Now you hear the girl again when the bearded desk clerk hands you the house phone. She’s running behind schedule, she says, would you like to come up.
OK, but what’s with her? It’s too early for a drink even if she had a bottle in her room. You don’t know her. Surely she doesn’t want you to listen to her brush her teeth.
The lift’s ornate ironwork opens each floor as you and the attendant rise past. It’s a lovely machine, ride all day, not a cage. You catch the eye of a chamber maid passing along a hall her arms full of last night’s sheets, then she’s out of sight below you.
Your college friend Sub’s wife’s former roommate this is: you forget the first name as you take her hand crossing the threshold, it’s a double room. A harpsichord steady and copacetic is coming from a little transistor on a plaid suitcase. Not a stitch of clothing adrift, not a half-slip, not a passport on the bureau’s glass top or a collection of change. Her bed is turned right down and a London A to Z is on the night table by a half full tumbler with bubbles at the bottom and up the side. She takes the tumbler into the lav.
She’s tall and dainty, her page-boy newly trimmed. She gives you a lifesaver. She stops the transistor, and her name comes back: Connie — Constance. She makes references to her parents and the job she’s just packed up, and a play she got a ticket for at the last minute last night. She puts a hand to her cheek thinking. She puts the transistor on the bed, opens the suitcase and carefully tears out two travelers checks. When you ask how Sub and his wife are, she locks the case, comes very close to you and says, Not good.
She’s better being solemnly shy in the slow elevator. She thanks the attendant, who thanks her, and doesn’t volunteer additional information when I answer her question about the big orange globes on posts at crossings. Belisha Beacons. Belisha. Someone during the war.
You cross Oxford Street and in the busy seclusion of Soho Square she turns the talk from your awe-inspiring expatriation to the church on the left which you find you don’t know anything about though you’ve sat on these benches reading The Evening Standard waiting for Lorna. You say it’s Huguenot you believe, let’s look.
Anon, leaving the far side of the Square you point out the film companies and for some reason say you want to make a film. About England sort of. When she asks if you have any experience, she seems quite alone.
To reach Blake’s house you cut through quiet St. Anne’s Court where, nodding at the male window-shoppers, you ask if she wants a little bedside reading, and she giggles. At the corner of Broadwick and Marshall down the block and across the street from the pub named for the pioneer anesthetist Dr. Snow, there is the sign on the small house, and you both read it. She says, Blake’s wife was totally uneducated. Let’s see, what would he have said about pornography?
You tell her a hat-designer friend of yours is just round the corner, and Carnaby Street’s a few steps further down Canton, but she asks if St. Paul’s is near Aldermanbury Square, she promised to say hello to an associate of Daddy’s. You say, That’s getting down into the City; she says, Where are we now then? and you explain the City with a capital C.
Her father’s associate is of course a broker. He is plugged into a New York Stock Exchange computer but of course when he plays with it to show what it can do the quotation on the read-out panel is yesterday’s closing because it’s only 6;30 A.M. in New York. He cashes a travelers check for Connie.
Children roam St. Paul’s. They pass under arches and look up into Wren’s Roman dome. Leave the Whispering Gallery to them. You show your guest the gold American chapel from the war, and she says she sometimes forgets if Churchill is dead yet or not and you say he wouldn’t appreciate that in his present state, and she says, Of course I wouldn’t say it to him, and giggles as if she’s chilly. She wants to see John Donne in his winding sheet and you tell her where it is and say you’ll wait.
In a small antique pub where every varnished line seems out of plumb you buy her a late lunch. You tell how Wren couldn’t get his way after the Great Fire, the Parisian unity of radiating axes offended the English mind, so London remains neighborhoods. Yes, instead of a baroque wheel (you say, wondering about another pint and about Connie), or for that matter say a grid like Manhattan, you say — but then you say Oh Christ and with a smile raise your mug and she touches and says, Thanks for riding down in the elevator with me, and she means it. You say she could have walked down, and she says she has several times.
You bear two halves of best bitter back to your lanterned nook thinking that Lorna said, Don’t you dare bring her home for dinner.
Connie asks if you have money of your own.
You return to the elevator. She says they just terrify her, that’s all there is to it, it’s her only neurosis.
She wants to see the London Stone, she isn’t sure why. The what? you say. We’re quite warm, she says, her finger on square 2B page 62 of her A to Z.
You say, Something to tell my English friends about, I mean whoever heard of the London Stone?
It’s stuck, in fact, into the outside of the Bank of China. The Cannon Street traffic grinds by, and she reads the plaque out loud, you watch her lips pucker on a couple of w’s and the tip of her nose takes a delicate dip-and plaque and A to Z mingle in the mind — this relic moved here 1962 from Church of St. Swithun’s south wall where it had been since 1798 (whip out your box and snap it onto Kodachrome), piece of original limestone once fronting Cannon Street Station, something about 1188 Henry Son of Elwyn de Loudenstone later Lord Mayor, this hunk is the stone the Romans used to measure all distances from London.
She’s a real walker, but when you find a little church she seems glad to go in and sit. She says things are so bad with Sub and Rose she doesn’t like to visit them; Sub gets a second wind and is charming to Connie and Rose accuses Connie of taking sides. Too bad Rose is pregnant again.
You suggest tea at Connie’s hotel. Can’t I buy you a drink? she says.
Pubs aren’t open till five thirty.
And I’ve got my train to catch, she says.
You think, Well that’s that.
Salisbury by dusk, she says, maybe wear myself out so I can sleep.
Can’t sleep?
Not in the normal course of things, she says.
You push a bit: the normal course of things?
She turns in the pew and contemplates your lapel before dismissing you.
I could have given you Raymond Chandler, you say, The Big Sleep.
Travel books, she says, they’re wonderful drugs.
You ask if they put her to sleep, and she says almost but not quite.
So, out of bed tomorrow morning in Salisbury; meet friends, drive to Stonehenge, get ahead of the crowds. Do you believe the Druids used it? she says. Why not? they use it now. Well, do you believe they sacrificed human people there? she asks. Maybe. Have you been? Never. The raincoat has parted over her thighs, are those patterned stockings tights? Two black copies of the Book of Common Prayer stand in the rack. You put your hand on hers and look her in the eye and say, Do you believe Merlin was buried alive under one of those megaliths at Stonehenge?
I’ll have to see, she says.
At her hotel she declines your help saying she’s got to get organized.
You wonder if Lorna rang up the garage, they’ve had the bloody car ten days. You buy an Evening Standard at the tube.