‘Everything is to be viewed as though for the first time,’ advised Saul Bellow (in one of his essays); accept Santayana’s definition of that discredited word piety – ‘reverence for the sources of one’s being’; reawaken the childhood perceptions of your ‘original eyes’ and trust your ‘first heart’; and never forget that the imagination has its own ‘eternal naivete’.
I’ll be needing to say more about innocence, at the very end. But now I have to pack. It’s one of those dawn departures. They’re meant to be good, Elena says, because you only lose a day, and not a night; but once I’ve got up at five in the morning it feels as though I’m losing both…
When I come to write the next chapter (which I hope to do while I’m there) I’ll be able at some point to slip into something more comfortable – namely the light armour of the third person. Before I write it, though, I’ll first have to live it. And when I reach Phoebe’s room, and when the room opens up to let me in, there’ll be no third person. It’ll just be me – and her.
*1 Early advice, or early commandments, can be pernicious. I love the short stories of Alice Munro; but someone must have told her, when she was little, to shun everyday contractions like ‘couldn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘hadn’t’ (for example, ‘[Enid had to tell Rupert] that she could not swim. And that would not be a lie…she had not learned to swim’). It makes for a choppy, counter-conversational forward flow. But in the end all those nots only amount to a flesh wound: bits of buckshot on the body of Munro’s prose…Whoever introduced Henry James to the joys of EV (see below) has systemic ills to answer for – among them gentility and evasiveness.
*2 As we say goodbye to this shaming topic, let’s spare a thought for perhaps the most pathetic noun in the English language: ‘missive’ (and its plural). Having no life of its own, it dawdles on street corners, waiting for some dim bulb – in his or her riff about ‘letters’ – to exhaust the usual EVs (‘communications’, ‘dispatches’, ‘items of correspondence’, and of course ‘epistles’) and finally make a long arm for ‘missives’. Then for a little while the shivering wretch creeps in from the cold.
Chapter 5 London: Phoebe at Seventy-Five
On a midweek afternoon I took the tube from Marble Arch to Bayswater, walked down the little cosmopolis of Queensway, turned left into Kensington Gardens Square, and paused outside number 14…I was thinking back, thinking back to the times when (after a certain sort of phone call) I used to sprint – sprint – the half mile from here to Phoebe’s flat and to her waiting human shape. Now, in 2017, my senses could look forward to a rather different kind of feast – and how nice it would be, I thought, to turn around and sprint or at least scuttle in the opposite direction. But no, of course I shuddered on, north for a block, then left into Westbourne Grove, where Hereford Mansions soon loomed.
As I approached the building I saw two once-familiar figures stepping out from under the porch and into the September sunshine, Lars and Raoul, squinting and chuckling as they furled their off-white silk scarves round their throats…I was early, and had time to consider them. Lars and Raoul resembled their long-ago selves in the same kind of way that ‘Beijing’ resembles ‘Peking’, that ‘Mumbai’ resembles ‘Bombay’: cognately. The same went for Martin, of course: I only derived from the Martin I used to be.
‘Ah, Mr Amis! It’s all our yesterdays!’
‘Martin. So – a blast from the past!’
‘Raoul, Lars,’ I said, lighting the pre-ordeal cigarette and asking them how they were…Up close, I had to admit, they seemed scandalously unchanged, Lars still the wiry beachcomber, Raoul still the ample maître d’; unchanged too were the inexplicably clean whites of their idle eyes. After a while I said,
‘Well, gentlemen. Nice to see you. I’d better go in. How’s her mood?’
‘Up and down, obviously,’ said Lars. ‘Though really not that bad. Considering.’
‘Great blow to her pride of course,’ said Raoul. ‘Her father.’
I said, ‘What about him?’
‘She never got over his death, you see. Sir Graeme popped off – ooh, ten years ago. At a hundred and six, God bless him. And he was a baronet, Martin,’ Raoul went on with a priestly air. ‘The centuries-old connection to the nobility severed, with Lady Dallen long gone and no male line. And I happen to believe that kind of thing matters dreadfully. A huge blow to her social self-esteem. Her entrée.’
‘You really think so? Is that when she stopped going out?…Maud told me. When I last saw Phoebe I’d just turned thirty-two. And now I’m more than twice that.’
‘In which case,’ said Raoul, smiling at Lars, ‘you may find her slightly changed.’
Phoebe was in her old apartment block, but she wasn’t in her old apartment. She had moved, from A (2) to g (vii), from the second floor to the eighth: to ‘the attic of grannies and widows’, as she used to call it, ‘and old maids’. The name tag no longer promised ‘Kontakt’ – just ‘Miss P. Phelps’. I pressed the steel nub and within a couple of seconds the lock buzzed and weakly rattled.
In the lift I tried to arrange my face in accordance with the politesse of late-phase reunions: bland, all-forgiving. But the door to g (vii) was already open and the woman peering through the gap couldn’t possibly be Miss P. Phelps. This was ruled out not by her hair (tufts of caramel blonde with a neglected streak of mauve), nor, at least in theory, by her wipeable nylon jumpsuit and
