Worlds

31. London Bridge

When we got off the tube in London I was set to immerse myself in History and Culture—but the first sight was a weird combination of anatomy and abnormal psychology. The Lambs of the Eternal Eye.

There were about a dozen Lambs in a line, begging, as we got off the train. They wore saffron robes and made soft music with finger-cymbals and sticks. Their skulls had been surgically removed from the eyebrows up, replaced with clear plastic, a sight presumably more pleasing to God’s eye than to mine.

They had stationed themselves wisely, as their tin plate full of foreign coins and currency showed. A blinker-card economy is hard on beggars; they had to get to foreigners before the Bank of England did, or on their way home.

One of them carried a sign saying THE BRITISH RAIL SYSTEM DOES NOT ENDORSE THIS ACTIVITY.

London taxis have human drivers. Eight of us squeezed into a cavernous black vehicle; Jeff told him the name of our hotel. We emerged from underground into bright morning sunlight and blue sky—garish after months of New York’s perpetual cloud.

The driver had an impenetrable accent (Cockney, I later learned), and chattered constantly. We drove down the Thames and sped by Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park—the Albert Memorial was almost majestic in its ugliness—and finally down into Kensington, where our hotel was. One man was trying to follow our progress on a map, and remarked that we were being taken for a ride in American idiom as well as British fact. I think the driver said this was the fastest route for this time of day.

When we got to the hotel and it was time to pay, I had to take over, as the only one used to blinker cards. The bill was twenty-one pounds; I tipped him three pounds, more for easy arithmetic than service. Inserted my card and punched it up, then passed my card around while the driver unloaded the luggage, telling everybody to punch three pounds, put the obvious end of their card into the obvious end of my card (all very sexy) and push the NOCODE button. One person gave me thirty pounds by mistake, and it took a while to sort that out.

The other two cabloads of people were already there, but presumably had not had as comprehensive a tour. The rooms had been arranged for in advance, but who was with whom had not been. Mr. Eppingworth, our director, noted that we had thirteen women and eleven men, and all of the rooms were doubles, and rather primly asked whether there were a lady and gentleman who would not mind? I thought about Jeff, maybe hesitating because of last night’s dream, but another couple shot their hands up with the speed of lust Jeff had glanced my way, not too surreptitiously, and that set off an obvious chain of thought:

I liked Jeff, but was more in need of a friend right now than a lover. He was too American to be athletically casual about sex; it would make him protective and intimate—and most of what bothered me, and I would like to talk out, were not the sort of things one would say to an FBI man, not even over a pillow. No matter how open-minded and thoughtful he seemed to be.

I could go ten weeks without the services of a man. Or maybe one of the others would turn out to have a suitably casual attitude—or maybe one of the women? The thought surprised me. My two such experiences, on Devon’s World, had not been pleasant, but then those people were weird, the women even more than the men. I needed arms and shoulders now, more than any other part, and women had as many of those as men, and had a more reasonable attitude toward tears.

I broke out of reverie in time to hear the last part of Mr. Eppingworth’s warning about gambling. The lobby of the hotel, and its pub, had slot machines that could suck all of the credit out of your blinker card in minutes. If we had to try them, be sure the rate selector stayed at the ten-shilling mark. That reminded me, I’d have to study the monetary system again. I’d glanced at it, and remembered a pound was about ten dollars, but I didn’t know a shilling from a doubloon from a pelican.

Violet and I chose each other for roommates; we had a half-hour to settle into our rooms before we met the tour bus outside. They were going to orient us to the city and then set us more or less free.

Violet set her suitcase in one corner and opened the drapes. The room was small and old—probably older than New New, it struck me—but neat and freshly painted. She bounced experimentally on the edge of one of the beds; it was some kind of old-fashioned design, with springs of metal.

“Bet you wish I was that blond chunk,” she said, smiling.

“The big one? Jeff?” I sat down on the other bed.

“I saw you looking at him.”

“He’s a nice man. We had a class together last quarter… and we’ve gone out a few times, dinner, sports. Nothing romantic.”

“Not interested?”

I lay back on the bed. “I’m not sure. I don’t want to get into anything complicated.”

“Line obligation?”

“No, just another man. Maybe two. The only thing I’ve decided about my line is that I’d the a virgin before I’d join my mother’s.”

“Me, too,” she said emphatically. “Brooks women never get anywhere. Too late for me to die a virgin, though, thank God.”

“Figure of speech. You want me to introduce you to Jeff?”

“Too big.” Violet was more than a head shorter than me. “I’d have to stand on a chair. But he is sort of fascinating.”

“You’d make quite a couple. A federal policeman with the daughter of—”

“He’s a cop? FBI cop?”

“That’s another thing that makes it complicated.”

“Oh, I see. You don’t want to tell him about all of that dope smuggling.”

I studied my nails. “Murder for hire, actually. I don’t think he would approve.”

She laughed. “Want to go downstairs and get something to drink? It’ll probably be a long ride.” Good idea.

We shared a pot of tea and our life stories, compressed. Her mother had bridled against the male-dominated Brooks line, but couldn’t legally be separated from it under Massachusetts law, her husband-of-record having given no grounds for divorce. So she took her infant daughter and ran away to Nevada, where she capitalized on her beauty and skill, and became a successful courtesan (the highest evaluation conferred there by the Guild of Working Women). She did that for eight or nine years, investing her income wisely, and bought her own bordello in Las Vegas. Violet—named for the color of her eyes when she was born; they were deep black now—went to boarding schools in New England and rarely visited Nevada, since the child of any rich person was too tempting a target for kidnappers. Whose profession was not illegal there. Nothing was.

She was worldly and intelligent but also deeply troubled, at some depth she didn’t have access to. She worshiped her mother but rarely saw her. She had never met her father, and “wouldn’t walk around the block” to do so, which was something we had in common.

She painted and wrote poetry (and knew Benny’s name) and didn’t have the faintest idea of what she was going to do after school. She respected her mother’s profession but didn’t want to pursue it. She was majoring in English out of love for it, but didn’t want to teach.

She said she envied me my ambitiousness.

The bus tour was an extended version of the cab ride, whisking us from place to place as fast as the traffic would allow. I guess the theory was that we should at least see the outside of everything. We did have a lovely lunch at a place called the Prospect of Whitby, a pub on the Thames that dates back to the Tudors. Five centuries.

It was more tiring than I would have thought; sitting, listening, and watching for eight hours. But it was fascinating. We even got to see King George, at quite a distance, as he was dedicating some public building. I’d seen him ten years before, when he passed through New New on his way to the Moon.

When we got back to the hotel, Violet and I decided to combine a little exploring with dinner, so we set off down Brompton Road in search of a reasonable place to eat Wrong road. After we’d looked in a dozen or so windows and rejected the posted menus I felt I was imposing on her, since she didn’t have to economize, and I told her I didn’t want to feel responsible for her starving to death. But Violet said she’d planned to eat frugally, too, so she could spend on other things. Ten cheap meals in London would buy a nice dress in Paris.

We finally came across a street vendor with sandwiches and ale, which we consumed on the way back to the hotel (he also gave us friendly advice about restaurants; we should have gone north instead of south). A cold drizzle started, but we had been warned, and put on plastic capes and hats.

It was a lot different from walking the streets of New York. The traffic was heavier and faster. Berserk, that is to say. Evidently there were no robot vehicles, and driving was a competitive sport; pedestrians were obstacles thrown in to make the game more interesting.

But on the sidewalks and in the shops, the pace was slower and more polite than in America. No sense of being in the middle of a beehive. Kensington was mostly residential, though.

The police were of both genders, wore no armor, and appeared to be unarmed. There were hitters, we’d been told, but they were rather rare. London proper had only one-fourth New York’s rate of violent crime. (“London proper” doesn’t include East End, which is a walled-off lawless section run by a bunch of hooligans who call themselves the National Front.)

We picked up a bottle of madeira, against the chill, and went back up to our room to put up our feet and see what cube was like in England. Their major networks are also owned by the government, but the programming seemed more intelligent, and the commercials more witty and straightforward, not scary appeals to the subconscious.

Neither of us had had madeira before, sweet and strong. We drank the whole bottle and passed quickly from giddiness to sleepiness. We wound up sleeping together, innocently, like girls. I woke up at dawn with her naked body warm against me, and though it felt nice I was vaguely disturbed by the lesbian-ness of it, and managed to disentangle myself without waking her. I drank about a liter of water, which was a mistake, but did find the hangover pills, and left them out for Violet. Then crawled into the cold bed and waited for the dizziness to subside.

Violet wanted to spend the day visiting literary land-marks, and I tagged along, though I don’t know too much about English literature (I would have, if I’d taken a full certificate in American Lit).

Dickens’s house was fascinating because it was full of nineteenth-century memorabilia, and quite a bit of it was about America. Dickens had nothing but contempt for the young country, but he evidently wasn’t averse to taking their money, giving readings. From there we went to Dickens’s favorite pub and had a couple of literary pints, getting a start on tomorrow’s hangover.

Samuel Johnson’s house was a couple of hundred years older, the wooden steps worn round by centuries of trudging tourists, but it was more like a museum. Hard to be properly awed when I’ve never read anything of the gentleman’s work. (Our guidebook was enthusiastic about his pub as well as Dickens’s, a “chophouse” that had been in continuous use since 1667. But it was lunchtime, and the place was so crowded we literally couldn’t get near it, a knot of beer-drinkers filling the alley in front of its door.)

The morning was bright and unseasonably warm, but the afternoon compensated with sleet and bitter wind. We decided it would be a good policy to spend the rest of the day indoors, and went back toward Kensington to wander through the Victoria and Albert Museum. We split up there, since Violet wanted to study the paintings and I wanted to spend a couple of hours with their marvelous collection of antique musical instruments. They were all functional, and you could listen with earclips to period music being played on them.

I was engrossed in a basset horn (which looks like a clarinet assembled by a cubist maniac, and sounds like a bad cold) and jumped when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Jeff Hawkings.

“Jeff! You scared me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You’re the first person I know I’ve seen all day.”

“What’ve you been doing?”

“Walking, riding the tube. Saw Scotland Yard. Waited in line for the Tower, but it got too cold.” He shook his head “There’s so much… how about you?”

I gave him a quick summary of our literary day. “Sounds interesting,” he said, smiling. “Have any plans for dinner?”

Violet and I were going to an Indian restaurant the sandwich vendor had recommended. He asked whether he and a friend could come along. I said sure, but for some reason thought the friend would be female, and felt a little twinge of disappointment, maybe jealousy.

The friend was male, and obviously brought along for symmetry, with Violet At the time, I was amused, and a little flattered.

Looking back. What if I’d been in a different mood, and been annoyed by Jeff’s directness? What if he hadn’t gone to the museum, or hadn’t signed up for the tour course, or hadn’t gone to the University, or hadn’t been born? Life would have been simpler, though I would certainly be dead.