The London Train Part 4

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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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.

VII.

Later 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. Bulls.h.i.+t, said Paul. It's pure f.u.c.king aggressive vandalism, that's what it is.

James meanwhile leaned on the saw, smiling into the gra.s.s 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, sc.r.a.ping Rice Krispies savagely into the compost bin, das.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton.

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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.sault 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 bra.s.s bed frame, the pink-striped duvet cover. How had he arrived at submitting to all this? Downstairs, Elise would be finis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sport 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 flouris.h.i.+ng in the dirt, a padlocked corrugated-iron shed, door ripped off its hinges. The beauty of the ma.s.sive 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 cafe, 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 coa.r.s.ely, her wrists and the collar bones visible under her loose s.h.i.+rt 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 cafe, 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. Was.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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.

VIII.

The 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, b.u.mped 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, b.u.t.toning 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 undercla.s.s 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 superst.i.tious 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 cafe. Paul buried his face deeper in the sofa cus.h.i.+ons 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 cafe 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-gla.s.s window of Pia in her long white ap.r.o.n, 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.sing 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 fl.u.s.tered 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 cafe 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 sc.r.a.ped back from her face, and she was disconcertingly lean under the ap.r.o.n 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 s.e.xual 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 superst.i.tious 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 k.n.o.bs 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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, was.h.i.+ng it down with c.o.ke or paper cups of tea from a cafe, 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 rea.s.sured 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 rea.s.suring her that he wasn't. Stella was diminutive and forthright, with dangling earrings and a pixie haircut: she had done Cla.s.sics at university. She and John were his friends and not Elise's; Elise said Stella reminded her of the head girl at school.

Paul pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+t again?