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

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,