Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [56]
I noticed a second wave of diners—probably the after-theater crowd—was starting to arrive. When I looked at my watch I saw it was close to eleven. Jean and I paid the bill and, after a short stroll along Curzon Street, prepared to part company.
Just before saying good-bye, Jean mentioned a party her hosts were giving the following weekend. She asked if I’d like to come.
“Sounds like fun. I’d love to.”
“I’ll call you.” She took down my number and handed me a card printed with the phone number of her London hosts.
My trip to the Freud Museum had left me with a strong urge to visit our old house near Sloane Square, the place where I’d lived as a young wife and mother. So after breakfast the next morning, I set out on a pilgrimage. As I walked toward the row of houses on Sloane Gardens, I imagined my husband and elder son as they were twenty-five years ago: a studious-looking man, slender and blue-eyed, with the high forehead of an intellectual, and a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old, running from one end of the square to the other, chasing pigeons.
If I looked hard enough I could see, off to the side, a dark-haired woman in a pink silk coat buying flowers—big bunches of pale apricot roses—from the vendor in front of the Underground stop. It was my mother. She’d made it a habit, while in London, to fill up her apartment and ours with fresh flowers.
The neighborhood was so familiar to me that it was tempting to continue reconstructing the past. So I did.
There is Bliss’s chemist shop, I thought, where we bought cold remedies and Band-Aids. And there’s the Peter Jones department store; we all bought raincoats there. And, oh, look! There’s W. H. Smith’s bookshop, where my husband bought books and I bought toy trucks for our son.
But I knew enough to be parsimonious with such memories. They still had the power to ambush me. I knew that lurking in the dark corners of such memories was an unwanted thought: the possibility that the most important part of my life existed in the past. Most of the time I knew this was not so, but occasionally, when trapped by memories, I would mistake change for loss, and grieve over the marriage that dissolved, the mother who died, the boy who grew up, and the young woman I was when I lived on this street.
But which house was it we lived in? Suddenly I couldn’t remember the exact number. Was it 15? Or 17? Looking at first one, then the other, I drew a complete blank. Then a door opened and a pleasant-looking woman of about forty, wearing a chador but with her face uncovered, stepped out.
“Are you looking for someone?” she asked in a way that suggested a wish to be helpful.
“Well, I was,” I said. “A family that used to live here. But they’ve moved away.”
When the woman turned to walk back into the house, I saw a flash of high-heeled silver sandals from beneath her chador. Watching her close the door to Number 15 Sloane Gardens, I wondered if she ever got homesick for a garden in Persia, one with a fountain splashing in the courtyard. I wondered if she, too, might have returned there once, searching for the person she used to be.
It was still early, so I decided to visit a museum I’d heard about: the quaintly named Museum of Garden History. One of my English friends had warned me not to miss the museum or its special exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of Gertrude Jekyll’s birth.
“Gertrude Jekyll?” I had said, pronouncing the last name Jeckul, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “The name sounds vaguely familiar but who exactly is she?”
“First off, it’s JEE-kill, not JECK-ul.” She smiled. “The ladies at the