In Grosvenor Square, when the sun shone, the typists came out from their offices to eat their lunch beneath the statue. They sat on the parapets with their paper bags, and soldiers came in twos and threes to sit opposite them. Mothers arrived with their children, prams were handled up the steps, straps were unfastened, the children ran, clattered, splashed in the fountain, hurried about their business of having fun among the stones. A man lay on his back with a handkerchief over his face: a woman with thick legs took her shoes off. A soft silence of sweat rose dropping through the light, and here I came for lunch to eat my sandwiches.
A small boy was riding a bicycle up the path. The place was different in the daylight. A tiny bicycle, like a toy, a fat tiny boy with a peaked cap and spectacles. I looked up to where the façade of the block of flats where Annabelle lived rose pink and pale and majestic. The small boy swerved, some typists screamed, he straightened himself: he was like some turn at the circus, imperturbable and whirling on his jerking wheels. There was a window high up in the flat pink surface where a curtain hung limply into the daylight. The silver wheels twinkled, the soldiers joined in: lurching between their legs he was like a rabbit dodging trees. I did not know which was Annabelle’s window: I did not mind.
Sun and solitude and nothing to do. I will sit here, I thought, until something happens. The small boy was arrested by a keeper. One of the windows was hers: out of the door there was a chance that she might come. A paper bag exploded like a pop-gun. I could sit here for years, I thought: there is nothing to stop me. An old woman like a Rembrandt was being photographed: some Americans were focusing in groups of three. A wave of laughter ran through the crowd. A soldier was inflating another bag, his eyes were like cherries, his cheeks blown tight. As he burst it the girls put their hands to their ears and wailed. Her eyes will be like an animal’s, I thought. The soldier beckoned towards the girls, he moved his body with his hands along the parapet, he patted the vacant stonework by his side. She will be dressed in red, she will have her hands in her pockets, when she walks she will not appear to be moving. The girls squirmed, protested, placed their fingers in front of their faces in reproof. Then one of them rose, advanced tentatively, was pushed from behind, and collapsed uproarious upon skirted knees. She will not appear to be moving. Then another girl made the attempt, stepped gingerly, held her skirt like a paddler. She was half way across and then suddenly, with a rush, was beside the soldier with a bun from his bag. She stretched her legs out in front of her, lay back on her elbows. The two sides cheered. It was like a game of French and English.
“If she comes out of the door”: but she might never. The soldiers and the girls were intermingled now — so easily. What were they saying? Nothing. The words were cries without the necessity of meaning. A lunch with sandwiches, a seat on the stone, and they were no longer strangers. So easily. An arm was slipped round a waist, a body leaned sideways, hair fell downwards on a shoulder. That evening they would meet again, they would go dancing, in alleys of darkness they would see each other home. The façade of the home where Annabelle lived was as impersonal as a factory. That evening they would touch, skirmish, circulate in couples. Suddenly the high-up window with the curtain hanging out was closed, silently, and now there was nothing to suggest that the surface had any more depth than a photograph.
I stood up. There was no reason that she should ever come this way. They were munching sausage rolls from communal fingers. No reason at all. To get together you have to have paper bags, you have to burst them, you have to deal in giggles and the arching of eyes. I moved away from them. They were arm in arm beside the fountains. She might never. It was not possible for me to go up because formality was necessary, and it was not possible to stay because to others it so apparently was not.
I walked to the National Gallery. The street was cluttered with the crowd. I minded now. Stepping on and off the pavement it was as if there was someone by my side. A string of bubbles descended from an advertisement: they were iridescent and oily like drops from a melted rainbow. In Trafalgar Square the fountains again were playing. They were soft and spectacular, the mist hung whitely, the scene was extended to a faintly distorted size. Here the stones were black, the groups in hundreds, the pigeons thick and myriad like ants. It was as if the lunch-hour picnic by the statue had been commercialized into the feeding of a thousand waiting mouths.
From beneath the great portico the birds chattered clamorous and invisible. Inside there was silence, and the vision of wings. A dim brownness, a watery stillness, an aquarium of eternity looking outwards to the light. The light was on the walls, the people were fishes, observing their observers they were sleepy like the sea. Paintings do what churches do, by stressing one’s insignificance they make possible self-repose. Squares of light, windows of eternity, solitude supported upon golden tides of foam. Swimming through the stillness I came upon a red velvet chair like coral. I sat in it. Sleepy with opaqueness I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I saw standing in front of me a girl whom I thought was Annabelle.
Of course it wasn’t. It was just a girl in a red coat looking at a Michelangelo picture and standing there with some of the poised intensity of the figures in the painting, a poise which I had recognized as being characteristic of Annabelle. She was standing with her weight on one leg and her head turned over her shoulder, the whole force of her seeming to be concentrated upon the point of her hip. I got up and walked round her to see her face, and it was a sad face, rather old and puffy, but it was the girl in the red coat who made me realize how much I loved Annabelle. It was funny, I thought. A stranger in a red coat with dark untidy hair.
So I walked away. I walked out down the steps with the chattering of birds beginning again, and in front of me the traffic like a furnace of machines. I wondered where I could find her, where I could come across her as if by accident. In the street it was dirty, there was a hammering of metal, a noise of steam and scorching and the arid smell of dust. I walked past St. Martin-in-the-Fields and down into the Strand. Where I could touch her, stand beside her, watch her face as it turned. But the noise was too insistent. It was enveloping, ferocious, like a forest fire. I could not think. I turned back furiously the way I had come, the afternoon like smoke and my body choked to breathe it, and then, as in a shaft of daylight, I saw Peter on the other side of the road.
A click of vision. The noise retreated. Quietly the cars ran gliding on their way. He was on the edge of a small crowd at the back of the National Gallery, an audience collected to watch the street performers’ turns. I could hear a man shouting his patter to get the crowd to give him money. Peter was throwing him pennies. I crossed over to him. He was leaning forwards, impatiently, like a child at a circus. “Oh look,” he said, “have you got any pennies?”