Judy had taken him to Hampstead Heath, scene of all sorts of sexual encounters, perhaps rather few of them heterosexual. Stuart and Judy were tangled together, standing up, only semi-naked, in a copse that promised to provide adequate cover. Suddenly a small black dog, rapidly followed by its owner, discovered them. The dog owner, a lean, white-haired, soldierly-looking man, stared at them with as much pity as disgust and said, “You dirty buggers. You deserve all you get.”
It seemed an odd thing for him to have said, but in a peculiar way it struck home with Stuart. As he buttoned and zipped himself up he knew that his affair with Judy had finished. Comic and trivial though this particular discovery had been, he realized they’d been lucky to get away with it for as long as they had. Discovery by the man with the dog had been somehow symbolic. If it went on much longer it would be Anita doing the discovering, and the consequences of that could be far more terrible than the simple pains of an ended affair.
The next time he saw her he told Judy as swiftly, as diplomatically as he could that it was all over. She did not take it well. She screamed at him, called him every bad thing she could think of, threatened obscure and terrible revenges. He told her she was being absurd. It had been an affair, he said, nothing more, fun while it lasted and surely not so terrible now it was over. But Judy wasn’t having any of that. She was wounded in a way he had never imagined, never bargained for. All he could do was say he was sorry, even though he wasn’t particularly. And when she began to say that she thought she was deeply, desperately in love with him, he was more convinced than ever that he’d done the right thing by ending it.
Judy Tanaka disappeared out of his life, left the job at The London Walker without giving any notice, something that both infuriated and perplexed Anita. Judy hadn’t seemed the kind to leave them in the lurch like that. It was said by other members of staff that there must surely be some pressing reason for her departure, and perhaps she’d return one day with a full explanation.
For his part, Stuart spent several weeks thinking Judy might exact some terrible revenge on him. The most likely, he thought, would be telling Anita about the affair. But it never happened. She was gone for good. Only months later did Stuart hear that she was working in a bookshop, a job that seemed far too dull and undemanding for someone of Judy’s talents.
Once it was all over Stuart felt little more than a profound sense of relief. He’d had a lucky escape. He’d got away with something that he probably hadn’t deserved to. Until Judy came along he had not been consciously looking for an affair. He’d known something was absent from his life, something that he needed rather badly, but he certainly hadn’t thought it was extramarital sex, and it seemed he was right.
Once Judy had gone the need for that something was greater than ever, it multiplied, grew exponentially; but a new affair, a new mistress, certainly wouldn’t have helped. If it would, there were plenty more new tour guides, replacements for Judy in every sense. But he knew that was not what he was looking for.
The affair was over and he wanted to get back to his old ways, back to the way things were before, and yet it didn’t seem to be an option any longer. Something, and possibly Judy was the agent here, had changed him. The old dissatisfactions were still there, but now mutated.
For a while he threw himself into trying to be a better husband for Anita but that gave neither party much pleasure. It was just as well he discovered what it was he needed to do. Even when he’d discovered it, he found it hard to understand exactly how the end of an affair could produce in a man the need to walk down every street in London; yet undeniably there was a connection.
He couldn’t see how this was any more convincing a reason than the other, more prosaic ones he’d previously tried for size. But somehow it fitted better even if it seemed more bizarre. Judy had made the whole of London come sexually alive for him. Now it appeared that he had ditched Judy but was continuing his affair with the city, pursuing it, wanting to possess it. He found himself bitterly amused at the absurdity of this latest ‘explanation’, but at least, he thought, he was no longer being unfaithful to Anita. Anita, however, when she eventually got to read the diary, might not see it that way at all.
THE WALKER’S DIARY THE FIRST ENTRY
So I have decided to keep a diary of my London walks; nothing too ambitious, nothing too pretentious. I’m simply going to describe what I see, although of course I know that the process of seeing is a highly selective one. What I see will reveal as much about me as about London.
At first I thought I might make an entry for every single street in London, set down what I observed in each one, what was special and unique about it. But I immediately realized the folly of that. You can’t force it. You can’t make yourself see things. There’ll be unremarkable streets where I see nothing worth remarking on. That’s fine. London has to offer itself up to me and I have to offer myself to London.
I have decided that I shan’t write anything down while I’m actually doing the walks. I shan’t be taking notes. I don’t want to look like a spy or a journalist, and I don’t want the act of note-taking to get in the way of seeing. Then, when I get home, I’ll type up my recollections of the day as best I can. I only want to remember what I remember. If I forget things, then so be it.
Once the information is on disk I’ll find a place to hide it, somewhere that prying eyes like Anita’s can’t find it. Why this urge for secrecy? I’m not sure, but it feels very real. For that matter, I wonder why Samuel Pepys wrote his diary in code? I’ll check on that.
♦
Oxford Street — Not my favourite bit of London but this enterprise is not about playing favourites. De Quincey refers to it as a stony-hearted stepmother who drinks the tears of children, which I think is going a bit far. Certainly on this weekday morning Oxford Street was completely free of children. At nine-thirty few of the shops were open. Outside the shoe shops staff were waiting for their bosses to arrive with their keys to let them in. In a doorway two homeless men were in sleeping-bags, fast asleep, showing no signs of waking despite the daylight and the presence of people. You’d have thought the homeless would be early risers.
Outside Tottenham Court Road tube station a dark girl, maybe Spanish, maybe Italian, was handing out leaflets advertising a language school. She gave one to an old, stocky, grey-haired Londoner who looked at the leaflet and reacted furiously.
“You’re telling me to learn English?” he ranted. “You’re telling me?”
The girl who’d handed him the card didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe she didn’t even know what he was saying.
A young black man with a woolly hat and sunglasses came down the street making odd movements with his left hand, a strange sort of action somewhere between mime and martial arts, and he was talking to some invisible companion as he walked along. When he got level with me he half looked at me and said, “That’s all right!!” and swept away.
I saw a man in a tam-o’—shanter. And a boy in a long, dark sinister-looking mac whose head was shaved except for a turd-shaped lump of blue hair on the very top of his skull. He looked like a maniac yet he was with a girl dressed in perfectly ordinary clothes, looking like a secretary, though she was carrying a yellow balloon on a stick.
A sad-looking, camp young man with a pierced ear and nose was holding a Polaroid camera, trying to get a picture of the window display in Top Shop. He was waiting not very patiently. There was a stream of people passing by. You couldn’t imagine when he’d ever get a clear shot.