A Small Indiscretion (8 page)

I
TOOK A TRAIN
from Heathrow to London and checked into a youth hostel at Earl’s Court, where I slept in the girls’ dorm. I went to the agency that had granted my work visa and flipped through index cards with job listings. I made phone calls and sent out letters. I worked on my typing speed on the typewriter at the agency. I ate bread and cheese on my bunk bed at the hostel, then went next door to the pub. Each night, I took enough money for only one pint, but there was always someone—some boy or man—willing to pay for more.

I tried to moderate myself according to how much others were drinking, but the more I drank myself, the more difficult it was to remember to keep track. After the first drink I wanted a second, and after the second, I wanted a third, and after the third, I wanted to remain. I wanted all of us to remain—the Australian backpackers from the hostel, the bartenders, the businessmen who came into the pub after work. I wanted the pub not to close and the night never to end. I wanted that whole society frozen in revelry, and I wanted my feelings frozen, too. My life and all the things that had happened or might happen to me seemed distilled and poignant, and the evenings themselves timeless and meaningful. I was no longer self-conscious
or afraid. I could say anything, and often did. I do not think I worried, at first, about ending up with a drinking problem like my father, though I have no idea now why not.

I might have gone off with one of the Australian boys—back to the boys’ bunk room or the dark corner of the basement of the hostel, with its well-worn brown couch and its velvet curtain, officially known as “the lounge.” I might have done away with my virginity that very first fortnight in London. That was clearly the inspiration behind the hands on my knee, and on my neck, and all those free pints of beer. But I wanted an experience more promising than the one those boys were offering. I wanted money—I needed money—and if I could not get it the way it had been promised, in a wire from my father, which never did arrive in London, I would have to find it some other way. Not by trading my body, but by trading my skills. It seems to me now that what I wanted when I set off for Europe was not so much adventure as deliverance. What I wanted, more than anything, was an office job.

T
HE WORK
-
STUDY AGENCY
finally sent me on an interview. The man who opened the door was Malcolm Church.

“You may as well leave your sweater on,” he said, after our first brief exchange. “I’ve got a meeting at the Isle of Dogs with colleagues from the London Docklands Development Corporation. You can come along and take the minutes if you like.”

He took very fast steps on long legs, so that as we walked toward the tube I had to break into a trot to keep up with him. I began to worry about the money for the tube ride, but when we reached the station he bought me a six-month pass and stood in front of me and fitted the card into its red plastic holder. On the tube, and after we’d transferred to the Docklands Light Rail, he told me more about the
historical redevelopment of the Docklands, and his affiliation with the London Docklands Development Corporation. He had worked for the firm that was granted the structural engineering contract for the initial Docklands Light Rail system. He himself had designed the station at Mudchute, just south of Canary Wharf. He was especially proud of Mudchute, which transported people to a wildlife habitat preserved during the redevelopment as an open-space park and city farm. Now he had struck out on his own and was preparing a bid to replace the small wayside station at Canary Wharf with a large one that could serve the needs of a thriving retail and commercial enterprise. The new station was to include six platforms serving three tracks and a large overall roof connected to the malls below the office towers.

It was crowded on the train and Malcolm was standing very close to me, both of us holding on to the overhead bar. He leaned in as he talked so I would hear him over the noise of the train. He explained that if he—if we—were awarded the contract, it would be the largest project he’d ever engineered, the final link connecting the Docklands to London, a triumph of twentieth-century redevelopment.

He had a quiet voice that trailed off at the end of his sentences. When he spoke, I had the odd sensation of a warm whirring at the back of my head, an almost hypnotic sense of friendship and safety and calm. Instead of using his authority to his advantage, he seemed to be trying to even things up between us.

The train stopped. Malcolm placed his arm under my elbow as the doors opened and we stepped onto the platform and walked up the stairs, onto a sidewalk cast in shadow by the tallest skyscraper in London. The meeting was on the top floor. Men were assembled around a table. Malcolm gave me a chair and introduced me.

“This is Annie Black,” he said. “She’s come from California to keep us organized.”

I took careful notes on a yellow legal pad Malcolm produced from
his briefcase. I recorded the technical terms as best I could. Lunch afterward was in a pub. All the men ordered pints, and I ordered one, then another, no longer caring that women in England customarily ordered only a half. I had been full of doubt that morning, dressing for the interview. I had stared at myself in the mirror and seen not clear skin and long legs and long hair, but my eyebrows, too thick and dark, and my overlapping bottom teeth, and the earring holes in my ears, one lower than the other. But after the second pint in the pub in Canary Wharf that day, the curtain dropped again, and the men began to talk to me, and I felt attractive. I felt it was a wonderful country I had landed in, where I could pass a workday afternoon in the company of men who were paying me to drink for free.

W
HEN WE RETURNED
to the office that first day it was nearly six o’clock.

“There’s a computer for you,” Malcolm said.

I sat down at what would become my desk. Malcolm handed me an office key and said that unfortunately he’d have to be heading home. He said he would pay me in cash every Friday, so I wouldn’t have to worry about taxes, and he would pay me double for overtime. He cautioned me against staying too late. He didn’t want to tire me out on my first day.

“You don’t have to pay me for tonight.”

“Of course I’ll pay you,” he said. “Don’t be silly. It’s not my money anyway.”

“Whose money is it?”

“It’s the investor’s money. The investor being chiefly my father-in-law. If we can get a bit more out of him, we can move into proper office space in Canary Wharf.”

He seemed to be sharing a confidence, so I did, too. I told him
how I was waiting for a wire from my father, and how, in the meantime, I’d persuaded the hostel to let me stay on credit.

He said nothing for a moment. Then he set his briefcase back on the desk and popped it open. “Let me give you something for this week,” he said. “An advance.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“It’s no problem,” he said. He removed a handful of bills and held them out to me. “Please.”

His hand was trembling and his voice seemed suddenly tender. The change alarmed me so much I nearly refused the money. But I didn’t. I took it. And I didn’t refuse him the other time that really mattered, either.

I
STAYED IN
the office a long while that first night, studying the picture of Malcolm’s wife and daughter on his desk, reading documents about the Docklands redevelopment Malcolm had left for me, and fiddling with my computer. By the time I locked up it was midnight, and when I reached the tube station it was closed. The streets were empty. There were gates pulled across the windows of the shops and even the pubs were shut. There were no taxis and no buses and I had left my street map at the hostel in Earl’s Court. I stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to the tube station, pushing the metal chain back and forth across its entrance with my foot.

I set out walking. I reached the Thames at Westminster. The river was black and quiet. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament were lit yellow in the night sky. I had no hat and no gloves and no coat, and I could sense the cold, along with the possibility of fear at being alone in a foreign city late at night. But it was as if I stood inside protective glass, and those feelings could not really reach me. Some new power had risen in me. All my tight cavities were opening
and warning voices were fading. I had only myself to worry about, and if I wanted, I could simply choose not to worry at all.

Finally there was a red double-decker bus creeping through the roundabout at Whitehall. I got on, then got off again after a while because I was not sure the bus was headed in the right direction. Somehow, I found my way back to the hostel. The very next day I took the money Malcolm had given me and bought myself the winter coat.

L
ATE
M
ARCH
. Frost on the window this morning, and outside, a cold, cloudless sky. I turned the heater off last week but now I’ve turned it back on again. I feel you not as an absence today, but as a presence. It’s your hurt that’s here, though we don’t know exactly what the hurt is about. It’s a large, cold hand I can’t scoot around because I can’t see it, but I know it’s present, because I helped put it here myself.

I will try to paint for you London as I remember it at nineteen, then twenty, all the while knowing my picture will be imperfect. Not only because memory itself is imperfect. Not only because I was young. Not only because I was a stranger in a foreign city, seeing it then and remembering it now in my own dialect, through the veil of my own customs. But also because the London I paint is colored by the pencil I hold, and the pencil I hold wants a picture with an ending we can all bear.

Malcolm arrived at the office each morning at nine o’clock sharp. He had two suits, which he alternated, and a gray raincoat that draped like a tarp over his enormous frame. Each evening at seven he prepared for his departure, lifting his briefcase from the floor beside his desk, popping it open, replacing his notebook and pen and
snapping the case quietly closed. It was an old-fashioned briefcase with a hard shell, the kind that could withstand the trauma of being ejected from the back of a motorcycle taking a roundabout at an unsafe speed—and had, he told me. He injected this story and others, abruptly, into random conversations, as if trying to make me understand that what I saw of him was not all there was, that he existed beyond the walls of the office we shared. It was in this same way that he first told me about his wife.

It was a Friday, and we had, at his suggestion, left work at five for a drink in the pub around the corner. We sat in a booth and he ordered us pints and asked me pointed questions about myself—my course of study in college, my aspirations, my childhood. I told him about the failed intervention, the money, Veronica Cox. I told him I had been majoring in French, and that once I’d saved enough money I hoped to travel on the Continent, beginning in France. He told me his wife’s family kept a Paris penthouse—the top floor of a small hotel—and that I must come along sometime for a holiday.

I told him my mother was a nurse and that my father was currently unemployed. He told me that when he was young his parents had wanted him to go into medicine or law. He’d wanted to be a scientist. Somehow he’d ended up in civil engineering, with a specialty in structural engineering. He and his wife had lived in central London when they were first married, then moved to Richmond after their daughter was born. They had a cottage out back they let out to boarders sometimes, or friends in need of a place to sleep. Right now it was inhabited by the son of a family friend, John Ardghal, who’d given Malcolm his first job out of university. The son’s name was Patrick.

Louise spent quite a bit of time in the garden, he told me, and was involved in the Royal Horticultural Society in London. That was what she’d gotten involved in when their daughter had gone off to
school. She was also interested in collecting art, especially photography. Patrick, their boarder, liked to take pictures.

“Patrick’s not a bad bloke,” Malcolm said. “Only his father ran into financial trouble, and I’m afraid that sent Patrick off course. He’s been out of university I’d guess eight years now, but he’s still dallying with the photography. He needs a bit of keeping on track.”