No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  For Hans too, there were women at the University of Edinburgh, drawn to his father’s title, even if the politics attached were frowned upon, and impressed by his posh accent. And since ease was Hans’s most cherished attribute, he didn’t bother much with his female classmates. Edinburgh wasn’t London in the late sixties, but that only made the women that much more eager to please.

  “When they graduated, Hans and Julian—Lord, I can’t stand that one—decided it was time Simon prevailed on his father to ‘mind the gap’ with his poor, estranged son,” Elizabeth said with quotation gestures and thespian inflections exaggerated by vodka. She put a kettle on with a wordless query to me to see if I’d like a cup of tea. I nodded. She continued, “You know, it was all about healing the pain caused by a broken marriage, reestablishing contact between père et fils and getting him a bloody flat in Paris.”

  Gordon Bromwell, settling into his backbench in Parliament, was only too happy to send his wild son to the other side of the Channel, far from the headlines of the Daily Mail. After all, Hans didn’t hide his fondness for an easy lay and Moroccan black hash, not the sorts of dalliances that fit with the politics of a Tory MP preaching law and order to the fed-up folks of North Hampshire. So yes, the elder Bromwell would supply the francs, but the younger one had to figure out what to do with himself in the City of Light.

  “Just don’t look in Montmartre,” Hans ordered Simon. “I’m not bloody Toulouse-Lautrec, staring up dancers’ nostrils. Find something on the Rive Gauche, in one of those little lanes near the Seine—preferably near a brothel. I’ll stare up something, just not a nostril.”

  That opening conversation was exhausting for me, cathartic for Elizabeth. She took up in the morning where she left off late the night before, once she had lured me into the basement laundry room to help her sort clothes.

  “Here, love, tug on the end of this,” she ordered gently as she tried to smooth a weathered slip over an ironing board. Her voice was groggy and a bit slurred from the drinking, but she appeared functional. I blushed a bit, gingerly took the lace hem, and pulled.

  She laughed. “Nothing to be afraid of, dear. No one’s hand has slipped up this in years.”

  As she worked, she talked, racing to fill the airtime before the nurses left Hans’s bedside and called me to duty.

  “I knew damn well I was missing the fun,” she lamented.

  On the occasional breaks from university when Hans felt like traveling home, he would swoop down on Houndsheath like a knight-errant. Their mother would make a fuss, prepare a regal feast with the best china, and dust off the formal dining room. When Hans and Elizabeth were young children, they ate in there routinely, waited on by staff, Hans looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy in his suit and knickers, Elizabeth prim in a stiff dress. But with Gordon more often than not at the pied-à-terre near Parliament and Hans with the Scots, the great mahogany table with its heavy, carved legs had fallen into disuse. Mother and daughter ate instead in the breakfast nook, hardly a nook with its huge square English oak table nudged into a great bay window overlooking an overgrown field. But it was certainly more casual.

  “We weren’t much for conversation in those days, Mum and me,” Elizabeth sighed.

  Charlotte would mainly glare at her daughter, whose nervous manners and vacant stares unnerved her. “Dear God, Elizabeth, chew with your mouth closed. Do you think you’re a horse?” Or, “If you slouch like that at the table, you’ll have permanent scoliosis. Imagine trying to find a husband bent over like a doddering great-grandmama.” Or, “Move your chair closer to the table, Elizabeth. You already smell like bangers and mash from that dog of yours. You don’t want to be wearing your breakfast as well.”

  When Hans was there, neither that setting nor that conversation would do. Around the dusted and polished Louis XIV dining room table with its parquetry inlay, he would regale his mother with witty but chaste stories of university life. Charlotte would be on her best behavior, ostentatiously displaying kindnesses to son and daughter alike.

  Hans would later sneak into Elizabeth’s room to tell of his drug- and booze-addled sex life. It was amazing what a shot of Glenfiddich would do to a town girl who had never been able to afford much more than a half pint of cider or a shandy, he’d tell her. He pleased the girls with his wallet, his accent, and his attention. They pleased him with what was at their disposal, which for Hans was quite a lot. Elizabeth would listen, rocking slowly on her legs, tucked underneath her on her bed, and biting her lower lip as her brother sat on the floor against the wall and laughed at his own exploits. She figured he was too immersed in his storytelling to pay much heed to her squirmings, but he was well aware of the education he was imparting. He felt it was a duty, cheerfully rendered.

  Hans’s stories sent Elizabeth searching for a way out of Houndsheath. A cousin, “Victoria Tunbridge was her name,” soon became her link, however imperfect, to the outside world. Vicki, as she insisted on calling herself, was not nearly as isolated as her Shakespearean cousin. She had gotten through her first set of exams to continue her schooling, but her inbred academic sloth had gotten the best of her before she could complete the exams for university. Which was fine, really. She had graduated to the party circuit, where she had considerably more energy.

  Physically, Victoria—slight, elegant, and effortlessly sexy—was Elizabeth’s opposite, and she quite enjoyed the contrast. Elizabeth’s uncertain presence, her perpetual motion, her 360-degree glances at her surroundings, gave Victoria the confidence of a well-protected politician, and in her more honest moments, she had to admit Elizabeth could be a damned better conversationalist. At a party, she could draw the attention, let Elizabeth do the talking, then let the bloke take her home. By that point, the lads weren’t looking for talk. She found it odd that Elizabeth didn’t mind the arrangement. Of course she did, “but that’s only because she couldn’t fathom my isolation,” Elizabeth said, folding the last of Hans’s briefs, grayed with age.

  In a sense, Elizabeth’s escape was inevitable, especially once Hans had abandoned her altogether for Paris. In Vicki, she had an escort out. In Hampshire, she had a launch pad. And in the summer social season of 1970, she had any number of practice runs, testing the pull of gravity to see how much force was needed to escape the orbit of the North Downs.

  In September, as the party boys headed back to university, Elizabeth plotted her most daring excursion yet. Hans went to France. She would go someplace warmer, Malaga, perhaps, or Majorca.

  “Don’t be stupid and boring. You can be so conventional,” Vicki chided her. “Let’s go to the Algarve.”

  “Where?”

  “Portugal, darling.”

  We were still talking that night, after Hans had retired beneath his blanket.

  “Aw, Mum, have you noticed how serious David looks at you when he’s listening to your stories? You’ve got yourself a real audience for once.”

  Cristina was calling into the kitchen before heading out for the night. She was wearing a diaphanous white chiffon shirt over a tight black miniskirt, bare legs, and sandals, though the fall chill had set in. Behind her was her new boyfriend, who was hulking, six four, I guessed, built, and black, with an almost pretty face. I was doing the dishes.

  “Oh, David,” she said, “this is Kelvin from some city called Detroit. Kelvin, this is our resident Yankee, David.”

  Kelvin had played college ball at Michigan State, I would learn over the course of a few visits, but he failed to be picked in the NBA draft. Undaunted, he was playing for the Birmingham team, hoping to impress the scouts. The Midlands were far from Brighton, but he earned enough money for quick weekend trips. They had met at a dance party at the Zap Club, just off the boardwalk in a cave of a structure built into the Brighton seawall.

  At that first meeting, with Kelvin standing behind Cristina, a wave of self-pity had passed over me; I understood how out of my league she was. It reminded me of the feeling I had had a year before, on a visit to Florence to see a co
llege friend teaching English there. I had arrived in tattered jeans, an oversized sweater, and high-tops, with my filthy green backpack on. I smelled a little. Watching the northern Italian men dressed in their elegance, their hair and nails trimmed perfectly, courting women of absolute perfection, I hadn’t felt so sexually irrelevant since my awkward midteens, when I battled acne and waited for a growth spurt.

  “Birmingham’s a ways from here.”

  “She’s worth it,” he said, and gave Cristina a gentle squeeze around her waist that I tried to ignore.

  “How’s the season going?”

  “Not bad. We’re over five hundred.”

  “What are you averaging?”

  “Twenty-four points, about a dozen rebounds,” he answered quietly.

  “Double double a game? Man, that’s fantastic. You’ll be in the NBA next season.”

  He gave me a dazzling smile.

  “Keep your fingers crossed for me, man.”

  Cristina let her body fall back onto the rock of a man behind her. She crossed an arm across her chest to rest her hand on his enormous forearm.

  “I have no idea what you blokes are on about. Mum, when are you going to make David and me one of those Portuguese dishes from Africa? I think our guest deserves that, don’t you?”

  “I thought you didn’t like those? ‘Reminders of scary times,’ you’d say,” Elizabeth responded absentmindedly. “Food’s like that,” she directed at me, “an instant association with the first time you recall eating it.”

  “I know, but really, I wouldn’t want an adorable bloke like David to be denied foo foo in piri piri sauce,” she sang out, glancing at me from under her thick eyelashes. “David, don’t keep Mum up too late. Mum, you’ve got a test tomorrow,” she said reproachfully. “Have you even cracked a book?”

  She turned her head to Kelvin’s chest, lingered for a moment in admiration, then looked up at him.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  Kelvin gave Elizabeth a shy little wave. I turned back to the dishes. Elizabeth’s glance lingered on the open doorway as Kelvin’s back faded from view.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a shag,” she muttered.

  Elizabeth took out a drink and a cigarette. If she still wanted company, I would acquiesce. I didn’t relish climbing the steps to my barren little room.

  Elizabeth poured me a shot of vodka along with her own.

  “It’s been thirteen years since the neck snapped. I’m sure you’ve been wondering. Everybody does.” She tapped the ash off her Silk Cut and took a swallow of vodka. “‘Such an injury would vex a very saint.’”

  She paused to enjoy my perplexity. “Baptista, in Taming of the Shrew.” She took another swallow. “But my brother’s no saint.”

  “This might seem very American to you, but do you mind if I ask you about the way you talk? I mean, it’s Shakespearean.”

  “It is Shakespeare, my darling. You don’t know Taming of the Shrew?”

  “I’m sorry. I always mix it up with Turn of the Screw.”

  “Ah, James. I’ll be reminding myself for the next year that you’re a Yank.”

  “James died a British subject,” I showed off.

  “Yes, poor dear. Anyway, Shakespeare is just about all I know, and I know it bloody well. ‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.’”

  It sounded impressive, but I have to admit, I didn’t know Shakespeare. This was the fall of 1988, and my education consisted mainly of liberation theology, Gabriel García Márquez, and a little Faulkner to burnish my southern upbringing, but not a lot of Shakespeare. I had intended to take a course on the Bard the year before, but there was a mix-up, and I ended up with Dickens. Elizabeth’s words amazed me, though—lyrical, expressive, at once anachronistic and timeless. Even disembodied from their context, her little snippets had the power to move, and to grace her with erudition and eloquence.

  “Though I suppose I’ve already started to unfold it for you, you’ll want the whole story,” she said. “‘The true beginning of our end.’ It was all my fault, this.”

  She lit a cigarette.

  “It all started with Vicki, you see, and our little seaside escape.”

  Portugal. The sun streamed through thin, salt-weathered white curtains that undulated in the ocean breeze. The rough cotton sheets were not what Elizabeth was used to, and she had kicked them in the night down below her waist. She glanced over to the twin bed not four feet away and watched her cousin sleeping soundly in her diaphanous nightgown, one strap over a shoulder, one breast exposed, a slight smile on her lovely lips.

  Vicki had entertained the troops well on the journey down, laughing with the businessmen on the ferry crossing from Dover, some students on the train from Calais to Paris, a couple of soldiers from Paris to Madrid, a bemused, dark-eyed Spaniard from Madrid to Lisbon, and a passel of tourists on the final leg from Lisbon to Faro.

  The sun had grown warmer and more intense, the sky a deeper blue, as they moved away from Hampshire. Their parents had given them the money without bother. The girls were twenty now, and a little adventure and independence would do them some good. The Algarve was becoming all the rage among the upper-middle class in and around London. Besides, the fascists of the Iberian Peninsula—Spain and Portugal both—kept a lid on the local undesirables. Elizabeth and Vicki would be safer in Praia da Marinha than on Brighton beach, Gordon thought approvingly.

  Elizabeth wondered if she should wait for Vicki to wake up before heading out. But Sleeping Beauty was not stirring. She brushed through her hair, instinctively pulling it back into a tight ponytail, and hoisted on her one-piece suit, cut low on the hip and high on the chest, a few small flowers breaking up the field of navy blue. Elizabeth’s body wasn’t half bad really, she thought, breasts pert, firm, and youthful, waist trim if not hard, sloping out nicely to hips still on the narrow side. She gave herself a last once-over in the mirror and opened the door to the sun.

  The resort in Albufeira was nothing special, just one of a jumble of whitewashed blocks above an expanse of beach and palms. But to Elizabeth, it was exotic, or at least not British, even if many of the lads and louts swilling bitter in the bars talked football in unmistakable cockney. Her father had misjudged the exclusivity of the Portuguese beachfront, understandable considering how long it had been since he had ventured into the sun. But there were palm trees, an old Latin town square, a few narrow lanes, and enough steeply sloping tiled roofs to maintain the feel of Iberia. The prawns were massive, served with the heads on and no adornment. The ham was blood red, finely sliced with pungent cheese on the side. The Spanish tangerines were divine, and the air smelled of sea foam and salt.

  After arriving the previous night, they had gone to a seaside bar where Vicki had turned heads. Waifish in an almost sheer cover-up (and shivering), she was chum for the clumsy, circling sharks.

  “Vicki, really, how long are we going to stay?” Elizabeth queried, looking piteous after the second hour at the bar. She really was tired. She was beginning to feel sorry for herself.

  “Oh, come on, Elizabeth, we’ve only just gotten here. I like it.”

  Elizabeth had sat at the bar and pouted, watching the men come and go, chatting up her cousin, who deftly deflected the attention of one by turning to another. Vicki was well practiced at this, and with one room between them, she had no choice but to be discerning. And in the subtropical heat, she had no need for a conversational assist from her cousin. Libidos needed no priming on the Algarve.

  With the next day’s sun climbing higher, Elizabeth primly stretched out a knotty, threadbare towel she had nicked from the room. It was not long enough, so she sat with her knees awkwardly bent, reading Portnoy’s Complaint, all sex and American and New York and Jewish and foreign.

  “There you are,” her cousin’s voice broke through.

  Elizabeth looked up at the pink bikini
Victoria was wearing, the material gathered at her narrow hips in little macramé rings, the halter top tugging gently at her chest. She swallowed her resentment and smiled.

  “Well, may I join you?” Vicki asked, her hand on a casually jutting hip, her smile self-satisfied.

  The cousins chatted about home, their respective brothers, how jealous they would be if they could see them now, and the boys they—well, Vicki—had met on the way down. The sea was calm. The surf lapped the sand hypnotically. Vicki went silent, pointed her delicate face to the sun, and slipped into sleep. Elizabeth picked up her book and scanned it for the naughty bits. The day passed pleasantly, without the adventure or excitement Elizabeth had expected but as a good holiday should. Her skin browned, then burned, but just a touch, enough to prickle and feel alive. She wandered up and down the beach, sometimes with her cousin, sometimes not, waded into the sea and felt blissfully far, far from home.

  That night, Vicki seemed to find a man to her liking, a young Portuguese business type visiting the coast to assess property for the burgeoning tourist trade. But as the night was giving way to morning, she was taking ill.

  “Excuse me, just for a moment,” she told him with a sweet smile. She casually slid off the barstool and sashayed to Elizabeth, who was nursing a beer and talking to a British student about life at one of the new universities.

  “Liz, would you please come with me to the loo?” she asked, her body as casual as ever, her eyes beginning to panic. They walked off together, Vicki clutching her cousin’s arm, leaning more and more heavily as they approached the restroom. As the door swung shut, Vicki lunged for a stall and exploded in obnoxious sounds and smells.

  “My lord, Vick,” Elizabeth chuckled, covering her face with cupped hands and secretly enjoying her cousin’s exertions.

  “I know, I know,” came a moan through the door. “I am so sick. It must’ve been those prawns we had for dinner, all that cinnamon and pepper.”