Angelica's Grotto

17 The Goodbye Look

Monday afternoon: Temple Underground Station. ‘“Waltz me around again, Willy,”’ Klein sang softly to himself as he climbed the stairs to WAY OUT, “‘around, around, around. The music is dreamy, it’s peaches-and-creamy — oh don’t let my feet touch the ground …”’ His meeting with the pornographer known as Angelica was almost seven hours away but he wanted to reconnoitre Surrey Street before dark.

The station was full of motion as people came and went, their various destinies intersecting and diverging. ‘“Look thy last on all things lovely,”’ said Klein, “‘every hour.’” Beyond the turnstiles he saw golden sunlight and the fruit and vegetable stall, brightly lit and festive, the gloss and colour of its offerings ticketed with white price cards. To the right of it was the flower stall, its blooms flaunting themselves under fluorescence and sunlight. To the left of it was the bright and cosy world of the newsstand, its wares ranked under the blazon of The Economist, the white title stentorian on a scarlet background.

Men and women waiting to meet someone stood by the station entrance. A Big Issue vendor, bearded and lonely, held up a magazine hopefully. Beyond him was the rush of cars on the Victoria Embankment; beyond the cars the river with its boats and sunpoints in a golden haze. ‘Sunpoints on the water,’ said Klein, ‘sunpoints dazzling on different waters, different times, other rivers watched by faces speaking and silent.’

Integral with the station entrance, the Temple Bar Restaurant was a haven for drinkers of coffee, perusers of newspapers, and those given to contemplation. ‘They mostly look like regulars,’ said Klein. ‘They can come into the Temple Bar Restaurant and say, “The usual.” Or maybe they just go in and sit down and it’s brought to them. Probably the regulars were here before the restaurant; they brought their coffee in thermos flasks and they read their newspapers leaning against a wall until the tables and chairs, the coffee urn and the steamed-up windows happened around them. This may be a demonstration of the anthropic principle.’

He mounted the steps to the street as men and women young and old, fast and slow, singly and in couples and groups, came down past him towards the station entrance. ‘Golden, golden,’ he said, ‘such a goldenness in the November afternoon sunlight!’ He crossed Temple Place with the low sun on the left side of his face, looked briefly up the long perspective of Arundel Street with its vanishing point somewhere beyond the Strand, and turned left with the sun in his eyes, his gaze following an adorable pair of legs moving briskly towards the Howard Hotel. ‘Don’t reify,’ he admonished himself, ‘but how can one not?’ The legs, diminishing rapidly, kept on straight ahead as he turned right into Surrey Street on the other side of which stood a King’s College building.

He moved slowly uphill, keeping to the right-hand pavement. About halfway up he came to broad steps on which sat some young men smoking and chatting, wide glass doors behind them at the top of the steps. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the nearest one, ‘what building is this?’

‘Arthur Andersen.’ Being helpful to the little old tourist, he added, ‘Over there across the street are the Roman baths.’

‘Thank you,’ said Klein. Opposite was a long tall cocoa-coloured Victorian edifice making its way up the street in reiterated gables, balconies, balusters, pilasters, Tudor-arched windows, cornices, and various ornamented outcrops and escarpments. Klein saw a sign, SURREY STEPS, and a dark archway beyond.

He continued up Surrey Street, the long cocoa-coloured succession continuing with him. On a portico he saw, in raised letters, Norfolk Hotel. Signs in three of the ground-floor windows said that the sometime hotel was now devoted to War Studies in London. He crossed to that side and walked back down to Surrey Steps and the dark archway where a sign guided him to the Roman baths. He went down the steps and found himself in a little alley facing a wall that said WARNING! HAZCHEM.

‘HAZCHEM,’ he said, putting a Hebraic spin on it. He went back to the other side of Surrey Street and up to the Strand where he watched a 91 doubledecker, magisterial in its redness, westering with the lesser traffic. He looked eastward to the spire of St Clement Danes sharp against the autumnal afternoon, westward to the church of St Mary-le-Strand in the valedictory gold of the declining sun. ‘De Schimmel,’ he said as a remembered image surfaced. ‘The Grey.’ It was a picture he’d seen at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Philips Wouverman. In the foreground was a path ascending a hill with a background of cloudy sky. A rider had dismounted and was holding the reins of his horse while he peered past a gnarled tree-trunk that ended eight or nine feet from the ground. Bare shoots grew out of this tall stump that stood at the left-hand edge of the picture; what the rider was looking at could not be seen. On the right-hand side were visible the head and shoulders of a second man coming up the curving path behind the rider. ‘That second man,’ said Klein, ‘is he mounted or on foot? Has the man with the horse seen him? What’s that one looking at beyond the edge of the picture? I’m not sure he should have got off his horse.’

‘What horse?’ said a man who now stood facing him and breathing alcoholic fumes on him. He was tall and shabby with a peaked cap at the top of him; he was dirty and long unshaven, looked as if he’d been sleeping rough.

‘Sorry,’ said Klein, ‘I was just talking to myself.’

‘What’s the name of that horse?’

‘De Schimmel.’

‘Pah! No good.’ He wagged a dirty finger. ‘Don’t put your money on De Schimmel.’

‘Why not?’

‘Never bet on a Jewish horse.’

‘Why not?’

‘They think too much.’

‘How do you know De Schimmel’s Jewish?’

‘Because he thinks too much. At the off he’ll be thinking how to invest his winnings while the other horses are already out of the gate and halfway round the track. You Jewish?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘You are — I can tell. So was Jesus, and look what happened to him. Can you spare ten quid or so? I need to get drunk.’

‘No.’

‘Give me the money you were going to put on De Schimmel.’

‘I wasn’t going to put any money on him.’

‘Won’t even back one of your own! Pah! Bad cess to you.’ He lurched away.

‘“Bad cess”!’ said Klein. ‘I’ve only ever read that — I didn’t think anyone said it any more.’

It was a little after four when he turned and went back down Surrey Street towards Temple Place and the river, towards the glittering sunpoints and the boats moving and still. He was walking on the Norfolk Hotel side, and when he reached Temple Place he saw, in the middle distance to his right, Waterloo Bridge between him and the setting sun. ‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when there was no bridge. There was a time when there was nothing except the river.’

On his way along Temple Place to the tube station he paused at the Victoria Embankment Gardens sign and went up the steps to the paved and balustraded area overlooking the river. He’d never been there before. To the right and left below him were the trees that had not been visible from Temple Place. There was a man sitting on one of the benches, no one else. ‘They’re going to refurbish this and make it a tourist attraction,’ he told Klein, ‘with a fountain in the centre, I believe.’

‘Tables and chairs and umbrellas?’ said Klein.

‘Probably.’

‘That’s too bad, really.’

‘It is. This is a quiet place — the way it is now it’s nice to come here and sit for a while.’

‘Most changes are for the worse.’

‘I think you’re right.’

Klein went to the balustrade and looked out over the Embankment where the early rush-hour traffic east and west made a continuous blur of noise in which the white eyes of headlamps and the red eyes of taillamps came and went. Still gold and silver under the darkening sky, the river was garlanded with lights on both sides. On the water bright pleasure boats with their music and working craft without moved up and downriver, the beat of their engines calling to the shorebound. ‘So elegiac,’ said Klein, ‘so full of departure and farewell. Shining waters hung with lamps; gold and silver on the river and a goodbye look.’

At the station he went into the Temple Bar Restaurant for coffee and a bun. He sat there for a while, whispering his thoughts with his hand over his mouth. Then he went out, walked past those waiting to meet someone, past the Big Issue man to the edge of the traffic on the Embankment. Across the river the word OXO, spelled vertically on the side of a building, glowed palindromically in red neon. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know.’

In the station a black cleaning woman wearing an orange London Transport hi-vi vest was singing to herself. It sounded like a Bach cantata. ‘There you have it,’ said Klein, and went home.