Even before he reached the top of the steps he called his son’s name. He heard his own name in response but it came from below.
“Terman?”
In a moment there were footsteps on the stairs coming up, a delayed echo.
“What time is it?” Isabelle asked him. “I feel as if I’ve been out of it for hours.”
He opened each of the five rooms on the third floor, pushing the doors open with his foot and stepping back. He tried the closets (once started it was difficult to give up the quest), looked under the beds, uncovered nothing. “Could I talk to you, Terman?” Isabelle asked.
In one of the rooms, the one with the full length wall mirrors, there was a chair by the window overlooking the street that he could have sworn had not been in that position before. It was the only obvious sign that someone might have been there.
“In my dream,” Isabelle was saying, “you were having a fight with my mother and I was trying to meliorate. You kept insisting — we both thought you were bonkers — that though you were younger than she, you were actually her father.”
“I was speaking metaphorically,” Terman said.
“My mother kept repeating — it was something she used to say to me when I was a child — “You make me want to tear my hair, luv.”
When they were downstairs he asked Isabelle if she had knocked on the bathroom door when he was in the bath.
“Why would I do that?”
“You didn’t, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t.” She lit a filter-tipped cigar, stared unhappily into the smoke.
He prowled the house, opening and reopening the same doors. Since when had she been smoking cigars, he wondered.
“Once you start something,” she said, “you never give it up, do you?” She put an arm around his waist, though removed it almost immediately.
“Don’t you give me a hard time too,” he said.
“Who’s giving whom a hard time, I’d like to know.”
If Tom were gone, he thought, everything else would fall into place. Isabelle left him to make a phone call from the kitchen with the door closed.
He shouted Tom’s name so that it reverberated through the seemingly untenanted house.
Isabelle returned as if he had conjured her from out of the walls. “If I were your son,” she said, “I’d probably hide from you too.” She winked at him to soften the remark.
He was in no mood to be propitiated, was up to the worst she had to offer. “If I were me, I’d hide from me too,” he said. “You don’t think he’s still in the house, do you?”
“I don’t see how he could be,” she said, “do you?”
At first he couldn’t find his corduroy jacket, and was willing to blame his son for that loss too, but then it turned up on the back of a chair in the kitchen. “I’m going out to find Tom,” he said. “We can go out for lunch at a wine pub when I get back if you like.”
Isabelle shrugged. “I find this all so unpleasant and painful, do you know? I tend to identify with Tom and wish to God you just let us be…I’m sorry, sweetheart.” She came over and leaned her head on his cheek. “Why don’t you at least call first and see if he’s there?” She kissed his face.
“Don’t comfort me,” he said.
“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” she said. “Would you like to have a go?” She winked at him in parody of brazenness.
It disturbed him when she wasn’t herself, made him feel he didn’t know her, that the person he knew no longer existed. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but found the words embarrassing to speak. “I can’t concentrate on anything,” he said.
“I’ve never known you to turn it down before.”
“Think of it as a postponement,” he said. “One can’t always do what one wants to do.”
“I know all too well how that is,” she said, holding the outside door open for him. “Sorry I asked.”
He almost expected the boy to spring out at him as he stepped into the air.
“I have to go to work at two,” she called after him. “I forgot to tell you.”
And then the oddest thing happened. Driving in the general area of his son’s rented room, he couldn’t find the street, was failed by his usually faultless sense of direction. He could neither find the right street nor remember its name. It was not even that the neighborhood was foreign to him, not that excuse, nor that there were no recognizable landmarks. He came on a rather grim playground he had once played tennis in and a church in the process of being torn down that he had passed on foot a number of times, but his son’s street, which ran parallel or perpendicular to it, eluded him. If only he could recall its unappealing name, he could stop someone and ask directions. Chepstow kept coming to mind, though that was the name of the proprietress, the street something else. He knew the number was 44, which was his age on his birthday before last. After a point, on something called Barlby — it was as if a syllable had been swallowed — he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car. He poked into the glove compartment to check out the ratty London street guide he kept there, though, like his memory, that too was gone.
He emptied his pockets, found a number of fragmentary messages on torn-off pieces of envelope, much of it at this point in unbreakable code. Tom’s address was not among the debris.
With no clear intent he got out of the car, thought on foot he might find his son’s rooming house or some familiar street name that would lead him to it. Perhaps he thought nothing of the kind, wanting merely to be out of the car, to be free of that burden.
The streets seemed to wind back on each other, but he walked energetically in a direction he had chosen arbitrarily, guided if at all by a trust in instinct. The buildings he passed were in states of disrepair, many uninhabited, some boarded up. He persisted in the sense that he was going in the right direction, took long strides — the faster he walked the less his bruised hip bothered him — anticipating that the next street (or the one after that) would be the one he sought. Never for a moment did he consider that he might be lost, or that a house with a Bed and Breakfast sign in the window might not after a certain point appear before him. It was one of those London days in which, though it appears not to be raining, almost everything is moist — the rain seeming to come up from the ground rather than down from the sky. He had the illusion from time to time that there were footseps behind him, but instead of looking to see who it was he quickened his pace.
Three Arabs standing in front of a pub, stared at him as he passed. One called something to him in a nearly incomprehensible dialect. The others laughed unpleasantly.
Did he know the man who spoke to him? He didn’t think so, though turned, despite his sense of urgency, to look. Something, a stone perhaps, hit him just above the right eye. He let out a scream, the sound like nothing he had heard himself utter before, his hand to his eye. The Arabs scattered, each taking a separate direction. The scream continued, despite his intent to stop, sustained itself like an electronic alarm that had to run its course. An older man, also dark-skinned (Indian or Pakistani, he thought) came over and said something unintelligble, the persisting scream overriding other voices.
His hand came away from his eye, unglued itself from the wound. He had not, as feared, lost sight in the eye, though his vision, perhaps from the pressure of his hand, was somewhat blurred. There was a little blood from the wound, not much, insufficient to his response, the palm of his hand the wound’s mirror.
Terman had embarrassed himself enough for one morning, refused the offer of the man’s arm, thanked him as an afterthought, and hurried off in the direction he had come.
The man followed briefly, offering a hospital or something that sounded like hospital as if he had one in his possession. He said repeatedly that he was okay, that no real damage had been done.