disappeared entirely, a passer-by brushed past me, waking me from the dream-world. I turned away from the tracks and began walking fast, head down, crossing the flower-bedecked square and fleeing up streets with whichever crowd carried me along.
I was dimly aware of changes: the standard odours of a downtown shopping district—petrol, perfume, perspiration—gave way to more exotic fragrances, chillies and sesame oil, roasting duck and incense. Then a splash of colour caught my eye, and I raised my head to look around me. A row of bright paper lamps danced in the spring breeze, strung between two equally colourful buildings. The streets were oddly discordant, strongly remembered yet utterly foreign, as if I'd known the idea of the place, but not the reality. I walked on, but after a while the streets changed again. The air became redolent of garlic, tomato sauce, and coffee. In a short time, those smells faded beneath the air of a waterfront, and suddenly I had run out of land.
I stood on the edge of a wide, curving roadway fronting a row of piers that bustled with machines and men, loading and unloading ships from a dozen countries. Wagons and lorries came and went, few business suits appeared, and the air smelt only of sea and tar.
Reassuringly like London, in fact.
After a while I began to walk along the waterfront road, turning towards the western sun. It felt good on my face, as the unmoving ground felt good beneath my feet, and the muscles of my legs took pleasure in the fact that they could stride out without having to turn and retrace their steps every couple of minutes. The claustrophobic air of shipboard life slowly emptied from my lungs, and I thought, maybe it actually was some
I stopped to watch some fishermen at work, all high boots and loud voices, repairing holes in their nets while wearing sweaters more hole than wool. The fresh, powerful smell of fish and crab rose up all around me, to fade as I continued on. An Army post intruded between me and the water for a time, then allowed me back, and with the water before me, a dark round mountain rising from the northern shore and the island of Alcatraz before me, I stretched out my arms in the late sun, half inclined to shout my pleasure aloud, feeling a smile on my face. I turned to survey the rising city—and it was only then I noticed the length of the shadows the buildings were casting.
“Damn,” I said aloud instead: I'd told Holmes I'd be back for tea.
I crossed the waterfront road to re-enter the city, and in a couple of streets I spotted a sign announcing public telephones. At least three languages mingled in the small room, an appropriate accompaniment to the Indian, English, and Japanese coins I sorted through in my purse. At last I found some money the girl would accept and placed a call to the St Francis. Holmes did not answer, nor had he left a message for me, so I left one for him instead and walked out of the telephone office nursing a small glow of righteousness: Had I been at the hotel at the declared time, I told myself, I'd only have been cooling my heels waiting for him to return from heaven knows where.
I continued south, which I knew was the general direction of downtown—it is difficult to become seriously lost in a city with water on three sides. And I was beginning to take note of my surroundings again, raising my eyes from the pavement to look around me. This was a more heavily residential area, the houses both older and larger than they had been in the area I had fled through, the residents less strikingly regional. As the ground rose, steeply now in a delicious challenge to my leg muscles, the houses began to retreat from the public gaze behind solid walls and gated drives. Street noises diminished with the loss of restaurants and shops, the trees grew taller and more thickly green, and the paving stones underfoot were more even although the number of pedestrians was markedly reduced.
The hilltop enclave might have had a moat around it and signs saying
Even the air smelt of money, I thought, crisp and clean.
I looked up smiling at the house opposite, an unassuming brick edifice of two tall stories, and nearly fell on my face over my suddenly unresponsive feet.
I saw: snippets of red-brick wall and once-white trim set well back from the street, now nearly obscured by a wildly overgrown vine and an equally undisciplined jungle of a garden; a grey stone garden wall separating jungle from pavement, in want of repointing and somehow shorter than it should be; one set of ornate iron gates sagging across the drive and a smaller pedestrian entrance further along the wall, both gates looped through with heavy chains and solid padlocks; the chain on the walkway gate, which for lack of other fastening had been welded directly onto the strike-plate—the very strike-plate that had reached out to gash open my little brother's scalp when he had tripped while running through it.
There was no mistaking the shape of the house: My feet had led me home.
Chapter Three
I don't know how long I stood there in the fading light, gawping at the house. I do know that it was nearly dark when a hand on my shoulder sent me leaping out of my skin in shock.
I whirled and found myself face-to-face with a tall, thin, grey-haired gentleman with sharp features and sharper grey eyes. I expelled the breath from my lungs and let my defensive hand fall back to my side.
“Holmes, for goodness' sake, do give a person some warning.”
“Russell, I've been standing behind you clearing my throat noisily for several minutes now. You appeared distracted.”
“You might say that,” I said grimly.
“Am I to assume this is your family's house?”
I turned back to look at what was gradually becoming little more than a blocky outline against the sky. “I couldn't have told you for the life of me where it was, but my feet knew. I looked up and there it was.”
“Do you wish to go in?”
“I don't have a key,” I said absently, then caught myself. “Not that the lack of a key would stop you. But frankly, I don't think your lock-picks would do much good against the rust on those padlocks.”
“The wall, however, is easily scaled. Shall we?” So saying, he bent and hooked his hands together to receive my foot. I eyed the top of the stones, which indeed were scarcely five feet tall, although my memory of them was high—my childhood memory, I reminded myself. The wall was not set with glass or wire, and certainly there would be no watch-dog in that jungly front garden.
I set the toe of my shoe into Holmes' hands, braced my hands on his shoulder and the wall, and scrambled over the top with stockings more or less intact. He followed a moment later, brushing invisible dust from his trousers.
The walkway was buried under a knee-high thicket of weeds; five feet from the gate, the path disappeared entirely behind the press of branches from the shrubs on either side. Still, the drive was open, and we sidled along the wall until we reached it, then picked our way up the weed-buckled cobbles to the house.
The street-lamps had come on, but so thick was the vegetation, their light made it to the house's facade in fits and starts, allowing us a glimpse of downspout here, a patch of peeling trim there, the lining on a set of drapes through a grimy downstairs window.
We followed, initially at any rate, the path of least resistance, and continued along the drive that ran down the side of the house. The windows here were similarly closed and uninformative, the once-trim roses that followed the wall between our house and the neighbours (the . . . Ramseys?) a thicket that reached thorny claws out to our clothing.
At the back of the house, the drive continued to a carriage house where my father had kept his motorcars.
