Do you think they’re finished with this house?
Will your young blond second tenor come and stay with you when I’m not here?
Ah. Since when is he blond?
Since this morning when he left here, and you must be watching yourself pretty carefully if you remember you didn’t mention his hair. Did he have curry last night?
Will your digestion be better if I say no?
My digestion is perfect. Say no.
No. He’s a friend of Dudley Allott’s. Tell me more about Tessa.
The film?
Tessa and the film.
Undress.
All alone?
No.
Maybe you shouldn’t have brought Jenny that memory of the red-haired woman and Reid.
Maybe I shouldn’t have come back.
I was feeling something even before the burglary.
What?
I phoned Dagger to ask how Alba was. You know how he is. He said he’d come over and keep me company.
You phoned him.
This time yes. He told me his brother—
His brothers range from twenty-five to fifty.
His brother the car salesman had to stand by and watch his alcoholic cousin let the business go down. They were on the edge of Watts. The cousin kept saying Negroes buy Cadillacs too, in fact that is what they buy. But they didn’t buy that many and then they didn’t keep up the payments and one of these Cadillacs disappeared and Dagger’s brother had to fly down to Mexico to repossess it but by then the chief of police was driving it around and said they could have it for thirty-three hundred dollars.
But the car salesman doesn’t work for the bank.
Anyhow it was funny.
Lorna always took her pants off before her bra.
I’ve heard that story before, I said.
She was sitting beside me. He asked if you’d take your film thing with you.
He was getting in touch with Claire, I said.
We listened to Will come upstairs. He walked around. From the head of the stairs to the hall beside my sister’s ghetto photos, his doorway, the bathroom (light on but at once off), hall down toward our room, back to the head of the stairs, his room, bathroom (again light on, off), his room, Jenny’s room, linen cupboard for some reason, and then his doorway.
He said, What’s the great circle route, Dad?
I’ll tell you in the morning.
OK.
I pictured the Cadillac dusting a village, shedding its muffler. Dagger had stories to get him from Casas Grandes to Chihuahua, from Tampico to Veracruz. Probably he’d been to Mexico. Lorna and I had not.
What must happen before anything else was that I must finish with Tessa’s moments. Lorna curled herself around behind me where I sat upright in thought — she had only her bra on — and I reminded her of the drink we’d all had in ’68. I’d had some jellied eel and three oysters in the street that afternoon, just passed a stall and had to have some. Then at six I got a stabbing pain below the belt just as we were sitting down with Tessa and Dudley to have a drink and wait for her father who was meeting us. It was one of those old pubs that have kept the three divisions, Public Bar, Private Bar, Saloon Bar. We were in the Private, a wedge of a nook that made you half recall a horse-drawn hansom you’d just pulled up in. In the normal course of accident and permutation, I’d never seen Dudley with his father-in-law, who had once so terribly opposed their marriage. Tessa’s father was an unassimilated German enclosing an assimilated Jew. When Dudley and Tessa made it doubly definite that they were getting married and that Dudley could not convert to Judaism, Tessa’s father put him through scenes of prophetic frenzy — rising to agonies of blood no rabbi’s indoctrination could have equalled, particularly for a young American scholar of modern European history, and descending to exhausted acknowledgment that Dudley was in fact circumcised. But before Tessa’s father arrived at the pub, my vitals attacked, and I left to go downstairs to the Men’s. The pain passed, but as I stood at the wash basin an old man with an enormous nose and hands and a baggy cloth cap and a louring face got hold of me to tell me his plan for a pub. He caught my arm as I reached for the paper towel and he wouldn’t let go and I let my hands just drip. His plan would cater to everyone, mind — it wouldn’t just be the jukebox and the rock-and-roll, there’d be a room for older people and then a room where you could bring a lady for a quiet talk and the dart-board room like the Public Bar now but no jukebox and there’d be room for the rock-and-roll records — I leaned gently away — and there’d be a family room where you’d bring the family for a sandwich and crisps of a Saturday, and maybe other rooms, but the plan would be radiating, see, radiating — you’d get your central bar in like a circle and all the rooms would radiate outward, see, like a wheel.
I said I’d think about it. He said, Right you are, Guv.
He didn’t leave when I did.
At the door to the Private Bar I heard Tessa saying, What would we have done without bombed houses! Her father put down his wine glass of neat whiskey to shake my hand. Lorna and Tessa sat snugly together on the leather cushions. Dudley was tamping his pipe and smiling at no one in particular. He said, That’s the trouble with London, no more bombed houses. Tessa’s father shook his head, no no we didn’t want any more bombed houses, no indeed, why when he came from Germany in ’38 he took a janitor’s job and every house on the other side of the road was demolished. When the planes came over, Tessa sat like an Egyptian cat in the Morrison Shelter. Tessa’s father seemed to be talking toward Dudley’s drink, a pint of beer; he described a Morrison Shelter, right-angle, dimensions — the density and strength of the steel mesh that hung down on all four sides like an oversize tablecloth.
It was Tessa, not her father, who’d told us about his law practice and the house in Munich and everything else that had been taken away except her mother, who had also been taken away. And about coming to England at nine and living for six months with a relation, not knowing till her father later told her that after she’d been sent to England he was picked up and would have died in a camp but as a World War I veteran he was excused so long as he left Germany at once. But her father now gave us a gentler, smaller picture to entertain us — of all the German Jews in North London trying to avoid the authorities who would intern them. They would be sent out by their wives first thing in the morning, and it was a sight, Tessa’s father said, all these German Jews with sandwiches in their long overcoats, hands behind them, aliens each on his own pacing Hampstead Heath all day till the coast was clear at home.
My pain stupidly returned and I was about to get up again, but Tessa cried out in something like a laugh and said, Guess what, sometimes they got home and the coast was completely clear — no house!
The barmaid put her head around the partition. Dudley lowered his pipe hand to the table: That was in bad taste, Tessa.
Tessa put her hand over Lorna’s where it rested lightly on the edge of the table and said, If I’m lucky, Dudley darling will buy me my dream house.
I said, Where? in Middle America?
Tessa snapped back, New York’s not Middle America — but we were all laughing, Lorna too, who several years before — though I’d not remind her now as she lay curled around behind my back with her knickers off — had been enough changed by her friendship with Tessa to find herself the following autumn, which would be ’58, plunging into the purchase of the house we now lived in.
I leaned to pull off my socks and looked around at a space of Lorna’s thigh that seemed tonight less routine and less real than the transoceanic clothes I was getting out of.