Before I could think of anything to say — I have trouble getting my story together — she was in and I was out. In a panic I stood with my back to the phone box for the longest time, waiting for her to finish her call. After a point, I walked over to Pizzaland. One of the punks, the smallest of the three, a ferret-faced kid with acne scars, emerged from the doorway. He grabbed my arm but I was too strong for him and knocked his hand away. When he brought out a penknife I had no choice but to show him the gun and, in a gesture I regretted even before its conclusion hit him with it across the face in an awkward jabbing motion. Then I ran in what I thought to be the only safe direction available. I didn’t look back, though I assumed the other two, if not all three, were converging on me. I don’t know what I regretted most, that I had hit him with the gun or that I hadn’t hit him hard enough. If I could keep away another ten minutes, I estimated, my father would appear with the car. Then I had the perception — it came unbidden which gave it added weight — that my father had seemed unsurprised at my news. I mean, why shouldn’t it surprise him that these three punks were trailing me around London. What did he know that I didn’t? Whatever his part in the business — I didn’t actually believe he had hired these kids to harrass me — I began to have doubts that he would show up as promised. He was capable, I knew, of finding excuses for indefinite delay. I didn’t see my pursuers when I glanced over my shoulder, but then one of them turned the corner and pointed a finger at me.
“My name isn’t Isabelle,” the woman said in an American accent.
The woman looked more like Magda than Isabelle and perhaps thinking of Magda, he had confused the two. “Excuse me,” he said.
When he stopped at the next corner for a light she wandered over to the car. “What a series of coincidences,” she said. “First at the airport and then here. Don’t tell me you still don’t know me.”
“Why should it matter whether I know you?”
“It matters to me. It makes me distrust my own identity if someone ignores me. Where are you going, Terman? Maybe you can drop me off somewhere on the way.”
The light had changed and the car behind him registered mute disapproval. “I’m going to Broadwick Street,” he said. “Do you know where Broadwick Street is?”
She came around the other side and climbed into the passenger seat, transferring the street guide to her lap. “I haven’t the smallest notion,” she said. “What’s there?”
She deigned to read the street guide for him while Terman rushed obliquely to his destination, detouring whenever traffic blocked his way.
“You were so awful to me at the airport,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing you a favor. I didn’t even like you much in the old days when we were all such good friends.”
Terman had to jam on the brakes to keep from hitting the car that had stopped abruptly in front of him. He held out his arm to keep Lila from pitching forward.
“I’m surprised you didn’t let me hit my head,” she said. “I used to think — it was also Magda’s opinion — that you were the most self-centered person of our acquaintance. Still, you were nice with the children at times, you really were. Take a left at the next corner. Was it that you didn’t like adults or that you didn’t like me and my then husband, or was it that you were secretly shy? I always meant to ask you but in those days I didn’t have the courage. It’s different meeting someone years later in another country. You always looked so angry, you know, so fierce really as if you wanted to kill anyone who got in your way. I thought of you, you’ll laugh at this, as a buccaneer. It was undeniably attractive in a certain way, though I think one had to have a masochistic streak to find it so. Take a left here. Tell me the truth. What was your impression of me in those days?”
He edged his way through traffic, trailed by some unnamable dread. That it mattered to him that he reach Tom was indication that he was capable of feeling. His sense of urgency was in itself like passion. He sensed, on the other hand, that he would probably never reach Tom and that in the long run it wouldn’t matter. Before he knew it, he was there. He drove down Broadwick at ten miles an hour, waiting for Tom to declare himself. A trick had been played on him. There was no Sketchley’s, no Chinese restaurant with ducks in the window, no phone in front of a pub called Wycherly Arms. “Could there be another Broadwick Street?” he asked her.
“Oh my,” she said. “Will you ever forgive me? We’re on Broadwick Place not Broadwick Street.” She checked the street guide, advised him to take a right turn at the corner they had already passed.
He swung the car around, an ill-timed audacity, a taxi coming the other way. He lived through the collision — the black Austin smashing into their left side as they turned — before he realized the cab had managed an abrupt stop inches short of contact.
The driver shouted at him, “Trying to get us all killed, are you?”
Terman had nothing to say in his defense, drove on with his head down, turning left at the appropriate street.
“You should have apologized to him,” Lila said.
“What difference would it have made?”
“You’re as incorrigible as ever, aren’t you? I don’t know why I allowed myself to get into this car.”
The phone box in front of The Wycherly Arms was unoccupied when he drove past, Terman discovering the pub only as it receded before him. He pulled up to the curb at first opportunity, kept the motor running. Tom’s absence determined the landscape.
“I’ll get out and take a bus,” she said. “I don’t want to get in the way.”
Two of the punks appeared on the other side of the street, shrunken and demented figures, sexually ambiguous, arms around each other’s shoulders like lovers. One of them might have been a woman, though it was impossible to tell which one. They seemed to him more pathetic than dangerous. He sat hunkered down in the car, observing them.
“I don’t know when I’ve had so much excitement,” Lila said.
Terman got out of the car after a few minutes and walked to the front of the pub. He peered into the back garden where a young couple sat eating what looked like bangers and mash, a child with a stuffed fox in its lap asleep in a stroller behind them. The commonplace scene fascinated him and he forgot for the moment the object of his search, or imagined himself as the object, the lost and forgotten child. The couple spoke German and he wondered at their apparent ease in this foreign place.
The sight of his son coming toward him took away his breath, made his chest ache, brought tears to his eyes.
Tom had his head down, barely acknowledged his father as he came up to him. They walked together to the car and Tom got in back slamming the door after him.
As they drove quickly away, Terman glimpsed the two punks staring at them, one had his fist raised threateningly, the other (the woman?) made a face like a gargoyle.
They escaped the street, rushing away in silence like thieves. “Do you remember me?” Lila asked, smiling at Tom. “My husband, Stanislaus and I used to be neighbors of yours. You used to play with my son Petey, when you were both much younger.”
Tom nodded.
“Are you all right?” Terman asked him.
“I’m on my last legs,” Tom said, laughing nervously. He held out his hands. “No stigmata yet. I had a few bad moments right before you came. And I thought for a while, you know, because you took so long, that you weren’t coming.”