69

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a grey-blue sky; and I could hear people saying ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ But all those tired greens, greys, browns … they seemed to compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks – how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face.

I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o’clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialled Ann Taylor’s number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited. Alison would be waiting for me, or if not there would be some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour.

At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor’s flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions.

I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.

Footsteps.

A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting-room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.

I backed.

‘Sorry. Wrong flat.’ I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, ‘It’s all right. Second floor.’ I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.

I walked back to the pub, and later that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers’ staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.

I went and had one more look at the flat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.

The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The flat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July – ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.

‘Must have been sharing,’ said the clerk.

And that was that.

And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her?

But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone-calls, not the smallest sign.

I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; and then it angered me that I was worried.

The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the ceiling, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that.

At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist’s board. It was a scruffy attic ‘flat’ over two floors of sewing-rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the ‘thirties vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been ‘a close friend’ – ‘God, the times I’ve put him to bed, poor sod.’ I didn’t believe her; ‘Dylan slept (or slept it off) here’ is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her – ‘My name’s Joan, everyone calls me Kemp.’ Her intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place.

‘Okay,’ she said at the door, after I’d agreed to take the rooms. ‘As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week.’

‘Good Lord.’

She nodded. ‘Them.’ I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner.

I also bought an old M.G. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw’s Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and – at least to begin with – stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone.