The London Train Part 1

The London Train.

Tessa Hadley.

The London Train.

I.

By 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 pet.i.te, 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 circ.u.mstances, ever gave way to any impulse of authentic feeling. Her room was pleasant; an open sash window let in the afternoon spring suns.h.i.+ne 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 s.p.a.ce on the planner where his mother's occupation of her room ab.u.t.ted 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 rea.s.sured 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 rea.s.sured 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 gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sages 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 acc.u.mulated 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 vanis.h.i.+ng. 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 s.h.i.+ning, 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 gra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.pyards 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 embarra.s.sment 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 b.u.t.ts 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 sc.r.a.ps 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.'

II.

At 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 repet.i.tions, 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 h.e.l.l 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 rea.s.sured Annelies. As soon as she realises she has to do her own was.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 plat.i.tudes: 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 gla.s.ses, 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' cla.s.s, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 gla.s.s 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 gla.s.ses 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 hards.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 impa.s.sable 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.r's neat secret hole exposed at eye level, a raw crack in the wood of the ma.s.sive 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, ma.s.sive 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 b.a.l.l.s; her hair was sc.r.a.ped out of the way behind a band. When she was finished, she stood over him where he sat on the side of the bed, raking his hair with her fingers away from his brow, frowning into his frown, interrogating him.

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

I'm all right.

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

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

III.