I thanked her for her offer and then turned away at something Wheel had started to propound about muggings on the West Side.
And then I looked back at her for a second, for no reason, and found her looking at me, quite openly, her face puzzled in a quiet way, the lines of interest reviving minutely, with sadness, looking at me as any woman might on a messenger who had come to tell her that her hopes were dead. There was no purpose behind her gaze, no future; it was nothing more than a brief query, the formalities of identity, a woman gazing on a body in a mortuary.
Yet it was a face I recognised now, shorn of all its happy drama: it was the one I had invented myself after reading her letters on the boat journey over, trying to invest Graham with a realistic sexuality: Helen Jackson was very nearly the woman I had walked towards at the crowded party in Westminster — that spring, six years ago when I’d just got back from Kenya: glasses falling about the place, the long table at one end littered with bottles, half a curtain drawn against the glare of evening light from the river….
I remembered my inventions on the boat: ‘She was tall and rounded in a way that could never for a moment be described as fat…. There was something of a hurry in her. The eyes always moved, were always swinging or lifting, like a commander at the head of an armoured division pressing into a new country
And this was Helen Jackson — the woman in front of me now — in many essentials: the long falls of hair sweeping down either side of her face … Had I, during those few moments on the boat, in some way really come to inhabit the remains of George Graham without knowing it? He would have known exactly what she looked like — the dark hauteur, the brown eyes sprinkled, broken here and there, with some even darker element — the constant attacks and surprises she made with her features: her permanent forwardness and willingness. Graham would have known these battle formations uniquely well, as an old soldier from that happy campaign. But not I. And I have no belief in transfiguration either. I had walked straight into an ambush on my first morning ashore and that new identity, that cover I had so carefully built up, was now all gone.
3
I didn’t go to the Jacksons’ apartment that night for drinks — pleading tiredness after the long day. And that was true, at least. I would have postponed forever, if I had been able, this meeting alone with Helen Jackson. I had no taste for it and even less for its outcome. It could not be other than something awkward, at the least, for both of us — for her in a personal way and with me professionally. At worst, it could have a disastrous end for both of us.
I had thought about it on and off, lying on my hotel bed that evening — thought of alternatives to my seeing her, but had found none.
And in any case, I wanted an end to running, to escaping. The whole point of my taking over Graham’s identity was to stop the dissolution, the canker, the treachery and all the other needless horrors which are the usual ends to our silly profession. I had said originally that I would pick up the remnants of Graham’s life and fulfil it for him, complete it — deny the forces that had ruined him and very nearly done the same for me. I should have then to meet Helen Jackson; I should regard our impending confidences as a second lesson in the ways of the real world.
We met downstairs in the main lobby of the Secretariat Building next morning. She and Guy had walked over from their apartment in the East Fifties and the three of us stood there, by the elevator banks, the secretariat staff moving past us towards the large Southern ladies who operated the machinery and the cooler supervisors who marshalled the passengers outside their allotted traps.
Even on my second day in the building, I felt a sudden huge luck in not having to go with them all, upwards into their dry glass cells, these hopeless workers of the world. I could go out and spend the crisp morning flat-hunting with a woman in a suede overcoat and a long red and white woollen scarf whose tails fell down, one in front, one behind; like the start of a school reunion, when we are all older and richer and better dressed and can spend the day as we will, without orders or denials. Even the business ahead could not dampen the moment’s happy expectation I felt then, Guy Jackson and the others disappearing into the air-conditioning, we into the real weather outside.
‘Do you like walking?’ she asked. I pushed the glass doors open for her, against the run of fretful people.
‘Yes, I do. I used to walk a lot.’
‘Guy likes the office. He used not to. He likes to get to his office. He was more active once. Where did you do your walking? Round Westminster?’
We had stopped at the pedestrian crossing outside the UN entrance looking over First Avenue.
‘I was in the field a lot — as well as a desk. In East Africa — doing TV programmes, compiling reports: that was the active part of the job.’
‘Yes, I know. Guy told me.’
A roaring stream of cars and lorries sprang up from the underpass to our right and we could hear each other no longer.
‘You used to live in Africa, didn’t you?’ I said when we’d got to the far side of the Avenue and had started to walk up 42nd Street.
‘Just after we were married. In Northern Rhodesia — now Zambia.’ She turned, and looked back at the long line of national flags in front of the Secretariat. ‘I can’t see the flag.’ She gazed at the colours cracking in the wind, shading her eyes from the sun coming off the river between the Con Ed chimneys. ‘Green and black and white — I think.’
‘It should be easy.’ I said. ‘Z. It must be the last flag on the line.’
‘What about Zanzibar?’
‘Part of the Republic of Tanzania.’
‘You know all about Africa.’
‘No. Just the alphabet.’
She turned back and we went on. Yes, we might have been starting out on a school reunion — tempting and teasing each other, seeing where the ground lay after so many years.
‘We call “Z” “Zee” over here — took me quite a while to learn your way.’
‘Why did you bother?’
‘Oh, they were very particular — Guy’s relations in Africa, his friends. They didn’t know what he was doing marrying an American in the first place. The usual thing — he should have married a Country Lifegirl and taken her to live on a thousand acres in Gloucestershire.’
The huge glass wall of a building loomed up on our right — fifty square yards of glass set between dark stone pillars and copper casements. Inside I could see nothing but a dense greenery — tall flowering cherries, palm-like trees with falling rubbery leaves, ferns, a carpet of exotic shrubs and bushes, a hothouse jungle with pools of water and little streams a few feet from the street. I stopped to look at it.
‘The Ford Foundation,’ she said. ‘Were you long in Africa?’ We both gazed through the glass at this immense natural contrivance; even Arcadia was not beyond the concrete and glass ambitions of Manhattan. Had I been long in Africa? All right — I would play the game as long as she wanted; in any case, I wasn’t going to have the whole business out with her in the middle of 42nd Street. She wanted to make final confirmation of my credentials, of course, make quite certain that I was the real shadow of her lover before inquiring about what had happened to his substance. I had no objections.