Free The London Train by Tessa Hadley Page B

out of sight under his deckchair, so the girls wouldn’t spot it.
    – And Martine, the one from Heidelberg. She was nice too.
    – Went back to Heidelberg.
    Elise laughed as if he was impossible, but also as if it gratified her, that he wouldn’t be drawn into making much of those girls, giving anything away.
    – Why doesn’t he stay the night ever? she asked Paul when Gerald had gone to get his train. – It must be awful for him, going back to that dismal flat.
    – It isn’t dismal. It’s how he likes it. He likes to keep his own hours, read as late as he wants, make tea in the middle of the night if he wants to.
    – He could do that here, we wouldn’t mind.
    Gerald had told Paul once that he got panicky in a place where other people were asleep – he had a problem with imagining their breathing or something. This must be part of the story with the girlfriends. If you lived alone for too long, the effort of breaking all your forms of life, to recast them with someone else, might be just too tremendous. Those girls, Katherine and the others, were shaken when they came back from throwing themselves at Gerald with such innocent enthusiasm. There was a cruelty in the blank side he turned to them, when he needed to cut them out.
    – It’s restful working alongside him, Elise said. – At first it feels funny not saying anything, then you settle into it. I used to think he wouldn’t talk to me because I wasn’t intellectual.
    Paul lied that he needed to go up to London again, to see his agent. He winced at the lie – Elise hadn’t absolved him yet, over the lies he’d told at the time he was seeing that girl in Cardiff – but at least it wasn’t for his own advantage, only Pia’s. Without warning Pia he was coming, he went straight to the flat. All the way there, on the train looking out at the yellowing landscape, and then on the Underground, he was rehearsing how he would persuade his daughter to come home with him. She ought to be looking after herself in her pregnancy, she ought to think responsibly about the future, she ought to be with her family who would love and cherish her best. He might be able to persuade her to pack a bag and leave with him there and then: he would take her home to Annelies, or back with him to Tre Rhiw, whichever she wanted. The idea of restoring her triumphantly made him emotional. His mission sealed him apart from the crowds around him in the Underground, their babble of languages silenced as they swayed together in the heat, strap-hanging, bodies indifferently intimate, faces closed against curiosity.
    Arriving at the block, he buzzed the entry phone. Someone seemed to pick up in the flat, but when he spoke into it no one answered, and after a moment it cut off. He hadn’t allowed himself to think of this when he was on his way: that there might be no one at home, or no one who wanted to see him. He rang again, and this time no one picked up. Pia’s mobile was turned off when he tried it. It was absurd that he hadn’t prepared for this eventuality; now he was at a loss. He read the paper for an hour in a dubious café somewhere off Pentonville Road, then tried the mobile and the entry phone again. He made efforts to persuade the concierge to let him in. ‘I’m sure they’re at home. Perhaps the phone isn’t working.’ The concierge tried for himself. ‘It working. No one in the place.’
    Paul spent the day in the British Library, returning to the block in the evening as the sun dropped and the brilliant daylight thickened and dimmed. As he approached he tried to work out which flat was Anna’s: one on the second floor with its lights on had its blinds skewed at angles halfway up the windows in a sequence he seemed to recognise, but he wasn’t sure it was in the right relationship to where the entrance was, or to the roof garden, whose dead stubble poked above a parapet, a fringe outlined against a sky of deepening royal blue. Again, no one picked up when he tried