Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [13]
But the young woman in the garden flat is in and still awake; the keys turn smoothly in their locks; the light switch is where Vinnie remembers it, just inside the door. There is the white telephone with its familiar number, and the stack of phone books in their elegant pastel colors: A–D cream, E–K geranium pink, L–R fern green, S–Z forget-me-not blue, holding between their closed petals the names of all her London friends. The sofa and chairs are in their proper places; the gold-framed engravings of Oxford colleges glow quietly on either side of the mantel. The clean grate is decorated as always with a white paper fan that echoes the white enameled pots of English ivy on their stand in the tall bay window. For the second time that evening tears ache behind Vinnie’s eyes; but these are tears of relief, even of joy.
Since she is unobserved, she allows them to fall. Weeping quietly, she hauls her bags into the flat, bolts the door behind them, and is safe at last, home in London.
2
* * *
Every man hath a right to enjoy life.
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
IN the Underground station at Notting Hill Gate a tall dark handsome American is waiting for the eastbound train. Restlessly, he stamps from one foot to the other, staring across the dark dirty tracks at bright colored advertisements of products he will never purchase: Black Magic chocolates and Craven cigarettes. Trained in the close reading of texts (he is an assistant professor of English), he wonders how the British public can be persuaded to buy candy that suggests an evil spell and tobacco designated as cowardly. Maybe there is a darker meaning to the glossy social and sexual occasions illustrated in these posters. Is the scarlet-mouthed blonde offering the box of chocolates about to poison or bewitch her guests? Are the smiling, smoke-breathing young man and woman secretly terrified of each other? In Fred Turner’s present mood both scenes seem empty and false like the city above him, almost sinister.
Though he has been in London for three weeks, this is the first time Fred has used the Underground. Usually he walks everywhere, regardless of the distance or the weather, in imitation of the eighteenth-century author John Gay, about whom he is supposed to be writing a book. In Gay’s long poem, Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, mechanical transport is scorned:
What walker shall his mean ambition fix
On the false lustre of a coach and six?
O rather give me sweet content on foot,
Wrapped in my virtue, and a good surtout!
In a vain search for sweet content, Fred has tramped half over London. Unless it rains hard, he also runs two miles every morning in Kensington Gardens, pounding along past dripping empty benches and gnarled bare trees, under a dark or dappled sky. While his lungs fill with damp chill air and the thin smoke of his breath steams away, he asks himself what the hell he is doing here, alone in this cold, unpleasant city. This evening, however, an icy sleet is falling, and Fred is expected for dinner in Hampstead; even Gay, he decided, wouldn’t have walked so far in weather like this.
Most of the other people on the Underground platform are not gazing at the advertisements, but—more or less covertly—at Fred Turner. They are wondering if they haven’t seen him somewhere before, maybe in some film or on the telly. A miniskirted billing clerk thinks he looks exactly like the hero on the cover of The Secret of Rosewyn, one of her favorite Gothics. A grammar-school teacher, collapsed on a bench with a bulging string bag, believes she saw him in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford last summer, in one of the main supporting