I asked what exactly his father hadn’t liked about the house.
Pavel made his humming sound again, clasping his hands in front of him and rocking back and forth slightly on his toes.
He hadn’t consulted his father at any point during the project, he said, but when it was nearly finished he had invited him to come out and look at it. They had stood outside and looked at it together, the transparent box. Pavel had designed it so that in certain places you could see all the way through it, out into the forest on the other side. His wife and children were in the kitchen: they could see them, his wife cooking dinner, the children sitting at the table playing a game. He and his father had stood there and looked and then his father had turned to him, striking his own forehead to signify Pavel’s stupidity.
‘He say, Pavel, you idiot, you forgot to build the walls – everyone can see you in there!’
He had heard afterwards that his father was freely talking about the house in town, telling people that if they went out to the forest, they could stand there and watch Pavel shitting.
After that Pavel had tried to find other work and failed. He had come to England and worked for a few months building the new terminal at Heathrow, being routinely sacked on a Friday night and rehired on a Monday, because the building company never knew in advance how many labourers they’d need. Then he’d met Tony and got the job he had now. At the end of his time at Heathrow, the terminal had opened: he was working near the arrivals gate and all day long he would watch people streaming out through the doors. No matter how often he told himself to stop, he kept glancing up, thinking that his family were about to come through that opening, thinking he recognised faces he knew in the crowds, sometimes hearing Polish voices and fragments of Polish conversation. For hour after hour he watched the scenes of reunion as other people received their loved ones. It was addictive: when he got home his room was correspondingly colder, bleaker, more lonely. It was better to be here, in this house of books: he’d been meaning to ask whether I’d mind if occasionally he borrowed one, so that he could try to improve his English. It was difficult to talk to anyone, his language level being what it was: this conversation was the longest he had spoken to anyone in weeks. The problem was that his thoughts far outpaced his verbal ability. Yet he knew that when he spoke, he improved rapidly: he had once been stuck on a bus in a traffic jam, sitting next to a girl who had started to talk to him, and by the end of that conversation, which had lasted an hour, they had been able to exchange confidences and intimacies in a way he hadn’t done with anyone since his conversations with his wife on his last visit home. She had told him he was all bottled up.
‘Nothing come out,’ he said with a small, ashamed smile.
He had been meaning to tell me, he added, to lock my windows at night: he had arrived early one morning and seen the front window was open. Also, he wondered whether I would allow him to put a chain on the door, so that I would be safer here when I was alone. He advised me to accept; it would take him five minutes.
I could hear my phone ringing downstairs and I asked Pavel to excuse me so that I could go and answer it. It was my son, saying that he had lost the key to his father’s house and was locked out. He was standing on the doorstep, he said. It was cold and there was no one at home. He began to weep, harshly, inconsolably. I stood and listened to the sound as though paralysed by it. I remembered how I used to hold him while he cried. Now all there was was the sound. Then abruptly the crying stopped and I heard him call his brother’s name. It’s all right, he said down the phone to me. Don’t worry, it’s all right. He could see his brother coming along the road, he said. I heard scuffling and laughing sounds in the background as the two of them met. I tried to say something but he said he had to go. Bye, he said.
The front door shut and Tony reappeared and picked up his drill. He was reticent when I asked what the neighbours had said. He looked me up and down.
‘You go somewhere?’ he said.
I said I had to go and teach a class and I wouldn’t be back until late. He nodded his head.
‘Better you not here,’ he said.
I asked whether he had managed to get any agreement from them about the noise. He was silent. I watched while he levered away a new section of plaster, releasing it in a shower of rubble and dust.
‘Is okay,’ he said. ‘I tell them.’
I asked him what exactly he had told them.
He yanked at the wall and a big broken piece of it came away with a crunching sound while a wide grin slowly appeared on his face.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘they treat me like son.’
He had acted, he assured me, on my behalf by telling the neighbours that they had his full sympathy, that I worked him and Pavel like a slave driver, that they were all of them my victims and that if they would only let him finish the job quickly he would be free.
‘Is best way,’ he said.
They had responded well, he added: he was given cups of tea and even a packet of sweets – the mixture of Dolly – to take home to his daughter. He wanted me to know that he had not of course meant the things he had said – it was a game, a strategy, using the force of their hatred to attain his own ends.
‘Like Albanian politician,’ he said, grinning.
There was something false in Tony’s manner that suggested he was not telling the truth, or at least that he was trying to impose his interpretation on a series of events he did not entirely understand. He avoided meeting my eye: his expression was evasive. I said that I could see he was trying to help. The problem, I said, with whipping up the neighbours’ hatred was that I had to continue living here with my sons after Tony had gone. I told him about an evening over the summer, when I had been sitting in the dark kitchen watching the international family next door in their garden, and had seen Paula come out of the flat below me and walk up the steps. She had talked to them over the fence: loudly, I had heard her telling them about me and about the terrible things I had done; I had watched their polite, embarrassed faces and knew that while they wouldn’t necessarily believe what she had said, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me either.
Tony put his hands out, palms up, his head to one side.
‘Is bad situation,’ he said.
I felt him looking at me furtively while I put on my coat. He asked me what I taught, and whether the children were well behaved – a lot of the children at his daughter’s school behaved like animals. They had no discipline, that was the problem. Life was too easy for them here. I told him that I taught adults rather than children and he laughed incredulously.