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By Root 1740 0

whether sincere or insincere. He has been in the country long enough to know that. But not at IBM. IBM is not Britain. IBM is the new wave, the new way. That is why IBM is going to cut a swathe through the British opposition. The opposition is still caught up in old, slack, inefficient British ways. IBM, on the contrary, is lean and hard and merciless. So there is no send-off for him on his last day at work. He clears his desk in silence, says his goodbyes to his programmer colleagues. ‘What will you be doing?’ asks one of them cautiously. All have clearly heard the friendship story; it makes them stiff and uncomfortable. ‘Oh, I’ll see what comes up,’ he replies.

It is an interesting feeling, waking up the next morning with nowhere in particular to go. A sunny day: he catches a train to Leicester Square, does a tour of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He has a day’s growth of stubble; he has decided to wear a beard. With a beard he will perhaps not look so out of place among the elegant young men and beautiful girls who pour out of the language schools and ride the Underground. Then let chance take its course.

From now on, he has decided, he will put himself in chance’s way at every turn. Novels are full of chance meetings that lead to romance – romance or tragedy. He is ready for romance, ready even for tragedy, ready for anything, in fact, so long as he will be consumed by it and remade. That is why he is in London, after all: to be rid of his old self and revealed in his new, true, passionate self; and now there is no impediment to his quest.

The days pass and he simply does as he wishes. Technically speaking, his position is illegal. Clipped to his passport is the work permit that allows him to reside in Britain. Now that he has no work, the permit has lost its power. But if he lies low, perhaps they – the authorities, the police, whoever is responsible – will overlook him.

Ahead on the horizon looms the problem of money. His savings will not last indefinitely. He has nothing worth selling. Prudently he gives up buying books; he walks, when the weather is good, rather than catching trains; he lives on bread and cheese and apples.

Chance does not bestow any of her blessings on him. But chance is unpredictable, one must give chance time. For the day when chance will at last smile on him he can only wait in readiness.

Fourteen

With freedom to do as he pleases, he has soon read to the end of the sprawling corpus of Ford’s writings. The time is nigh for him to deliver his judgment. What will he say? In the sciences one is permitted to report negative results, failures to confirm hypotheses. How about the arts? If he has nothing new to say about Ford, would the correct, the honourable action be to confess he has made a mistake, resign his studentship, return his bursary; or, in place of a thesis, would it be permissible to turn in a report on what a let-down his subject has been, how disappointed he is in his hero?

Briefcase in hand, he strolls out of the British Museum and joins the crowd passing down Great Russell Street: thousands of souls, not one of whom cares a fig what he thinks of Ford Madox Ford or anything else. When he first arrived in London he used to stare boldly into the faces of these passers-by, searching out the unique essence of each. Look, I am looking at you! he was saying. But bold stares got him nowhere in a city where, he soon discovered, neither men nor women met his gaze but, on the contrary, coolly evaded it.

Each refusal of his gaze felt like a tiny knife-prick. Again and again he was being noted, found wanting, turned down. Soon he began to lose his nerve, to flinch even before the refusal came. With women he found it easier to look covertly, steal looks. That, it would seem, was how looking was done in London. But in stolen looks there was – he could not rid himself of the feeling – something shifty, unclean. Preferable not to look at all. Preferable to be incurious about one’s neighbours, indifferent.

In the time he has been here he has changed a great deal; he is not sure