Disorder is only order we can’t see, and coincidences are the evidence. My days had remained quiet but I was out of time with the world around me, clinging to old understandings in spite of the clues. Things that should have been separate were no longer separate. The riots, bombs and murders were a background noise I refused to hear.
My new order was made in prison: shopping my friends, putting them into history. I described what made us come to Bayswater and how we did there, each case an instructive lesson. Now I’m an expert on migration, our confused dramas buried in the aggregate. And I’m waiting for a letter, my heart and mind given over to unfinished business. Nothing from Adnam. The students are back. The newspaper article with its grey photos of dead men has clouded Vermont and made its landscape thin and false. A year ago when I arrived, full of hope and nervousness, I loved this house and my new work. I liked my students, enjoyed their affection and admiration. I watched TV and was fascinated by what made up an American, secretly considering whether I had what it took, a migrant’s migrant in a nation of migrants. But these days it is something old and unfinished that is reaching out for me.
♦
AFTER
LIFE
YOU WOULD THINK, WOULDN'T YOU, THAT THE LAW—or some regulating influence of the world, some collective defence of the status quo, some governing moral force —would have stepped in to stay us, to prevent, arrest or eliminate us, the whole unaccountable enterprise of us. Over the previous weeks I had accumulated a sort of nervousness, like a confident mountaineer who, near the summit, unexpectedly develops a fear of heights. The alarm I had felt at the news of Ashraf’s arrest had been cushioned by a deeper feeling of relief that the correct and inevitable had arrived to re-establish sense. And when Ashraf turned up later, cheery and untouched, blessed by the powers-that-be, my vertigo returned with him, even as I gathered myself, like a good Sherpa, to continue our ascent. Apparently, my intuitions were all wrong. Just as the slave traders were in the good graces of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the authorities in England had no objection to anything we did.
Still, you would think, wouldn’t you, that in such a world, the sources of misfortune might be readily foreseen—the many imaginable motives for assault, betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, deportation or restraint. This was not so. While I had been meeting with Her Majesty’s peer of the realm, the representatives of unpleasant governments, crooked financiers, arms dealers, mercenaries and spies—my friends, that is—another London had escaped my attention but was waiting to embrace me.
I reached the street outside the Coburg and breathed its air: coolness, cooking smells and petrol fumes, the thick perfumes of the American women exiting the hotel with me. I walked north along Queensway in a light rain that shone on the road, reflecting the lights of cars. There was the Fortune Cookie Chinese restaurant, the Taza juice bar, the entrance to the ice rink that looked more like an entrance to a theatre. The unlit gap over there was the Catholic church. The flower stand by Bayswater Tube. The BCCI across the street. I was grateful to be grounded again by all this familiarity, to know it so well, to be passing through it with nothing more grand than my own two feet. I was pleased that it was rainy and cool, ordinary and English. I took deep breaths and deliberately slowed my steps. It would be all right. In a couple of weeks all this would be over and it would be all right. We’d never have to do anything like it again. Benji would go back to being Benji, the full, happy, clever, good-hearted Benji.
"Years later, in my Cookham College researches, I came across a nineteen-sixteen painting of Bayswater Tube Station by Walter Sickert, who apparently was famous. The name on the portico was Queens Road Bayswater then —before Queens Road became Queensway and a second station was added with the new name—but the name was the only change that I could see. It remained a simple, well-proportioned entrance framed with blue and white lettering and topped with the bright red of the London Transport symbol. Inside, the vestibule divided into simple steps down to the platforms on either side of the railway, which briefly humped to the surface there before diving underground in both directions. Of the three tube stations within walking distance of my flat, Bayswater had always been my favourite for its human proportions and simple style, but I was astonished to find a famous painter had also noticed it.
A group of teenage tourists—German was my guess —swarmed past me, excited and laughing, and I allowed myself a small smile at their happiness, as if they were guests in my home. When I came level with Bayswater Tube, I was trying to remember what shop or restaurant the BCCI across the street had displaced, nostalgic for it and mildly annoyed that it escaped me. Three men stood near the telephone boxes just beyond the station, caught by the dark allure of the prostitutes’ cards that filled the windows. Unconsciously I think, I altered course to give them a wider berth, which brought me closer to the station entrance.
“Marcella!” The voice was deep, and urgent, with a desperation that put everything else out of my mind. I turned towards the station without a thought. I turned my head, then moved my legs, while others just turned and hesitated in their step, the way they did for distant bombs.
“Marcella! It’s Kamara. They’re beating me. I’ve done nothing. Help me.”
All I could see were the dark-blue backs of two policemen, jerking in struggle as they pushed and pulled a person
