The Magus - John Fowles [254]
compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks--how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face. I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o'clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialled Ann Taylor's number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited; the idea that Alison would be waiting for me. Some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour. At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor's flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions. I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked. Footsteps. A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile. I backed. "Terribly sorry. Wrong flat." I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, "It's all right. Second floor." I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens. I walked back to the pub, and later I went to an Italian restaurant Alison and myself had used to go to. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers' staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless. I went and had one more look at the fiat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man. The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognised the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The fiat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July--ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee's address was the same as the assigner's. "Must have been sharing,"