Isabelle asked him, prolonging the awkward gesture of his departure, if he was pleased to be in London. He shrugged and said nothing, waving to her as he left, backing out the door, aware that he had expected something to happen between them that hadn’t happened. He wondered what she made of his refusal to remove his coat.
He walked quickly, compelled to create some distance between himself and the occasion of his embarrassing performance. The neighborhood changed as he walked north, changed from street to street, a sense of obscure privilege slipping away, a failing of light.
Tom was looking in the window of a record shop when a young woman who resembled Isabelle, who at first he thought was Isabelle passed him in reflection. A moment later he saw her in a Newsagents shop — he was browsing in a magazine called Time Out — and listened in when the proprietor asked her about her father’s condition.
She sighed before answering, her narrow figure weighted by trouble. “He came home from hospital yesterday,” she said. “They say it will take a bit of time before he’s himself.”
“It’s my opinion time heals all wounds,” said the proprietor, an Indian or Pakistani. “Still, it’s a terrible shame such things are allowed to happen.”
When the girl left the shop Tom found himself walking in the same direction a few steps behind. He fell into the rhythm of her walk, mimicked her brisk, small steps. When she stopped to brush something from her skirt, he caught up with her despite an inclination to linger behind. He thought to introduce himself, felt pressured to talk, though passed her with only the barest stirring of words.
“Did you say something?” she asked.
Up close she was another person, someone less compelling than his first impression suggested. Her complexion was marred; her chin pointed oddly; her eyes were too close together. He resisted disappointment.
That she was less than beautiful made it easier for him to talk. He said what he had been rehearsing to say, that he had unwittingly overheard her remarks to the newsdealer and that he could understand how she felt about her father’s illness, his own father having been a chronic invalid for years.
“How awful for you,” she said.
“It’s more mental than physical,” Tom said. “He doesn’t have memory of certain things — I mean obvious things like the names of people he’s known all his life.”
“That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” she said without even the barest touch of irony. “My father’s memory since his return from hospital is like a loose connection. He has flashes of clarity and then nothing. He has these dreams about the two thugs coming at him from behind and when he wakes up he’s so frightened he doesn’t know where he is. I have to sit with him until he gets back to sleep. He’s like a little child.”
Tom commiserated, said he knew exactly what she meant, that his own father was not without certain childish characteristics.
“You’ve lived with it longer than I have,” she said. “Next to people who are really badly off, I account myself fortunate.”
They walked a little further together, then she touched his shoulder and said she had to go in. “If I’m not there when he wakes up he goes into a panic,” she said. He accompanied her to the door of the stunted frame house, noted that the address was 27 Foxglove Road. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
She was suddenly distrustful. “Why do you want to know?”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “A fatal attraction perhaps.”
“That doesn’t make much sense, does it?” she asked, her seriousness without flaw. “I’m not a pickup if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Forget it,” he said.
She called something to him as he walked away, her name, which he didn’t quite hear, which sounded like nothing he had ever heard before, the name of a flower perhaps. His face burned as if he had been slapped.
A church was being torn down at the next corner and he stopped for a moment to observe. The spire, supported by cables on three sides, was making its anxious descent, seemed possessed by some separate will. He noticed that one of the cables was frayed and trembling, looked as if it would snap at the smallest provocation. The workers seemed unconcerned with the potential danger. One in fact was smoking a cigarette with his back to the trembling cable. Tom called to him to look out. When he got no response — perhaps the danger was less than he imagined — he broke into a run, vaguely panicked by something. Two dark-skinned men were coming toward him in a way that seemed ominous. They opened a space for him to pass between them, a smallish space barely large enough to avoid contact. A slash of laughter pursued him. At some point he thought he heard the cable snap and an ancient voice cry out in pain or surprise. He never looked back.
He stopped at a fruit stand and bought a peach for ten pence. On the next street, a less disheartening one than the two preceding it, there was a Bed and Breakfast sign in one of the windows and, after passing the house, Tom returned to ring the bell.
A large distracted woman with chalky yellow hair led him to a small lightless room on the third floor, a single window offering a view of the faceless brick apartment building across the street. The room was closetless, was furnished with a narrow bed, a wardrobe permanently ajar, a mahogany-veneer dresser and a small chintz-covered stuffed chair. An additional chair might be supplied, she said, if the tenant required more than one. There was a bathroom down the hall he might want to inspect, which had a new plumbing system.
“How much?” he asked.
She showed him the bathroom and another room on the floor, which she referred to as a kitchen, a closet-sized space with a two burner hotplate and a refrigerator slightly larger than a bread box.
“Twenty pounds a week including continental breakfast,” she said.
“How much is it without breakfast?” he asked.
The question distressed her, caused her eyes to narrow and her shoulders to quiver under an invisible weight. “It’s the same,” she said, “with or without the breakfast. If you looked around, I’m sure you noticed that you can’t do any better than what I’m asking.”
Tom went into his pants pocket and took out a twenty pound note. “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” he said.
“You can move in anytime,” the woman said, folding the twenty pound bill in thirds and putting it in the pocket of her housedress. “I don’t care what you do in that room as long as everything is kept in the same condition you find it. I’ve made an inventory of each and every item in your care.”
He went back into the room to see if his memory of it had survived the passage of fifteen minutes. When you approached it without expectation of grace or charm or comfort, the room wasn’t bad at all. The landlady waited for him in the hall, her demeanor faintly ironic as if she knew some minor fraud were being perpetrated on one or both sides.
“I suppose you’d like a receipt,” she said as if the request (he hadn’t made) was the first excess of many she might expect from him.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if she had propositioned him in the next breath, or accused him of coming on to her with lecherous intent. If she weren’t watching him, he might have stashed the gun in one of the dresser drawers, its insistent weight burdening his hip. Guarding the door like a jailer, she asked him again if it would please him to have a receipt.
He said, joining her in the hall, that the room was exactly what he wanted and he would move in that evening.
The receipt, written in illegible hand, was on a half-sheet of letterhead, the landlady’s name and address printed at the top. O. Chepstow, Fashion Specialist. 62 Wornington Road. London W2.