Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [50]
I headed for Sloane Street and began browsing the shop windows. The sales were on in full force and the stores were jammed with bargain hunters. I was tired and about ready to give up when I spotted what I thought might work: a pair of beige silk espadrilles with high rope-soles and laces that tied round the ankles. Although such shoes were all the rage in London, I knew they were way too hip for me and I’d probably look ridiculous wearing them.
But what the heck, I thought. Why not? It was time to let go of worrying about such things as whether or not I looked foolish in a pair of trendy shoes. The shop had my size. I bought them.
As I walked back to my flat, I wondered if Freya Stark, whose book had become my bedtime companion, was ever lured into buying clothes when she traveled. Some garment in Turkey, perhaps, that seemed quite flattering at the time, but once out of its native habitat looked ridiculous. The night before, to my surprise, I’d learned that Freya had an interest in and a theory about clothes: “Nothing is more useful to a woman traveller than a genuine interest in clothes; it is a key to unlock the hearts of women of all ages and races,” she wrote, describing a subject that had enabled her to connect with women from very different backgrounds. “The same feeling of intimacy is awakened, whether with Druse or Moslem or Canadian. I wonder if men have any such universal interest to fall back upon?”
Reading this made me like the intrepid, no-nonsense Freya all the more. It also made me ponder her question as it might relate to men. Were sports the male equivalent of a universal interest? It was the only thing I could think of that might be comparable, although I knew many men who had little or no interest in gamesmanship.
But right now another, more pressing question faced me: would I be able to walk in my new shoes? Or, for that matter, even stand in them for any length of time without falling flat on my face? I imagined my apprehension to be similar to what Freya must have felt when she mounted her first camel and set off to cross the desert atop that ridiculous-looking creature.
My brother and sister-in-law were staying at the posh Lanesborough Hotel at Hyde Park Corner. Shelby is all the family I have left from my childhood. He is the last person who shares with me family secrets and the realities of who we were before we remade ourselves into the adults we are. Sometimes it was hard for me to connect the boy I knew—the skinny smart kid who collected lead soldiers and pursued Boy Scout merit badges—with the phenomenally successful man he’d become. But sooner or later, when we were together, some remark would inevitably trigger childhood memories and then we’d be off, zipping down a path that existed now only for the two of us.
After all, who else remembered the ten-year-old boy who, trying to keep the battery from dying, regularly started up the car Mother never learned to drive? And who but Shelby could retrieve the memory of his three-year-old sister being rushed by ambulance to the hospital in the middle of the night when her appendix ruptured?
We were the repository, he and I, of our family’s history and its secrets. Together we held on to the memories of Father returning from a trip, loaded with surprise gifts; the taste of the plain, sometimes peculiar, Scottish food we ate as children; our exciting visits with an aunt and uncle to the exotic Algerian Room, a nightclub in the Baltimore hotel where they lived.
But mostly when we were together Shelby and I lived in the present and concentrated on having a good time. This visit was no different. For the next several days we talked over long, leisurely breakfasts, visited the sights, shopped, went to the theater, had late-night suppers, and always closed down the day by gathering with his friends in the cozy hotel bar for champagne. In between, there were massages and facials for the women; lunch at the club and business