I apologized for the meagerness of the room, said sometimes it grows on you. Sometimes not.
“I think it’s cozy,” she said in a breathy voice, moistening her lips with her tongue.
There was almost nothing she could do to rouse me in my present mood. I was indifferent to the taut outline of her birdlike breasts, the lacy hem of her slip, the thin pale thighs.
“You seem to be miles away, Tommy,” she said. “In which direction are you traveling?”
I heard, or thought I did, somone’s heavy foot on the stairs and put my ear to the door to listen. Astrid sat up and smoothed her short skirt over her knees.
“What is it, Tommy?” she asked, hugging her knees. To entertain my guest, perhaps to frighten her too, I took out my father’s gun and stood behind the door, waiting for whoever it was to try to force his way in. I wondered what I would really do if the door swung open. Astrid giggled, put her hand over her mouth.
The playacting began to depress me and I returned the gun to my pocket. I continued to sense that someone was there just beyond the door (Mrs. Chepstow or my father), positioned to eavesdrop, standing absolutely still to avoid discovery.
Astrid tiptoed over, felt the outline of the gun against my side. Her question was unspoken.
When we were outside, walking in the dreary rain, I was sorry I hadn’t gone to bed with her. I held her narrow hand as we walked.
“You’re nicer now,” she whispered to me.
She was wearing (why hadn’t I noticed before?) the scarf I had given her, a flowery thing I had picked up at Liberty’s in one of my earliest forays. I complimented her on it, though in fact it seemed to overwhelm her face.
“When are you going to introduce me to your father?” Astrid asked. We, in fact, seemed to be walking in that direction.
I suggested we go to Soho, the idea arriving the moment I announced it.
“If you want to Tommy,” she said, all acquiescence and self-denial. If I were capable of believing anything, I would have believed at that moment that she imagined herself in love with me.
The cruelty of my mood resisted compromise. There wasn’t a passing figure in the street for whom I didn’t have an unexpressed contempt. I raged at the bus for taking so long to arrive, all the time pretending it didn’t matter, pretending to an almost catatonic self-control. Astrid held on to my arm, chattered.
The 77 Bus finally came (two others of its kind in close succession), and we went, at my insistence, to the upper level. It was crowded and we had to take seats on the aisle behind one another. As soon as we were seated, Astrid clutched my arm, whispered something I was not prepared to hear.
Someone she didn’t want to see was on the same bus, Astrid in a panic.
She looked around to see who else might be listening, then pursed her mouth to my ear, “It’s the man I’ve been going with.”
I waited for the import of this discovery to sound itself, but Astrid had nothing more to say at that moment. Each time the bus stopped she looked out the window to see if he had gotten off.
Later I learned, or am I making it up, I’m never sure, that the man was married and almost twice her age and that she had been sleeping with him since she was sixteen.
The woman next to her got up and Astrid took the window seat and I moved into the vacated seat alongside her. Everything had changed. “Why do you care if he sees you?” I asked.
“I just don’t want him to,” she snapped. “That’s enough reason, isn’t it?”
Stop after stop she stared anxiously out the window, her head drawn back, wanting to see without being seen. He didn’t get off, or she didn’t see him get off, his (real or imagined) presence barring our way.
I mentioned that it wasn’t possible to see everyone who got off at every stop.
I tried to amuse her but I was in no mood to be amusing. “I’ll plug him for you,” I said.
She looked at me in alarm, shocked or frightened. After we turned the corner at Oxford Circus she got up without a word and made her way to the stairs in back. I waited to the last possible moment before following.
The streets were mobbed, tourists packed three and four deep, not everyone moving in the same direction. I thought I saw Astrid just ahead of me when I stepped off the bus, but before I could get to her she had merged with the crowd.
It didn’t strike me at first that it had been her intention to lose me. Only afterward when I had pushed my way through the mob did I recognize the obvious and even then it was not easy to accept. I called her name once, shouted it in a voice that might have made her wince had she heard me. Once seemed sufficient. She had gone off, I had to believe, with the other guy. It was like a recapitulation of everything in my life, so I had no business being surprised or hurt.
I stood on my toes, observing and I suppose being observed, then I joined the human race and let it take me where it was going. I took my revenge in indifference.
Later in the day, I thought I saw Astrid from the back walking with a man that could have been my father. When I got closer I saw it was two other people, and I began to wonder how much of what I saw was real and how much hallucinatory. Perhaps I hadn’t yet arrived in London, perhaps I was on the plane coming over and had imagined what might happen when I got to London, or perhaps I hadn’t yet boarded the plane and was in my bed at home thinking of the trip.
7
He thought it odd that Isabelle hadn’t answered the phone, tried to imagine where she might have gone, was angry at her defection. A taxi went by, was gone before he could call to it, before he could step from the booth and make himself known. Through the glass of the phone box, the street, the one he had come to through the small park, gave off glints of familiarity. He had visited it before, perhaps earlier that day. The peeling facade of a yellowish frame house directly across from where he stood had been a point on some trip he had once taken or dreamed.
He had the idea that Isabelle, worried about his prolonged absence, had gone out to search for him, had taken a bus or taxi to his son’s apartment with certain disastrous consequences.
He also had the idea (one didn’t cancel out the other) that Max Kirstner had arrived at his house and finding Isabelle alone, had persuaded her to go off with him to his flat in South Kensington. It was no less possible that she was in the shower or had gone to work.
In five minutes, or ten (or twenty-five), he was at his car, was in the driver’s seat, his head against the steering wheel. He didn’t have to raise his head to notice that there were three men across the street, staring at him, one of them the devious Pakistani that had dogged his steps.
Terman started up the car, considering only briefly what options remained to him if it didn’t start. All the while, a mist of rain coming through the half-opened window, he sweated from some private heat. He imagined himself taking a hot bath, a recuperative bath, soaking his swollen ankle, washing the sweat from his face. It was better than any real bath might have been, this imagination of bath, calmed his terrors.
He drove home, sat in the car for no time at all after he parked, felt incapable of letting himself out, of crossing the street, of unlocking the door to his house.
A furious woman, unimaginably familiar, was tapping at the window with a key.
“Didn’t you see me?” she was asking. “I was standing at the entrance to the park when you drove by and I was calling you, wasn’t I, and waving my arms.”
Isabelle came around and got in the other side of the car, though neither of them was going anywhere. “Tell my about it,” she said. “Did it go all right?”