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Overview
In this New York Times Notable Book from one of today’s most acclaimed writers, two lives stretched between two cities converge in a chance meeting that will irrevocably change their lives.
“Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces.” —New York Times Book Review
Unsettled by the recent death of his mother, Paul sets out in search of Pia, his daughter from his first marriage, who has disappeared into the labyrinth of London. Discovering her pregnant and living illegally in a run-down council flat with a pair of Polish siblings, Paul is entranced by Pia’s excitement at living on the edge. Abandoning his second wife and their children in Wales, he joins her to begin a new life in the heart of London.
Cora, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction, back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life in London. But there is a deeper reason why she cannot stay with her decent Civil Service husband; the aftershocks of which she hasn’t fully come to terms with herself.
Connecting both stories is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and Cora.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062011831 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/21/2020 |
| Series: | P.S. Series |
| Edition description: | Original |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 440,705 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.84(w) x 5.36(h) x 0.88(d) |
About the Author
Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including Clever Girl and The Past, as well as three short story collections, most recently Bad Dreams and Other Stories, which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker; in 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
The London Train
By Tessa Hadley
Harper Perennial
Copyright © 2011 Tessa HadleyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780062011831
Chapter One
By the time Paul got to the Home, the undertakershad already removed his mother's body.
He protested at this, it seemed done in indecent
haste. He had set out as soon as they telephoned him;
surely they could have waited the three or four hours
it had taken him to get there (the traffic had been heavy
on the M5). Mrs Phipps, the owner of the Home, guided
him into her office, where whatever scene he might make
wouldn't upset the other residents. She was petite, vivacious,
brown-skinned, with traces of a South African
accent; he didn't dislike her, he thought she ran the
Home to a good standard of care, his mother had seemed
to resign herself gratefully to her efficiency and brisk
baby-talk. Even at this moment, however, there was no
sign that the taut, bright mask of Mrs Phipps's good
humour, respectfully muted in the circumstances, ever
gave way to any impulse of authentic feeling. Her room
was pleasant; an open sash window let in the afternoon
spring sunshine from the garden. On the wall behind
her desk was pinned a colourful year planner, almost
every square scribbled over with busyness and responsibility:
he imagined a space on the planner where his
mother's occupation of her room abutted abruptly onto
blankness.
If he wanted to see his mother, Mrs Phipps said,
putting the right nuance of sorrowful tact into her voice,
she could telephone the undertakers, he could go to see
her there. Paul was aware of the hours ahead as requiring
scrupulous vigilance; he must be so careful to do the
right thing, but it wasn't clear what the right thing might
be. He said he would take the undertakers' address and
number, and Mrs Phipps gave it to him.
– I ought to let you know, she added – because I
wouldn't want you to find out in any roundabout
way, that Evelyn made another of her bids for freedom
last night.
– Bids for freedom?
He thought that she was using an odd euphemism for
dying, but she went on to explain that his mother had
got out of bed at some point in the evening, and gone
into the garden in her nightdress. There was a place they
always looked when they couldn't find her: Evelyn's
little den in the shrubbery.
– I'm sorry that it happened. But I did warn you that
we simply aren't able to provide twenty-four hour
supervision of residents when they fall ill. The girls were
in and out of her room all evening, checking on her.
That was how we realized she had got out. To be frank
with you, she was so weak none of us had imagined she
was even capable of getting out of bed. She can only
have been out there for ten to fifteen minutes before we
found her. Twenty at the most.
They had brought her inside and put her back to bed.
She had had a good night; she only deteriorated after
breakfast this morning.
Mrs Phipps was worrying that he might make a
complaint, Paul realized.
– It's all right. If that's what she wanted to do, then
I'm glad she was able to get out.
She was relieved, although she didn't understand his
point. – Of course we were worried about her body
temperature, these spring nights are treacherous. We
wrapped her up warmly and made her a hot drink, we
kept an eye on her all through the night.
Paul asked if he could sit in his mother's room for a
while. They had already stripped her bed and pulled up
over the mattress a clean counterpane in the standard
flowered material that was everywhere in the Home:
there were no signs he could see of what had taken place
in here. Mrs Phipps had reassured him that his mother
had 'gone very peacefully', but he took this as no more
than a form of words. He sat for a while in his mother's
armchair, looking round at her things: the last condensed
residue of the possessions that had accompanied her from
her home to her small flat in sheltered accommodation
and then to this room. He recognized some of them only
because he had moved them for her each time; others
were familiar from his childhood and youth: a majolica
fruit bowl, a blue glass girl who had once been fixed on
the side of a vase for flowers, the red Formica coffee table
that always stood beside her chair, with its built-in ashtray
on a chrome stem.
When Paul left the Home, he drove to the undertakers
and sat in his car in their small forecourt car park. He
had to go inside and talk to them about arrangements
for the funeral; but there was also the issue of seeing his
mother's body. He was his parents' only child. Evelyn
had absorbed the brunt of his father's death twenty years
ago, when Paul was in his twenties: now all the lines
met in him. Of course his wife would be sorry, and his
children too; however, because for the last few years
Evelyn's mind had wandered farther and farther, she had
become a distant figure to the girls, and he had only
brought them to visit her every so often. She still recognized
them, but if they went into the garden to play, or
even if they went to the toilet, or moved round to the
other side of her chair, she would forget she had already
seen them; each time they returned she would greet them
again, her face lighting up with the same delight.
His father had died in hospital after a heart attack;
Evelyn was with him, Paul had been living in Paris at
the time and had not arrived until the next day. The
possibility of seeing the body had not arisen; in his
concentration then on his mother's bereavement, it probably
hadn't seemed important. Now he did not know
whether this was important or not. He peered into the
undertakers' shop window with its kitsch discretion, urns
and pleated silks and artificial flowers. When eventually
he got out of his car to go inside, he realized it was past
six o'clock. There was a closed sign hanging on the shop
door, with a number to contact in case of emergency,
which he didn't write down. He would come back in
the morning.
He had got into the habit of using the Travelodge, if
ever he needed to stay overnight in Birmingham when
he came to visit his mother; conveniently, there was one
only ten minutes' drive from the Home. He unpacked
his few things, a clean shirt and socks, toothbrush, a
notebook, the two books of poetry he was reviewing –
he had not known when he set out in the morning how
long he would need to stay. Then he telephoned Elise.
– She'd gone by the time I got there, he said.
– Oh, poor Evelyn.
– Mrs Phipps said she went very peacefully.
– Oh, Paul. I'm so sorry. Are you all right? Where
are you? Do you need me to come up? I'm sure I could
get someone to have the girls.
He reassured her that he was all right. He didn't want
to eat, but walked around the streets until he found a
pub where he drank two pints, and browsed a copy of
the Birmingham Mail that was lying on a table. His
mind locked into the words, he read each page exhaustively,
taking in without any inward commentary every
least detail: crime, entertainment, in memoriam. He had
a dread of being overtaken by some paroxysm of grief
in a public place. Back in his room, he did not want to
read either of the poetry books; when he had undressed
he looked in the drawer of the bedside table for a Bible,
but it was a New International Version, no good to him.
He turned out the light and lay under the sheet, because
the heating was stuffy and airless and you could not
open the windows more than a crack. Through the crack
the fine spring night sent its smells of greenness and
growth, mingled with petrol fumes from the road outside
that never stilled or grew quiet, however late it was. He
was relieved, he thought. What had happened was merely
the ordinary, expected, common thing: the death of an
elderly parent, the release from a burden of care. He had
not wanted her life prolonged, in the form it had taken
recently. He had not visited her as often as he should.
He had been bored, when he did visit.
When he closed his eyes there came an unwanted
image of his mother out in the dark garden of the Home
in her nightdress, so precise that he sat up in bed
abruptly. She seemed so close at hand that he looked
around for her: he had the confused but strong idea
that this present moment could be folded closely enough
to touch against a moment last night, that short time
ago when she was still alive. He saw not the bent old
lady she had become, but the mature woman of his
teenage years: her dark hair in the plait she had long
ago cut off, the thick-lensed black-rimmed glasses of
those days, her awkward tall strength and limbs full of
power. When she was still alive it had been difficult
sometimes for him to remember her past selves, and he
had been afraid he had lost them for ever, but this recall
was vivid and total. He switched on the light, got out
of bed, turned on the television and watched the news,
images of the war in Iraq.
Lying stretched out again in the dark on his back,
naked, covered with the sheet, he couldn't sleep. He
wished he could remember better those passages in The
Aeneid where Anchises in the Underworld explains to
his son how the dead are gradually cleansed in the afterlife
of all the thick filth and encrusting shadows that
have accumulated through their mortal involvement,
their living; when after aeons they are restored to pure
spirit, they long, they eagerly aspire, to return to life
and the world and begin again. Paul thought that there
was no contemporary language adequate to describe the
blow of his mother's vanishing. A past in which a
language of such dignity as Virgil's was possible seemed
to him itself sometimes only a dream.
The next morning when he went back to the undertakers
he told himself in advance that he must ask to see
her body. However, once he was involved in making the
arrangements for the funeral, he found it difficult to
speak at all, even to give his minimal consent to whatever
was proposed: his dumbness did not come from
deep emotion, but its opposite, a familiar frozen aversion
that seized him whenever he had to transact these
false relations with the external world. He imagined the
young man he spoke with had been trained to watch for
the slips and give-away confusions of grieving family
members, and so he tried to make himself coldly impenetrable.
Elise should have been there to help him, she
was gifted at managing this side of life. He could not
bring himself to expose to the youth's solicitude any
intimate need to touch his mother a last time; and perhaps
anyway he didn't want to touch her.
Afterward he went to the Home as he had arranged,
to deal with paperwork and to clear his mother's belongings
from her room, although Mrs Phipps had insisted
there was no hurry, he was welcome to leave things as
they were until after the funeral. He sat again in Evelyn's
armchair. The room was really quite small; but on the
occasion they had come here first to look at it, there
had been someone playing a piano downstairs, and he
had allowed this to convince him that the Home was a
humane place, that it would be possible to have a full
life here. He had not often heard the piano afterward.
When he had packed a few things into boxes he asked
Mrs Phipps to dispose of the rest, and also to show him
what she had called his mother's 'den' in the garden; he
saw her wonder whether he was going to make
difficulties after all.
In the garden the noise of traffic wasn't insistent. The
sun was shining, the bland neat garden, designed for
easy upkeep, was full of birdsong: chaffinch and blackbird
the broody rumble of the collared doves. Mrs
Phipps's high-heeled beige suede shoes grew dark from
the grass still wet with dew as they crossed the lawn,
her heels sinking in the turf, and he saw that she was
annoyed by this, but would not say anything. The Home
had been a late Victorian rectory, built on a small rise:
at the far end of the garden she showed him that, if you
pushed through the bushes to where the old stone wall
curved round, there was a little trodden space of bare
earth, a twiggy hollow, room enough in it to stand
upright. The wall was too high for an old lady to sit on
or climb over, but she could have leaned on it and looked
over at the view, she could have watched for anyone
coming. When Evelyn was a child, when there was still
a rector in the rectory, everything beyond this point
would have been fields and woods: now it was built up
as far as the eye could see. Paul pushed inside the hollow
himself and looked out, while Mrs Phipps waited,
politely impatient to get back to her day's business. He
could see from there the sprawling necropolis of the
remains of Longbridge, where Evelyn's brothers had
worked on the track in the Fifties and Sixties, building
Austin Princesses and Rileys and Minis. At night this
great post-industrial expanse of housing development
and shopping complexes and scrapyards was mysterious
behind its myriad lights; by day it looked vacant, as if
the traffic flowed around nowhere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The London Train by Tessa Hadley Copyright © 2011 by Tessa Hadley. Excerpted by permission of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
Sam Sacks
“Powerful…. Ms. Hadley has a talent for the canny detail…. There are platoons of novelists producing work about middle-class marriages in disarray, most of it very dull. Ms. Hadley is one of the gifted exceptions, and the calm acuity with which she depicts these fractured relationships is haunting.”
Ti Sperlinger
“Impressive. . . . a triumph of form.”
Anna Shapiro
“Spectacular….A compelling and serious page-turner.”
Jean Thompson
“Hadley is a close observer of her characters’ inner worlds. Her language can be fine-grained, subtle, eloquent…. Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces.”
Heller McAlpin
“The London Train brings a quiet, nuanced intelligence to domestic fiction….The London Train is the sort of muted, thoughtful read that requires switching from the clattering express onto life’s slow local tracks. Hadley, a meticulous stylist, has woven into her narrative reflections on memory and time.”
Susanna Rustin
“The minds of Paul and Cora are so fully occupied by this most astute and sympathetic of writers....Hadley has crafted real excitement, so that each story ends in a flurry of curiosity and The London Train snaps shut with an effective twist.”
Peter Parker
“Elizabeth Bowen-like in its attention to nuance in language and behaviour, this concise novel also offers a sharp portrait of modern Britain.”
Richard Platt
“Hadley’s strength lies in her characterization. . . . . There’s something pleasingly human about them. With characters like these Hadley makes us wonder what forms our own darkness takes.”
Emma Hagestadt
“Tessa Hadley is a writer whose antennae are almost indecently attuned to the interior static of private lives....[M]asterly...”
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