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By Root 170 0

to the alluring Irene, who feels suffocated by her husband and their life together. And, to be sure, Montpelier Square even today feels hermetically sealed, although it is only a few blocks from Harrods and the busy Brompton Road. The garden at its center, with its carefully manicured wall of hedges and tidy gravel paths, can easily be imagined as a cross between a sanctuary and a green prison. Wisteria vines climb the walls of several of the houses, giving them a sort of Sleeping Beauty quality. At midafternoon on a workaday weekday, there is no one in the central garden, no one on the square, no one on the streets at all except for two workmen working on the pointing of an exquisitely restored house, a hint of lavish drape and bullion trim just visible through the long windows.

Montpelier Square

Like many of the most beautiful squares in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, Montpelier Square has the trick of seeming as distant from the push and pull and press of the main roads as if it had a great glass skylit ceiling over it. It is possible to imagine either being completely content here, or very very restless. Or perhaps that is just remembering the novel, remembering Irene and her discontent.

Round and round the square, peering at the house numbers for 62, where Soames kept her like an especially beautiful painting in a frame of crystal and polished furniture. Round and round again. But there is no number 62. Perhaps the author wanted to protect any actual house from the taint that might attach to the fictional unhappiness in his own creation. Perhaps he chose a number out of the air, without any attention to the house numbers on Montpelier Square itself. Perhaps in a small way he wanted to drive home what is always a valuable lesson, when we insist on learning the world through books: that accuracy and truth are sometimes quite different things.

CHAPTER SIX

My excitement, even joy in the concrete existence of these fictional locations—even if the numbers don’t exactly match—raises an obvious question. Why did I wait so long to visit London in the first place? Like every American teenager, I’d had my chance to backpack through Europe, an excursion that inevitably included a hostel in Chelsea, a pub near Piccadilly, and far too much Guinness. “Another pint!” friends of mine shrieked in a private joke when they’d returned. “Please, sir—I want some more.”

I suppose that was part of it, that feeling of being the ugly American in the high reaches of high art that made me cringe. It is a sense I experience each time I return to London about the essential character of its people: They are cordial strangers, happy to proffer directions, say, but content then to be on their way without the sort of where-you-from-how-you-like-it pleasantries that would be the hallmark of any such American exchange. As an experiment I once stood on a corner of the Strand with an open map and a pronounced expression of confusion for fifteen minutes. I can assure you that if I did this on Broadway someone would offer directions, since New Yorkers are indefatigable know-it-alls. In London, not a single passer-by volunteered.

Jane Austen, 1775-1817

This national character is quite clear after only a few days in London, and clearer still in fiction. Those who chatter or openly emote are classified in virtually all English novels as fools; in fact, the mindless yammerer, fecklessly easy with strangers and unthinking of propriety, is a bit of a stock character, the best known version being Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. When Londoners do become what, in the parlance of their national character, might be considered overwrought (although certainly not by any passersby in New York), it is usually because of something flagrantly un-English. So it was that, in the fall of 2003, city residents responded savagely to the American David Blaine. Blaine is usually referred to as an “illusionist,” which is what you call a magician with pretensions and a press agent, and for reasons obscure he decided to spend forty-four days in a Plexiglas box suspended