Read Online The London Train by Tessa Hadley - Free Book Online Page B

Pia? Both of them spoke English well, but sometimes they lapsed into Polish, and then Paul found himself looking from one to the other as if he was watching a film without subtitles, which might make sense if only he concentrated hard enough. What would Annelies think of him, seduced like this – or Elise? Marek refilled Paul’s glass several times.
    Anna said she wanted to develop her own small business, an outlet for friends who made jewellery: ‘very original, good quality’. Lifting her hair, she showed Paul silver earrings, little jagged lightning strokes, set with tiny stones, the sort of thing you could buy at any market stall. With a qualm, Paul wondered if they were imagining he had money, calculating he might help them with their projects. For all he knew, Marek could be married, or at least have other women at home in Poland. He even asked himself once whether Anna was really Marek’s sister: but there was a trick of likeness between them, not obvious but unmistakable when you’d seen it, in how their dark eyes were set in their skin, so that their awareness seemed gathered behind their faces, looking out.
    When he asked, they told him they came from Lodz, but didn’t seem interested in talking about their home. Paul had been twice to Poland, long ago, but his idea of it mostly came from the poets he had read. These two wouldn’t want him dragging out all those old associations, that old junk, they wouldn’t want to know he’d once worn a Solidarno ść badge to school. They were too young to remember life in the old Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, and he didn’t know much about life in the new one. For the moment anyway they were Londoners, absorbed in that, more at home in the metropolis than he was. When he eventually left the flat, remembering his train, he managed to pull Pia half outside the front door, onto the walkway. Probably she thought that he was drunk.
    – You have to promise me something, he said in a low voice, urgently. – If they ask you to do anything you don’t like, you will call me straight away, won’t you?
    He saw her eyes widen under their blue-painted lids. – I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. – Do you mean drugs?
    – Whatever. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
    He wasn’t clear himself about precisely what he feared, and was half-ashamed of where such imaginings came from. Was it only because the man Pia had chosen was a foreigner?
    She shook off his hand from her arm, to go back inside. – I told you. This is what I want.

VI
    E lise’s bedtime routine was intimately known to him: the yawns, the cleanser, the glass of water she only rarely touched, the pillow she liked to drag under her cheek, her alarm clock set inexorably for the following morning. One new detail was the glasses she had begun to need to read with. These gave Paul mixed feelings: on the one hand, a chill from the middle age into which she advanced always just a little ahead of him; on the other, a frisson of affection, making him think of a character in one of those mid-period Bergman movies, women struggling to take possession of themselves, their past and sexuality. Was that what Elise was doing? She kept a pile of modern novels by her bed that he rarely looked into; they seemed to him pretty much interchangeable – what people called ‘women’s fiction’. The trouble with cohabitation seemed to be that you were gripped in some struggle for vindication so convoluted that you couldn’t afford to imagine things impartially from the other one’s centre.
    She would abandon reading with a little sigh, smiling apologetically, but giving out a hum of sensuous submission as she slipped under into sleep, leaving him high and dry, beached in her wake. It was too hot these nights to wrap himself around her from behind; her breasts, if he put his hand on them, seemed scalding; she brushed him away without even waking properly, murmuring a protest. Curled with his