What does he do, this young hero of ours, charged with the task of providing for a first night of bliss? There are no hotels in Camden, and, besides, that is too close to home. His thoughts and his steps take him to the vicinity of Paddington Station, where he eyes from outside, with an intensity of circumspection (he should have worn a hat with the brim pulled down and turned up the collar of his coat), the ranks of plausible hotels that accost the traveller hying to and from the West Country.
It was here, of course, that he first alighted in the capital, in the classic guise of the indigent waif, scorned by his elders, come to find his future in the big city. (Now he has found his future.) And it was from Paddington Station, which still reeks of coal and steam though the Great Western Railway is no more, that the trains that once thrilled him in his younger days set forth. And it has already occurred to our young hotel-assessor that the station in his dream, so blessedly adapted to the needs of two very important travellers, was Paddington.
He selects a hotel. Are names significant? It is called the Denmark Hotel. The white stucco seems newly painted. It has stone steps, leading up to its fanlighted front entrance, and, so far as he can see through the glass-panelled door, what lies within is not outrightly forbidding (he imagines the fearsome business of signing the register) nor blatantly at odds with its outer pretensions. There are three hotels in the terrace, and it is the only one to have its front steps thoughtfully whitewashed at the edges. There is, of course, the thorny question of the price.
He doesn’t go in. Later that day he telephones, not from his Camden quarters, where Mrs Nesbitt generously allows her lodgers to make use of the phone — while stationing herself squarely within earshot — but from a call-box in the street. He thinks he has prepared a casual and credible style of inquiry. He is even ready, if needs be, to spin some yarn about how they will have travelled down — he and his wife, that is — from the north that day and will be getting a train to Somerset the next morning (he has in mind Weston Super Mare: it is August, after all, the holiday season).
But he is caught by surprise by the female voice at the other end, which is not so far removed from Mrs Nesbitt’s, though with a practised smarminess that Mrs Nesbitt cannot muster: a voice that seems to go with a certain length of earring, a certain weight of bosom and a certain adroitness at sizing people up. And he is tripped up by the perfectly feasible “For one night only?” and by the abrupt “And whom is this speaking, sir?” Up to this point he has thought: what is wrong with his own name? But, suddenly panicked, he plucks out of the air the name Nesbitt. “Nesbitt. Mr Nesbitt.”
Yet the thing is done. He establishes that the price is three pounds ten shillings. A small fortune. A room is booked for the following Sunday. And that night, at the Blue Moon Club, he tells her (she giggles; he feels a little stupid) that she will have to remember that she is Mrs Nesbitt.
It is 1957. All this stealthiness is not unwarranted, if perhaps overdone. But what true lovers were they who never learnt to speak in whispers or tread on tiptoe? They arrange to meet in a café on Camden High Street, from where they will take a taxi to Paddington. He tells Mrs Nesbitt (this is getting confusing) that he is going to his mother’s and stepfather’s for the night, and packs a medium-sized suitcase with redundant clothing. No doubt Mrs Nesbitt will think this excessive for a journey of one night and that a Sunday evening is a strange time to be beginning a journey home. But there is nothing he can do about this: on Sunday nights the Blue Moon is closed; and his baggage has to fit more than one alibi. He takes to the street, suitcase in hand, anxiously eyeing his watch, and it occurs to him, again, that he is re-enacting his dream.
It is a wet evening, shot with interludes of silky, brassy light. She is first at their meeting place, carrying a small travelling bag and wearing a borrowed ring. He is, by this time, in a fair fever of nerves, but her presence calms him, rallies him, instructs him. He realises that what this is is simply an exercise in acting (one of the few of his life). Tonight they will have to pretend — and not pretend — to be other people. Her smile imparts a spirit of mischief and audacity he has quite overlooked. Let us give this night its due.
“So — Mr Nesbitt.”
They dine on cod and chips and strong tea, by a steamed-up window that seems, in its veiled opacity, somehow appropriate. Beneath her raincoat, she wears a blue, white-dotted summer frock that buttons down the front. He realises that in just a little while— It is strange to think that only the night before, in the Blue Moon Club, she was all satin and egrets’ feathers, but this dress, with its polka-dots and buttons, which is neither too modest nor too flaunting — the sort of dress a young wife might wear when setting out with her husband on her holiday — excites him more than he can say.
They linger in the fish and chip parlour. Though neither of them utters the thought, it is understood they are waiting for darkness to descend. This too seems appropriate. When you are out on an adventure …
When they can see their faces in the misty window, they leave.
Nothing is meant to be. Everything is meant to be.
They hail a taxi. They are used to taxis. (There are no problems: it doesn’t break down.)
“The Denmark Hotel, Norfolk Square.” Can the taxi-driver guess?
The woman at the desk has neither pendulous earrings nor ramparts of bosom. She is thin, toothy and angular and has an air of veiled boredom. He signs the register. A good, a commendable performance. There are no trick questions. Only the momentarily disarming “Will you be wanting a call in the morning?”
“No, that’s all right — we’ll manage.”
“Only we don’t like our guests”—a piano-key smile—“to miss any trains.”
She holds out, dangling from a wooden bobble, the key to number thirty-two (ever afterwards a magic number). And before any smirking porter can intervene (but there is no porter, it’s not that sort of place), they turn with their bogus bags to mount the stairs — where with each flight, the carpet and paintwork get progressively dingier, while, as if to compensate, excitement flares between them.
You have to picture the scene. How it was then, on a wet August night in 1957, in the days before she was famous. The room looks over the street. The backcloth, beyond the window, is the inky shimmer of London under rain. But the curtains are soon drawn, and almost as soon, it seems, clothes are removed, plucked, pulled, yanked from impatient flesh. He had not expected it quite, this frenzy and breathlessness to be unclad, as if some off-stage voice, some prompter’s whisper, should have gently enjoined: take your time, you have all night. Nor was he prepared for the arresting candour, the simplicity and amazement, of nakedness. And this, you see, is me. And this is me.
He was not prepared, either, for the tender and inspired fluency (as if to complete the candour) with which each one of them offers the other on this indelible night the complete and unabridged story of their lives up until this point. His is a strangely dramatic tale (though he doesn’t know the half of it yet), full of comedy and tragedy in the romantic streets of Paris, and hers is a tale of the obscure London suburbs. But it is she who will be the actress, who will be the Queen of the Nile.
And so it is that he tells her, what he has never told anyone before, about his — father. That he took his life.