barbed wires and guard dogs in the movies of his youth. Just show a passport, with its harmless new name, and join the line of German tourists waiting for the bus. In and out. See where Kafka lived. Wenceslas Square, which wasn’t a square but a long street. He knew because he’d seen the Soviet tanks on television last year, lined up against the students.
What would they say to each other? Where did you go that night? How was it arranged? Why didn’t-? But what was the point? Everything he wanted to know, that drew him, was further away than Prague, back irretrievably on 2nd Street. That was where they still lived, in some dream of the past. It was what he couldn’t tell Molly, because he hadn’t known it then himself. He was afraid of ghosts. They were too fragile. If you disturbed them, they vanished. If he saw a nice old man living with a Czech wife somewhere west of Vienna, his father would be gone for good.
The house was quiet; even vigilant Mrs Caudhill in the ground-floor flat had gone to bed. It was an ugly Victorian redbrick, one of four whose bay windows stuck out like prows in a row of modest Regency terrace houses, and he’d been lucky to find it. A room at the top back, “overlooking the garden,” which turned out to be a birdbath and a clump of rhododendrons that never bloomed. When he opened his door and switched on the desk lamp, still tiptoeing from the climb up the dim stairs, he could see everything in a glance: a bookcase of boards and bricks with a record player in the middle, a daybed and a cast-off easy chair, a desk with typewriter and stacks of index cards, an electric fire in front of the bricked-up fireplace. He flicked the fire on, rubbing his hands. It was always cold in England, and they put the water pipes outside the houses, where they could freeze.
He sat down, still in his suit, then got up to make some tea on the gas ring. It was only when he went over to look out the window that he realized he was pacing, jittery and caged. He wouldn’t sleep. Anxiety had sopped up the alcohol, leaving his mind too sharp to rest. He thought of rolling a joint, but that would run the risk of an unwelcome thought floating in, and he didn’t want to think. Everyone smoked in Vietnam because it was surreal and then you couldn’t tell the difference. Now he needed to do something, crossword puzzles or solitaire, to keep his attention on the immediate.
The kettle whistle startled him and he hurried to make the tea. Why now? He sat back down in front of the electric fire, counted the orange bars, and sipped from the mug. He could will himself to be calm. Read something. As long as he didn’t think. Then he glanced out the window and saw the top branches of the leafless tree and 2nd Street came flooding back, racing through his body until he actually felt memory, a tingle in his fingers on the cup. Everything he’d pushed away at Jules. Scene after scene. Had she thought he was indifferent? That it wasn’t still there, just waiting? Welles and his stupid gavel, rattling ashtrays for the cameras. The swarm of hats outside the window, drinking coffee. His mother all dressed up for the charities benefit. The pearls flung backward on the dented car roof.
He stopped. That was the other thing. She’d left her apartment, checked into the Mayflower, and jumped. That was all. A girl at Garfinkel’s. But before that, what? Discussion groups about capitalism? Saving the world from fascism? What had made her come forward, unraveling her lethal thread? What did the committee know, anyway? His father’s judges. One of them, it turned out, had been a member of the Klan, convinced the Communists were organizing Negroes. It was there in the index cards. He glanced over at the desk. Indifferent? Then why the stacks of cards for Wiseman, the trail back? Larry had known instinctively that the research was a pose. He was studying the mechanics of history to find out something else. Had his father gone there that night, a last stop at the hotel? And now the one person who could tell him had sent a message and he sat with a mug of tea, too afraid to ask.
The room was warm enough for him to change now, and he went over to the closet to put his jacket away. He could read something until he fell asleep. Trollope, maybe, who’d probably seen houses like this going up and thought they were handsome. But his hand fell on an omnibus Stevenson, and there was memory again, Kidnapped in the club chair. He took it out anyway, a gesture of refusing to be intimidated, and threw it on the bed. He’d never read Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, just seen the movie, and that seemed safe enough. Then he realized, with a sighing irony, that he wasn’t going to escape it. Who was that, after all, but his father, one person, then another? Except that Dr. Jekyll couldn’t help himself, once he’d taken the medicine.
He folded his pants and put them on a hanger and started unbuttoning his shirt, staring down at the pile of laundry on the closet floor. He’d have to go to the Chinese tomorrow. When it hit him, he held on to the open front of his shirt, literally dizzy.
The shirt. His father hadn’t been able to help himself then; Nick had helped him. It was something only they knew, that Nick had tried to help. In his child’s mind, he had even been willing to break the law, anything. He was asking for help. That was the code.
Nick stood for a minute, arguing with himself, but he knew beyond reason that he was right. There had never been any point in making the message cryptic-why not just ‘Come see me’? “He’ll know.” And he did know. I need your help again. Don’t tell anybody. Between us, like before. It couldn’t mean anything else. His father might have used a hundred references from Nick’s childhood, but he used the shirt, their secret. Molly could have thought it was an old family joke, nothing more. Was that what his life was like now, so cautious he didn’t even trust his own messenger?
But he trusted Nick. Nobody else had ever tried to help him. And now there was another shirt.
Nick walked over to the desk, pulled by strings that stretched so far back he was afraid mere movement would make them snap. What if he were wrong, standing there in his socks and underwear in the middle of the night, reading things into an innocuous hello? Or maybe just telling himself a story that would make him do what he wanted to do anyway. What if?
He picked up the phone and started to dial, surprised at the clunking sound in the quiet room. Flaxman nine. A Fulham number. Maybe he was still stoned. But he had never felt more alert in his life.
“Hullo?” The phone was picked up on the first ring, as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear.
“It’s Nick.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
Why hadn’t he waited until morning? But it had already been a month. “I know. I’m sorry. It couldn’t wait.”
“What?”
“I’ve changed my mind. You still willing to make the trip?”
“Maybe we’d better talk about this in the morning.”
“Are you?”
She paused. “What made you change your mind?”
“It doesn’t matter. You were right. I have to go. Can you leave right away? Tomorrow?”
“Are you crazy? We have to get visas. It takes a few days. You can’t just walk-”
“Okay, where do we go for the visas?”
“Czech consulate,” she said, suddenly practical. “It’s in Notting Hill Gate.”
“Will you meet me there? First thing in the morning?”
“Try noon. They don’t open till late. And you just have to wait in line anyway. But go early if you want.”
“No. We have to go together. You’re my fiancee, remember?”
She laughed. “Do I get a ring?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I was kidding, for God’s sake. Are you all right?”
“Okay, noon. Where in Notting Hill?”
“Meet me at the tube stop. It’s about a block. Nick?”
“What?”
“Are you sure? I mean, you seemed so — I have his phone number, you know. I can just give it to you, if you want.”
“No. The way he says. You’ll be the contact.”
There was a silence. “I thought you didn’t want to see him.”
“Now I do.”
Chapter 6
