Through the filmed glass, meadows and cricket fields and new towns and the unnetted bare white frames of soccer goals are seen as if from a breakneck canal. The Frenchman asks, For how many years have you lived in England? You don’t quite answer, you are wondering if you could take Will up to see the Clifton Bridge in August when you and he and Lorna and Jenny come down to the seaside town where the boatyard is that you have a piece of. What do you think of Nixon? your French companion says, and with a finger and a nod decides to have that thin flat white triangle (called a round) after all. Going on fourteen years, you say, and ask for another can of Guinness.
In Victoria Station, the Gateway to the Continent, the schoolboys are copying train numbers neatly into their pocket notebooks. This is what Will did the whole of his tenth year. The man in a bowler carries himself well. Does anyone except you look up to the cast-lion and glass roof? It is a bridge for the light to rest on, though now begrimed. You have not enough time to make it worthwhile bussing home, bucking the early rush in the Underground or even turning toward the Thames and paying a quick visit to the Tate to look at Turner’s tiny black train submerged in the artist’s godlike steam of color, but almost too much time before you meet Lorna and friends in a pub, the Salisbury, before the theater; so wondering about the total effect of a bomb dropped through the vast delicacy of this roof, you decide to kill an hour, you feel like eating a bit of jellied eel. You may have to walk a ways for it.
Between engagements you have time in your hands. You would not say to one of those airmen in 1970 go out and come in again, even if you were really a teacher at the NATO first-strike base where the University of Maryland’s worldwide contract with the Defense Department to supply college courses finds particular embodiment in the large and cheerful presence of Dagger DiGorro for whom you substituted this evening. He arranged it with the sergeant, who would in any case not tell the U.K. program-director, not that there is anything to tell except that Dagger and his French wife Alba are visiting her parents in La Frette near Paris this weekend, and you have nothing to do here at Bentwaters Air Force Base (having come by tube, train, and official car a considerable but enclosed distance) except discuss with the men (and one captain’s wife) the effects of technology on government and then for the bulk of the period give Dagger’s exam, for all of which he’s paying you twenty-five dollars American plus expenses but you won’t take it. A Bauer upright piano stands against the wall near the door behind you. You’ve done stints for him before but you have never felt a base as you feel this one tonight, the American security of a capsule suburbia with trees in the right places and prowling station wagons and street signs. The captain is taking his wife to Covent Garden to the opera next week, she is quiet and fluent and tough and content; three kids in the class are going home, with two years of college credit packed away somewhere. After class they were courteous and probably drew conclusions from your beard. You told them Mr. DiGorro would discuss their exams with them next period. The evening drew these people away to their duty-jobs, to barracks, to off-base housing, and then there was your Air Force station wagon and your driver, a black man who didn’t say much coming and doesn’t say much going, except that he’s driving you to Ipswich not Wickham Market, which will be better for you, you won’t have to change — and you imagine better for him in some unstated way too, though it is perfectly possible that he is sitting down passing time. He brakes smartly at the guard gate. You ask if he comes to London, how long he’s been in, what he thinks of the war, and you get the briefest possible answer and chuckle to each as if he’s been trained how to talk to spies. You do not ask him where he comes from, but he tells you New York and adds that he’s got a mechanic’s job waiting for him there. He calls you sir. He wants to talk now — but it’s too late, your train is coming in.
Your train like a tunnel draws you home to London from England, from America, from nowhere, from another tube, from an official station wagon piloted by a Negro chauffeur. On the train you wonder how easy this easy life in England really is, and you wonder how on a couple of hundred feet of relentless film you could find the quality of American life at Bentwaters. Or, now you think of it, at Alconbury, where the U.S. Air Force has brought in falcons to countervent the starlings that threaten the flights.
7
I had never come back so soon. Five days Stateside, less. I have come home to London in January and from the lower deck of a red bus have seen through shop windows tradesmen in their long, light brown workcoats or from the high-slung roominess of a taxi felt, like some intricate certifying of my own privacy, the route the driver’s awesome knowledge of London zig-zags down unheard of residential streets but here (more often called roads) that curve into crossings I didn’t know I knew where I’ve changed buses on the way home a hundred times or looked at a locksmith’s or passed a medallion portrait of a glistening horse in the window of a betting shop, or contemplated a bank of Cox’s at the sight of which like the mottling streams of rose down the pale honey skin, saliva springs under the tongue-roots, for Cox’s Orange Pippins, however dry they sound when you shake them and hear unique among apples the rattle of seeds at the core, hold round each drop of fleshly sugar a sheen of tart no New York apple yellow red or even green as far back as those high-shouldered pale-streaked Red Delicious of the thirties and forties my mother chose on Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights ever had — zags in, zigs out — the London cab corners up one spoke of the map, down another, and on from one to another of the city’s interior circumferences as if swung into the next neighborhood — women queueing at a Request Stop, dun brick semidetacheds, an obscure shoe shop, a corner pub with a promising name in gold, a radio rental, then just before the inevitable Indian restaurant, a news agent who sells Cornish ice cream.
London villages, almost.
Once not long ago I came back from the other direction, from Dieppe, and at Newhaven it was as if everyone was on grass, a calm like slow-motion. Anything to declare? A wave of my hand, two hundred fags, a bottle of claret. Thank you. Thank you.
Then’k you again, for even here at the Newhaven boat-train pier where after the watchful French these people seem Ruritanian, they don’t want not to be the last to say thanks. And I let them. I like them. What is the matter with me?
Jenny falls to the ice of the Queensway rink and her hand splays out and Lorna calls from behind us, Her fingers!
I have come home to London in the spring. In spring rain. In St. Louis there was a rainbow when I left. Coming home I have heard the rain touching the leaves in our square, and when Lorna opened her mouth to kiss me and then sent me out again to the Express Dairy, the big wheezing Welshman didn’t even know I’d been gone three weeks and when he put a packet of biscuits and a small marmite like a jar of dark brown ink out of my school past down on the counter he said, Well then, what do you hear from the States?
But now, though I knew that the burglary and Phil Aut’s trip meant I had to be in London, I was aware of having been drawn away from an equal scene that made a demand that was equally immediate, and as I tried to have a few hours of sleep Sunday night in a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Knightsbridge and my teenage son Will was saying in my sleep, What English word has six consonants in a row? I counted 16-mm. spools on Dagger’s work table, but they moved so I lost count but in the dark confusion of losing count of all those thousands of tangled frames a sound came clearly off the optical print repeating like some vehicular cadence (in nights of old when lays were cold and castles not particular, they lined her up against the wall and did her perpendicular; but can you be two places at once?). And just before the maid knocked at seven with my tea I woke muttering, Unless you’re Phil Aut.