Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [22]
And the London she describes is a place worthy of that love, and still visible in spots today. There’s a nice description of Amber riding out of town to snare an unsuspecting dupe in the village of Knightsbridge. While Knightsbridge is now as much a part of the main body of London as London Bridge, it is possible to walk through its side streets and small squares and understand how the great swathe of green designated for hunting by the king, later to become Green Park—not to mention the torturous horseback travel of the day—would have relegated it to village status. Amber takes up lodgings at a house called The Plume of Feathers: “A large wooden sign swung out over the street just below Amber’s parlour windows—it depicted a great swirling blue plume painted on a gilt background, and was supported by a very ornate wrought-iron frame, also gilded.” Of course, any London visitor can see a similar sign hanging from any one of a dozen pubs. And the shops where Amber is seen with Bruce by his wife sound remarkably like the shopping arcades—odd, because the action of the novel takes place years before those arcades were built.
Or not so odd, perhaps. While I was on a trip to London, the author of Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsor, died at the age of eighty-three, and in a lively obituary in the Guardian a writer described her book thus: “It was a love letter to a London she had read about in Defoe and Pepys, but had never seen.” He went on to describe how the twenty-four-year-old American had been inspired by her husband’s thesis on Charles II and had written her spectacular maiden success with the help of years of research and an enormous map of Restoration London. How odd it was to know that one of the writers who had first taught me to love London—because, given all the talk about how dirty Amber was, it was a must-read for teenage girls even twenty years after its publication—was also a writer who had fallen for the city at a distance, created it in her mind’s eye, as well as on the page.
CHAPTER NINE
Luckily on that visit to London I had a more historically accurate opportunity to visit its rich past. The British Museum had just opened a show on London 1753, as though someone had known I was coming and would only be able to stomach so much of Internet cafés and Starbucks lattes and all the one-world paraphernalia that has so homogenized foreign travel. The British Museum is not crowded in on the Brompton Road with the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History, and the Science Museums. Nor is it one of the gems in the necklace of important places that curves around Trafalgar Square: the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery with their columns and plinths and plumes of water trumpeting their importance.
The British Museum is instead surrounded by bookstores and other small shops and houses in the midst of Bloomsbury, in such an unlikely setting that one shopkeeper a block away said that when he saw people enter with cameras and guidebooks he knew instantly to say, “Left at the end of the street, then down and it’s on the right hand” even before they’d opened their mouths. Perhaps as well as any other great London institution the museum plays with the idea of how past and present conjoin. The building itself does the trick, by combining a square and stodgy classical Greek temple facade with a glass-and-steel skylit roof over the great court. The transparent roof went in in 2000 and is an absolutely magical marriage of technology, beauty, and function. (Contrary to Gershwin’s “Foggy