you? Do you need me to come up? I’m sure I could get someone to have the girls.
He reassured her that he was all right. He didn’t want to eat, but walked around the streets until he found a pub where he drank two pints, and browsed a copy of the Birmingham Mail that was lying on a table. His mind locked into the words, he read each page exhaustively, taking in without any inward commentary every least detail: crime, entertainment, in memoriam . He had a dread of being overtaken by some paroxysm of grief in a public place. Back in his room, he did not want to read either of the poetry books; when he had undressed he looked in the drawer of the bedside table for a Bible, but it was a New International Version, no good to him. He turned out the light and lay under the sheet, because the heating was stuffy and airless and you could not open the windows more than a crack. Through the crack the fine spring night sent its smells of greenness and growth, mingled with petrol fumes from the road outside that never stilled or grew quiet, however late it was. He was relieved, he thought. What had happened was merely the ordinary, expected, common thing: the death of an elderly parent, the release from a burden of care. He had not wanted her life prolonged, in the form it had taken recently. He had not visited her as often as he should. He had been bored, when he did visit.
When he closed his eyes there came an unwanted image of his mother out in the dark garden of the Home in her nightdress, so precise that he sat up in bed abruptly. She seemed so close at hand that he looked around for her: he had the confused but strong idea that this present moment could be folded closely enough to touch against a moment last night, that short time ago when she was still alive. He saw not the bent old lady she had become, but the mature woman of his teenage years: her dark hair in the plait she had long ago cut off, the thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses of those days, her awkward tall strength and limbs full of power. When she was still alive it had been difficult sometimes for him to remember her past selves, and he had been afraid he had lost them for ever, but this recall was vivid and total. He switched on the light, got out of bed, turned on the television and watched the news, images of the war in Iraq.
Lying stretched out again in the dark on his back, naked, covered with the sheet, he couldn’t sleep. He wished he could remember better those passages in The Aeneid where Anchises in the Underworld explains to his son how the dead are gradually cleansed in the afterlife of all the thick filth and encrusting shadows that have accumulated through their mortal involvement, their living; when after aeons they are restored to pure spirit, they long, they eagerly aspire, to return to life and the world and begin again. Paul thought that there was no contemporary language adequate to describe the blow of his mother’s vanishing. A past in which a language of such dignity as Virgil’s was possible seemed to him itself sometimes only a dream.
The next morning when he went back to the undertakers he told himself in advance that he must ask to see her body. However, once he was involved in making the arrangements for the funeral, he found it difficult to speak at all, even to give his minimal consent to whatever was proposed: his dumbness did not come from deep emotion, but its opposite, a familiar frozen aversion that seized him whenever he had to transact these false relations with the external world. He imagined the young man he spoke with had been trained to watch for the slips and give-away confusions of grieving family members, and so he tried to make himself coldly impenetrable. Elise should have been there to help him, she was gifted at managing this side of life. He could not bring himself to expose to the youth’s solicitude any intimate need to touch his mother a last time; and perhaps anyway he didn’t want to touch her.
Afterwards he went to the Home as he had arranged, to deal with paperwork and to clear his mother’s belongings from her room, although Mrs Phipps had insisted there was no hurry, he was welcome to leave things as they were until after the funeral. He sat again in Evelyn’s armchair. The room was really quite small; but on the occasion they had come here first to look at it, there had been someone playing a piano downstairs, and he had allowed this to convince him that the Home was a humane place, that it would be possible to have a full life here. He had not often heard the piano afterwards. When he had packed a few things into boxes he asked Mrs Phipps to dispose of the rest, and also to show him what she had called his mother’s ‘den’ in the garden; he saw her wonder whether he was going to make difficulties after all.
In the garden the noise of traffic wasn’t insistent. The sun was shining, the bland neat garden, designed for easy upkeep, was full of birdsong: chaffinch and blackbird, the broody rumble of the collared doves. Mrs Phipps’s high-heeled beige suede shoes grew dark from the grass still wet with dew as they crossed the lawn, her heels sinking in the turf, and he saw that she was annoyed by this, but would not say anything. The Home had been a late-Victorian rectory, built on a small rise: at the far end of the garden she showed him that, if you pushed through the bushes to where the old stone wall curved round, there was a little trodden space of bare earth, a twiggy hollow, room enough in it to stand upright. The wall was too high for an old lady to sit on or climb over, but she could have leaned on it and looked over at the view, she could have watched for anyone coming. When Evelyn was a child, when there was still a rector in the rectory, everything beyond this point would have been fields and woods: now it was built up as far as the eye could see. Paul pushed inside the hollow himself and looked out, while Mrs Phipps waited, politely impatient to get back to her day’s business. He could see from there the sprawling necropolis of the remains of Longbridge, where Evelyn’s brothers had worked on the track in the Fifties and Sixties, building Austin Princesses and Rileys and Minis. At night this great post-industrial expanse of housing development and shopping complexes and scrapyards was mysterious behind its myriad lights; by day it looked vacant, as if the traffic flowed around nowhere.
He couldn’t feel anything inside his mother’s space, couldn’t get back the sensation of her presence that had come to him the night before; there had been no point in bothering Mrs Phipps to bring him out here. But in the afternoon, driving back to where he lived in the Monnow Valley in Wales, he found himself at one point on the M50 quite unable to turn his head to look behind him, so sure was he that the boxes of Evelyn’s bits and pieces on the back seat had transmogrified into her physical self. He seemed to hear her familiar rustle and exhalation as she settled herself, he tensed expectantly as if she might speak. His knowledge of the fact of her death seemed an embarrassment between them; he felt ashamed of it. He had driven her this way often enough, bringing her home for weekends before she grew too confused to want to come. She had liked the idea that her son was bringing up his family in the countryside: although all her own life had been spent in the city, she had had a cherished store of old-fashioned dreams of country life.
In Evelyn’s room the miscellany of her possessions had seemed rich with implications; transposed here to Tre Rhiw, he was afraid it might only seem so much rubbish. He couldn’t think where they would keep the ugly fruit bowl, or the Formica smoking table. There was no smoking in this house. His daughters were fanatical against it, at school they were indoctrinated to believe it was an evil comparable to knife crime or child molestation. Paul had given up anyway, but when his friend Gerald came round in the evenings the girls supervised him vigilantly, driving him out even in rain or wind to smoke at the bottom of the garden; in revenge Gerald fed his cigarette butts to their goats.
The girls were still at school; the bus didn’t drop them off until half past four. Elise was in her workshop, but she came over to the kitchen as soon as she heard him. She was in her stockinged feet, with a tape measure round her neck, red and gold threads from whatever fabric she was working with clinging to her black T-shirt and leggings. She had a business with a friend, restoring and selling antiques. Paul called her a Kalmyk because of her wide cheek bones. Her skin was an opulent pale gold, she had flecked hazel eyes; her mouth was wide, with fine red lips that closed precisely. She was three years older than he was, the flesh was thickening into creases under her eyes. She had begun dyeing her hair the colour of dark honey, darker than the blonde she had been.
– You’ve brought back some of her things.
– There’s more in the car. I told Mrs Phipps to get rid of the rest.
She picked items out of the box one by one and held them, considering intently a Bakelite dressing-table set, filled with scraps of jewellery. – Poor Evelyn, she said, and her eyes filled up with tears, although she hadn’t been particularly close to his mother. She had used to get exasperated, when Evelyn was still compos mentis , about her panics, her fearful ideas of what went on in the world outside her own narrow experience of it. Evelyn’s eagerness to spend time with them would always sour, after a couple of days, into spasms of resentment against her daughter-in-law, Elise’s insouciant-seeming housekeeping, her unpunctuality. Evelyn had been bored in the country, she had feared the river, and the goats. They always ate too late, which gave her indigestion.
Elise put her arms around Paul, and kissed his neck. – It’s so sad. I’m sorry, darling.
– I wish I could have been with her. It doesn’t seem as if anything real has happened.
– Did you see her?
He shook his head. – They had already taken her away.
– That’s awful. You should have seen her.
After she had hugged him for a while, she took the kettle to the sink, filled it from the noisy old tap that squealed and thundered, lifted the cover of the hotplate on the Rayburn.
– I don’t know what to do with all this stuff, he said.
– Don’t worry. Think about it later. It will be good to have her things around, to remind us of her.
Paul carried the boxes down into his study. This was at the opposite end of the kitchen to Elise’s workroom, built into an old outhouse sunk so low into the steep hillside that the sloping front garden crossed his window halfway up; on the other side, he had a view of the river. The walls were eighteen inches thick; he liked the feeling that he was at work inside the earth.
When the girls came home they were briefly subdued and in awe of what had happened to their Nana; they cried real tears, Becky shyly hiding her face against her mother. She was nine, with a tender sensibility; shadows had always chased across her brown freckled face. Ten minutes later they had forgotten and were playing outside his window in the front garden. He could see their feet and legs, Becky jumping her skipping rope, Joni the six-year-old stamping and singing loudly: ‘Bananas, in pyjamas, are coming down the stairs.’
A t the end of all the other transactional calls he had to make the next day, Paul meant to telephone Annelies, his first wife. Before he could get round to it, Annelies telephoned him, which was not usual; often they did not speak for months at a time. She sounded as if she was offended with him, but he was used to that: it had been their mode together, the contest of hot offence and cold repudiation, ever since they first found themselves in this awkward relation, strangers bound together by the thread of their child – his oldest daughter, who was now almost twenty. He had not been much older than that himself when she was born.
– 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.
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 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?
Paul went to make himself a drink. In the long, low stone-flagged kitchen, built like a fortress against the weather, the dark was thickening while light still blazed at the deep-recessed windows; an orange sliced on the table scented the air. He tried not to think about how he had neglected Pia: it was pointless, a self-indulgence, no use to her. In his study he poked around in the boxes he had brought from Evelyn’s room. Certain objects as he lifted them out brought back the strong flavour of his childhood: a china biscuit barrel with a wicker handle, a varnished jewellery box that played a tune when the lid was opened. These had been set aside from use in their sitting room at home, almost like religious icons, in a cabinet with glass-fronted doors; packed together in the box, they still seemed to hold faintly the smell of the green felt that had lined the cabinet shelves, though the cabinet had been left behind years before, when Evelyn first moved.
At the bottom of one box were copies of his own books – the one on Hardy’s novels, which had been his PhD thesis; the one on animals in children’s stories; his last one, on zoos. He had given them to his mother as they were published, and she had displayed them proudly on her shelf, assuring him that she read them, although he could only imagine her processing the pages dutifully before her eyes, relieved when she reached the end as if she had completed some prescribed course of improvement, opaque to her.
The land behind Tre Rhiw sloped down to the river: first the garden, then the scrubby bit of meadow where the goats were fenced in and Elise kept her chickens and grew some vegetables. When they had first moved in, their property had bordered three small fields belonging to a couple who had grown too old for farming: they only kept a couple of superannuated horses and a donkey, to eat down the grass. Those old fields were mounded with the ancient hemispherical ant heaps found on land not broken by heavy machinery, their clumps of hazel scrub were cobwebbed with lichen, the tussocky grass blew with toadflax and cranesbill and cornflowers in spring and summer.
When the old man died, and the woman moved to live with her daughter in Pontypool, their house with its land was bought up by Willis, a farmer on the other side of the village, who ripped up whole lengths of ancient hedgerow to make the three fields into one, ploughing up the hazel scrub and the ant heaps. Paul had confronted him, ranting, threatening him with legal action, although there were probably no laws against what had been done. Elise said it was a fait accompli, they might as well let it go, there was no point in getting on the wrong side of Willis, they all had to live together. Nothing anyway could ever restore the hedges that had gone, which had probably been centuries in the growing. Since then, Willis seemed always to be spreading chicken shit on the field, or spraying with weed-killer, whenever they had a summer party out of doors: Elise was sure he only did it because Paul had hassled him. Apparently he wasn’t popular in the village. Willis was English, he had married a local girl.
Elise said Paul should ask Willis’s son whether Pia had been in contact. He put it off for a few days, but when there was still no news of her, reluctantly one morning he walked over to Blackbrook. It had been a mouldering old place among ancient overgrown apple trees, mossy roof slates thick as pavings, the rooms inside unchanged in half a century. Willis had stripped it back to the stone, put in new windows with PVC frames, replastered ceilings tarred nicotine-brown from cigarette smoke, cemented white sculptured horse-heads on the gateposts, fixed his Sky satellite-dish high on the wall. Its blandness and nakedness made it seem unreal to Paul, like a building in a dream or a film. As he crossed the concreted expanse of the yard, he saw that Willis was running the engine of a tractor, down from the air-conditioned cab, absorbed in listening to it: a sandy, stocky, huge-handed man, features almost obliterated under his freckles.
– There’s a snag in the bastard, he said. – It’s catching somewhere.
– Is James around?
– What’s he supposed to have done?
– He hasn’t done anything. I want to ask him a favour.
Willis tipped his head at the interior of the huge corrugated barn. – Hosing down. Don’t spoil your shoes. He doesn’t do me any favours.
Picking his way past dungy water streaming in the concrete runnels, Paul headed for the sound of the pressure hose; the barn was dark, after the brilliance outside, and the animal stink overwhelming. The boy turned off the hose as he came near, his eyes adjusting to the murk; James was sandy and freckled like his father, but taller, and skinny, hunched over his work, stiff with reluctance.
– How was Pia when you last saw her?
– Why?
– We’re worried about her.
He shrugged. – She seemed all right.
– When was this? Have you been to London to see her? Has she been down here?
The boy turned on the hose again, aiming its jet of water into the corners of the pens. – Can’t remember when.
– Did you know she’d dropped out of her university course?
– She may have said something about it. I can’t remember.
He asked if James knew where they could contact her, but he said he only had her mobile number.
Pia had gone to the Willises at first to play on their PlayStation. She had been bored when she came to stay in the country, she didn’t like reading or going for walks: Paul and Elise were pleased that she was making friends, at least. As she got older, Elise thought there must be something going on between her and James, or that Pia had a crush on him, but Pia had denied it flatly, convincingly: she didn’t fancy him, they were just friends, they understood one another. It was true that if you came upon them idling around the lanes together, or sprawled watching television, they appeared at ease as if they were siblings: their loose, rangy bodies companionably slack, not strung on sexual tension. Paul couldn’t imagine what they talked about. James seemed fairly monosyllabic, lost in thickets of resentment. They caught the train together into Cardiff to go clubbing, or Pia spent evenings at Blackbrook. Willis had converted a barn into a sort of annexe where his sons could live independently, with a games room and a kitchen; in the summer their mother organised this for holiday lets, now that the two older sons had left the farm. Willis had apparently wanted them to stay on, to help develop the business (as well as farming, they made ice-cream and sold Christmas trees, employing several people from the village); there were stories going round about the rows these boys used to have with their father. And the boys had gone.
Elise arranged a dinner party. – Is that all right? She massaged hard muscles in his neck and shoulders. – Are you ready to be sociable yet?
He thought he was ready, but when the party came he wasn’t in the mood for it. They were Elise’s friends and not his (she’d said no to Gerald. – I love Gerald, but he’s not quite house-trained, d’you know what I mean? Not good at the social give and take). Ruth and her husband came, and another couple they’d got to know while waiting for the school bus. Most of the people they knew in the village were incomers, but Ruth was born here, her brother had inherited the farm she grew up on. She was small and capable, with neat pretty features and curling dark hair tied back; Paul found her constrained and puritan. He and she had argued viciously once about the Welsh language. He was sure Elise complained to Ruth about his absorption in his books and his writing, and about his failure to do his share of domestic duties, even though Elise’s work contributed more to the family income than his did.
Elise had warned him he mustn’t ‘spoil everything’ at the party, he was supposed to join in and help the conversation along; but he found it boring, a social music running up and down as accompaniment to the food. All of them around the table, men and women, were somewhere in their early forties; Paul couldn’t help seeing on their faces the first signs of their ageing, little lapses of their flesh around the mouth and jaw, puffiness under the eyes, the beginning of the crumpling and crumbling that would turn them into their disintegrated older selves. They discussed costume dramas on television. Someone said that nothing really changes, that wherever you look you find underneath the wigs and dresses the same old patterns playing out, the same human nature. Paul said he thought this was only because the television dramas tried to persuade you of this sameness, that it was a consoling illusion, a sham.
A muscle tightened in Ruth’s cheek, bracing against him, as she prodded at her rice with her fork. – What do you mean?
– Human cultures move forward in time as if through a valve that permits no return. The substance of experience is altered over and over with no possibility of return or recovery. History’s the history of loss.
– But there are gains, Elise insisted.
– Like human rights, and the treatment of women. The abolition of slavery.
– And contraception.
– Does it follow, Paul said, – that the sum necessarily balances out, gains against losses? Who could decide 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.
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 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.
– You don’t mean for a termination?
She was shocked. – No! It’s too late for that. Much too late!
It wasn’t clear, she said, exactly how far the pregnancy was advanced; there was confusion apparently about her dates. – They’re waiting for the scan. Then they’ll know.
She seemed to have handed herself over to this process – its dates and appointments and inevitabilities – in a dream of passivity: he wanted to shake her awake. During all this conversation, Marek could no doubt hear them from the other room, in this flat without any privacy. Paul felt he must tell Pia about her grandmother, but couldn’t bring himself to do it in front of a stranger. When they sat talking over the horrible coffee, in the living room amid all the mess of sheets and duvet and overflowing ashtrays, he tried to find out how Marek earned his living, and what kind of prospects he might have for supporting Pia and a child. All the time they talked, the television spewed its news: Iraq, the timing of Blair’s resignation, a rail worker killed in an accident on the line, the child snatched in Portugal still missing. It distracted Paul, but the others didn’t take any notice. He felt the absurdity of his playing the part of the offended protective father, given his own history with Pia; and it almost seemed as if Marek understood this, reassuring him to help him out, amused at him.
– There’ll be enough money, don’t worry. There’ll be a better place than this, much better. It will all be good.
He said he worked in business, import-export, Polish delicatessen. He was going to make money, with Polish shops opening in every city, every street. Was he a con man, or a fantasist? The condition of the flat hardly suggested a successful entrepreneur: unless he was peddling drugs, small-scale. Paul had spent time in rooms worse than this one, twenty years ago, when he was in that scene. Everything about the place and the situation made him fearful and suspicious on Pia’s behalf. And yet, as they talked, he could begin to imagine the power this man had to make her trust him. Smiling, with his cigarette wagging in his mouth, he gestured a lot with his hands, and was somehow amusing without saying anything particularly funny: at the same time he managed to have an air of serious competence, as if there was another message, poignant and melancholy, behind the improbable surface of the things he said.
They had met apparently through Marek’s sister. While she was still at the university, Pia had had a part-time job at a café where the sister worked. Paul remembered that Annelies had gone looking for Pia at that café, and that they’d said she had left. She had left, he learned now, because she was being sick all the time, in the early stages of the pregnancy.
– But I’ve got past that now, I’m feeling fine, I’m really well. I should start looking round for something.
Marek tugged her hair affectionately, as if he was showing something off to Paul, his role as the one who knows best. – I’d rather she just stays at home, look after herself, and make the place nice.
She didn’t seem to be doing all that well at making the place nice. But they had only just got out of bed. Perhaps things in the flat got better as the day wore on.
Paul asked Pia to come down to the gate with him when he left. He told her about her grandmother when they were out of sight of her front door, alone on one of the landings in the well of concrete stairs, with its whiff of cheap disinfectant. When she realised what he was saying, her mouth stretched in helpless, ugly crying. He thought how different she was from his other daughters. They seemed to have from their mother a finished, worldly awareness, like a gloss of complexity on their every gesture, on every detail of their appearance. Pia had grown up in the city, but she was raw and artless, with her thick fair hair like straw and big-knuckled hands. Her half-sisters loved her tenderly, perhaps because of this; they took great interest in her entry into grown-up life. Making an effort, she found a tissue in her sleeve and wiped her face.
– I’m all right now.
– I can’t leave you in this state. Won’t you come out with me, after all? We can buy a decent cup of coffee.
– It was just the shock, that’s all. Because I had no idea.
– We could hardly leave it as a message on your phone.
Could she authentically be so grief-stricken, over the death of an old woman she hadn’t visited for months? When she was a child she had wept bitterly over the deaths of her hamsters. Probably she was imagining this baby out of the same reservoir of ready emotion, as if it was a kitten or a doll for her to play with. He couldn’t persuade her to come out; they parted at the entrance to the block. At the last minute she clung onto him, pleading with him not to tell her mother. He couldn’t begin to imagine how Annelies would react if she knew the full story of her daughter’s situation. He quailed at the idea of involving her, or not involving her.
– Don’t tell her yet, please, just not yet. You promised you wouldn’t.
H ome from his London visit, Paul found that his routines, which had seemed satisfying enough before he left – the hours working in his study, the long walks, the round of picking up the children from the bus stop after school, the language classes for foreign undergraduates at the university – had hollowed themselves out in one convulsive movement. He was restless, he couldn’t sit at his computer. Elise was working on a set of voluptuously dainty Edwardian dining chairs; crowded on the cobbles in her workroom, they seemed to be at their own debauched party, broken up into gossiping groups tilted towards one another, their insides spilling out of rips in the filthy old purple velvet.
– What’s the matter with you? She frowned at him, putting down the metal claw she was using to lever out the tacks. There were streaks of sweaty dirt on her face, the air in the workroom was greasy with dust pent up in the chairs for a hundred years. – What happened in London? Didn’t they like your idea for the radio programme?
– It’s not that.
For the moment he wasn’t saying anything about seeing Pia, though he would have liked to hand the problem over and be free of it. When Annelies telephoned, he told her only that Becky had spoken to her, Pia sounded fine. She was living with friends.
– Then why won’t she see me, Paul? What did I do that was so terrible?
Paul was going to visit Pia in London again the following week. He would have to tell her that he must speak to her mother, he couldn’t hold back any longer.
On the drive into Cardiff to see Gerald, the city’s scrappy approaches seemed bleached and exposed in the flat sunlight: corrugated mail-order storage sheds and the back end of new housing estates, a new red-brick budget hotel. Sometimes Paul wished they lived in the city, and thought it was a mistake, their having chosen the countryside. Gerald’s flat was at the top of a tall Victorian house beside one of the city parks. All the heat in the house rose up to his attic and beat in through the slates on the roof; his windows were wide open, but it was still stifling. While Gerald brewed tea, Paul stood at the window looking out into the shady spacious top of a copper beech, one in an avenue planted along the side of the park. A tinkers’ lorry, on the lookout for scrap metal, cruised past in bottom gear, and a boy sang out ‘Any old iron’, riding standing up among the rusting fridges and cookers. Paul said it was the last of the old street-cries, resonant and poignant as a muezzin. Although Gerald said the tinkers cheated old ladies out of their money, he couldn’t spoil Paul’s mood – excited and impatient. He was full of emotions arising out of the painful complications of the past. From his vantage point at the window he half-expected to see a girl he’d known and been involved with, who’d lived round here, and used to walk in this park. He remembered her near-religious attitude to literature; he seemed to see her, striding out below him on the path under the trees – tall and serious, handsome, with slanting, doubting brown eyes. But probably she’d sold her house by now, and moved away.
Gerald sat cross-legged to drink his tea and roll up, using for a flat surface a book he was reading, balanced across his knees. It was about the Neoplatonists of the early Christian era, Plotinus and Porphyry. He explained an idea from the book – how, in its work of imagination, inventing forms, the human mind replicates or continues the work of the world soul, inventing forms in nature. Paul didn’t smoke much dope these days – Elise didn’t like him doing it, she said it made him boring and made him snore – but this afternoon he needed it. The sleepy heat and the smoking brought back the years between his first and second marriages, when he was teaching in the language school. When Paul had moved to Paris, Gerald had followed him. The patterns of sleep Paul had developed in those days had been ‘disastrous’, so Elise said; he’d only had part-time hours at the school, often he’d stayed up reading, or talking with the little crowd of his friends, until three or four in the morning.
While Gerald talked, Paul found himself thinking about Pia’s pregnancy, not simply as a difficulty and a disaster. He had a vision of how dumbfounding it was, Pia’s originating as a tiny folded form invisible inside her mother, and now inside her unfolded realised self, starting the same thing over; forms folded within forms. How different it was to be male, to feel the unfolding come to an end in your biological self, which could not be divided. The role of the male in this endless sequence was an act of faith, however definite the science. A Frenchman had said to him once that the man’s role in making a child was about as much as ‘this’ – he’d spat on the pavement.
This train of thought may have all been a consequence of the dope.
– Your eyes are rolled up in your head, Elise told him when he arrived home. – That stuff Gerald smokes now is too strong for you, you’re not used to it.
James Willis came looking for Paul one afternoon when Elise was out at a sale with Ruth, and the girls were at school. Paul had been getting himself lunch in the kitchen – hunting in the fridge for an end of pâté, desultorily reading the Guardian , anything rather than sitting down again at his computer – when the boy was suddenly in the doorway, stooping, worrying about his dirty boots on the mat. In the barn, it had been too dark for Paul to take him in properly, his hunched awkward height, the adolescent hormonal shock still in his face, lips swollen with it, eyes bleary, hands hanging heavy. He was long and pale; when he spoke he addressed his feet. There was a stud in his lip, Paul saw, like the one Pia had taken out.
James said he’d come with a message from his father, who wanted them to cut back the aspen poplars on the border between their places. Willis’s next-door field was planted this year with elephant grass for biofuel. Apparently Willis thought that, because of the trees, the harvester wouldn’t be able to turn closely enough at the end of the field.
– If you don’t have a chainsaw, Dad said, he’ll loan you one.
– You’re joking, Paul said. – Your dad’s crazy, he’s really crazy. Those trees aren’t in the way of anything. Have you even looked at them?
The boy shrugged. – I’m just saying what he said.
– Tell him he’s crazy. And tell him not to dare to touch those fucking trees. They’re on my land.
– He says not.
Willis sending the boy with this message was a cruelty in itself; he must resent his son’s attachment, however tenuous, to an enemy household. Paul invited him in, fetched beers out of the fridge. Warily James stood drinking at the table.
– Your father’s really wrong, you know, about those trees. Whether they’re on his land or mine. There’s plenty of room for the harvester to turn.
– It’s a big machine.
Paul went on to explain why the biofuel was a bad idea in the first place. He caught a glint in the boy’s eye, of derision no doubt, at Paul’s citified perspective, the idea that his father would care about the ethics of a crop one way or another. Paul told him he’d seen Pia. James already knew this, he and Pia must have spoken on the phone.
– Do you know about this man: Marek? Paul said, taking a chance. – What do you think about him? Who is he?
James tipped up his bottle, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. – She’s told me about him, that’s all.
– Do you think she’s safe? Should we trust him?
– It’s not my business.
– No? Aren’t you two friends?
– It’s her business.
– And the other thing? D’you know about that too?
He was visibly startled. – I didn’t think she was going to tell you yet.
– It didn’t need any telling. It was plain as day.
– Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.
No wonder Pia had chosen a man in preference to this boy with his burden of suffering youth, blushing, stumbling over his own feet on his way out of the house, pushing his fists deep in his pockets, forgetting even to thank Paul for the beer. She probably imagined that her own youth had been taken off her hands, that she had given herself over to someone who would know how to manage whatever happened. The Willis boys had always been awkward, not fitting in with the other kids in the village. They affected an American twang in their accents and they stuck together, mucking about on the expensive quad bikes their father bought them. The oldest had written off his first car before he left, driving it when drunk into a tree. James at least didn’t have his brothers’ veneer of showy sophistication.
Paul told Ruth’s brother about the Willises and the chainsaw; when he and Gerald walked over one evening for a pint at the pub in the village, Alun was at the bar. He laughed and said Willis was a nutter, but that if the trees were on Willis’s land, there wasn’t much Paul could do about it, a trim wouldn’t do them any harm. He was friendly, but Paul felt Alun always kept him at a deliberate distance, perhaps because of things Ruth told him, perhaps just because of what he would imagine was Paul’s type: English, opinionated, arrogant. He wouldn’t quite come out on Paul’s side against Willis.
Alun was small and broad-chested, handsome; he kept liquorice-coloured sheep on the hills and a small beef herd on the red soil in the better fields; they had a farm shop where his wife sold the fruit from their orchards. Although Paul and Ruth didn’t get on, Paul liked her brother’s decency and shyness; from the first when they’d moved down here he’d identified him with the landscape and the place, which was probably romantic. Gerald thought he romanticised. Gerald had also grown up on a farm, on the North Yorkshire moors. He had been grateful to leave it behind and didn’t have any particular thing about farmers, although it turned out – to Paul’s surprise – that he could talk to Alun in an easy way Paul couldn’t, mostly about money, money and machinery, how impossible it was for the hill farmers, the endless setbacks that seemed to make up the rhythm of their life. Now there was anxiety about the drought.
Paul really did have to go up to London the following week, to record an interval talk he’d written for Radio 3. In the late afternoon, after he’d finished, he made his way to Pia’s; he’d called to remind her he was coming, but she hadn’t answered. Pressing the button on the intercom on the forbidding exterior gate, he was relieved to hear the crackle of her voice responding, suspicious and uncertain.
– Pia, it’s Dad.
– Shit, Dad. I’m not ready. It’s not a good time.
At his exposed back, traffic roared around the island-block. This place really was his idea of hell: the remorseless, ceaseless pressure of vehicles travelling onwards to destinations that in the aggregate were absurd, each under its atomised separate compulsion, brought together in this filthy flow, poisoning the air with fumes and noise.
– But I’m here now. Let me in.
There was a pause; then resignation. – I’ll come down.
When she appeared she was in the same black cardigan as last time, over a pink nightshirt and slippers. Her face was pasty and she hadn’t brushed her hair, which was pulled out of its bunches and loose on her shoulders; he guessed she had come straight from bed. From under the nightdress her swollen belly poked assertively.
– I forgot you were coming today.
As he followed her up to the flat, something about the place elated him, even while he was intent on getting Pia out of it. He was bracing himself for encountering Marek again, reading him more deeply, for better or worse: when he realised there was no one home besides Pia, he was almost disappointed. She said they had gone out.
– They?
– Marek and Anna.
The television was switched on, inevitably. The place looked a bit better than last time: at least the spare bedding was folded in a pile on the floor, the blinds pulled halfway up. The smell of dope was pungent, though the windows were open. Perhaps Pia hadn’t been in bed, but tidying: in the kitchen there was crockery piled in a fresh bowl of soapy water, and while she waited for the kettle to boil to make tea, she did rinse a few plates and propped them on the draining board. Paul asked about her pregnancy, her appointment at the hospital: into her expression there came the same vagueness as last time. The doctors thought from the scan she was twenty-eight weeks, or something like that. Everything was fine.
– You see. I told you it was too late for a termination.
– And are you planning on keeping this baby? Or putting it up for adoption?
– I don’t know. We’ll see. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.
She said this as offhandedly as if she was choosing between subjects for her college course.
– Are you eating properly? Aren’t there vitamins and so on you’re supposed to take?
– Anna’s taking care of that.
– People are smoking in this flat. I’m sure you know how bad that is for a developing foetus.
– Oh, Dad.
– What?
– You smoked around me all the time when I was a kid. I used to beg and plead with you to stop.
– Did I? It’s not the same thing. Anyway, just because I was an idiot doesn’t mean you have to be one too.
Pia dressed in the bedroom while Paul drank his tea. She came out in a new stretch top she said Marek had bought her, grey with huge yellow flowers, pulled tightly across her stomach, showing it off, as was the fashion with pregnancy now. Then, sitting beside him on the sofa, she made up her face in deft accustomed movements, looking in a small hand-mirror, concentrating intently, putting on a surprising amount of stuff: colour on her skin to cover her blemishes, blue lines painted around her eyes, stiff blue on her lashes, colour on her lids, pale lipstick.
– What? she asked anxiously when she’d finished, putting bottles and tubes away in a zip bag. – Have I put on too much?
The mask of beauty painted on her face seemed precarious. When she stood up to brush her hair he was startled, as if there was someone new in the room between them. He imagined her days passing – sleeping late, tidying half-heartedly, dressing and painting her face, waiting for her lover to come home. When he asked if she wasn’t missing university work she shuddered, as if he’d reminded her of another life.
– God, no. I was so miserable there.
– It won’t be like this, he said, – if you have a baby. Getting up at three o’clock in the afternoon.
– You never trust that I will be good at anything.
He tried to say that this was not what he meant; he just didn’t want the baby to spoil her flight and bring her down to earth too soon. – And I have to tell your mother something. She’s out of her mind with worry, you can imagine.
– Tell her you’ve spoken to me and I’m all right. Tell her I’ll see her soon.
– Why won’t you see her? Just to put her mind at rest.
– It wouldn’t, would it? Her mind would be very much not at rest, if she had any idea what was going on. It would be hyperactive. You know her.
There was ignominy for Paul in keeping her secret, as if he was trying to score cheap triumphs over Annelies, fighting with her over their daughter’s confidence, where he hadn’t earned any rights, given his record. Pia’s resistance to her mother took him by surprise.
– She recognises you’re an adult, you’re free to choose what you want.
Tugging the brush through her hair, Pia looked round from the mirror. – This is what I want. And I’ll see her, but not yet.
As soon as Marek and Anna were in the flat, Paul saw that Anna was a force just as her brother was, and that Pia had been drawn to both of them, not just the man. Both moved with quick, contemptuous energy, crowding the place; Paul recognised that they were powerful, even if he wasn’t sure he liked them, and couldn’t understand yet what their link was to his daughter, or whether it was safe for her. Marek greeted Pia with the same gesture as last time, tugging affectionately at her hair; Pia slid into a daze of submission in his presence. In the flowered top, with her face painted, Paul could see how her languid fairness, freighted with the pregnancy, might be attractive.
Anna’s jeans and white T-shirt were moulded tightly to her slight figure: she probably wasn’t much older than Pia, but everything about her seemed finished and hardened. Her straight hair, dyed red-brown, was chopped off at her shoulders; her narrow face was handsome, boyish, with fine bruise-coloured skin under her eyes and a dark mole on one cheek. When they were introduced, Paul thought he might have known, from touching her hand alone, that she wasn’t British: under the fine-grained skin he seemed to feel lighter bones, a more delicate mechanism for movement. Her nails were painted with black varnish, there were nicotine stains on her fingers. Anna began scolding Pia: had she eaten properly? She was supposed to eat breakfast and lunch too. – What time did you get out of bed? Don’t sleep too much: you need exercise.
Pia defended herself half-heartedly, enjoying the fuss made of her.
– It’s a meeting of the family, isn’t it? Marek brought a bottle of clear spirits from the fridge in the kitchen, and three small glasses. – The new family. It’s good that we get together.
– Pretty good family, said Anna, – with no home to go to.
– Anna gets fed up with us, her brother said tolerantly. – Messing up all her nice, tidy space.
– I’m not surprised, Paul said. – It’s a small flat.
– Soon, soon, we’ll get a bigger one. We’ll be out from your hair, Anna, then you will miss us.
Pia said she was going back to work at the café, that would bring in some money. They needed more money than that, teased Marek affectionately, much more. The slivovitz, which Pia didn’t drink, was deliciously ice-cold in this room overheated by the low sun striking in through the windows. Paul had come to the flat intending to coax Pia home, at least for a while, to think things over; but he felt himself being drawn farther into her life here, without getting any of the explanations he ought to be asking for. No one seemed to think anything needed explaining. He had no idea whether the possibilities Marek and Anna discussed animatedly were realistic. They said they had been looking for shop premises, although they also seemed to have been approaching shopkeepers to supply them with goods. Marek asked Paul to explain leasehold, which he wasn’t able to, not knowing how it worked in any detail. Were these two really going to make money, and look after Pia? Both of them spoke English well, but sometimes they lapsed into Polish, and then Paul found himself looking from one to the other as if he was watching a film without subtitles, which might make sense if only he concentrated hard enough. What would Annelies think of him, seduced like this – or Elise? Marek refilled Paul’s glass several times.
Anna said she wanted to develop her own small business, an outlet for friends who made jewellery: ‘very original, good quality’. Lifting her hair, she showed Paul silver earrings, little jagged lightning strokes, set with tiny stones, the sort of thing you could buy at any market stall. With a qualm, Paul wondered if they were imagining he had money, calculating he might help them with their projects. For all he knew, Marek could be married, or at least have other women at home in Poland. He even asked himself once whether Anna was really Marek’s sister: but there was a trick of likeness between them, not obvious but unmistakable when you’d seen it, in how their dark eyes were set in their skin, so that their awareness seemed gathered behind their faces, looking out.
When he asked, they told him they came from Lodz, but didn’t seem interested in talking about their home. Paul had been twice to Poland, long ago, but his idea of it mostly came from the poets he had read. These two wouldn’t want him dragging out all those old associations, that old junk, they wouldn’t want to know he’d once worn a Solidarność badge to school. They were too young to remember life in the old Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, and he didn’t know much about life in the new one. For the moment anyway they were Londoners, absorbed in that, more at home in the metropolis than he was. When he eventually left the flat, remembering his train, he managed to pull Pia half outside the front door, onto the walkway. Probably she thought that he was drunk.
– You have to promise me something, he said in a low voice, urgently. – If they ask you to do anything you don’t like, you will call me straight away, won’t you?
He saw her eyes widen under their blue-painted lids. – I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. – Do you mean drugs?
– Whatever. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
He wasn’t clear himself about precisely what he feared, and was half-ashamed of where such imaginings came from. Was it only because the man Pia had chosen was a foreigner?
She shook off his hand from her arm, to go back inside. – I told you. This is what I want.
E lise’s bedtime routine was intimately known to him: the yawns, the cleanser, the glass of water she only rarely touched, the pillow she liked to drag under her cheek, her alarm clock set inexorably for the following morning. One new detail was the glasses she had begun to need to read with. These gave Paul mixed feelings: on the one hand, a chill from the middle age into which she advanced always just a little ahead of him; on the other, a frisson of affection, making him think of a character in one of those mid-period Bergman movies, women struggling to take possession of themselves, their past and sexuality. Was that what Elise was doing? She kept a pile of modern novels by her bed that he rarely looked into; they seemed to him pretty much interchangeable – what people called ‘women’s fiction’. The trouble with cohabitation seemed to be that you were gripped in some struggle for vindication so convoluted that you couldn’t afford to imagine things impartially from the other one’s centre.
She would abandon reading with a little sigh, smiling apologetically, but giving out a hum of sensuous submission as she slipped under into sleep, leaving him high and dry, beached in her wake. It was too hot these nights to wrap himself around her from behind; her breasts, if he put his hand on them, seemed scalding; she brushed him away without even waking properly, murmuring a protest. Curled with his back to her at the other edge of the bed, he’d taken to trying to get to sleep by going round and round in his mind the rooms of his childhood home, remembering their obscure corners, which had once seemed banal in their ultra-familiarity and now held the deepest mystery for him. There was no one else to remember them. He inventoried drawers and cupboards: the hairgrips and elastic bands and dust, the crumbling bath cubes, books half full of Green Shield savings stamps. Pins and needles were stuck into shiny paper in a folded card shaped as a flower basket. An old cut-throat razor, with a bone handle, hung around for years after his father had taken to using an electric one. The house itself was gone now, he’d looked for it on Google Earth and, although most of the road still stood, there was a gap where they must have demolished four or five of those mean houses, built shoddily of compressed ash only sixty years ago, as the answer to Birmingham’s inner-city slum problem. He had hated the place, but the discovery of its non-existence was a blow, as if he’d been cheated of something.
One night he woke, groaning loudly, out of a nightmare that his mother was dying in hospital, alone, strapped to her sheet in a bed like a metal cot with bars, twitching in violent convulsions, tubes and monitors bristling all over her body. His groaning woke Elise too.
– It won’t have been like that, she reassured him, putting her arms around him, cradling him. – They know how to do it, how to ease them out with morphine, making them as comfortable as they can. When Dad was dying the nurses knew just how to prop him up, moisten his lips and hold his hand and speak to him. They know these things.
He didn’t believe her, but he was grateful and hungry for her comforting, which turned into love-making, affectionate and familiar. Into that, taking Paul by surprise, came images of the Polish girl: her air of tough disdain, the mole on her cheek, her sloe-dark eyes, young breasts under her tight T-shirt. He imagined the girl carried away in sexual excitement, breaking out in pleading exclamations in her language that he couldn’t understand: it was a rough, slightly degrading scene, as if he was punishing her, or proving something. It had not even occurred to him, all the time he was in Anna’s real presence, that anything like this was at work in him, saving itself for later. The middle-aged cliché shamed him, his fantasising about one of his own daughter’s friends, probably not much older than Pia was herself. He tried to conjure up instead the girl from the past, the one he’d seemed to see from Gerald’s window – but she eluded him, her features were blurred.
Paul sat to watch nature programmes with the girls in the little cubbyhole where they kept the television, a room without a window between the hallway and the kitchen; they curled up together on an old broken-backed sofa. If Joni wasn’t interested in the programme she stretched herself along the top of the sofa back, biting her comfort blanket and scuffing with her stretched-up foot along the wall, kicking at the edge of a poster for a Lucian Freud exhibition. Becky was driven to distraction by her sister’s insouciance; they would fight after she had been patient for long ages, rolling over one another, squealing and hissing and pinching. Separating them, Paul felt their heat, intense and intimate as cubs in a den.
Some of these programmes distressed him, with their casually apocalyptic language. He wanted to protect the girls from hearing that all the beauty of the world was spoiling, its precious places being built over or cut down, its animal life poisoned with pollution. The girls seemed sanguine enough, taking it all in. Perhaps they were hardened through over-exposure; but perhaps a terrible nihilism was being implanted in them, to lie in wait for when they were adult and would understand how to despair. Paul could remember learning in a geography lesson at school about the layered living of the equatorial forest – his imagination had soared at the idea of animals that spent their entire lives in its canopy, never needing to come down to ground level. He had not wanted particularly to travel to the forest and see for himself; the knowledge that it existed was like a reserve in his spirit, a guarantee that spacious beauty existed somewhere.
– I shouldn’t worry about it, Elise said. – They seem to cope all right. Isn’t education the best hope for change? This generation ought to grow up passionate environmentalists. The programmes try not to be gloomy, but they have to tell the truth to the children, don’t they? You couldn’t want to deceive them that everything was all right.
– I’m afraid it makes them helpless. You need such complex contexts, to grapple with the information they’re getting.
– Do you? It seems straightforward enough to me. Thank goodness things aren’t all left up to the people who understand the complex contexts. If it was up to them, perhaps nothing would ever get done.
Gerald often ate with them in the evenings. Elise didn’t mind having him there as long as it wasn’t a dinner party. In fact she fussed over him, cooking the things he said he liked, teasing him about how he didn’t look after himself properly. Paul had told her about the Scotch eggs and hummus. – Do you ever clean anything? she asked. – Gerald, have you ever cleaned your lavatory? The girls were gloating and giggling, enjoying the game. Gerald said he had bought some toilet cleanser once, and sometimes squirted it in. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Paul was sure he was exaggerating, playing along with their joke; he didn’t remember the toilet being so very bad. Gerald told them he had a theory, that after a certain point the rooms never got any dirtier: they didn’t get cleaner, but they didn’t get any worse.
Elise pretended to be appalled. – Won’t you let me come round and clean up for you? It will only take a couple of hours. I won’t touch any of your precious books, I promise.
It was a joke, but Paul saw with surprise that she half-meant it, too. She didn’t care about the cleaning, but she was intrigued by the idea of Gerald’s flat, where she’d never been, and she wanted to get a look inside it. Joni wrapped her skinny arms around Gerald’s knees, wheedling. – We want to come, we want to come to your smelly flat!
Gerald said he would love to invite her over for tea, he’d get in cake and crumpets specially. – As long as you’re not afraid of the spiders.
– Spiders? No… Joni was hesitant. – Are they big ones?
– How about bats?
– He hasn’t! Becky squealed delightedly, not certain.
– Or cockroaches?
He convinced them that he lived with a menagerie of animals, confessing to Paul and Elise later that the cockroaches were for real. After dinner he helped Elise water the vegetables: he was strong as an ox, could easily carry two full watering cans. Paul thought of him when he was a boy, baling out hay from the back of a tractor trailer in winter, or trimming the overgrowth of their sheep’s feet with a paring knife. He had told Paul he used to think up the solutions to maths problems while he worked. To save water, Elise had fixed up a barrel that collected waste from the kitchen sink and the bathroom, to reuse on the garden; after a few trips with the cans, Gerald put in a hose running from the water butt to the vegetable patch. She was delighted with him. They all three sat out with chinking glasses of gin and tonic in the late sunshine, when the chores were done and Becky and Joni were feeding the goats.
– Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Gerald? Elise asked.
– It’s probably the cockroaches.
– No, seriously. Although I don’t suppose the cockroaches help. What happened to Katherine? She was nice.
– She was nice. Gerald was smoking surreptitiously, holding the spliff between drags out of sight under his deckchair, so the girls wouldn’t spot it.
– And Martine, the one from Heidelberg. She was nice too.
– Went back to Heidelberg.
Elise laughed as if he was impossible, but also as if it gratified her, that he wouldn’t be drawn into making much of those girls, giving anything away.
– Why doesn’t he stay the night ever? she asked Paul when Gerald had gone to get his train. – It must be awful for him, going back to that dismal flat.
– It isn’t dismal. It’s how he likes it. He likes to keep his own hours, read as late as he wants, make tea in the middle of the night if he wants to.
– He could do that here, we wouldn’t mind.
Gerald had told Paul once that he got panicky in a place where other people were asleep – he had a problem with imagining their breathing or something. This must be part of the story with the girlfriends. If you lived alone for too long, the effort of breaking all your forms of life, to recast them with someone else, might be just too tremendous. Those girls, Katherine and the others, were shaken when they came back from throwing themselves at Gerald with such innocent enthusiasm. There was a cruelty in the blank side he turned to them, when he needed to cut them out.
– It’s restful working alongside him, Elise said. – At first it feels funny not saying anything, then you settle into it. I used to think he wouldn’t talk to me because I wasn’t intellectual.
Paul lied that he needed to go up to London again, to see his agent. He winced at the lie – Elise hadn’t absolved him yet, over the lies he’d told at the time he was seeing that girl in Cardiff – but at least it wasn’t for his own advantage, only Pia’s. Without warning Pia he was coming, he went straight to the flat. All the way there, on the train looking out at the yellowing landscape, and then on the Underground, he was rehearsing how he would persuade his daughter to come home with him. She ought to be looking after herself in her pregnancy, she ought to think responsibly about the future, she ought to be with her family who would love and cherish her best. He might be able to persuade her to pack a bag and leave with him there and then: he would take her home to Annelies, or back with him to Tre Rhiw, whichever she wanted. The idea of restoring her triumphantly made him emotional. His mission sealed him apart from the crowds around him in the Underground, their babble of languages silenced as they swayed together in the heat, strap-hanging, bodies indifferently intimate, faces closed against curiosity.
Arriving at the block, he buzzed the entry phone. Someone seemed to pick up in the flat, but when he spoke into it no one answered, and after a moment it cut off. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of this when he was on his way: that there might be no one at home, or no one who wanted to see him. He rang again, and this time no one picked up. Pia’s mobile was turned off when he tried it. It was absurd that he hadn’t prepared for this eventuality; now he was at a loss. He read the paper for an hour in a dubious café somewhere off Pentonville Road, then tried the mobile and the entry phone again. He made efforts to persuade the concierge to let him in. ‘I’m sure they’re at home. Perhaps the phone isn’t working.’ The concierge tried for himself. ‘It working. No one in the place.’
Paul spent the day in the British Library, returning to the block in the evening as the sun dropped and the brilliant daylight thickened and dimmed. As he approached he tried to work out which flat was Anna’s: one on the second floor with its lights on had its blinds skewed at angles halfway up the windows in a sequence he seemed to recognise, but he wasn’t sure it was in the right relationship to where the entrance was, or to the roof garden, whose dead stubble poked above a parapet, a fringe outlined against a sky of deepening royal blue. Again, no one picked up when he tried the entry phone. The traffic roared behind him, a broad river devilish in its night-blare, streams of red and white lights. He crossed to look up from the other side of the road at the lit-up flat. Someone was moving about in there, passing and repassing behind the blinds as if they were tidying up, or getting dressed to go out. If this was the right flat, it could be Pia; but he couldn’t attach his feeling to that shadow, in case it was only a stranger’s. Or it could be Anna, or her brother. It could have been the shadow of a slight young man.
Paul had forgotten about rescuing Pia; instead he only felt shut out from wherever she was, whatever they were doing. He hadn’t been bitten by this anxiety for years, he thought he’d left it behind him with his youth: wanting to be part of something happening, and feeling excluded. He didn’t want to go home from here to the quiet of the country. And yet nothing was happening. No one went into the block of flats, or came out of it, while he watched.
Going to Annelies’s house seemed preferable to catching the train home; he thought he would tell her finally about Pia. It was about time. Perhaps if she hadn’t eaten, he would take her out to one of the Greek places in Green Lanes road. When he arrived, though, she was in the middle of some kind of social occasion. He could smell food as soon as she opened the front door, and hear women’s voices and laughter from the room where she had her dining table. He was sorry when he saw what Annelies thought it meant, his turning up unannounced on her doorstep: she braced herself, as if for some dreadful assault.
– It’s all right, he reassured her. – Don’t worry, everything’s fine. If you’ve got people here I won’t come in, I’ll ring you tomorrow.
– You have news of Pia?
– Not bad news, nothing to worry about.
– Paul! You think I can wait? You’ve seen her?
She pulled him into the little front room that was empty, but tidied ready for her guests to move into later, lamps lit, flowers on a table. There were red and white gingham cushions and a striped rug, framed photographs of Pia were on the mantelpiece.
– What? What news?
Paul told her Pia was pregnant, that he had seen this for himself. He said she was living with the man who was the father of the child. For some reason he spoke as if he hadn’t met Marek, and didn’t mention that he was Polish or say anything about his sister.
– How do you know all this? When did you see her? Today?
– Not today. Last week. But she didn’t want me to tell you yet.
– You’ve known since last week that my daughter is pregnant, and you haven’t told me?
– I was afraid that if I broke my promise we’d lose her again, she’d go out of contact.
– OK, Paul. This isn’t the end of the world. Our GP is Pia’s old friend, he understands everything, we can get her in somewhere straight away, private if it’s quicker. Who is this man, anyway? You know where she’s living?
The crisis, and the idea that Paul had had access to Pia, roused Annelies to defend herself against his way of seeing things, to override it. Her stocky body and stiff wiry curls, her lowered head and shoulders hunched in tension, made him think of a guard dog, loyal to its idea.
– She wants to have the baby. She says it’s too late for a termination.
– This is a joke, right?
The voices in the next room had fallen quiet. A couple of women from the party peered round the door, asking if Annelies was all right, as if she might be at some risk from Paul. Annelies said that her daughter was pregnant, and Paul wouldn’t tell her where she was. Trying to convince her that their link with Pia was too tenuous to risk breaking it, he imagined that all these women, whoever they were – Annelies’s work colleagues or her knitting group or book club – were ganged up against him.
– Who is this man she’s with? What does he want with my daughter?
Paul found himself claiming that Pia and Marek loved one another. As soon as they’d come out of his mouth, he couldn’t believe he’d said the words. Annelies’s contempt was bruising. – You think that makes any difference to anything? What kind of love, if she doesn’t want to tell her mother? Just give me her address. Let me go to her. I beg you. Please.
One of the women suggested that if Pia was experimenting with her freedom, it might be best to respect that. Annelies pushed the idea away as if she was brushing off cobwebs. Paul wasn’t sure why he stuck it out so determinedly, refusing to tell her where Pia was staying. Perhaps he was afraid of her blundering into a situation more risky than he’d quite let her know. Because of her job, she was expert in the conditions migrant workers sometimes had to live in, and in itself the flat was not too bad. But she would react with passion against the mice and the mess and the dope, and Pia getting up in the middle of the afternoon, and the three of them spinning out improbable plans for the future, improvising recklessly.
He told Elise, the next day, as much as he’d told Annelies.
– You’ll have to give her the address, Elise said.
– Then Pia will refuse to see either of us.
– It’s her daughter, Paul! Imagine how I’d feel if it was Becky or Joni. I’d never, ever forgive you for holding that back from me.
– But Pia’s twenty.
– That’s not your reason. You’re up to something. I thought you were up to something, all those trips to London. I thought it might be a girl, and then it turns out just to be Pia. Pia, pregnant.
L ater that week, Paul woke in the morning to the whine and shriek of a saw, and the burned smell of cut wood floating in at the open window. Pulling on his dressing gown, he ran downstairs and outside to find that Willis had the first of the aspens half down already, in a blare of sawdust startling as blood, petrol fumes from the saw thick in the air. James was with him. Elise in her kimono was already out there; she had abandoned the girls at the breakfast table and now they were hovering in tears at the house door. She was shrieking at Willis, her usual aloofness trampled in her desperation. Paul saw in Willis’s expression – filtered through a flirting, quivering fan of the leaves of the murdered and half-fallen tree – that this was exactly what he was cutting down the aspen for: to have the pair of them out in their nightclothes, screaming at him absurdly across a wall on a fine morning, exposed as idly breakfasting while working men sweated. It was as if he were an exorcist and had forced them to appear in their true form at last.
This was an outrage, they ranted. The aspens didn’t belong to him, they were on Tre Rhiw land (this was debatable, it wasn’t clear from the deeds), it was illegal for him to touch them without their permission, which they would never give. They would sue, they would get an injunction. And anyway, why was he cutting them down in the first place? Willis made his claim that the trees were getting in the way of the farm machinery. – Bullshit, said Paul. – It’s pure fucking aggressive vandalism, that’s what it is.
James meanwhile leaned on the saw, smiling into the grass and sawdust around his feet, sharing the joke of it all with himself.
– But don’t you think these trees are beautiful? asked Elise rashly.
– Trees are just trees, said Willis.
He agreed eventually, reluctantly, to leave the rest of them at least for this one day: probably only because he wasn’t really sure either who owned them. When Paul came back from dropping the girls at the bus pick-up, Elise was still in her kimono at the kitchen table, nursing her cold coffee. He was surprised to see she had been crying; she didn’t often cry. Soggy tissue was wadded in her palm.
– They belong here and we don’t, she said. – No matter how long we live here.
– He doesn’t belong here, El. He’s English, he comes from outside. You told me yourself, he isn’t popular. The other farmers in the village aren’t like him: they love this land. And what he’s doing is a mistake, even in farming terms: the trees are windbreaks. The aspen suckers help consolidate the soil. He doesn’t need to cut them: he’s only doing it to get at us.
– But behind it, the reason is real: why he hates us and resents us. He works the land; what are we? We’re nothing, we’re only playing here. This place where he earns his living is only our pleasure ground. That’s what he knows, he knows we feel it. If we live here all our lives, we can’t earn that out.
Paul was furious at her fatalism because it was something he was susceptible to himself. – I’m not going to feel guilty, he insisted. – Aren’t we working here? Who says that it’s his kind of work, mostly poisoning and destroying wildlife habitat, that earns the right to cut down the trees? We taxpayers subsidise farmers like him, to be custodians of the countryside. I’m phoning a solicitor, to get an injunction against him.
– Please don’t. Don’t make this more horrible than it has to be. I don’t want to get in a feud with them. We can plant new trees. We’ll put in a new row, on our side of the wall. Ruth says he wants to make enemies of us.
– What’s Ruth got to do with this? Did you call her while I was out?
– She belongs to this place, she understands how things work here. We have to respect these country people. Don’t forget, it isn’t only Willis who’s English.
– I resent you bringing Ruth into something that only concerns us.
They rowed as they hadn’t done for a long time, their quarrel degenerating almost at once into an ancient idiotic riff over who did most in the house, who was working the hardest, who was having the worst time. While they argued Elise was clearing the breakfast things from the table, scraping Rice Krispies savagely into the compost bin, dashing leftover cold tea into the sink. No one had properly finished eating or drinking that morning. Paul felt excitement mounting, a kind of release. They got onto the dangerous subject of Elise’s family. He said he had never been able to work out what her mother used to do all day, apart from choosing clothes and ordering servants about.
– Don’t be ridiculous, we didn’t have ‘servants’, not the way you make it sound. Only while we were in Washington.
He claimed there was something unhealthy in how her family hung on to trunks full of papers: diaries and memoirs, souvenirs of dogs and horses, photographs of the houses they had lived in, home movies. Her sisters had hours of taped recordings of their parents reminiscing.
– Who are you keeping it for? Whoever d’you think will be interested?
– I’m shocked, she said. – When I told you about those tapes, I never dreamed you were thinking all this horrible stuff.
– I couldn’t care less about the tapes. But you’ve got to admit, your family carries a lot of heavy baggage.
– No: it’s just meanness in you. Something miserable, that wants to shrivel up what other people care about. Does the meanness come from your background, did you get it from your parents? Are you jealous, of all the memories we have?
– I can’t believe you’ve actually used that word: ‘background’. What are you, my fucking social worker?
– Don’t you dare bring politics into this.
Willis would have been gratified to hear them, Paul thought. Probably this was exactly how he imagined the intimate life of people like them, degraded because they had too much time to indulge themselves with thinking.
Elise said she had work to do, and went off to the barn. Paul stood for a while in the cramped tiny bedroom upstairs. The duvet was still heaped on the bed where he’d thrown it off when he heard the saw. Rage at Elise and rage at Willis’s assault on the tree were mixed painfully together. The bedroom seemed oppressively feminine, the dressing table with its bottles of perfume and cosmetics, the muslin curtains at the windows, the brass bed frame, the pink-striped duvet cover. How had he arrived at submitting to all this? Downstairs, Elise would be finishing the last of the little dining chairs. She had cut the fabric so that at the centre of each seat there was a single rose, black against a dark pink background. Ruth had found a buyer for the whole set of twelve, and someone wanted pictures of them for a lifestyle magazine, which would be good for business. Sometimes, preparing for one of these magazine photographs, Elise transformed one of the rooms in Tre Rhiw, painting its walls a different colour, purple or pink or green, bringing in furniture from the barn where it was waiting to be sold, whipping up new curtains on her machine. She was paid extra for all this. The hems on the curtains would only be pinned or roughly tacked, as if for a stage set, and she wouldn’t bother painting behind corner cupboards or a sofa. This set would become the frame of their real lives for months afterwards, until it was all changed for a new shoot.
Paul threw some clothes in a bag with a couple of books, put his passport out of long habit in his back pocket, his laptop in its carrying case, then left the house the front way, walking to the station on the road rather than using the path through the garden and along the river, so that Elise couldn’t see him go from her workroom. The raw gap of the aspen’s absence in the sky was a pulse of shock, a murder scene: its felled slender length stretched out along the red earth, new coppery-pale leaves still trembling and sprightly, its death not having reached them yet through the slow sap-channels. Should he have stayed, to phone the solicitors? But Elise was against him doing that anyway. He told himself it was futile to worry about a few trees, when the extreme weather this year was so full of signs of disaster. They were all of them sleepwalking to the edge of a great pit, like spoiled trusting children, believing they would always be safe, be comfortable.
On the train he was devoured inexplicably by the same excitement as on the two occasions he had pursued other women, since he’d been with Elise. Elise only knew about one of these, the last one – the Welsh one, the park girl. He hadn’t done anything of that sort for three years, was not planning on it now, but he couldn’t read his book; his heart raced uncomfortably. While the train crawled, scarcely advancing, through the outer London suburbs, he took in the complicated man-made wilderness around the track with intensity, as if it had some message of freedom for him: black-painted walls chalked with white numbers and festooned with swags of wiring, willowherb and buddleia flourishing in the dirt, a padlocked corrugated-iron shed, door ripped off its hinges. The beauty of the massive old stonework and rusted ancient machinery roused a nostalgia sharp as a knife for the old world of industrial work that his parents had belonged to.
There were various friends who wouldn’t mind putting him up for a night or two, but he didn’t want to see them yet: instead he went straight to the flat where Pia was staying. He told himself this was only a postponement, not a destination. All the way there, he was borne up by the conviction that today his luck was in, he would find them at home, even though when he last spoke to Pia, a few days ago, she had been at work. In the background behind her voice he had heard the noises of a café, the rattle of crockery and chatter. He had rung her to let her know that he’d told Annelies about at least part of the situation she was in. – I know, Pia had said. – She called me. She went fairly ballistic, like I knew she would. She tried to be calm at first, then she lost it. It’s all right. It’s better she starts getting used to the idea.
It was Marek’s sister who picked up the entry phone. When he said he was Paul, she sounded blank.
– Pia’s father.
– Oh, Pia’s not here.
– Can I come in? I’d like to talk to you.
After a moment’s hesitation she buzzed him in, and he found his own way up to the flat. The girl was waiting, holding the door open for him. At first he thought she was not as attractive as he had remembered. She was wearing jeans again, and a sleeveless T-shirt with the logo of an athletics team from some American university. One of her front teeth was cracked and discoloured, she was really very thin; he wondered again about drugs. Inside, she offered him a cigarette, and he enjoyed pulling the smoke down into his lungs. She perched cross-legged, lithe, at one end of the sofa.
– I’m in London for a few days, Paul explained.
– You want to stay here?
It was what he wanted, though he hadn’t known that until she offered it. But there was surely no room; in fact the flat seemed more cramped even than the last time he’d been in it, because boxes that must be something to do with Marek’s import venture were stacked up everywhere against the walls. The Polish writing gave him no clue as to what was inside. Was Anna imagining that while she slept on the sofa, Paul would stretch out beside her on the floor? He remembered his dream about her.
– It’s easy. I stay with my boyfriend.
It didn’t matter if she had a boyfriend, it was better. He had never imagined anything else. – I’d like to stay. Only for a couple of days.
– OK, it’s fine. You can be close to Pia.
Anna wasn’t beautiful exactly, but her movements were sinuous and fierce at once; nothing in her was made coarsely, her wrists and the collar bones visible under her loose shirt fine as porcelain, the beauty spot on her cheek precise as a mark on the mask of one of those nocturnal animals, a lemur or a loris. She explained that she couldn’t give him a key to the flat. The keys were given out by the council, only to tenants named in the agreement; it wasn’t possible to get them copied. He’d have to call, to make sure someone was there to let him in.
– They watch us coming and going, she said. – We don’t know if they will report us to the council, that Marek and Pia are living here. Maybe we’ll get turned out: who cares? Soon, we’ll be getting a better place.
Anna said Marek was looking for a lock-up to rent, to store the boxes. There had been more problems with the concierge about these. Apparently there were biscuits inside, and Lech beer and jam; Anna said they had got a ‘very good deal’. While they were waiting for their business to take off, she was working again at the café, along with Pia; he had only caught her at home because this was her afternoon off. Paul asked whether her boyfriend was Polish; he wasn’t, he was Australian, he sold computer software to the retail industry, he did a lot of work in Northern Ireland. – Belfast is a nice place, she said. – Maybe I’m thinking about moving there.
Paul had been like this when he was young: always drawn on by news from elsewhere, always wanting to be beginning again in a new place. But then he had changed his mind, and had wanted to be rooted instead.
He had to use the bathroom. The door hadn’t been fixed back on its hinges yet: he tried to pee as noiselessly as possible. Washing his hands, he grimaced at himself in the mirror. When he was a boy he had been pretty, he had had to fight off the interest of certain teachers. Now he was a couple of stone heavier, the flesh of his face had thickened and darkened, his hair had gradually been leached of its colour. Who knew how old he seemed to Anna? And yet it was a fact, it had almost a biological rightness, that men of his age often partnered with girls of her age.
He went out in the afternoon and walked around the streets. He had imagined himself getting away from home to concentrate with a new and cleaner passion on his writing, but now he hardly thought about it, as if he had left it behind in another life. He walked among the crowds and down the side roads until he was tired, bought smuggled cigarettes from a street vendor, then stopped at a bar in Upper Street that had tables on the pavement and read the newspaper over a couple of beers. When he called Elise, she wouldn’t pick up. He left a message, saying he was staying with his old friends Stella and John, he would be home in a few days. Stella was his BBC contact. The lie felt bland in his mouth, he shed it effortlessly.
T he days he stayed in the flat slipped into weeks. The first night, getting ready for bed in that tiny living room, it had seemed impossible; he had thought he would have to leave the next morning. He would never be able to sleep here. Pia said it was ‘weird’ having him stay. He could hear them undressing in the room next door, his daughter and this stranger who might or might not be good for her: they opened drawers, bumped furniture, communicated in intimate low voices that were only just uninterpretable. The plasterboard walls were a perfunctory divide, as if really they all slept promiscuously together, exposed to the sky. It never got dark: light and noise streamed in from the street outside. The traffic ploughed unendingly, only easing off somewhat towards morning. In contrast to this, his bed in Tre Rhiw was a den burrowed deep in the earth.
As he got used to the noise over the nights that followed, he began to imagine it was a tide, and that in the small hours the block slipped its moorings, floating out. Pulling the duvet over his head, he smelled on it the tang of Anna’s sweat, her musky perfume. He thought he would never sleep, and then night after night fell into hours of velvety oblivion, waking at three or four in the morning to the trucks outside and the sodium light, not knowing where he was, excited and afraid. Once, the people next door put on loud music suddenly at dawn: probably they’d arrived back from a party they didn’t want to be over. Marek came out without hesitation from the bedroom, buttoning his jeans as he went. They heard him pounding with his fist on the neighbours’ door, not even bothering to try the bell. Then there was shouting, then silence. There was never any trouble from them again.
On the whole the neighbours in the block weren’t bad, Pia said. They were pretty quiet. One tenant upstairs apparently had ‘mental problems’, as she put it. Mostly he was OK, as long as he was taking his medication, but he had twice left the tap running in his sink with the plug in, and water had poured down into their flat below. If confronted, he got argumentative and violent: they had the number of his social worker to call in an emergency. Marek said it was pointless, people like him being allowed out into the community, to spoil things for everyone else. – If he doesn’t want to look after himself, why should we? Paul argued about the cruelty and futility of the old asylum system. He said society had a duty of care towards its weaker members.
– You’ve seen him? Marek asked. – He’s not so weak.
In fact, the schizophrenic was a huge man, with broad podgy shoulders and waist-length ginger hair, benign-seeming enough when Paul met him a couple of times on the stairs. Apparently he had bought his flat when the right-to-buy scheme was still operative, so the council couldn’t move him anywhere. Marek didn’t mind Paul arguing with him. He would listen to him attentively, almost fondly; somehow this had to do with his feelings for him as Pia’s father, as if their relationship through her pregnancy required him to treat Paul with special consideration, conciliation. He tore open one of the boxes and got out a bottle of vodka flavoured with something he didn’t know how to translate; Paul worked out from a picture on the label that they must be rowan berries. Pouring, Marek would patiently explain again how Paul was wrong, how if you were too soft with people they didn’t thank you for it, but turned on you in the long run, how if your welfare system was too generous it would only attract a whole underclass of criminals and no-goods, waiting to take advantage.
– I myself will take advantage of it, he said disarmingly, – if you allow me. You must not allow me.
The conventional things Marek said, and his doctrine that could have come straight out of the tabloids, somehow weren’t alienating, in the stream of his good nature and boundless energy. He talked about how difficult things would be when the baby was born, but Paul knew he didn’t believe this really, his confidence in himself was unfaltering. Whatever Marek said seemed protected behind a habitual humorous irony. His curiosity was restless, he was a repository of information, he picked up quickly whatever he wanted to learn (he had found out all about leasehold, for instance, since he last saw Paul, and was keenly interested in the regeneration work going on at King’s Cross).
It was only when Paul had been in the flat for several days that he took in that there were no books in it, none, apart from a tatty dictionary and a couple of recipe books. There were DVDs, most of them Hollywood, along with a few Polish films that looked like thrillers – no Kieslowski or Wadja. He had always had a superstitious fear of being shut up somewhere without books; now that it had happened he hadn’t even consciously noticed. Long ago, when he was a student and went home for the summer to work in the brewery, he had built his books almost into a rampart in his bedroom, against the bookless house. Staying over with Pia, he didn’t care. He had brought something with him from Tre Rhiw to read on the train, but hadn’t opened it. Nor had he unzipped the bag with his laptop in it.
Pia got up early in the mornings to go to the café. Paul buried his face deeper in the sofa cushions while she stepped around in the chaos in the living room, finding the things she needed for work. She was light on her feet in spite of the pregnancy. He was aware of her making breakfast obediently in the kitchenette, because Anna insisted she must eat it. Usually Marek went out not long after Pia. When they were both gone and the door pulled shut behind them, the return of stillness in the flat was a guilty luxury into which Paul sank, chasing the tail end of dreams that seemed exceptionally vivid and important. He got to know the way the light advanced across the floor of the flat, split into laths by the blinds, the day’s noise and heat building in the room until he couldn’t ignore them. Sometimes when he was dressed he made efforts to tidy the place, not only stowing his bedding in the bedroom, but attacking whatever mess was left in the kitchen from the night before, soaking pans and rinsing plates. It never looked very different when he’d finished. Even with the windows as wide open as they would go, it was always hot, there was always a sweet smell of something rotting, inside the flat or floating in from outdoors.
Several times he visited the café where Pia worked, a place in Islington that specialised in patisserie. The first time he came across it by chance, walking the streets going nowhere in particular; he only recognised where he was when he caught sight through a plate-glass window of Pia in her long white apron, clearing tables. When he had imagined the two girls working together, he had pictured Pia as a clumsy apprentice performing under Anna’s tutelage. Surely his daughter, who had been so protected and had never had to work for a living, would not know how to submit to a work discipline? She had failed at university, which should have been easy. But he saw now that she was good at this work in her own right, steady and capable. She carried the heavy tray of crockery between tables without faltering, then returned to take orders, waiting with her pen and little pad, explaining patiently to the customers the array of cakes that rose above the counter, rank upon rank: pink and beige meringues, macaroons, tarts filled with fruit or custard, chocolate truffles sifted with cocoa. The women eyed them with hungry desire, delaying choosing. He could see they were touched by Pia’s swollen pregnancy. It wasn’t the sort of place Paul would ordinarily have stopped, it was fashionable and expensive, with chunky long tables of oiled wood, cream enamel lamps. The clientele were handsome, well dressed, loud.
While he watched through the window, Pia felt his gaze on her and lifted her head; a smile broke the surface of her absorption in her work, and she beckoned to him to come inside, brought him coffee and tried to persuade him to have a cake. He didn’t want cake, but the coffee was good, and he didn’t mind sitting there reading the paper, aware of his daughter passing backwards and forwards among the tables behind him, using the tongs to pick out cakes, ringing up bills on the till. When he went in another time, she was making the coffee, using the Gaggia machine, banging out the old grounds and tamping in the new, making shapes in the foam on the cappuccinos. She got used to him, and forgot to be flustered if he was watching. He recognised that he had overlooked, in Pia’s childhood, this capacity of hers for steady, graceful work; he had overridden it with his own certainties.
Anna in the café was quite different. Occasionally she came round to talk business with Marek in the evenings, but after the first day, he hadn’t seen much of her in the flat. At work she was unsmiling, fierce, effective, a little frown pulled taut between her plucked eyebrows. Her hair was scraped back from her face, and she was disconcertingly lean under the apron tied around her waist: her hard young body seemed in itself a challenge, a form of contempt. Paul saw how the customers were drawn to her as if they wanted to woo her, coax and soften her, and how she played on this, winding the sexual tension tight without giving anything away. Meanwhile she was kind to him as if they were in a conspiracy, undercharging him, bringing him cake to eat that he hadn’t asked for and only left on the plate. – Have it, it’s good, she said. – Eat. They charge too much. I see the invoices, I know what goes on here. Take it home, eat it tonight.
Anna’s default position towards authority was suspicious and derisory, but for some reason – because of Pia – Paul had been excepted. Like her brother she watched scrupulously over him, as if he needed cajoling and swaddling. He asked himself whether there could be anything sinister behind this, but couldn’t find it. They knew he didn’t have money. The longer he slept on their sofa, the more they must know for certain that he didn’t have power. Really, their generosity could only be superstitious and romantic. They must believe in the mystery of the coming child, and how it bound them all together in one improbable shaky family.
– It’s nice for you, Anna said to Pia, – to have your father round. It’s good.
He did not know what Anna would think of him, the grandfather-to-be, if she knew he was dreaming about her at night. Perhaps she guessed. These dreams occurred at the margins where deliberate fantasy slipped over into sleep, so he wasn’t altogether responsible. In one dream he made love to her in a hotel room, horrible like the one at the Travelodge in Birmingham. Anna came from the shower, her hair still sopping; cold water soaked into the sheets and pillows on the bed. She lay with her back to him, he put his mouth to the knobs of her vertebrae, standing out under her skin the colour of pale coffee, cold to the touch and goosefleshed. He ran his hand across her ribs, down her flat stomach, to her gaunt pelvis. In the dream the hot weather had broken and it was raining outside, the windowpanes blurred with running water, the room full with its rushing noise, its gargling in the gutters. The implications of it all were infantile, humiliating. Yet imperceptibly and against all reason, the dreams also began to bind him to the real girl, as if they meant he knew her.
Marek borrowed a van from a friend, a dirty dented white Vauxhall Combo, to take round the boxes of biscuits and beer and try to sell them. Paul had worked driving a van in London more than twenty years ago, before Pia was born: he offered to help, he hadn’t anything else to do. Marek didn’t like driving. Paul was pleased to fill his days with the kind of work that tired him out without requiring him to probe his inner life. The van handled badly, the steering was shot and the engine hunted in first gear, but he got on top of it and found his way round the old routes, baulked only by changes to the one-way system, or by having to avoid entering the congestion-charge zone. Marek explained to him why the charge was a terrible idea and didn’t work. Paul didn’t care, didn’t bother to argue.
He and Marek were well suited to working together. For long periods of time they didn’t talk, then Marek would erupt into a kind of absurd humour, which Paul remembered belonged to this fragmented experience on the road, tangling momentarily in the crazy complexity of local lives and then torn out again. When he closed his eyes at night he sometimes thought he was still driving, carried bodily along, hurtling into the dark. Everyone they met seemed funny. Marek imagined he was a good mimic, although Paul told him all his imitations simply sounded Polish. There were so many Polish shops, and they made sales in Asian and Middle Eastern groceries too. He got used to the special atmosphere of these places, some better, some worse – their stale sour smell, the shelves crowded with faded goods displaced from their natural habitat, pale gherkins floating in cloudy brine, dark rye bread, blue flashes from the insect zappers, the sound of the Polish voices, the metal shutters drawn down over windows and doors when the shops were closed. Some of them kept their windows shuttered even during the day. He picked up a few greetings, yes and no, some names.
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.
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.
– Read to me? Dad, have you forgotten I’m twenty years old?
She was adamant, as if she suspected him of trying to smuggle in under cover some scheme for getting her back into education. All she would agree to was his borrowing DVDs from a local rental place, which they watched together in the afternoons. Her taste was not what he’d expected, not sentimental. She liked clever thrillers, Michael Clayton , No Country for Old Men . They began on the first series of The Wire together; she was much quicker than he was to pick up what was happening.
– Aren’t you missing your friends? he asked her. – What about your old girlfriends from school? Or from the university.
– I did see some of the girls from school at first, when I moved in here. Once I knew I was pregnant, I couldn’t go out drinking with them, and that’s all they ever want to do. I only miss James.
– James Willis? Really? Isn’t he a bit of a clown?
– James and me are soulmates. We think the same things at the same time. One of us says what the other was just about to. That’s why we never could go out together.
– He’s always tongue-tied if I try to talk to him.
– That’s because you’re you, Dad. You’re not the easiest person to talk to.
He told her about Willis senior coming to cut down the poplars at Tre Rhiw.
– Was James involved in this? He’s never mentioned anything about it.
– He was the one wielding the fucking saw.
She laughed, and he began to remember all the detail of that morning, which from this perspective in the flat seemed highly comical. When he told her about his quarrel with Elise, she took Elise’s side, she said it wasn’t worth making an enemy of Mr Willis for the sake of the trees. It was clear she couldn’t really remember which trees he was talking about, and she said they could always plant some more. Paul had wondered if she might take the opportunity of backing him against Elise. She hadn’t always got on with her stepmother. Elise could be blunt sometimes, and when Pia was younger, Elise had found her obstinate and unresponsive. Sometimes when she first came to stay with them, before Becky was born, she was patently sick with misery, away from her home; but however Elise coaxed her, she had insisted with a little false smile that she was fine, sitting on the edge of her bed, swinging her feet. There had been something heart-wringing, exasperating to Elise, in how she had unpacked her rucksack so neatly and arranged her trainers in pairs against the wall.
The shape of Pia’s pregnancy as it grew was fearsome, a bloated dome; her belly button turned outwards, she stretched the cloth of her T-shirt across it to show it off to Paul. He wouldn’t lay his hand on her belly when she offered, if the baby was kicking; but sometimes unavoidably, at close quarters in the crowded flat, they knocked up against one another, he and his grandchild-to-be. Pia’s mood seemed to Paul to be changing as the pregnancy advanced. Her girlishness fell away, she was less capricious, more brooding. Once she said passionately that she wished her Nana could have seen the baby, and he realised then that he’d stopped dreaming about his mother since he came to the flat. She began to make a little collection of baby clothes. When he remembered her balancing her tray and patiently picking out cakes in the café, he wondered if she might after all be gifted for motherhood when it came. Perhaps the women who found it easiest were those who didn’t fight against relinquishing their own will.
He tried to make the flat pleasant for his daughter to spend time in, buying flowers and bringing home fresh food, plenty of fruit. Marek commiserated over her being stuck on the sofa all day, but it was difficult to imagine him doing this sort of domesticated shopping. Instead he arrived back with pieces of equipment he had got at bargain prices: a complicated pushchair on three wheels, a baby alarm, something improbably called a baby gym. There wasn’t room to unpack these from their boxes.
He called Tre Rhiw from a pay phone in Upper Street. While he waited for Elise to pick up he felt trepidation, half-expecting to be transplanted back inside their last conversation, with its intimate unguardedness, late at night. In the blaze of afternoon, however, her voice was quite different, brusque. She conveyed that any talk was snatched out of a day impossibly busy, between the pressure of orders in the workshop and looking after the children.
– You’ve managed to find time to call, she said. – That’s good of you.
He couldn’t argue with her outrage, didn’t try to defend himself. But it seemed laid on in thick strokes, like a mask over some other excitement. He fixated on the idea that she had been conspiring with Ruth against him; or with her sister Mirrie, who had been at Tre Rhiw for the weekend.
Over the phone the girls sounded years younger. Becky was shy and he could hardly squeeze information out of her. He could picture her blushing behind her freckles, murmuring into the mouthpiece, holding herself still in concentration.
– What are you doing in London, Daddy?
He told her he was staying with her older sister. Becky seemed to know about the baby, giggling diffidently when she mentioned it; he explained this was why he was keeping an eye on Pia, to make sure everything was all right. Joni was perfunctory, as if she’d half-forgotten him already. She couldn’t wait to hand the phone to her mother.
– Did Willis come back? he asked Elise.
– He came back. She gave a hard, short laugh. – He offered to sell me back the trees cut into logs.
– The man’s unbelievable.
– Yes, well. I’ve had other things to worry about.
He asked after Gerald, whether she’d had any contact with him. Elise didn’t appear to be anxious any longer that he was having a breakdown. – He’s been spending a lot of time out here, she said. – I think it’s good for him. He and Mirrie got on well together.
This didn’t seem likely to Paul, but he didn’t comment.
Anna called in after work to tell them Annelies had come looking for Pia at the café. Luckily, she said, no one had mentioned Pia’s connection with her, or given away that Pia was living in her flat. They would only give her Pia’s mobile number, which Annelies already had.
– I’ll call her, Pia said. – I’ll go and see her. I really ought to.
– You don’t have to. It’s your choice. Don’t let her blackmail you.
Paul encouraged Pia to get in touch. Anna seemed lit up with hostility to the idea of Pia’s mother, as if Pia was a refugee from some oppression. Beside Anna, Pia seemed steady as a rock, calming. No doubt Annelies’s performance in the café – she hadn’t been happy with their non-cooperation, apparently – had given some flavour of how she might judge her daughter’s new friends, their rackety household, their prospects.
Paul hadn’t yet met Anna’s Australian boyfriend. He was away for some time in Belfast, and then even when he was back, Anna didn’t mention him often. If she did, it was with a smothered impatience; was he too malleable, Paul wondered, or not malleable enough? Anna began spending more time at the flat again, and Paul knew he ought to go, to make room for her in her own place, although she never hinted at this and he believed she might not want it. In some crazy way they had accepted him as part of their improvised family. Marek teased him affectionately, calling him an intellectual, caricaturing him as an otherworldly idealist. In the evenings, or even in the afternoons if Anna wasn’t at work, Paul was aware that she and Marek were sometimes fuelling themselves, apart from all the dope they smoked, probably with pills or coke: they went off into the kitchen or the bedroom, claiming to be talking business, and came back wired and jumpy. They kept this stuff away from Pia with exaggerated protectiveness: and from Paul too, out of a kind of courtesy, touching and faintly insulting, as if they thought he was too innocent, or just too old.
One evening Marek took Pia out for a meal, because she had said she was going mad, stuck all day in the same place. While they were out, Anna talked to Paul about their troubles at home in Poland. The windows in the flat were all open, cool air was blowing in at last after a day when the heat had never moved. The orange sky outside was barred with shadows: clouds gathered on the horizon in the evenings, but didn’t come to anything. They sat without switching on the lights, Anna cross-legged on the sofa beside him, hair falling into her eyes, dabbing with the end of her cigarette in the brimming ashtray. She spoke in her usual abrupt sentences, fatalistic. Their father was ill, he had been diagnosed a year ago with bone cancer. She wondered if the diagnosis was accurate: it was well known that Polish hospitals made mistakes.
– Will they give him the best care? I doubt it. I don’t trust them.
He listened sympathetically, asking tactful questions. She said her father was a strong man, physically small but very strong, who had never had one day of illness in his life. He had been a supervisor in a factory making household cleansers, but now he had been off work for months. ‘Who knows what chemicals they used there, or if they gave him the right protection?’
Their mother was alive, but their parents were separated. Paul began to understand while she was talking that she and Marek hadn’t seen their father since he’d been ill, or even spoken to him: and not for some considerable time before that, either. He didn’t ask why. What Marek paid him for a day in wages would have bought them a cheap flight home. Anna sat with her shoulders hunched almost to her ears: defiant, estranged. He was overwhelmed by his attraction to her, as if she was a miserable beautiful animal, huddled in captivity.
She bent forwards to stub out her cigarette and in the orange light he could see the small mounds of her bare breasts inside her loose vest, surprisingly soft and plump against her skinny torso. He put out his hand and felt the hem on the neck of her shirt between his fingers, then touched her hot skin, reaching down inside the dark under the cloth, cupping his hand around one breast, feeling its nipple in his palm. Its soft flesh seemed quite separate from the rest of her: the softness seemed to send an unexpected, hopeful message. For a few seconds Anna didn’t pull away from him. But when he leaned forward to kiss her, she darted her head down and bit him on the inside of his forearm, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to make him yelp and jump back. She shook her finger at him, laughing and frowning.
– Naughty, naughty.
He remembered how his boy’s desire had stirred for the robber maid in Hans Andersen’s Snow Queen , who tickled the throat of her pet reindeer with her knife. The bruise Anna made on his arm stayed in his skin for weeks.
He dreamed he was in Willis’s yard. In the dream something in its blanched, clean-swept order was uncanny, its light like the thick honey stillness before a storm. Willis’s horses were dipping their heads to dash away flies above their half-doors, and he could hear their hooves shifting on the cobblestones out of sight. There seemed to be some kind of whitewashed arcade around the yard, like a cloister (this was only in the dream, not at the real Blackbrook). Paul was aware at the edge of his attention of a figure moving in and out of its intense shadows: working stiffly, bending her long back. A metal bucket clanged against stone flags, a mop was sopped in water. He couldn’t see his mother’s face, but he knew for sure it was her; he recognised an old nylon dress she used to wear for housework: white zigzags on navy, slubbed and limp-pleated. Even in the dream he thought how this dress had lain neglected at the bottom of his memory, and was excited by rediscovering it. Who knew what other discoveries were waiting for him, if only he could push farther inside the yard?
That was all, nothing else happened. He only remembered the dream at all because he was woken in the middle of it by some kind of disturbance in the flat. He sat up abruptly, sweating, throwing off the duvet, thinking he’d been roused by sounds of violence. It might be the schizophrenic upstairs: had he started trouble? There was banging from somewhere. Before Paul had collected himself completely out of the dream, he shouted out for his daughter, to see she was all right. Then there was silence, only not empty, more like a wakeful aftermath. He identified too late the noise of lovemaking that had broken through his sleep: banging probably because their bed was cheap and pushed right against the wall, perhaps noises forced out from between the lovers’ clenched jaws, however Pia may have tried to keep them from her father’s ears. No wonder this thrilled in the air as violence. Paul had been embarrassed to wonder, the first nights he slept in the flat, whether his presence behind these flimsy walls might be inhibiting for his daughter and Marek; he had reassured himself vaguely, when he never heard them, that they might not be making love anyway, in her advanced state of pregnancy, or that the walls were soundproof after all.
The bedroom door opened, Pia came out in her nightshirt, closing the door behind her. He thought she was very angry.
– Dad? You shouted.
– I’m sorry. I think I woke up out of a dream. A nightmare.
He was sitting up on the sofa with the duvet pulled across his lap. In the light from the street lamps her shirt was fairly transparent, so that he saw her distended shape – long legs, mounded stomach, breasts growing heavy – almost as if she stood there naked, intimidating. The pregnancy appeared to him for the first time as the blatant outward sign of his daughter’s secret sexual life.
– How long are you going to be staying, Dad? Because there isn’t really room here. Isn’t there anywhere else that you could go? This really isn’t working out.
He took out two thousand pounds at the bank, which they gave to him in a brown envelope. When he went to say goodbye to Anna at the café, he pressed the envelope into her hand.
– Please take it, he said. – I got some money unexpectedly. You’ll have a lot of extra expenses over the next few months, with your father’s illness and everything.
The place was busy, humming. At several tables people were waiting to have their orders taken.
– Oh. Thank you.
Anna looked quickly at the envelope, she didn’t open it to see inside, only put it away in the money bag the waitresses wore around their waists, glancing to see if the other staff were watching. She must have felt the thickness of the wad of notes, though. He didn’t know how to read her expression, whether she was offended by the present, or grateful, or even slyly triumphant.
– It was very good of you to put me up at the flat. In my hour of need.
– It’s no problem.
She was remote, as if his gift had turned him back into a stranger, a customer. He had imagined kissing her before he left, just a grown-up peck on the cheek. But there was no way he could carry it off in front of all these people.
T he aspens’ absence beside Tre Rhiw, as Paul came up through the garden, disfigured everything. Planes of sky and slanting field were exposed in a new relationship with the house, which was thrust nakedly forward. On the near side of the garden wall was a line of new, very young trees, each with its stake and its beige protective casing – this planting undertaken without him was another shock. Around them the earth was still raw, but above the little casings leaves of brilliant yellow-green fluttered out like flags, flaunting their growth. Elise must be watering them every night, in this dry heat. The doors to the workshop were open at both ends and Paul walked through it, half-expecting to find her.
The house door stood open too. He heard the television as he crossed the yard, where the sunlight struck with a new ferocity because it wasn’t filtered through the trees; for a moment he was blind, coming into the smothering dimness of the hallway. Peering into the cubbyhole where the television pictures weakly danced, he took in a lungful of its familiar stale morning air: musty cushions, little girls’ farting, souring milk spilled from their cereal bowls.
– Hello! It’s Daddy! Becky said in cheerful surprise, making no move.
– Where is he?
Joni had to crane to see him around the bulk of Gerald, who was slumped on the sofa between the girls. The girls were snuggled against him, and Gerald had his arms round both of them. Before Paul’s eyes learned to adjust, he seemed more like a blockage of the light than a positive presence. Then he made out where the black hair was pushed behind Gerald’s ears; the ears stood out as pale, delicate for a man of his build. He was looking up at Paul.
– Oh, it’s you! said Elise, arriving out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her striped butcher’s apron. She was wearing her hair in some new way, pulled loosely into a tail at the nape of her neck; she must have allowed it to grow longer since he left. He hadn’t thought he’d been away long enough for anyone’s hair to grow.
– You could have phoned, she said. – To warn us you were coming.
– But here I am. Who helped you put in the trees?
– Gerald.
Gerald seemed to have gone back to watching the television. The presenters of these children’s programmes were manic, they contorted their faces with dismay or were orgasmic with enthusiasm.
– I’ll put coffee on, Elise said. – Would you both like coffee?
– Please, said Gerald, not looking up again.
Paul followed her into the kitchen. In the light he saw that his wife’s hair was growing out, an inch from her parting: not grey exactly, but a faded neutral, weaker than the strong honey colour of the rest. He couldn’t sit down yet, he was too restless, moving about the room, picking things up and putting them down – the pepper grinder, blackboard for shopping lists, plastic bottle of washing-up liquid, vanilla pod in a jar of sugar – as if they might have altered while he was away.
– For goodness sake, said Elise, lifting the hotplate cover, putting on the kettle to boil. – Sit down, Paul.
The kitchen smelled of baking, little cakes were cooling on a wire rack. He tried to catch her around the waist from behind. Something had changed in how she moved and held herself. He thought she was wearing an unfamiliar perfume.
– Not yet, she said, pushing him away. – Let me make this coffee. Why don’t you put up the umbrella, and we’ll have it in the yard? The weather’s so lovely.
– I noticed how, with the trees gone, the yard’s in full sun.
– We have to not be thinking of those trees all the time. It’s pointless getting worked up about them.
– Tell me about the day when Willis came back.
– Not now.
She explained that she had paid for the new aspens out of Evelyn’s money; she had thought it was a good thing to spend it on, something that would endure and would be a reminder to them of Evelyn, for at least as long as they lived at Tre Rhiw. Her tone was as if she was justifying herself, rather belligerently.
So far the new trees were doing fine, they had all survived.
– Gerald dug and I gave the orders. We got them all planted in a day.
– Good team.
– It was good for him. Paul, he was in a bad way.
She dropped her voice, stirring the coffee in the pot, imagining Gerald must still be in the cubbyhole with the children. At that very moment Paul watched through the kitchen window as Gerald stepped out, blinking, into the yard. He stumbled, surprised by the bright light, unearthed from where he had been hibernating. Hands pushed in his pockets, head down, he started with his usual shambling walk down through the garden in the direction of the path along the river to the station. Paul didn’t point out his departure to Elise.
– When he was first here he couldn’t read a book, or even a newspaper. I had to phone his department at the university, to say he was sick. Some days he didn’t get up, except to use the lavatory. He lay there with his eyes closed, or watched television. He started to smell, even the girls noticed it. In the end I had to run a bath for him, I made him get in it, then while he was in I put his clothes in the washing machine. I bought him a toothbrush and clean underclothes. Ruth said I ought to get a doctor. I was frightened of him doing some harm to himself.
– El, you should have told me how bad it was. I’d have come home.
– I did try to tell you, when you phoned from Stella’s.
– Not the full story, not like this.
– I asked him if I should get a doctor, and he said it would help if he had his antidepressants, so I drove into Cardiff to pick them up from his flat. You never told me what that place was like. It’s a horror.
At the thought of the flat, the full coffee pot seemed to quake for a moment in her hand.
– And did they help?
– Did what help?
– The antidepressants.
– Oh, yes, I think they did. Anyway, he’s much better than he was. Tell him the coffee’s ready, would you?
– He’s gone. I watched him leave five minutes ago. I guess he didn’t really want coffee.
– Who’s gone? Gerald? Where?
– He walked down the garden, I presume in the direction of the station.
Elise ran out into the yard, then halfway down the garden, and stood shading her eyes with her hand, looking for Gerald; but he was out of sight. She rushed back into the kitchen, pulling off her apron, as if she was going to go after him. – My God, you have no idea! What were you thinking of, to let him go? You have no idea how serious things have been here.
– He seemed all right to me. He’s a free man: if he wants to catch a train home, that’s his business. You said he was better.
– But does he have money for the train? Does he have his keys?
– If he doesn’t, then I suppose he’ll have to come back.
Elise came at him with her fists upraised. – Everything’s been so uncertain. And then you come blundering back into it, with no comprehension.
She hit blows on Paul’s shoulders and chest that were only slightly painful, distracting because he had to hold his face away from them while he tried to catch hold of her wrists. Then she smacked him hard across his cheek, which hurt more, so that he pushed her and she fell against the draining board. Crockery smashed into the sink.
Becky and Joni, roused from their television slump, watched from the door.
– Where’s Gerald? Becky asked, as if appealing for the one sane person in all this mess.
– He’s gone, Elise said, sounding blank, bereft.
She picked up a tea towel to wipe tears from her face, then reached out for one of the rock cakes cooling on the wire rack. – I shouldn’t eat these. The calories will only go straight to my thighs.
Paul poured the coffee and made the girls milkshakes. They all four sat subdued around the table, eating cake.
Gerald didn’t come back.
In the afternoon Elise played Leonard Cohen in her workroom, while she worked on dismantling and repairing a broken old lacquer box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, that Ruth had bought in a country sale. Paul went through his post, which Elise had piled on the desk in his study, and his emails.
Something had happened between Gerald and Elise while he was away. Elise wouldn’t talk about it.
– If you mean sex, she said, emphasising the word contemptuously, – then you’re barking up the wrong tree. I know how your mind works. But he isn’t like you.
Paul tried to be reasonable. – All right then, it wasn’t sex. I’m glad it wasn’t.
– How dare you? How dare you take yourself off and disappear to London without any warning or explanation, and then come back and think you can call me to account, that you’ve got any right to know about my private life?
– I haven’t got any right. I’m not asking you because of right.
When he said he loved her, she only sobbed furiously, carrying the plastic tub into the yard to hang out the washing. Paul guessed she had thrown herself at Gerald, and he had rebuffed her. Or that she had been planning on throwing herself, just about the time when he arrived home, spoiling everything. He found himself imagining in detail her going in to Cardiff to fetch Gerald’s antidepressants, parking the car beside the grassy city recreation ground, looking for the number on the tall gloomy old house, using Gerald’s keys to let herself into his flat: a busy competent woman, on a charitable errand. She would have been shocked by the mess; she must have saved up examples to exclaim over to Ruth afterwards: mouldy pitta breads in the fridge, the crack in the wall, the stained toilet. Perhaps she even washed some dishes. In his mind’s eye, she wasn’t in a hurry. He saw her closing the door behind her when she first arrived, leaning for a long time with her back against it, taking in everything. Before she even started looking for the pills, he imagined she sat down in one of Gerald’s broken old armchairs, holding her bag on her lap, closing her eyes, laying her cheek against the greasy ancient chintz, just breathing in the empty space, the stale hot air. In his pictures she had her hair fastened in the new way.
– Gerald’s different, Elise said. – He lives more truthfully.
Paul was miserably perturbed and jealous, he tried to argue with her that truthful wasn’t enough. It was one of the fixtures of their life together, that Elise found Gerald comical, and disapproved of his indifference to material things. But now she was suffering with a breathless excitement, she jumped whenever the phone rang, and sometimes Paul knew she had been crying. Paul slept in the cubbyhole. There was bedding already folded away on the sofa, which must have been Gerald’s. In the middle of the night he woke up stifling, and had to go walking around outside in the grass, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, afraid of ticks on his bare legs. The stars shone brilliantly, the goats detached themselves, pale forms, from the surrounding dark, they came trotting over to the fence, eager with curiosity to watch whatever he was up to. An owl hunted in the fields nearby. He missed London.
Elise asked him about Pia’s flat, but as if she couldn’t make herself properly interested in his life there.
– How’s Pia then? What’s this boyfriend of hers like?
He described Marek cautiously, making him out to be somewhat more sensible and businesslike than he really was, never mentioning the existence of Anna. He waited for Elise, who managed their bank accounts, to notice the missing money, but she didn’t say anything, so either she didn’t register it or didn’t care. Perhaps she assumed he’d given it to Pia. When he spoke to Pia on the phone she said everything was fine. The swelling in her ankles had gone down, they were pleased with her at the hospital. She had been to visit Annelies, it hadn’t gone too badly.
Paul took over watering the new trees. The drought was supposed to end soon, according to the weather forecast. James Willis delivered the logs cut from the old trees, and Paul paid for them, stacking them in the outhouse, even though when he looked it up he found that poplar wood wasn’t supposed to burn well. One evening they all went out with Ruth to watch for otters: apparently there was a family of them living further up the river. Ruth’s husband had seen them playing in the moonlight. Elise shivered in her sleeveless dress, because they’d left home in the late sunshine and she’d forgotten to bring a cardigan. Ruth warned the girls that the otters were shy, they probably wouldn’t put in an appearance. She showed them a dusty depression on the bank that might be where the otters slept by day, and their spraints nearby, blackish messes of fish scales and fragments of bone, probably eel bones. They watched from behind a screen of hazel stems on the opposite bank; the moon rose out of sight, its glow seeping into the sky from behind the hill, then sailed overhead.
Paul was touched by the girls’ obedience and patience; he felt the discipline in their little bodies huddled against him. Elise wrapped one of the blankets she’d brought to sit on around her shoulders – they waited for more than an hour, but didn’t see anything. Becky pleaded for them to stay longer. She was sure she had spotted something in the water, ‘a little ripple, like a nose poking up’, but Elise complained she was going numb with cold. She tried to keep her voice perky and joking, but Paul could hear the effort in it. On the way back Becky sulked; Joni whined and was tired, and Paul carried her. It was the first time she’d let him pick her up since he’d been home. She laid her head on his shoulder, her fine baby hair tickled his cheek. That morning at breakfast she hadn’t allowed him to cut off the top of her egg; pouting, she had said she wanted Gerald, ‘Instead of you.’
Paul began writing something new: not a memoir exactly, but a recollection of his earliest interest in nature. He tried not to think too hard about it, but felt hopeful that it might come to something. At junior school he had won as a school prize a book on exploring the countryside, which had set out all the different animal footprints diagrammatically, as neatly labelled black ink blots: badger, fox, roe deer, red deer, and so on. He had dedicated himself to learning them, along with the animal droppings, the leaf shapes and the different nuts and berries, as if nature was a kind of code, like learning Latin; if he only worked hard enough at breaking the code, he believed he could break through to the mythic world of beauty he intuited behind it. He borrowed more nature books from the central library in Birmingham, catching the bus into town to change them on Saturday mornings. Afterwards he used to meet his father, who knocked off on Saturdays at midday, outside the corrugated-metal gates of the screw factory where he worked. If Paul got there early, then he started in on the pages of the first book, leaning with his back against the gates in the cobbled street whose walls were the windowless back ends of factories. It hadn’t occurred to him to look for nature anywhere in the world around him. The books were safe in their nylon string bag between his feet. In those days, even at weekends, he would have been wearing ankle socks and his school lace-ups, his skinny knees would have been bare below his shorts.
– Go and make sure he’s all right, Elise said, meaning Gerald.
It was first thing in the morning, she was in the bathroom still in her nightdress, cleaning her teeth, spitting into the sink, watching Paul in the mirror.
– You go.
He had come upstairs from his sofa in the cubbyhole, needing to pee; he wasn’t sure whether, the way things were between them, he should go ahead while she was in the room.
Her eyes fixed him. Wordless, she scrubbed vigorously behind her back molars.
– He’ll be fine. We’d have heard if he wasn’t.
She spat again. – All right then. I’ll go, she said.
– Of course he might not be there. In the summer he spends a lot of time at his parents’.
She ran the tap in a fierce spurt.
Later that morning he heard her drive off in the car. He walked around the place, having it all to himself for the first time since he’d been back. He tried the drawers in the lacquered box Elise was fixing, used the hose to water the trees, and then the vegetables and the borders and tubs, though it was the wrong time of day for this. Inside, invading the suspended stillness of the house, he looked for more to do, but Elise had washed the breakfast dishes, so he tidied up vaguely, straightened the duvets on the girls’ beds. It was already hot in the rooms upstairs, where the sun beat through the roof. His study was cool. He sat reading through a book on ecology and elegy that he’d been sent for reviewing. After a couple of hours he heard the car come back. Elise walked quickly through the house to her workroom, heels scraping on the flagstones in the yard. She must have put on her dressy shoes to go out. He followed her.
– How was Gerald?
She was wearing eye-shadow and lipstick, and a new silky shirt, printed with lilac-coloured flowers, which he hadn’t seen before. It was more or less an hour’s drive into Cardiff: she couldn’t have spent any time with Gerald, even if she saw him.
Squinting at the sewing machine, trying to thread the needle without her glasses, sucking the thread and coaxing it to a point, she claimed she didn’t know what he was talking about, that she’d been out with Ruth to look at a dresser for sale on one of the farms. He didn’t believe her. Perhaps she’d gone looking for Gerald and he’d been out. Or perhaps she’d found him, and he’d closed himself against her.
– OK, I just thought you said you were worried about him.
– He’s your friend, Paul. You’re the one who should be worrying.
They ate leftovers for lunch together, under the umbrella in the yard; Elise said they ought to invite people round for a barbecue the next day, before the weather broke.
– If you like.
He heard her telephoning round.
– I left a message on Gerald’s phone, she said. – But why don’t you try him? Try and persuade him to come. It would be good for him.
Paul tried dutifully. Gerald’s phone was switched off; he left another message.
Elise spent the next day preparing food: marinated chicken and fish and vegetables for the barbecue, little deep-fried Middle Eastern patties, a cheesecake topped with nut brittle, home-made prune ice-cream. Paul thought she was doing too much for an impromptu occasion, but she turned on him angrily when he tried to say so, her face hot from the frying. She sent him to Abergavenny in the morning with a shopping list, mainly for drinks; he drove all the way into Cardiff instead, and called in on Gerald, half-expecting he wouldn’t answer the door because it was still too early. If Gerald was surprised to see him – possibly Paul stood just where his wife had stood the day before and not been invited in – then he only hesitated for one moment, puzzling, swaying slightly on his feet (small, like his ears), before he turned without a word, as was usual, and preceded Paul through the dank old air of the three flights of stairs to his lair under the roof.
Inside the flat, black plastic bags of waste paper and kitchen rubbish lay open on the floor, the hose of a vacuum cleaner plugged in at the wall snaked on the carpet; the windows were thrown up high and the plum-dark leaves of the copper beech outside were bruised and brooding in the wind that was supposed to herald different weather. Neither of them commented on the cleaning in progress; Paul felt uncomfortably as if he’d stumbled into his friend’s privacy. Gerald made tea, meticulous in his measuring and stirring. He said he was trying to give up smoking, and was baking his dope instead into chocolate brownies made from a packet mix; bringing some in a cake tin from the kitchen, he offered them to Paul, who wasn’t tempted. The brownies looked dry. Gerald munched through two with an air of despatching a necessary routine. He asked after the little girls, and then showed Paul a book he was reading, about the variations among different cultures in the language used to categorise emotion.
– The Ilongot in the Philippines have a word to describe a reaction to the violation of a community norm.
– Don’t we have words for that in English?
– Can you think of any?
Paul could only think of words that weren’t emotions, like ‘respectable’ and ‘scapegoat’.
– And toska , in Russian, Gerald said, – means ‘how one feels when one wants some things to happen and knows they cannot happen’.
– Very Russian.
– That’s the point.
Paul invited him to the party that evening, suggesting they could drive back together now; Gerald said he was busy in the afternoon. – I’ll let you know. I might come over later.
– Elise worries about you. She thinks you’re in a bad way.
– I was in a bad way. I’m feeling better. Elise persuaded me to wash, which was a place to start, for which I’m grateful. And she drove over here when I was at your place, to get my pills for me.
Paul pretended he hadn’t known this. – She came in here?
– She dropped something actually. Will you take it for her?
Gerald hunted through the heaps on his desk until he found a printed silk scarf Paul recognised. It smelled of Elise.
– Did the pills work?
– They did what they do. Under the nuanced cultural variation, the blunt chemical truncheons. It’s not a fine science.
Elise complained that he’d been gone for hours; Paul didn’t explain where he’d been. It was his job to get the fire going in the big barbecue that Elise had built out of stones from one of the ruined outhouses, the grill made by the local blacksmith. Becky and Joni arrived home with the first contingent of guests, children and parents from the school. The gang of children was soon running wild, looping around the house and garden, a few tiny ones staggering after them, down to the river where Becky womanfully scooped up the babies to safety and Joni swung from the branch of a tree to show it was hers, kicking out her legs over the water. Then they ran back again. Their parents shouted warnings and prohibitions.
Elise had made a summer punch, with mint and borage and strawberries floating in it, served in a glass jug frosted from the freezer. She had showered and washed her hair, and looked composed and demure in the new flowered shirt. He heard her tell the otter story as if it was funny, that he and the girls had wanted to stay on, staring at nothing in the dark, while she was frozen stiff. At first he could tell she was careful not to drink too much, because she had to manage heating the patties up in the oven and getting them onto serving plates, while keeping watch over the barbecue; once everyone had had something to eat, she allowed herself to be more reckless. One or two of the smallest children had fallen asleep by this time and been put into the beds upstairs; the rest were playing hide-and-seek all round the house and garden and in the fields. Light was withdrawing behind mauve bars of cloud on the horizon; a fume of shadow spread under the old apple trees in the meadow, the children’s skulking or speeding forms indistinct in it, their noises amplified: a thud of footsteps if they were going for home, or the sudden yelp and relinquishment of defeat. The older children were organising this game, one of Ruth’s boys and a girl. Joni didn’t grasp the rules, or refused to play by them; she kept on running and squealing even after she’d been touched.
– I needed this, Elise said, swallowing mouthfuls of the punch thirstily, relaxing, dropping against the back of her cane chair. – I’ve been looking forward to this drink all day. Isn’t this perfect? What a perfect evening!
Perfect food too, everyone agreed.
Paul was talking to Carwen, a friend who was the education officer for the nearby conservation area, about what he’d been reading that afternoon, in the book on elegy, about the asymmetry in complex systems – how painstakingly long it took to construct them, and how almost instantaneously they could be destroyed: as true of social and cultural systems as it was of living organisms.
– It’s tragedy, built in to the very structure of things.
– You could choose to look at it like that, Carwen said. – But if I’m allowed to be a brutal scientist, destruction is also cleansing, it liberates the way for new systems.
– Isn’t that how tyrants have justified their wars? asked Ruth.
– We can’t afford to see it in that time scale, Paul said.
– Don’t you hate that word tragedy? said someone else. – Everything’s a fucking tragedy nowadays. They use ‘tragedy’ when they just mean an accident, or anything sad.
– Don’t spoil things, Paul, Elise said. – Don’t be all doom and gloom.
But in fact he was enjoying himself. He was buoyed up by his hopes for his new book. And he felt affectionate towards these people, even some of them he didn’t know very well, even Ruth. Ruth looked pretty, she was wearing some kind of long patterned smock over jeans and it made her seem less buttoned-up, more girlish. She had been nice to him since their vigil waiting for the otters – as if she withdrew somewhat from her solidarity with Elise, and felt sorry for him.
He took a call on his mobile, hurrying farther down the garden, where the signal was better. Elise tensed in her seat when she heard it ring, and he knew she was distracted from her own conversation, trying to work out who it was: afterwards he beckoned her to come over, so they could talk. Unsteady on her high heels when she stood up, she slipped out of the shoes and came in her bare feet across the grass. Bats were sketching their flight across the grey air. In the dusk her face was blurred, he could only clearly see her pale clothes, the dark of her cleavage where the top button of her shirt was undone.
– Who was it? Was it Gerald? Is he coming?
Her speech wasn’t slurred, but aggressive; some layer of concealment had been stripped from between them. Where their feet bruised it, the grass sent up its yearning green smell, tugging at his emotions. He seemed to guess how Elise felt, eaten up as if something essential was passing and she was prevented from reaching it, so that all she had to give, all her bloom, was going to waste.
– It’s Pia, he explained. – I have to go. Something’s up, I don’t know what, I don’t know exactly where she is, but she’s left the flat, she needs me to drive and pick her up.
– Oh, shit, Paul. Shit! You can’t drive anyway. You’re drunk.
– I’m not. I’ve only had a couple of glasses.
– Why can’t she go to Annelies?
– She’s already somewhere on her way here. She was hitching, she’s at a service station but she doesn’t know which one, she’s going to phone me back.
– Can’t she get a bus or something?
– She’s pregnant, El. And I don’t even know what’s happened, to make her leave. I’m afraid for her.
– All right. OK.
– I’ll come and make my excuses to everyone.
B efore he started the car, he checked his phone for messages from Pia. He saw that he had missed a text from Gerald, saying he was on his way to the party. He didn’t see any need to pass this on. Gerald would be there in person soon enough.
Paul was sure he was all right to drive, although he had probably had more than the couple of glasses he’d owned up to. He liked night-driving. The empty roads weren’t banal as they were in the day – drawing the cover of darkness around them, they were transformed as if he was speeding through a different landscape, charged with mystique. He was full of apprehension for Pia. He had no idea what the matter was. She had refused to go into detail over the phone, she had been tearful, terse, desperate. Had she found out something about Marek, which she couldn’t live with? Perhaps he had been arrested, or they were going to deport him; perhaps it was something private, worse, some worm of deviancy or cruelty that he, Paul, had lived alongside and not detected. Perhaps Marek had only waited until Paul was out of the way to reveal himself. When he tried to imagine the man he had liked, he came up against the locked door of Marek’s unknown life. Already the time in that London flat was receding as if it had never belonged to him. When he thought about it from his perspective at Tre Rhiw, he was shocked at the casual drug-taking, the unfocused future, the lack of any genuine preparations for the baby’s arrival.
These anxieties circled round and round in his mind, but he also experienced a certain exhilaration: here he was, flying through the night towards his daughter when she needed him. This rescue seemed a simplifying and cleansing thing; a pure demand that he could meet and live up to. On the motorway he found himself, even at this late hour, backed up behind slowed traffic at some point after he’d crossed the bridge into England, funnelled into one lane. At least the traffic never stopped moving, and it didn’t take him too long to reach and pass the cause of the delay: there had been an accident, long enough ago for an ambulance to have arrived and for the police to be in charge. Two small cars were slewed across the road, facing the wrong direction altogether; the barrier along the central reservation was buckled, debris and broken glass strewn everywhere. Superstitiously, and out of respect, Paul didn’t look to see if anyone was badly hurt; he was aware that among the fluorescent jackets of the rescue services a few dazed young people stood around, woken up out of their lives into this disaster. He accelerated into the emptiness of the motorway ahead. When his phone buzzed, he pulled over onto the hard shoulder, more scrupulous after seeing the accident than he might have been. Pia texted that she was at Strensham services, and Paul answered that he’d be with her in less than an hour.
At that time of night the service area was ghostly: the staff outnumbered the customers, they looked around in the foyer from where they were grouped together, talking, when he walked in. One man was pushing a bucket on a wheeled trolley, washing the floor. Paul saw Pia in the café at once, bundled up in a windcheater with her back to him, her hair in two bunches, rucksack propped against the table beside her. The sight of her alone there, so intensely familiar, pierced him, and he hurried forward to claim her. When she turned around he saw that she had put the stud back in her lip. She was very pale. She hadn’t made up her face, and her sulky expression reminded him of her childhood.
– God, I couldn’t have waited here another moment, she said. – They’re all staring at me.
– I expect they’re only concerned about you. A pregnant young woman waiting here alone, late at night. You’re a bit of a mystery. And what were you thinking of, hitch-hiking? You should have called me, right away.
– I had a lift with a guy in a lorry, but he was turning off here. It’s better if you’re pregnant, they don’t try anything.
– I didn’t realise you’d hitch-hiked before.
She shrugged. – Well, I never told Mum when I did it, obviously.
When he bent down to put his arms round her, she leaned her head submissively against his jacket.
– What’s happened with Marek? Why have you left?
– Nothing happened.
– But you’re all right? He hasn’t hurt you?
She pushed her empty cup angrily across the table, and he didn’t ask anything more about it for the moment.
– Do you want another coffee, or anything to eat, before we set out?
Pia only wanted to get going. In the car she rifled through the CDs in the glove box and announced he hadn’t got anything decent to play; she put on the radio, which he had tuned to classical music, then turned it off again. Restless and uncomfortable with the seat belt round her, she arched her back and shifted in the seat; he remembered Elise doing this when she was pregnant. He felt triumphant, driving home with Pia sitting beside him – as if it completed whatever mission he had begun weeks and months ago, when he first went to look for her. He was bringing his daughter home, he would look after her.
– Don’t get the wrong idea, Pia said, shifting again, as if the accusation erupted out of her physical irritation. – Nothing happened.
– Something must have happened.
– I changed my mind. That’s all.
– Something must have happened to make you change your mind.
She turned her face away from him to stare out of the window. This stretch of motorway was lit, the tall stems of the lamps flicking past and the hanging veils of light giving the space an empty grandeur, cathedral-like. Then they came out on the bluff above the flat estuary valley, and saw ahead the two lit bridges coiling over the water into Wales. Paul was careful not to speak, in case he deflected whatever was coming. If she had found out something shameful, she wouldn’t want him to have guessed at it.
– It was me, she said. – It was my fault.
As if he had asserted something different, she insisted that Marek was a good man, he and Anna were kind, generous people. And Marek really loved her. She was sure that he wanted to have a family with her, he meant it.
– I don’t know why I did what I did.
– What did you do?
It was so stupid, Pia said. She had pretended that the baby was Marek’s.
That wasn’t really as bad as it sounded. When they first got together she hadn’t had any idea she was pregnant. She had liked Marek, he used to come into the café to see Anna; she liked his way of making a fuss of her, it seemed romantic. He was different from the English boys she was at university with, grown-up compared to them. And he was the first one to realise why she was being sick; he asked her about her periods and everything. As soon as she understood, she knew Marek wasn’t the father, because she’d been feeling these things for a few weeks before anything had happened with him. But he had taken it for granted that the baby was his, naturally enough. And she hadn’t put him right. At first she’d thought if she was going to get rid of it anyway, there wasn’t any point in putting him right. But then she hadn’t got rid of it. The dates they’d given her at the hospital had confirmed what she already knew; she had lied to Marek and Anna about these.
A momentary spatter of rain made Paul switch the windscreen wipers on.
– So, who is the father?
– Who d’you think? James, of course.
– Oh. Paul considered this. – Does James know that he is?
She shook her head. No.
He drove without saying anything for a while. They passed the site of the accident he had seen on his way over: there was still single-file traffic past it, but the emergency services had all gone and men were manoeuvring the smashed cars onto a breakdown truck.
– You’re mad at me, Pia said. – I knew you’d be mad at me.
– I’m not mad at you.
But he did feel obscurely hurt, and disappointed. He had been ready to feel outraged by Marek and Anna, and now instead he felt uncomfortable and guilty, as if he was implicated in Pia’s deception of them. She had seemed steady – a steady, fair English girl – and she had not been. He had imagined her given over in good faith to her adventure; now he couldn’t help picturing their surprise, or disgust, or distress, when they read the note she said she’d left behind. Pia said they wouldn’t know how to find her – they didn’t have her mother’s address, they only knew Paul lived somewhere in Wales. She would change her mobile. She had never told them anything about James. And anyway, they wouldn’t want to find her.
Her voice was small and bleak.
– I want to feel free. I just want to be my own person again.
On the approach road to the village, she asked him to drive her to Blackbrook and drop her off there. It had not occurred to Paul that she wouldn’t be coming with him to Tre Rhiw, at least for this one night. At the idea of arriving home without her he lost his temper, stopping the car, pulling it into the grass verge so that shoots of bramble grazed along the window on his side.
– You’re being unreasonable, he said. – It’s two o’clock in the morning. We can’t wake them up at this time. There’s nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.
– We can ring the bell on the extension. Only James will hear. I’ve tried his phone but he’s got it turned off.
– I think you ought to listen to me, after I’ve driven you this far.
Pia undid her seat belt and opened the car door, clambering out heavily. A blast of night air disrupted the warmth inside the car; the drift of fine rain passing over, damping the baked earth, had roused a rank vegetable stink. Paul knew where they were: beyond the dense invisible hedgerow of hazel and blackthorn, the green shoots were standing a foot high in Willis’s fields.
– I know my way from here, Pia said. – It’s easy.
– Don’t be ridiculous. It’s pitch dark.
– I have to talk to James.
– Talk to him in the morning.
She set out walking ahead of the car along the road, visible in his headlights, encumbered, obstinate, her back set in resistance to him, then stumbling over something, a pothole or a stone. Cruising after her, he wound his window down.
– What about your rucksack?
– I’ll get James to come for it tomorrow.
– OK, I give in. Pia, get in the car. I’ll take you.
She was breathing heavily when she climbed back in. He thought she was crying; she wound the window down on her side, and pressed her face out into the night. Where the drive forked at Blackbrook, Paul took the lower track, leading towards the converted outbuildings where James had his room. As he drew up outside, a security light clicked on and a dog barked up above them, at the main house. Paul thought how he hated Willis’s conversion, featureless and glaring with its new ceramic roof tiles and plastic windows, the old barn’s soul exposed and dissipated.
– This is a really bad idea, he said.
– Don’t worry.
– You know Willis is a nutcase. And he hates me.
– Everything isn’t always about you, Dad.
They got out together and Pia pressed the doorbell. They waited while she pressed it twice more, hearing it ring inside. Crouching at the level of the letter box, knees apart, she called through in a voice that she tried to make subdued and penetrating at once.
– James! James!
Someone inside thudded down an uncarpeted wooden staircase. Pia only just scrambled up in time before the door swung inwards; Paul saw how, expecting James, she sagged forward in relief. But it was Mrs Willis instead who stood behind the door: stout, stubby, grey-black hair cut short so that it stood up on her head like a brush. She didn’t look her best, roused from sleep presumably, glaring and defensive, in an incongruously feminine pink nightdress.
– What’s up?
– I’m really sorry, Susan, Pia said. – I didn’t think you’d be sleeping over here. I didn’t want to wake you. I wanted James.
– Did you now!
The woman’s intelligence came awake behind her eyes and darted between Paul and Pia’s face blotched with tears, her swollen shape. Behind Susan Willis the hallway and staircase had the neutrality of a holiday let, with no comforting accretion of belongings or mess.
Paul was helpless to stop himself sounding English and effete. – I tried to persuade Pia that it was an unreasonable hour. But she was adamant.
Adamant wasn’t a word he even used.
– Is he here? Pia persisted, desperate.
At that moment James appeared on the stairs in boxers and saggy T-shirt, bare legs fuzzy with blond hair, face bloated and blinking from sleep, missing a couple of steps in his fuddled state and only just saving himself from falling headlong by grabbing the handrail. Susan Willis was still staring at Pia, calculating, bemused – but not preparing to be outraged or devastated, Paul thought. He’d only seen her in passing before; he’d spoken to her once or twice when he was sent to buy ice-cream and she was serving in their shop. He hadn’t recognised then this reserve of irony in her. Perhaps she was sleeping in the annexe to be apart from her husband.
– She says she wants to talk to James, Paul said. – But we could come back in the morning, if you’d rather she didn’t stay.
– She can stay if she likes, said Susan warily. – If it’s what James wants.
– What? James said. – What’s she doing here?
– She wants to talk to you. It looks like you might have something to talk about.
– It’s nothing to do with me, said James.
– No, it is, Pia said.
– This is what she told me, Paul said, – in the car on the way down here.
– I pretended it wasn’t to do with you. I almost came to tell you the truth once. I bought the ticket at Paddington and then I didn’t get on the train. I got on and got off again, at the last minute.
– I don’t believe you, James said.
He was rubbing his fists in his eyes, shocked out of his deep adolescent sleep, doubting and resistant. Pia looked shocked too, as if the revelation wasn’t going the way she had pictured it in advance.
– It’s a girl, she said shyly. – Apparently it’s a girl.
When Paul was born, his mother had been expecting a girl, they had had a girl’s name ready. There was some old wives’ tale: you dangled a ring on a thread over the unborn child, watching to see if it spun clockwise or anticlockwise. So much for old wives’ tales. Evelyn hadn’t been disappointed, she’d been relieved. She’d said to him once when he was still living at home that she hadn’t wanted a daughter, to be born into drudgery. A son could get away into a different life. Perhaps she had felt otherwise about it later, when Paul in his different life had left her behind – didn’t visit often enough, didn’t know how to turn over on the phone with her the interminable, essential detail of her everyday. A daughter might have been a better bet.
Paul sat for a while in his car after Pia had been swallowed up inside the Willis’s house. Evelyn, when she was alive, would have hated the idea of Pia pregnant and unmarried; she wouldn’t have understood why they were all taking it so calmly, as if it wasn’t momentous. The world turned and the old forms, which had seemed substantial as life itself, were left behind and forgotten. There wasn’t any place he could go now to remember his mother. Perhaps her name was written in a book in the crematorium – or did they only do that in churches? – name after name in neat black calligraphy, with an embroidered bookmark on the opened page, furred with dead moths and dust. He preferred to think about her in the dark. She had been visiting him again, since he came home – but with less ferocity than at first. In her dead self, in his dreams, she could even seem forgiving, the knots of her anxious fearfulness loosened. Paul was so tired, he almost fell asleep there in the car. He didn’t want to drive the last quarter of a mile.
Searching everywhere inside the house, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Was Gerald here somewhere, with Elise? Party mess was piled up in the kitchen, dirty plates, sleazy regiments of bottles, leftover food not put away in the fridge. Upstairs, the spare mattresses were dragged out onto the girls’ bedroom floor, extra children were curled heaps under duvets or in sleeping bags. All of them were asleep amid signs of wild play cut short, the toy box upended, dressing-up clothes trampled on the floor where they’d been thrown off. He touched the door to the bedroom across the landing, which stood open as always: swinging back soundlessly, it revealed only the landing light trapped in the mirror, the expanse of white counterpane on their bed undisturbed, Elise’s make-up bag on the dressing table disgorging pencils, tweezers, pots of colour. The open window rattled on its catch; the flurry of rain had stirred up smells of earth and growth in the garden. Moths batted inside the luminous paper globe on the landing behind him.
Elise was extravagantly absent.
Were all these children safe, alone in the house without her?
From the window he thought he saw pale shapes moving in the meadow. He went downstairs again, deliberately clattering, running the tap noisily in the kitchen, calling out of the back door for her. Coming from the lit indoors, when he stepped out into the yard and then across into the garden it felt as if he pressed against a skin of darkness and then broke through it, having to step cautiously and lift his knees, wading in a thicker medium, not sure where he was putting his feet down.
– El? Where are you?
She seemed to break through something, too, when she was suddenly ahead of him, the night thinning out around her form. She must have pulled a jumper over her shirt when it turned chilly, but he knew from her height in relation to his shoulder that she was still barefoot. He intuited across the space between them her intensely familiar sceptical scrutiny, invisible in the night.
– Paul? Is it you? What have you done with Pia?
– I’ve left her at Blackbrook. She wanted to be with James.
– That’s good, because there are children on all the mattresses. What was it all about? Is she all right?
Paul told her more or less what had happened, Pia’s deception and escape, waking Susan Willis in the middle of the night. – I can’t believe we’re mixed up with the appalling Willises now. Actually genetically mixed up with them. It’s a nightmare.
Elise said she’d thought there was something funny with Pia’s dates. She had looked too big in the pictures she sent Becky.
– Was it a good party, after I’d gone?
– It was a drunken party. We drank too much.
– Fun drunk or hazardous drunk?
– Anyway I’m sober now. I’ve been sober for hours. I went out to walk under the apple trees by myself. It’s amazing what you can see and hear in the dark. Your eyes get used to it. It was lovely there.
– Did Gerald turn up?
She answered airily, lightly. – He did turn up. But you know what he’s like. He doesn’t say anything in company. He just sits there – exasperating really. You’re wondering all the time whether he’s judging everything, or just oblivious to it.
– He doesn’t like parties much.
– Someone brought the speakers outside and we danced, but Gerald wouldn’t join in. Then I looked round and he’d gone. I suppose he caught the last train. But I’d told him he could stay. I mean, this was almost his home for weeks, when he was ill. We were very close, when he was here and I was looking after him. One night I had to hold onto him for hours, Paul, he had such an attack of horrors. Nothing happened, you understand, except that I held him.
Paul took this in.
– Never mind, he said. – You know what he’s like. That’s what he does, he comes and goes. He lives in his own world.
Garden flares stuck in the plant pots had burned out hours ago, the yard was dark. They peered in through the window at the lit-up kitchen: the piles of dirty washing up, the greasy leftovers, the chairs displaced, bunches of dried herbs and corn dollies and postcards pinned to the beams and thick with dust, school notices bristling on the fridge door.
– Whoever lives in this house, Elise said, – I’m glad it’s not us. It’s a filthy mess.
– Me too. I’m glad about it.
– I’d hate to have to go in there and get started on that washing up.
Her voice was careless; massaging her shoulders, though, Paul felt her disappointment and humiliation, resistant as a knotted rope. Her jumper slithered under his working fingers, against the silky shirt. Through his hand, he seemed to be in touch with the surge of her inner life, which mostly wasn’t disclosed to him: deeper and more chaotic than it ever showed itself in the words they exchanged. He felt as if he hardly knew her, this wife and mother of his children. When they first met he had been drawn to Elise because she seemed complete and fearless, with all the bright presumption of the class she came from. Now, it was as though she was stepping out of that identity – leaving it behind like a husk – into something new and more precarious. He was stricken and desiring, imagining her walking about alone, before he came home, under the trees in the meadow where the children had played in the twilight. What had she been thinking, all that time?
– Let’s not go inside just yet, he said. – Let’s walk.
– It’s some crazy hour of the night, you know. We’ll be shattered tomorrow. Those kids’ll be up at the crack of dawn.
– I know. But it’s nice out here.
At first they were both blind again, when they turned to face into the garden, because they’d looked too long into the kitchen light. Paul promised to get up first with the children in the morning.
– All right then, Elise said. – I don’t mind, if you promise.