My Father More or Less

2

In the final scene, his hero, the international detective Henry Berger, would track the conspiracy to some unnamed European country and into a palace of mirrors to be cut down at gun point as he enters the building by the one person he continues to trust. The film would stop just as the bullet struck him, or fractionally before, a look of astonishment and disillusion on Henry Berger’s face, the reflection of it echoing through the maze of the room. “I love it,” Max Kirstner said, “but is it, I wonder, absolutely on the mark? Irony tempered by human understanding. This script must be beyond bloody reproach, my friend, or so subversive that the sharpest accountant in the industry doesn’t know he’s being had. What it wants at this stage is a touch more compassion.” He spoke, particularly when the news was bad, at astonishing speed.

Terman agreed to study the director’s notes and the inane jottings of some producer’s reader, which is to say he kept his disagreement unspoken. A year ago almost to the day, Max had pronounced the screenplay “beautiful beyond my wildest hopes.” “A few cosmetic changes,” the director had said, “and we’re in business, son.” Three drafts later — it was a collaboration in which Terman did the writing and the director suggested other possibilities — they seemed only infin-itesimally closer to a shooting script. With each revision, new problems of strucure and conception arose. Someone who mattered — sometimes it was Terman himself — was always unsatisified.

He was revising the closure, had put Henry Berger, and the unnamed woman with whom he traveled, on a flight from London to New York. He was due at Heathrow himself in little over an hour. Before leaving for the airport, he called Isabelle at the most recent work number she had given him, wanting to heal the wounds of the previous night. She wasn’t at that number, he was told, after having been held on the line for ten minutes, was working today at some other studio. Did they have another number for her? They didn’t or were opposed to giving it out, kept him waiting as they debated the issue outside his hearing. If they wouldn’t give out her number, would they call her themselves and say that Lukas Terman was trying to reach her? The woman on the other end said that it was not a question of not wanting to give out a number but of not having a number to give out. He didn’t believe it, said, overstating, that it was an urgent matter, that the news he had for Isabelle was something she had been waiting to hear. “That’s not my problem, is it?” said the woman. “I’ll take down your number. That’s the best I can do.”

He wrote Isabelle a note in case she returned in his absence and propped it up with a paperweight against the phone in the kitchen.

Deciding she might go right by it if she were in a hurry, he took it up to their bedroon and laid it out on her pillow, though he was not fully satisfied with that placement either. After going down the stairs, after putting on his corduroy jacket, he returned to the bedroom to retrieve the note, reading it as if with Isabelle’s eyes.

He was out the door with the note folded in his jacket pocket when he thought to go back and leave it on the kitchen table. The details of his return were exactly as he had imagined them: the undoing of the bolt lock, retracting the catch with second key, going through the front parlor (that enormous room), into back parlor, into dining room, taking a right turn into the kitchen, putting the note down on the table where it couldn’t be missed, a butter knife across it to hold it in place, then the same trip in reverse order, remembering to double lock from the outside, hurrying to his car.

Driving to the airport through unyielding traffic, he decided that the note was an ill-conceived gesture, that Isabelle would more readily forgive him if he hadn’t apologized than if he had. It was also possible that, taking him at his word, she wouldn’t return to the house at all. He had suggested (the suggestion seeming to make itself), that she spend the first night or two of Tom’s visit at her own place.

“It makes a lot of sense,” she said and went up to the bedroom to pack a few things.

He found her sitting on the bed in an uncharacteristically crumpled posture, an empty suitcase on her lap. “It’ll only be for a day or two,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said in a hurry.

“What are you thanking me for?” She tended to express gratitude at the most inappropriate moments, a source of small irritation to him.

“For being straightforward with me.” Her lip quivered. She was not given to excesses.

He took the suitcase from her lap and sat with her in silence, his arm draped around her shoulders, until it was time to go to bed.

“If you don’t mind, I want to stay at my own place tonight,” she said. “You won’t make it difficult for me, will you?”

“Does it make it difficult if I say I don’t want you to go?”

“Of course it does,” she said. “You damn well asked me to leave, didn’t you?”

He repeated her name in exasperation, a litany of Isabelles.

The signs pointing him to the airport led him there. As he entered the building, his doomsday premonitions slipped away. The first thing he did was to go to the bathroom to empty his bladder of, as it turned out, illusion. His hair was in terminal disarray, and he wet it down, combing it with his hand, which was no improvement. He had a rash on his forehead, a portent of bad weather from within. When he got out of the bathroom he followed the signs to Immigration and lined up on the other side of the rope to wait for Tom. There were four booths out of a possible nine in operation, passengers from a mix of two or three flights filtering through. Terman hated to wait, hated to stand in one place without other occupation, suffered loss of time as if it were (as it is) an incurable disease. He memorized the faces of people coming through, committed to not missing a thing, dimly worried that he might not recognize his son. Who can explain associations? It struck him that the grail (was that his idea of Tom?) only revealed itself to the pure in heart. He interrupted his vigil from time to time to check his watch which, it suddenly dawned on him, had had the same time for the past two hours. He could almost admire its constancy.

“I know you,” a woman said to him. She had come up to him from the blind side, surprising him in an unacceptable way. “You may not remember me.”

“No,” he said, not looking at her. “I don’t.”

“Aren’t you Lukas Terman? You knew me as Lila Parsicki. My former husband and I lived in the same building as you and your wife — I mean of course your former wife. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.”

He looked at her for the briefest of moments, withheld recognition. “You have the wrong bridge,” he said, affecting a faint European accent.

“I’m sorry to have interfered with your privacy,” she said in a sarcastic voice, offering him a view of her back. Though physically round, heavy-breasted, moon-faced, big-hipped, her manner was all angles and sharp points. He remembered her with marked displeasure, and moved away into the underbrush of the crowd.

The moment he forgot about her, she was at his elbow again. “You shouldn’t lie to people,” she said. “It’s not the least bit nice.”

“Excuse me,” he said in his mock-German accent.

She thrust her face into his, as close as it might get given that he was six or seven inches taller. “I said I don’t like to be lied to,” she said.

He regretted his imposture, though he was unwilling to give it up, stared ahead blindly, neglecting his relentless vigil.

There was no sign of Tom as far as he could see and Terman reasoned the boy had missed the plane, or had decided at the last possible moment not to make the trip. His reaction to the possibility of Tom’s not coming at all — relief perhaps one aspect of it — was without definition. Terman also wondered whether it was conceivable that Tom had passed through without being recognized by his father.

Lila joined the people she was with, then — her tenacity frightening and marvelous — returned to his ear. “Is it that you’re hiding from someone?” she asked. “Believe me, I have no intention of revealing your innermost secrets.”

The more he ignored her, the more lethal her voice became. “Don’t you think it’s cruel to pretend not to know someone? It’s the most awful thing, believe me, to have your view of reality denied. Are you trying to make me doubt my whole system of perception? Is that your intention? I can’t believe you’d be so heartless.”

Even if she were in the right — surely the crowd must recognize that — her reaction was far in excess of provocation. He strove for a posture of heroic (and compassionate) indifference.

“It’s not true that he doesn’t know me,” she said in a strident voice, attracting the embarrassed attention of a half a dozen people around them. “It’s not true and he knows it’s not true.”

She went on in the same vein, pleading her case to a circumstantial jury, increasing the stakes of her complaint. He had ruined a number of women, she said, had humiliated them in unimaginable ways. Terman stared at the floor, refused to acknowledge that the outburst of this impossible woman concerned him.

As gratuitously as she started her assault, Lila gave it up. The potentiality of its return filled the air like some unaccountable hum. When he felt he could do it inconspicuously, he looked around to see where she had gone. Their eyes met — she had been waiting for him to seek her out — and she mouthed, “I’m still here.”

He had a momentary loss of focus where he had to remind himself why he was there, studying the illegible faces of people he didn’t know and was not likely to see again. The crowd thinned and after awhile he discovered himself its sole survivor. Even Lila had gone on to other business. It seemed uncanny that he and Tom should miss connection.

He had Thomas Terman paged over the loudspeaker and when he heard the mostly familiar name in the air, he had the urge to answer the call himself.

The international long distance lines were oversubscribed and Terman had to wait for the longest time before he could get his call through to New York.

“Is something wrong?” Magda asked as soon as she recognized the voice.

“I was going to ask you the same question. Did Tom make his flight?”

She sighed, a woman who valued competence above all other virtues. “As far as I know. Isn’t he there with you?”

“You saw him board the plane?”

“I would have heard from him by now if he hadn’t gotten on. How could you have missed him?”

“Magda, he wasn’t there. I waited for him at Immigration for over an hour.”

She made a groaning sound. “You’d better do something to find him. If you want my advice, that’s what it is.”

His pose of sensible concern at great distance from what he really felt, he said, “I’ll keep in touch, Magda.” He swallowed the name.

She said nothing he could hear, withdrawing from the connection like someone backing out a door.

He had Tom paged one more time. The call produced Lila Parsicki who sidled up to him just as he was leaving the Pan Am desk. She thought he ought to know, she said, moments before he arrived someone who resembled the Tom she remembered, though he was just a child when she’d seen him last, had passed through Immigration and gone on without stopping. “What did he look like?” Terman asked.

“He had the same blue eyes as Magda,” she said.

It was not impossible. Terman reconstructed the scene. Not seeing his father as he came through Immigration and unsure of the arrangements they had made, Tom had assumed that he was supposed to go on to his father’s house in London and had proceeded accordingly. The misunderstanding was grave but forgivable. With barely a nod of thanks to Lila for her information, he hurried off to his car and fought his way back through traffic in half the time of the original trip.

The Holland Park house was dark on his return and Terman rang the bell to no answer before letting himself in with his key. He made himself a double Scotch with Perrier water, sat down on the least comfortable chair in the front parlor and wondered what steps a man in his situation ought to take next.

A few minutes after he decided that the next move was Tom’s the phone rang. It took him a while to answer, undecided as to which extension to pursue, though he was naturally eager to get the news.

The voice was not the one he expected so diasappointed him, the disappointment mingled with relief. It was Isabelle’s husky purr at his ear. She was staying with a friend in Battersea, would see him, she said, tomorrow or the day after. He didn’t urge her return, although it was a recurrent intention. “I can’t live without you,” he said to her at some point, which produced a moan or a laugh. No mention was made of his son, no questions asked.

He sat up by the phone in his study, kept close watch on it, awaiting Tom’s call, but after a while he dozed in his chair and when he woke up it was the next day.

The morning passed without word from Tom. The only call had been from Max Kirstner to remind him of an appointment at his office for two that afternoon. Terman didn’t mention Tom’s disappearance, said he would be by as arranged, though when he was off the horn he had the distinct recollection that their appointment had been for the following day. Max never had to change his mind; he just revised the past.

The fourth complete version of the “The Folkestone Conspiracies” was opened in front of him on the desk and though he couldn’t bear to look at the screenplay again, he read through the opening scene.

Screenplay by Max Kirstner and Lukas Terman

The screen is gray, almost black. If we look closely enough, we can make out the silhouette of a man. He could be anyone. He seems to be speaking, though perhaps the voice comes from elsewhere.

Voice: I cannot reveal my identity to you at this time. If it were known that I was telling you this story, I would be permanently silenced, rubbed out as if I were no more substantial than a typographical error. I mention this so that you will excuse the rudeness of my not showing my face. The story I am to tell is true, as true as any story you’re likely to be told in the dark. My connection to these events is not important. Let it be said that I had a seat on the periphery of the action. The story starts — I was about to say our story, but unfortunately the story at the moment is mine alone — in a European country known for its neutrality in international affairs. A shabby, unprepossing man of early middle age, rumored to have some connection with Interpol, has arrived this morning and taken a room in the capital city’s second finest hotel. On his visa where it says profession, he has written “Journalist.” Where it say purpose of visit, he has written “Holiday.”

The gray screen seems to be a curtain and is pulled open to reveal the registration desk of the Hotel Candide.

Attendant: You are in Room 917, Monsieur Berger. The room you request is occupé, though you will find the one we have given you has nothing to be said against it.

Berger: Who may I ask is Room 1017?

Attendant: It is in the process of renovation.

We cut abruptly to the small elevator as Henry Berger gets in. As the doors close, we see a tall man wearing dark purple gloves, bis face obscured, say something to the desk clerk. The clerk looks puzzled, shakes his head.

We see Henry Berger entering his hotel room. He tips the bellhop more than he expects, says: “My wife will be joining me later.” When the bellhop leaves, Henry Berger walks to the window to check the view. He puts his suitcases on the bed, opens one of them, takes out a change of shirt and then, as if an afterthought, a small revolver which he rests next to the shirt. He walks around the large room, looking for something — a bugging device, it soon becomes apparent — and seems disappointed not to find one. He then picks up the phone and makes a call.

Woman’s voice: Si?

Henry Berger: Let me speak to Carlos Soto, please.

Woman: Not here.

Berger: Is there some place I could reach him? I’m an old friend.

Woman: He has no old friends. There is no place to reach him.

Berger: I wouldn’t be calling unless it were important.

Woman: Leave your name and place and he will locate you.

Henry Berger gets into a taxi, gives the driver an address, and settles back into his seat. After a moment, he has an intuition and glances out the back window to see a black limousine keeping pace. They turn a corner and the limousine, some fifteen yards behind, also turns. Henry Berger insructs the cab driver to do what he can to shake the car behind them. The driver, after initial confusion, says: “You mean the way do in Amercian movies? 1 do my best for you.” The cab makes an abrupt left turn at the next corner, then speeds two blocks and turns left again. In a few seconds the limousine reappears in pursuit. The driver says that he has not shown them his best yet. After narrowly avoiding a collision with a truck — this after a succession of hairpin turns — the cab loses its pursuer. Berger looks at his watch, shakes his head despairingly at the loss of time.

Cut to Berger going though the front doors of an apartment building that might have seemed elegant in the îyio’s. There is an odd quiet in the building, the lobby (which has a fountain at the center) desolate. Berger takes the lift up, rings the buzzer at 50, waits, rings again, tries the door. The door is open and he goes in, calling “Carlos?…Carlos?” There is no answer, no sound of life. The stub end of a cigarette, however, is still burning in an ash tray. The bedroom door is closed and Berger knocks on it twice before going in. He stops after taking two steps into the room, turns his head. We see at a blurred distance, as if Berger were glancing at them out of the corner of his eye, the corpses of a man and a woman on the bed. Berger is profoundly upset, sits down in the living room at the edge of the sofa. A matchbook on a coffee table catches his eye — Cafe Fleurs de Mal, he reads upside down..

A knock at the front door — perhaps it was the fifth or sixth knock — recalled his attention.

He let himself out of the study — the door sticking briefly — and hurried down the long flight of stairs, wondering why his visitor had overlooked the bell. It was the kind of knock that policemen in movies made in the middle of the night.

He thought he knew who it was even before he opened the door to let his son in.

Tom stood there, frowning apologeticaly, his swollen canvas suitcase a foot or so behind as if it had trailed him there without his notice. He had the look of someone who didn’t plan to stay.

Terman waited a moment before inviting him in, frozen himself in the doorway, considered embracing his son, cosidered taking his hand, considered acknowledging some pleasure in his presence, but found himself committed to silence and inaction. He remembered an appointment he had and asked Tom if he knew the time.

“Am I too late?” Tom asked.

Terman went behind his son to gather up the lone suitcase — was that all there was? — and asked in passing where he had been, mumbled the question.

“Let me take that,” Tom said, pulling it from his father, the case suspended momentarily between them, the object of a tug of war. Terman gave it up and Tom carried the suitcase in himself.

“I don’t know how I missed you,” Terman said. “If it was my fault, I apologize.”

Tom dropped heavily into a chair, the springs crunching under his sudden weight. “It’s not too comfortable,” he said. “It’s not the lap of luxury so to speak.”

Terman took the rebuke personally, indicated that the larger of the two couches was the most reasonable place to sit, a piece of information Tom acknowledged with a nod, though he didn’t trouble himself to move. Perhaps he liked being uncomfortable, Terman thought, perhaps that’s what he wanted. “Did you spend the night in a hotel?” he asked him.

“No,” Tom said.

“Where were you all night?”

Tom studied the question from all sides. “Around,” he said.

Where did the time go? Terman noticed that it was already after two (seven minutes after) and he phoned Max to say he had been detained unavoidably. “Tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten why I wanted to see you,” Max said. “No doubt it will all come back to me in a blinding light when you get here. How’s young Oedipus making out?” When Terman got off the phone, Tom had his eyes closed.

He was going to shake him but discovered he was reluctant to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Tom” he whispered. “Tom.”

“Sleepy,” the boy murmured, the voice dredged from some pocket of childhood.

“Tom,” he whispered, “your room is on the third floor, second door to the left from the main stairway. I have to go out a while on business. There’s some cheese in the refrigerator, stilton and brie, which should tide you over if you get hungry. Will you be all right?”

There was no response from the sleeping form, barely the sound of breathing. The boy had a mustache or the beginnings of one, yet seemed younger than his age, seemed with his eyes pressed shut like a fearful and vulnerable child. Terman took a blanket from the hall closet, a faded pink blanket that might have come with the house or been donated by Isabelle for some occasion he disremembered, and put it over Tom’s lap.

“Tom,” he said, standing over the sleeping figure, unwilling or unable to leave, “I’m going now.”

It was twenty-five to three and he took a taxi, despite feelings of impoverishment, so as not to be any later than was already unavoidable. The days went too quickly, he thought, moved in accelerated time, didn’t know when to stop. He was forty only last year and in less than a month he would be forty-five. Where had his life gone?

Max’s secretary, Valerie Lowe, reputed also to be his mistress, had her hand on his shoulder, was shaking him with unreasonable zeal. He had been getting layed in a cathouse in some obscure town in Idaho while waiting for his car to be gassed. When rude hands were laid on him. “You were snoring obscenely,” Valerie said.

Two men of a certain age were coming out of Max Kirstner’s office, expensive suits, one of whom, an investor in films, Terman had met before.

The other, a hawk-faced man, prematurely white-haired, came over and shook hands. “Luke Terman, is it? I’m a great fan of yours.”

Terman aspired to conceal his dislike for his ostensible admirer, took the other’s hand. “What a coincidence,” he said. “I happen also to be a fan of yours.”

“Mutual admiration society, are we? I doubt you even know my name.”

“I may not know your name,” he said, “but I have your number.”

When the men were gone Max apologized in his perfunctory way for having kept Terman waiting in the anteroom. “I’m not my own man,” he said. This remark, which he used at every opportunity, self-parodying and ingratiating as it seemed, was an excuse, Terman knew, that permitted Max almost anything.

“Whose man are you this week?” Terman asked.

Max looked over his shoulder in parody of a man pursued. “Let’s repair to the inner sanctum,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

Terman trailed his employer and collaborator into the elegantly cluttered inner office, sat down before invited to.

Max took out a bottle of brandy and two coffee mugs from his desk — it was the way they always started — and poured them both a drink. “Do you have anything for me?”

“I thought it was you who had something for me.”

Max laughed with his mouth closed, took a thick nine by twelve envelope from his desk and placed it in Terman’s hands. “Take a look.”

“Must I?”

“You bloody well must,” he said, making an ironic face at the ceiling. “You’ll love it, old son. It’s from the fine Italian hand of the producer’s nephew.”

He knew his line. “I’ve seen the fingerprints before,” he said.

“They want us to go into production in ten days,” Max said casually, watching him out of the side of his eye. “We can’t do that, can we?”

“I thought all the money wasn’t in place.”

Max put his feet up on the desk. “For the sake of argument, let us say the money is there, a proposition we both know to be contrary to fact. If it were all there, could we or could we not begin principal shooting in ten days? Is the screenplay, in your opinion, ready to be shot?”

“Whenever you’re ready to shoot it, it’s ready to be shot,” Terman said, his irritation undisguised. “You’re the director.” He had the sense that they had had this same conversation, almost to a word, six months ago.

“Terman, Terman,” Max said, spoke his name as if he were a recalcitrant child that needed shaking, shook him by his name, loosed his name in the air between them, pointed a finger at him. “If it weren’t your script, Terman, what would you advise? I put myself in your hands.”

Terman looked at his hands. “They’re empty,” he said.

Max pantomimed exasperation, poured them both another brandy. “What are we talking about? Is it your perception of reality, old son, that I don’t want this film to happen? Can you honestly accuse me of faint-heartedness on this project? Have I not been Henry Berger’s most enthusiastic supporter but one from the outset? I issue no blame but the script, which I think is basically terrific, has never been quite on target, has it?”

Terman stood up to say that he disliked being manipulated, was prepared to walk out, though he sat down again with only the barest murmur of complaint. He had the sense that Max understood him, that what wasn’t said was in its own way made known.

The subject changed, or evolved into something else without appearing to change. “I want this film to transcend its apparent occasion,” Max was saying. “This isn’t a genre film we’re making, is it? We’re dealing here, as you know, with a transcendent conspiracy, a cosmic malevolence. Okay? If all the agencies of civilization are corrupt and murderous, we have to offer the viewer some kind of moral counterweight. That’s the missing element. Do you see my point?”

Terman had a sense of déjâ vu comparable to walking into a movie you had dreamed or seen before under another title, though Max often generated that illusion in him. The director made a self-deprecating gesture then laughed at himself.

“Marjorie’s been longing to have you and Isabelle over for a feast,” Max said. That unfulfilled expectation had been in the air between them for months.

“We’ve been waiting to be asked over,” Terman said. “We talk of nothing else.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Max said. “Some people are coming to the house in Kent for the long weekend and I want you and Isabelle to join the party. It would give you and me the opportunity to make finishing touches on the script mano a mano.”

“Not this weekend, Max,” Terman said. “My son just arrived and I really have to spend some time with him.”

“No problem there,” said Max. “Thing to do is bring the prodigal along.” The director got up, a whimsical finger in the air — some further comment held in abeyance — and went into the bathroom adjoining the office.

Had he been dismissed? Terman got up to go, though not before overhearing the splashes of Max’s disemburdening in some secret place behind the wall.

“You’ll have to give me directions,” he said to the closed door.

“You just follow your nose,” said Max.

Driving back to the Holland Park house, he wondered what Tom was up to in his absence and conceived a scenario.

Even after Tom heard the door close, even after he imagined his father getting into his car and driving off, even then he kept his eyes closed for another ten or fifteen minutes, focusing on a swatch of light that seemed to burn through the blackness. He conceived himself getting out of his chair, his eyes still tightly shut, like a spirit stepping out of its body. His spirit didn’t go far without him, it never had.

The house was even bigger than he had imagined and more bizarre, one inexplicable place moving anomalously into another. He knew from his father’s letters that certain movies had been filmed there, but the odd thing was how different the mood of each of the rooms, how startlingly unrelated to one another. He decided to see it all, to take the full tour, starting on the third floor and working his way down. The room set aside for him was at the far end of the hall — it was the third room he had visited, the only one with a freshly made bed — and looked, he thought, like someone’s idea of a 19th century French whorehouse. The bed was too soft. There were pink cupids on the oval ceiling. The plush carpet was a garish red and with the overhead light on gave the impression of something recently eviscerated. On one of the two desks was a Blue Guide to London, a Nicholson’s London Street Guide, and a map of the underground system. On the other was a set of two keys. He wondered why his father had chosen this particular room for him. Two of the rooms on the floor were more spacious, another had a more interesting view, still another was more appropriately furnished. Of the five unused bedrooms on the third floor, his was, taking a variety of factors into consideration, the third best overall. Who was the best room for, the room with mirrors on the walls and ceiling, an enormous space with a large round bed in the center and a terrace coming off one of the windows? He studied his reflection, reflection within reflection, in the several mirrors (odd, he thought, how unlike myself I am) then moved down to the second floor.

There were five rooms, not including bathrooms, on the second floor: his father’s study, two bedrooms, an empty space, and a storage room with a padlock on the door. In this order, moving from left to right: study, storage room, bedroom, empty room, master bedroom. The first thing that struck him about the study was both waste-baskets were over-filled, a handful of scrunched up papers on the floor. He left the room, then tempted by something else, came back and sat down at his father’s desk, swivelling absent-mindedly in the imitation leather chair. There was a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. He typed “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” Facing away from the desk, he reached behind him to open a drawer, the middle of three, his hand sidling in while his glance rested elsewhere. He came away with a black fountain pen the thickness of a fat cigar which he scrupulously returned. When he exhausted the middle drawer — there were no discoveries there, nothing but the obvious — he moved on to the drawer below. He worked his way through layers of manuscript to the bottom where he found the very thing he imagined himself looking for. And even then, moving it about with his fingers, grasping it, removing it from its secret place, he disbelieved his intuituion. He had only to turn his head slightly to verify the weapon he held in his hand, to verify that it was something other than a toy, but for the moment he resisted the discovery he would allow himself in the following moment. Having demonstrated a certain self-control, he rewarded himself by looking at the object in his hand. It was new, he thought, pethaps unused. It smelled faintly of oil and had an almost imperceptibly oily aspect. Tom watched himself in the mirror on the far wall, aiming his father’s gun at the opposing figure. The sounds of bullets crashing against glass were only in his head, though from time to time he made small firing sounds in his throat, a muffled simulation of the real thing. It was childish, he knew, and he observed himself ironically pointing a pistol at the ironic observer that confronted him. The question of what the gun was for never asked itself and he was returning it to its place, trying to put it away exactly as it was found, when he was startled by the ringing of a doorbell. He put the gun and a box of shells in his jacket pocket and started down the stairs.

The doorbell rang a second and third time. Tom retraced his steps to the top of the stairs and waited anxiously for the intruder to decide that no one was home. The door opened — he could hear the turn of a key — and a woman came in. He couldn’t quite see her face from his vantage at the top of the winding stairs but he had no doubts it was a woman. “Hallo,” she called. “Is anyone there?”

“My father’s not here,” he said, coming down.

A long-legged woman of about thirty or so appeared at the bottom of the wide stairwell. “Tom, is it?” she asked.

It was not something he was ready to deny. She introduced herself as Isabelle. “I’m Isabelle,” she whispered. He thought of her — the words came to mind unbidden — as his father’s whore, the latest and greatest. She looked like a movie star, he thought, somewhat like Julie Christie. “Do you live here with my father?” he asked.

She walked away, turned her back on him, before answering. “I have my own flat if it’s any of your affair,” she said.

“You came in with a key,” he said.

He followed her into the kitchen and stood behind her at the stove while she waited for some water to boil, said he hadn’t meant to be offensive.

“Of course you meant to be offensive,” she said.

“The hell with you,” he said and sulked off.

She made herself a cup of tea which she drank in gulps while standing alongside the stove with her back to him.

“How do you know what my intention was?” he asked, his voice rising. Isn’t it possible that you’re the one who’s being offensive?”

Isabelle was looking for something in a cabinet above the sink, her full concentration on whatever she sought.

After she left the kitchen, excusing herself to go by him, she went upstairs to the master bedroom. She was taking a hair dryer and some other gadgets from one of the dressers when Tom glanced in. “Does my father know you’re doing that?” he asked.

She stopped what she was doing and stared cooly at him. “You’re not to be believed, are you? You’re just about the rudest person I’ve ever met in my life.”

Tom walked out and came back, walked up the stairs and halfway down again. “Bitch,” he whispered, a secret he was unwilling to share. She was the one not to be believed, he thought, a mean-spirited, presumptuous shrew. He was aware of having made a terrible impression.

He went upstairs to the unlikely room his father had given him and closed himself in with a self-dramatizing gesture. The door, that had appeared to bang shut, swung open. He crouched on the bed with his hand on the gun in his pocket, staring through tears into the shadows of the hall. His sense of grievance seemed a bottomless wound.

When he heard Isabelle leave he picked up one of the London guides, pocketed the set of keys (though he had no intention of returning) and, after taking a granny smith from the kitchen, let himself out. The house, particularly the third floor, spooked him.

He walked with his head down so was surprised to see Isabelle standing on the corner when he passed. She called to him or so he thought, hearing or imagining his name between them. “Tom?”

He didn’t turn around, though considered the possibility.

“I didn’t mean for us to get off so badly,” she said. “Sorry to be so shrill.”

He turned and shrugged, felt himself immune to her seduction.

“Where are you off to?” she asked.

He withheld an answer, though it may only have been that he had none to give, shrugged his shoulders as if to say it’s of no importance.

“You don’t know or you’re not telling?”

“Come on,” he said. The kind of remark he would have made to his mother when he was fifteen. “I’m the rudest person you ever met in your life.” He walked along with her, some small distance between them, into Holland Park.

It had never been his intention to accompany her; it was just that they happened to be going in the same direction, happened to be walking through an astonishing park across the street from his father’s house.

They walked through a wooded path that screened out the sun, that seemed, for the few moments they were lost in its maze, like a dense forest. “Would you like to see the peacocks?” she asked him.

If he were capable of being charmed, the question would have charmed him.

He let her talk without offering anything in return, took pains to listen, was conscious of himself listening to her talk. At the same time — he rarely did fewer than two things at once — he found himself increasingly disturbed by the gun he had discovered in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk. It was not something Terman would keep unless he had a use for it. What worried him most was his father’s reaction when he discovered his revolver was missing.

She showed him the peacocks and he said yes, they were amazing. One of them had its feathers unfurled and was running up and back, making an odd threatening noise. She put a hand on his arm to gain his attention. She said she believed the noise was a mating call, that it stood to reason, didn’t it? It seemed to him, he said, like some form of indigestion.

When they got to the other side of the park she said she had a flat nearby and did he want to stop in for a bite of something. The offer tempted him which was reason enough to turn it down. He said he planned to spend the day, what was left of it, checking out London.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “When I come to a new place I want to get some kind of hold on it. Is that how it is with you?”

“No,” he said, then laughed madly.

He rejected her offer of food at least twice, stood in front of her building saying goodbye, before giving in to the afternoon’s destiny. Isabelle put out a plate of jam tarts on the kitchen table and made a pot of tea. As an afterthought she brought out some stale bread and blue-veined cheese and the remains of a spinach salad decorated with slices of hard-boiled egg. Tom looked at the off-white walls of the small unlived-in apartment, said her taste reminded him somewhat of his mother’s. There was one beer left in the otherwise bare refrigerator, a Watney’s Light Ale, which Tom agreed to drink only if she would share it with him.

“Oh, Tom,” she said, “go all the way.”

He had a heel of bread, a tiny wedge of cheese and slightly more than a half a glass of ale and felt inescapably in her debt. Assuming that his father was what he wanted to talk about, she told him that Terman, as everyone called him, was a difficult man to get to know, which he could have told her himself if she hadn’t been the one telling it first.

“Does my father treat you badly?” he asked at one point.

She said no, at least not in the obvious way, that she was the difficult one or at least equally difficult.

He kept postponing his decision to leave until it seemed that if he didn’t make his move momentarily, he might never get out the door.

“How did you meet him?” he asked.

“I don’t know that I want to tell you that,” she said.

He stood up abruptly, announced for the third or fourth time that he thought that he ought to go.

She said she understood, that she had to go somewhere in a few minutes herself.

Before he went out the door he thanked her for the food and they shook hands. She was as tall as he was (was it the heels she wore?) and their eyes met briefly in a way that frightened him.

Isabelle asked him, prolonging the awkward gesture of his departure, if he was pleased to be in London. He shrugged and said nothing, waving to her as he left, backing out the door, aware that he had expected something to happen between them that hadn’t happened. He wondered what she made of his refusal to remove his coat.

He walked quickly, compelled to create some distance between himself and the occasion of his embarrassing performance. The neighborhood changed as he walked north, changed from street to street, a sense of obscure privilege slipping away, a failing of light.

Tom was looking in the window of a record shop when a young woman who resembled Isabelle, who at first he thought was Isabelle passed him in reflection. A moment later he saw her in a Newsagents shop — he was browsing in a magazine called Time Out — and listened in when the proprietor asked her about her father’s condition.

She sighed before answering, her narrow figure weighted by trouble. “He came home from hospital yesterday,” she said. “They say it will take a bit of time before he’s himself.”

“It’s my opinion time heals all wounds,” said the proprietor, an Indian or Pakistani. “Still, it’s a terrible shame such things are allowed to happen.”

When the girl left the shop Tom found himself walking in the same direction a few steps behind. He fell into the rhythm of her walk, mimicked her brisk, small steps. When she stopped to brush something from her skirt, he caught up with her despite an inclination to linger behind. He thought to introduce himself, felt pressured to talk, though passed her with only the barest stirring of words.

“Did you say something?” she asked.

Up close she was another person, someone less compelling than his first impression suggested. Her complexion was marred; her chin pointed oddly; her eyes were too close together. He resisted disappointment.

That she was less than beautiful made it easier for him to talk. He said what he had been rehearsing to say, that he had unwittingly overheard her remarks to the newsdealer and that he could understand how she felt about her father’s illness, his own father having been a chronic invalid for years.

“How awful for you,” she said.

“It’s more mental than physical,” Tom said. “He doesn’t have memory of certain things — I mean obvious things like the names of people he’s known all his life.”

“That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” she said without even the barest touch of irony. “My father’s memory since his return from hospital is like a loose connection. He has flashes of clarity and then nothing. He has these dreams about the two thugs coming at him from behind and when he wakes up he’s so frightened he doesn’t know where he is. I have to sit with him until he gets back to sleep. He’s like a little child.”

Tom commiserated, said he knew exactly what she meant, that his own father was not without certain childish characteristics.

“You’ve lived with it longer than I have,” she said. “Next to people who are really badly off, I account myself fortunate.”

They walked a little further together, then she touched his shoulder and said she had to go in. “If I’m not there when he wakes up he goes into a panic,” she said. He accompanied her to the door of the stunted frame house, noted that the address was 27 Foxglove Road. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

She was suddenly distrustful. “Why do you want to know?”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “A fatal attraction perhaps.”

“That doesn’t make much sense, does it?” she asked, her seriousness without flaw. “I’m not a pickup if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Forget it,” he said.

She called something to him as he walked away, her name, which he didn’t quite hear, which sounded like nothing he had ever heard before, the name of a flower perhaps. His face burned as if he had been slapped.

A church was being torn down at the next corner and he stopped for a moment to observe. The spire, supported by cables on three sides, was making its anxious descent, seemed possessed by some separate will. He noticed that one of the cables was frayed and trembling, looked as if it would snap at the smallest provocation. The workers seemed unconcerned with the potential danger. One in fact was smoking a cigarette with his back to the trembling cable. Tom called to him to look out. When he got no response — perhaps the danger was less than he imagined — he broke into a run, vaguely panicked by something. Two dark-skinned men were coming toward him in a way that seemed ominous. They opened a space for him to pass between them, a smallish space barely large enough to avoid contact. A slash of laughter pursued him. At some point he thought he heard the cable snap and an ancient voice cry out in pain or surprise. He never looked back.

He stopped at a fruit stand and bought a peach for ten pence. On the next street, a less disheartening one than the two preceding it, there was a Bed and Breakfast sign in one of the windows and, after passing the house, Tom returned to ring the bell.

A large distracted woman with chalky yellow hair led him to a small lightless room on the third floor, a single window offering a view of the faceless brick apartment building across the street. The room was closetless, was furnished with a narrow bed, a wardrobe permanently ajar, a mahogany-veneer dresser and a small chintz-covered stuffed chair. An additional chair might be supplied, she said, if the tenant required more than one. There was a bathroom down the hall he might want to inspect, which had a new plumbing system.

“How much?” he asked.

She showed him the bathroom and another room on the floor, which she referred to as a kitchen, a closet-sized space with a two burner hotplate and a refrigerator slightly larger than a bread box.

“Twenty pounds a week including continental breakfast,” she said.

“How much is it without breakfast?” he asked.

The question distressed her, caused her eyes to narrow and her shoulders to quiver under an invisible weight. “It’s the same,” she said, “with or without the breakfast. If you looked around, I’m sure you noticed that you can’t do any better than what I’m asking.”

Tom went into his pants pocket and took out a twenty pound note. “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” he said.

“You can move in anytime,” the woman said, folding the twenty pound bill in thirds and putting it in the pocket of her housedress. “I don’t care what you do in that room as long as everything is kept in the same condition you find it. I’ve made an inventory of each and every item in your care.”

He went back into the room to see if his memory of it had survived the passage of fifteen minutes. When you approached it without expectation of grace or charm or comfort, the room wasn’t bad at all. The landlady waited for him in the hall, her demeanor faintly ironic as if she knew some minor fraud were being perpetrated on one or both sides.

“I suppose you’d like a receipt,” she said as if the request (he hadn’t made) was the first excess of many she might expect from him.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if she had propositioned him in the next breath, or accused him of coming on to her with lecherous intent. If she weren’t watching him, he might have stashed the gun in one of the dresser drawers, its insistent weight burdening his hip. Guarding the door like a jailer, she asked him again if it would please him to have a receipt.

He said, joining her in the hall, that the room was exactly what he wanted and he would move in that evening.

The receipt, written in illegible hand, was on a half-sheet of letterhead, the landlady’s name and address printed at the top. O. Chepstow, Fashion Specialist. 62 Wornington Road. London W2.

Tom was outside and halfway down the block when he realized he hadn’t gotten a key. Embarrassed at having to come back, he hesitated at the door, his finger in the air. The imposing figure of O. Chepstow appeared just as he pressed the buzzer or even perhaps an instant before. She held out an open hand, two keys in her massive palm, as if she were feeding a skittish horse. “I knew you’d come back,” she said.

“I couldn’t keep away,” he said, mirroring her grim smile.

When you thought of one thing leading to another, this was the other led to by the first. Tom had gone into a W.H. Smith’s with the idea of getting himself a notebook in which to keep a journal, an activity urged on him by his mother. When he left the store he had handguns in both jacket pockets, the second a toy that bore the real one a more than generic resemblance. Impressed with the toy’s verisimilitude, he had put it in his left hand pocket as counter ballast to the other. Since the toy gun was nothing he wanted, nothing he had planned to buy, nothing he had even conceived a use for, he walked out without acknowledging the acquisition. He edged away from the store with his head down, keeping an even pace, expecting someone to come running up behind him calling “Thief.” His expectation unfulfilled, he spoke the word to himself, became his own accuser. The moment he felt free of pursuit, his exhilaration died. He walked around London for the rest of the afternoon, picking up odds and ends, escaping retribution, until it was almost dark. Then, after a series of phone calls, he slipped into his father’s house, repossessed his suitcase, and moved, body and baggage, into his new home.