Free The London Train by Tessa Hadley Page A

at school about the layered living of the equatorial forest – his imagination had soared at the idea of animals that spent their entire lives in its canopy, never needing to come down to ground level. He had not wanted particularly to travel to the forest and see for himself; the knowledge that it existed was like a reserve in his spirit, a guarantee that spacious beauty existed somewhere.
    – I shouldn’t worry about it, Elise said. – They seem to cope all right. Isn’t education the best hope for change? This generation ought to grow up passionate environmentalists. The programmes try not to be gloomy, but they have to tell the truth to the children, don’t they? You couldn’t want to deceive them that everything was all right.
    – I’m afraid it makes them helpless. You need such complex contexts, to grapple with the information they’re getting.
    – Do you? It seems straightforward enough to me. Thank goodness things aren’t all left up to the people who understand the complex contexts. If it was up to them, perhaps nothing would ever get done.
    Gerald often ate with them in the evenings. Elise didn’t mind having him there as long as it wasn’t a dinner party. In fact she fussed over him, cooking the things he said he liked, teasing him about how he didn’t look after himself properly. Paul had told her about the Scotch eggs and hummus. – Do you ever clean anything? she asked. – Gerald, have you ever cleaned your lavatory? The girls were gloating and giggling, enjoying the game. Gerald said he had bought some toilet cleanser once, and sometimes squirted it in. Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do? Paul was sure he was exaggerating, playing along with their joke; he didn’t remember the toilet being so very bad. Gerald told them he had a theory, that after a certain point the rooms never got any dirtier: they didn’t get cleaner, but they didn’t get any worse.
    Elise pretended to be appalled. – Won’t you let me come round and clean up for you? It will only take a couple of hours. I won’t touch any of your precious books, I promise.
    It was a joke, but Paul saw with surprise that she half-meant it, too. She didn’t care about the cleaning, but she was intrigued by the idea of Gerald’s flat, where she’d never been, and she wanted to get a look inside it. Joni wrapped her skinny arms around Gerald’s knees, wheedling. – We want to come, we want to come to your smelly flat!
    Gerald said he would love to invite her over for tea, he’d get in cake and crumpets specially. – As long as you’re not afraid of the spiders.
    – Spiders? No . . . Joni was hesitant. – Are they big ones?
    – How about bats?
    – He hasn’t! Becky squealed delightedly, not certain.
    – Or cockroaches?
    He convinced them that he lived with a menagerie of animals, confessing to Paul and Elise later that the cockroaches were for real. After dinner he helped Elise water the vegetables: he was strong as an ox, could easily carry two full watering cans. Paul thought of him when he was a boy, baling out hay from the back of a tractor trailer in winter, or trimming the overgrowth of their sheep’s feet with a paring knife. He had told Paul he used to think up the solutions to maths problems while he worked. To save water, Elise had fixed up a barrel that collected waste from the kitchen sink and the bathroom, to reuse on the garden; after a few trips with the cans, Gerald put in a hose running from the water butt to the vegetable patch. She was delighted with him. They all three sat out with chinking glasses of gin and tonic in the late sunshine, when the chores were done and Becky and Joni were feeding the goats.
    – Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Gerald? Elise asked.
    – It’s probably the cockroaches.
    – No, seriously. Although I don’t suppose the cockroaches help. What happened to Katherine? She was nice.
    – She was nice. Gerald was smoking surreptitiously, holding the spliff between drags