The London Train Read Online Free PDF Page A

Not even about her timetable, so that he could ask after her among her classmates? The young woman looked at him with patient hostility.
    – I know it’s difficult for parents, she said. – But the students are adults. If you were on a course here, you wouldn’t want us giving out your personal data to anyone who asked.
    – You told her mother, though, that Pia had dropped out of her classes.
    – I don’t know who gave out that information.
    He was shocked to find himself closed out; he had counted on the power of his confident concern, and the charm he had turned on this doughy-faced girl in glasses. Talking to Annelies the night before, he had not taken her anxiety seriously. Now, making his way back to Paddington, the crowds pouring along the streets and into the entrances of the Underground station seemed an infinite stream: the mind, he thought, was not naturally equipped to conceive of the multiplication of all these lives heaped up together in a metropolis, mountain upon mountain of life-atoms. Slipped away from them into this, Pia was lost – if she chose to be. Her mobile was the only slender link they had to her: what if she stopped calling, or lost her phone? How could they hope to trace her then?
    Shuffling in the crowd towards the exit from the Tube at Paddington, he glanced across to the opposite platform and suddenly, extraordinarily, was sure he saw Pia waiting there, standing out tall above the people in front of her, staring into the distance from where the train was coming, pale hair fastened into bunches on her shoulders, black jacket zipped to the neck. If he had not known her, he would have seen a serious and dreamy girl, not unattractive but old-fashioned, somehow vulnerable and raw. Paul shouted her name, disrupting the queue for the exit, forging towards the platform edge to attract her attention, waving his arm. He thought she turned and looked towards him – but then everyone looked, and at that moment the train roared in, swallowing up his sight of her, probably to carry her away; he was left cut off with his conspicuousness, the object of everyone’s idling attention.
    In case she had waited, for a different train or for him, he hurried over to the opposite platform, but of course by the time he got there the train was gone, and Pia with it, if she had ever been there. He began at once to doubt that he had seen her. It must have been some other girl, blonde and tall as Pia was, appearing at the right moment to collaborate with his fears. He was agitated by his exaggerated response and his disappointment, which translated as he recovered into a loop of worry, circling round and round. All the way home on the train, a woman in a seat nearby, not visible to him, talked into her mobile at full volume, filling up every crevice of his privacy, so that he couldn’t concentrate on his book. – I think that’s a beautiful feeling . . . you said before you wanted to move on . . . for any person growing emotionally . . . it’s a different sort of painful, it’s the healing kind . . .
    When he arrived back at Tre Rhiw the last sunshine was still on the back garden, slanting obliquely, burnishing the grass and shrubs as if the light was yellow oil. The spell of fine spring weather was holding, everyone’s pleasure in it tinctured with nervousness, because of climate change. The girls were playing with their goats in the field, feeding them leftover vegetables. Joni was fearlessly familiar with animals: she crooked her arm around the goats’ necks and nuzzled their ears, kissing their pink grey-spotted lips, with a sense of the impudence and effect of her own performance. Becky was more circumspect, anxious for the goats’ feelings, holding her hand out carefully flat to offer them food, as she had been taught. The animals tolerated them, businesslike they munched on, beards wagging, alien eyes cast backwards as if they were unwilling witnesses to visions. Elise was sitting out in