by Adam Foulds
Kristin was so happy and light as she left with everybody else. She hardly noticed the others around her—she was preoccupied with all that she’d seen, gathering it inside herself. She was almost out of the door of the building when she remembered her coat in the cloakroom and went back.
*
They were onstage together. Strong lights angled down from overhead. Kristin could feel the heat of them on her skin. Sometimes they swept through her field of vision like headlights or stars. Darkness was wrapped around them. In its outer reaches, it prickled with the unseen eyes of spectators. Henry was upset, frantic, as he had been in the play. He was pale and couldn’t focus. Kristin was trying to help him. Other characters appeared for short scenes of anxious, incomprehensible communication. A soft, smiling man held a dagger then became irrelevant somehow. Kristin took hold of Henry’s forearm to steady him. He was grateful, relieved, as if she’d saved him from drowning. They stood closer together in a turning column of light. He was so near, Kristin wanted so desperately to kiss him that she strained to close the final distance, pushing her face across the fabric of her pillow, her lips parting, her eyes opening.
*
The Germans were there already, in the same places as yesterday. Kristin greeted them. “Good morning. How are you today?”
“You look well.” The man smiled and his wife turned around quickly, unsmiling, to see. From this, Kristin knew that the man was flirting with her, that he did it often, that his wife hated it.
“I’m good,” she said, as though he’d asked her a question. She walked to her table.
“The weather is improved,” the man pursued. “The sun is out today.”
This was true. Kristin looked up and saw a bridal whiteness in the net curtains. The patterned carpet at Kristin’s feet glowed. The universe was happy for her, sharing in her secret. The Germans felt very far away while Kristin ordered poached eggs on wholemeal from the waitress and took out her phone.
A voicemail message. Her mother. Despite the expense, despite the annoyance she knew she would feel, she pressed the button to listen, just in case it was something worse than the usual.
I just heard from Suzy you’re in England going after that actor you met that one time. Well, Krissy, I’ve made myself clear as I can on that subject some time ago without any effect as I can see. I just hope you’re being careful over there.Look, I’m not saying …
Kristin took the phone from her ear and hit three to delete. Usually, her mother’s anger—a permanent state since Kristin “lost” Ron—was expressed as a quiet, general pessimism, a softly spreading stain of complete disillusion with Kristin at its centre. She never said a word. From this there was no escape. Now the attack was direct and could be ignored. Her mother knew nothing of life, really. A few years ago, she had seen a local news report about a woman who was making a fortune from collectibles on eBay and she had decided to do the same. Now there was a closet in her room—which she treated like a huge secret though she told everyone about her hobby—stacked with Disney Princess dolls pristine in their plastic packaging. Rainbows and snowflakes and zooming stars decorated the boxes. The dolls smiled emptily through the cellophane window. This was the image that came to mind when Kristin remembered her mother’s useless opposition. Those dolls should be played with, alive in the magic of some little girl’s game.
*
Kristin had expected more from Buckingham Palace. Broad, blank, set back behind its black gates, it had nothing of the castle about it, no towers or turrets. The gleaming, dull-eyed guardsmen, polished and creaseless, with shining weapons and standing absolutely still were the most interesting thing there. Tourists moved around them, stood beside them and in front of them, leaning in with their phones on selfie sticks and the guards didn’t flinch. Kristin took out her own phone and took a few pictures of the building and a guard. She took a selfie, too, turning her back to Buckingham Palace and arranging it over her shoulder, dipping her forehead and lifting her gaze. Something to post on Facebook or send to Suzanne or her mother. As she was putting her phone back in her pocket an American voice asked, “Hi there. Would you mind taking a picture for us?” Kristin turned. A small woman in a blue fleece with short grey hair combed down evenly in all directions. Her silent husband, smiling, was exactly the same height as she was and that made them look a little silly, Kristin thought, when she took their camera. She kept her voice quiet and her accent unidentifiable when she said “okay” and the couple shuffled together. “One, two, three.” Their smiles grew fiercer. Kristin pressed the button. She handed the camera back. They thanked her as they checked the image and Kristin walked away, keen to avoid conversation and stay in her private thoughts where Henry was. She stopped to look up at Queen Victoria on her crowded monument, stern, pudgy, unattractive, her blank, bored eyes staring into the traffic.
There was a park. Kristin walked into it. That was better. Leaves and light. Choral arrangements of colourful flowers in flowerbeds. Squirrels bounded between trees, scampered up the sides of bins. A smell of life from the ground and soft grass. She sat down on a bench to wait out some more of this meaningless interval. It occurred to her that a butterfly should fly past through the spring air bearing its secret message for her. No butterfly came but, hey, it didn’t matter. Everything was still faultlessly in place. Kristin thought of where to go next.
*
The escalator was silver and vast, like the side of a pyramid. It climbed towards white sky and delivered Kristin at a metallic arch. She passed through the ticket barriers and into a wide plaza. The wind was quick, a river wind, blowing across the width of the Thames. A different world, a whole different London. Kristin inhaled. The light was dazzling, the buildings sharp and modern. From interviews, Kristin knew that Henry lived in this neighbourhood. His eyes looked on these things, this sky, these walkways with their Sunday strollers, those white boats.
There were more people on the path by the river. Kristin stopped and leaned against a rail to look at the water. Where the sun struck there was a crater of glittering white light, pulsing with tiny movements, too bright to look at for long. Elsewhere the water was brown, swift, sombre, serious. The flowing movement was absorbing to watch. It gave Kristin a sensation of drifting, anchored to the rail but in motion. She turned her eyes towards the light and closed them, letting the wind fuss noisily around her head. When she opened her eyes again there was something in the water moving towards her, a dog, a dead dog, its jaws open, its face just under the surface, beneath the window of the water. Its front paws flopped in the current, loose. It slowly rotated. The fur looked dowdy, like worn carpet. Kristin turned to see if anyone else had seen it but no one was looking. This must happen now and again, Kristin reasoned, dogs falling into the water. There was nothing there to think about. It had crossed, gone past towards the sea in silence. So much for Suzanne’s accusation that Kristin only ever saw what she wanted to see. She certainly hadn’t wanted to see that. It stayed in her mind, the strange ugly peacefulness of it drifting and turning.
Kristin walked on, among the Sunday people. You could somehow feel it was Sunday, everyone moving in a lull of recovery, living their actual lives for a change, couples holding coffee cups and pushing strollers together. There was a hint here of something coming in Kristin’s future, given that this was where Henry lived, of a large, placid, domestic peace that they would share, washed in the freshness of the river air. She could picture so easily how they would weave together in the little rituals, the wordless rhythm of good habits, dressing and undressing together, cooking, watching TV and snuggling up, the ordinary plentiful safe feeling of love in a life. She looked mildly around, diffusing her blessing over the scene, until she saw a man who looked like Henry bouncing through it, who was Henry, the back of Henry’s head getting farther away as he ran. Adrenalin burned the breath out of her chest and stopped her. She struggled into her next step and hurried after him. Was it him? It did see
m like him. She was sure it was him. He was turning a corner where the railings bent to the right. She had to run herself, to jog, her backpack thumping her shoulder. She turned and could still see him. She slowed, breathless, but kept going in long urgent strides. It was him, definitely. She was where he lived. It was all true. It was all coming together. Fate sometimes just smacks you upside the head. He turned again, off the main walkway. Kristin sprinted as fast as she could but he was gone when she got there. She heard a door close in one of the buildings and she could feel where he had been. She walked to the source of the sound and found that she was right. Henry Banks was printed on a small white label by one of the buzzers on the intercom. No special font or sign, like he was just another person. And he was inside. He was safe. Kristin, breathing hard, her bangs sticking to her moist forehead, could feel him in there. Should she press the button? She couldn’t. It was too soon. She wasn’t prepared, either mentally or in her outfit and appearance. Kristin looked at that small, magical name. How it crawled and twisted inside her heart! She knew that she should stick to the original plan. Everything was falling into place, just as it was meant to be. Everything was going to be all right. Perhaps she would deliver a letter there later. How wonderful now to have his home address and not have to send everything through his agent.
*
When she walked into the dining room, the German man was alone, looking at something on his phone through reading glasses, head tilted back, eyelids half lowered. His face looked severe, old, disappointed. But when he looked up and saw Kristin, it changed, almost convulsed into a smile. It wasn’t pleasant to see. He pulled off his glasses with a quick movement.
“Good morning,” he said.
“And to you.”
“My wife packs,” he said. “We leave later today.”
“Well, I hope you had a good time.”
“For sure.”
He fell silent, returning his attention to his phone while Kristin ordered her breakfast. When she was done, he put his phone in his hip pocket, his glasses into his top pocket, and came over to Kristin’s table.
“So, I will say goodbye now.”
“Okay. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
He bent down and kissed her on the cheeks, his hands on her shoulder blades to pull her into him, though she resisted and their chests did not make contact. He smiled down at her as though they together had stolen a quick, illicit pleasure. “Have a good stay,” he said. Then he left and Kristin was alone.
Kristin remembered this feeling of being alone in a room after such an incident, left to sort it in her mind, to interpret, to ignore, to decide to forget. This happened frequently in the early days with Ron when she was his PA and working in his new home office. A friendly squeeze of her upper arm, a pat on her lower back, brushing some fleck from her jacket collar and adjusting her hair. Sometimes he would lean down beside her to read a document on her screen, one hand on the back of her chair, his face so close beside hers she could feel the blurred beginning of touch. She knew what Ron was doing and she made a choice she now regretted, a bad, materialistic choice. Those drives out from Philly to near Valley Forge, the large house in its trees. The times when Ron’s wife went out and they were alone. Later, after the game had played out, and he told her that he wanted a divorce, she wanted to shout No! This is all wrong! Don’t tell me you don’t love me! It was me. I was the one who didn’t love you. Not for a moment.
*
The tourist sites weren’t nearly as interesting to Kristin as the places of Henry’s London and there was one address lodged in her memory that Kristin decided to visit. She wanted to know what the office looked like, to see where this part of the drama of her life had played out. All those envelopes that she’d written out by hand and she’d never wondered what the office looked like. She had in her mind only a flash of generic glass partitions, desks, swiftly walking suits, ringing phones. Envelopes with butterflies on them, full with the reality of love, with many details of her life, had gone to an address that was in her mind like a melody. She looked it up using the hotel’s wifi and went.
The street had a strange name, Stanhope Mews. The sight of it dispelled Kristin’s weak preconceived images of a busy, wordly, Hollywood players kind of place, and replaced it with a much better reality. A mews turned out to be a kind of side street cul-de-sac. To enter this one you turned off a main street and found yourself in a small, cobbled, sloping, uneven row of buildings like something from Dickens, everything as soft and irregular and alive as in a painting. In front of one door was a barrel turned into a planter and spilling red geraniums into the sunlight. There were plants and flowers everywhere, in pots and boxes and hanging baskets by every door, in window boxes above. The English did love their gardens. Naturally her letters had flown to a place like this for their rendezvous with Henry Banks, this sweet and lyrical street. She walked down the smooth, small stones, checking the different doors and their signs. Some kind of branding company. An asset management company. Something that didn’t explain what it was with Dorian Inc. on a brass plate. And there was Haverford and Styles, Henry’s agency, number eleven Stanhope Mews, SW7, in the flesh. A quiet doorway beside a wide window. Kristin looked through the reflections on the panes to see into the room within. There was movement, a dim shape of someone’s head. Kristin pulled back, picturing herself seen from the other side, framed, garish in daylight, peering in. She walked on up the mews as though looking for somewhere else, down to the front of the building that closed off the end. With no farther to go, she turned and walked back. Now there was someone outside Haverford and Styles, a woman sucking on a vape pen. Kristin slowed her pace. The woman released the button and sighed out a big cloud of steam or whatever was in those things. Her hair was cut in a bob; at the bottom, two sharp point swung forwards. Her black jacket matched her hair; it too was angularly cut in hanging panels. Smooth plastic jewellery bulged on her fingers. But her knees under wrinkled opaque tights conveyed a different mood. A vulnerable human being could be seen in those knees. They reassured Kristin. She said, “Hey.”
The woman looked up. “Hello?” she asked.
“Hi,” Kristin said.
“Can I help you? Are you looking for something?”
“No. Not really. I’m like a tourist I guess.”
“I see.”
Kristin stood and smiled while the woman put the vape pen back in her mouth, pressed the button and inhaled.
“Do you work here?” Kristin asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Wow.”
“You’re not an actress, are you? Because I have to tell you door-stepping agents is not going to get you …”
“I’m not an actress. Don’t worry.” Kristin laughed. “My gosh, no. You work with some cool people here, I guess.”
“I do. Is this … I’m confused. How do you know what we do here?”
“Oh, I’ve sent a lot of letters here. You represent Henry Banks, don’t you?”
“He’s one of my clients. Are you?”
“What?”
“You write letters to Henry care of us?”
“I have done. Yes.”
“A lot of letters. Really, a lot.”
“Sure. I like to stay in touch. We met once and …”
“You’re Twice-A-Week, aren’t you?
“Sorry. What?”
“You’re American. You write a couple of times a week. I know who you are. We call you Twice-A-Week in the office.”
“Okay. Wow, okay. So …”
“Should I be worried that you’re here? Just turning up like this?”
“I don’t think so. Why would you be?”
