The London Train by Tessa Hadley

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.

V
    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