It had not been Claire who’d come out of the Knightsbridge gallery. It had been Jenny. If Reid had nothing to do with the film, then neither had Jenny. But Jenny had something to do with the film. She had typed most of my diary. But that was not what I meant.
I know this route from Holloway tube past the great brown compound of Council flats, the ABC cinema, the branch of Sains-bury’s fastidious supermarket where Lorna comes down once a week to shop, the branch of Marks and Spencer’s which is for everyday clothes what Salisbury’s is for food and in whose bright aisles may be felt the M & S empire’s grand auspices like a father’s welcoming foreknowledge — and past the mile of shop fronts of this noisy domestic north-London thoroughfare off which down one street Lorna took Will for a National Health x-ray when he had bronchitis that wouldn’t go away — yes, I know it so well that I was under the impression I did not think about what Reid and I passed in our bus. And yet it was important precisely for being taken for granted — though at this moment of my threatened life this didn’t occur to me.
I am really here: this is what I saw when at our stop Reid had to wait, with his newspaper under his arm and his pony tail hanging outside his jean jacket collar which was of brown corduroy — while two old parties (in macs, in blue macs, and round white straw hats like snugger halos) stepped down; but he did not turn to my corner where I now took the precaution of twisting around as if to see something in the street and found myself looking at my unshaven cheeks above my beard, though in retrospect when I think hard about it I imagine people take my beard for granted and are thus able to see my whole face better, or then look at the mole in the middle of my forehead which for some reason I myself seldom see when I look in the mirror.
Then Reid was gone round the greengrocer’s corner into the traffic and business of Highgate High. Mine was the other way. Yet there were more than two ways.
The buildings seemed low.
It was Monday. At the cash register in the window of the dairy in an ample white coat was Mr. Jones, who believed me no more surely when I said they didn’t eat marmite in the States than Tris and Ruby believed me when they tasted on Pepperidge Farm whole wheat this spread like undiluted beef bouillon cubes and were told that English kids have marmite for tea.
Between two elms in the square a child’s large ball was at rest, yellow in the autumn sun.
At other entrances to the square I saw no Reid. My house seemed forbidden. I had not made up Sub’s day bed. Lorna would sit in her nightgown at the piano and work out another Charles Ives song she was performing at a local benefit. I had to admit I liked melody even (or especially) when being washed in the blood of the Lamb; the Ives songs were too intelligent, as if some old American strains were interrupting each other so as to break down into their comparative frequencies, so you got their true neural meanings only to find that after all you didn’t really want these explicit.
The West Indian attendant sat on the black railing by the Public Convenience looking across toward a downhill lane whose opening gave a sight of central London silently rising through its own air but as if nearer and nearer rather than higher and higher — or this seemed the direction in which the West Indian attendant was looking.
I was not going to call Dagger.
It was eleven twenty-five, and several retired persons of genteel aspect would be settled into the Reading Room of the High-gate Literary and Scientific Institution across from the square. A sports car whipped in, gunning down for the turn. A sycamore leaf with its five limbs out like a rough star or some bundled human abstract lay on the pavement in front of a bench I had often passed.
A man and a girl were on the courtyard wall of a pub waiting for it to open. As I looked, it did.
I met no one I knew.
When it rains you don’t think of the leaf shapes.
One should stay in one place.
My house seemed unusually close to the square. I came uncertainly abreast of the steps and the door lock cracked and I automatically decided not to arrive. I wanted to touch Lorna’s spine.
Walking on, I crossed the road and stopped by a tree to light my cigarette of the day.
My angle of observation was poor so I saw only Lorna’s arm. Her cardigan.
Perhaps you have not been here and so don’t know what my eyes, my feet, my feelings took for granted, standing in, seeing through. But I have in my head things I may not exactly have seen, just as you who read this have me.
Lorna said, You really can go now, and then she said something I missed.
I moved dangerously far and she had her back to the street. I moved further and bent away lighting another match.
Lorna was facing into the hall, facing a man blond, young, and clean-shaven. Above his head at the landing above the rear end of the hall, light from the garden smudged the leaded compartments of our florid stained glass.
He would be the second tenor, but Lorna’s lock was fixed.
I could not tell if the second tenor looked past Lorna. There wasn’t a picture of me in the house.
He was there to reassure her. He liked her. She was alone and had been burglarized.
He came and kissed her on the forehead. She was wearing trousers.
She could not have had eyes in the back of her head.
Between my eyes or in my throat a space spun so slow I could barely code its message that to pass through Lorna to reach this other person whom I desired to erase from my hall might open something else again behind him.
Which was Jenny. Or what lay behind her.
You can understand my state.
Under the hall table next to Lorna’s visitor was the three-dimensional noughts and crosses I’d constructed out of my head that in spite of the illuminated variations on O and X I’d drawn on the little four-by-four placards like options on a typographer’s chart tended, Lorna said, to look like someone’s three-tiered sandwich-server. For teas we’d never got in the habit of.
The door had closed, and the second tenor was still inside.
I took a turn down the block. Again I heard a door shut. I saw the second tenor turn away toward the bus.
Looking at me before she hugged me, she said, Marriage is an act of faith.
Her cheek against mine seemed to bear in to wear away the flesh. She smelled of pine soap that she said smelled like her parents’ camp in Maine, and when she said, Say something, I could think only — in rapid sequence — of the white candles during the power cuts — white as marble in our dark, cheerful, chattering rooms — of the brown turtle in the green garden, of Jenny’s dress, and Lorna’s record I’d left in the Knightsbridge B & B this morning.
I’m glad after all, said Lorna. I thought I didn’t want you to come.
You didn’t phone back, I said.
Lorna’s dark hair parted in the middle fell softly down each temple. She spoke with a new readiness and simplicity: It’s all there, I’d say.
She stepped back and looked at my feet and my raincoat. I’d left my suitcase, which Lorna had slowly packed.
Lorna said, I even started reading it.
We went and sat in the gray velvet medallion sofa in the shadow of the piano and held hands. Everyone knows something, but not enough, and still we wear gloves. Why did I not go right upstairs to Jenny’s room?