The London Train by Tessa Hadley Read Free Book Online Page A

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