Without Reservations (17 page)

“Ah, I see you’re awake,” a cheery voice said from the door. It was Victoria. Angela stood behind her. “How do you feel?”

“Like a cat on a hot tin roof,” I said, without the slightest clue as to what in the world prompted such a totally inept description of my physical state.

“Can you drink some tea?” Angela asked. “Maybe eat a dry biscuit or two?” I said I’d try.

A tea tray was brought in and the two women sat on the bed opposite mine, pouring tea and offering sympathy.

They stayed most of the afternoon, seeing to it that I drank fluids, took aspirin, and rested.

“Sarah will pop in tonight with some soup,” Victoria said as they were leaving. “And we’ll see you tomorrow.”

Over the next few days, a three-shift schedule went into action. Someone on duty in the morning, usually Victoria; then Sarah in the afternoon; and in the evening, Angela. Each woman stayed for an hour or two, and each had her own approach to the task at hand.

Victoria arrived bearing two or three newspapers, from which she would read aloud after fixing me tea and toast. Sarah brought flowers and wholesome things to eat such as chicken-and-rice soup and delicate puddings. She also brought flowers and watched television with me. We particularly enjoyed a show called
The House of Eliott
, a story of two sisters who become fashionable London dressmakers in the 1920s.

But it was Angela’s evening visits that I looked forward to most. What Angela brought was: herself.

Like Scheherazade, she told me stories; tales about her life as an only child and as a slightly reckless young woman who longed to be an actress. She told me of her first marriage to a barrister, a happy union that produced a son; and of her second one to an aging actor she’d met while living for a year in Italy. She talked of her son, of their closeness, even though he lived in an isolated part of Wales. And she talked of what she wanted in the years ahead: “The life I have now, plus my health,” she said. “And maybe one grand surprise every year or so.”

On one such evening Angela brought me a book titled
The Journey’s Echo.
“It’s a selection of travel writings by Freya Stark,” Angela said, explaining that Stark, who’d died just three months earlier at the age of 100, had spent most of her life exploring Arabia and the Middle East. “She was an extraordinary woman who traveled alone at a time when women simply didn’t do such things. I thought you might enjoy it.”

I was touched by Angela’s thoughtfulness. And flattered, too. I had come to admire her very much.

Later that evening, while thinking about how I had let myself depend on the kindness of these three women, I suddenly bumped into a new thought: the realization that something in me had loosened, the way a knot loosens, and I had allowed myself to lean on someone else. Over the years, without noticing it, I’d subscribed to the notion of independence as a condition that dictated complete self-sufficiency. That I should let go—even temporarily—of such a ridiculous idea came as something of a surprise.

That night I had a dream:
Mother and I are sitting on the back porch in the sun. I am a little girl and she is washing my hair in a white enamel basin. Later
she dries it with a towel and begins to braid it. I love the feel of her hands in my hair and I lean back against her body, overcome with happiness and contentment.

Three days after the onset of my illness I awoke at five in the morning. Immediately, I knew something was different. For the first time in several days, I felt hungry.
I’m well
, I thought.
Whatever I had is gone and I’m well.
I sat up and looked through the window. Outside, the stars were growing pale. I pulled on a robe and stepped onto the balcony.

Daylight was just starting to color the sky. London was not yet awake. But the birds were. From somewhere above me a dozen speckled birds appeared, flying through the sleeping sky in tight formation, passing near enough that I could hear the
flap, flap, flap
of their wings rowing the cool morning air. As they moved away, they called to one another, their shrieking cries trailing behind them. Seagulls? I wondered, remembering I’d read somewhere that on windy days, the gulls can be blown inland to London. Were they heading for the ocean?

Wide awake now and caught up in the euphoria of feeling well again, I imagined myself an adventurer, flying solo like Amelia Earhart through the night skies, through the stars, into daylight. I thought suddenly of the book Angela gave me. It seemed the perfect time to start it.

I carried a cup of tea and a scone with me out onto the balcony and settled into a chair. Opening the book, I turned to the first page and read a passage written from Baghdad by Freya Stark in 1929, when she was thirty-six years old. It began:

Immediately I felt the little thrill I always get upon opening a book and finding inside the voice of a kindred spirit. It happens sometimes in life, too, that immediate sense of kinship. I felt it when I met Victoria. And Sarah. And Angela. Particularly Angela.

Of course, I knew that the kinship of strangers, particularly those met while traveling, is often a temporary kinship. But who’s to say length is the yardstick by which to measure such encounters?

I decided I would take Freya and my three new friends with me when I moved on. I could see it now, Freya leading the four of us through the gardens of Baghdad. Or Freya crossing the desert on camelback, followed by four women, in matching sweater sets, riding behind in a boxy maroon car. But she wouldn’t be scornful of us, not if she’s the Freya I think she is. She would understand some of us are more comfortable walking in the foothills of adventure than climbing to the summit.

And Freya would understand that even though I wasn’t scaling mountains or crossing deserts in this, my Year of Living Dangerously, I was in my own way wading into the stream of the unknown, accepting whatever the gods had to offer.

O
ne morning while having breakfast on the King’s Road I suddenly realized how foreign my life as a reporter now seemed. When I thought of it now—the deadlines, the constant search to find material for a story or column, the compulsive need to read three newspapers daily, the fear of getting something wrong or not getting the whole story—it was like imagining a country I hadn’t visited in some time.

Just how far I’d strayed from the newspaper mentality, however, was driven home that morning when my café au lait arrived and I settled in to read the papers. As usual I was armed with the
International Herald Tribune
, which I bought every day but didn’t always read, and the
Kensington & Chelsea Post
, a neighborhood newspaper that I always read. Instead of focusing on world news or politics or what might loosely be described as important-issue reporting, I found myself avidly reading a front-page story in the Kensington-Chelsea paper about a cat.

Under the headline,
HUNT CONTINUES FOR MISS ARIELLE
, the article began:

Next to the story was a photo, larger than the entire article, of a man holding a rather plain-looking white cat. “Pictured with the cat is the owner’s husband, John,” read the caption beneath.

I ordered another cappuccino and sat thinking about Miss Arielle’s disappearance. I thought about the people who took the time to show up with Arielle look-alikes, about the thousand leaflets put up by Miss Arielle’s owner and about what seemed—judging from the photograph—a totally romanticized and inflated description of the missing cat. Soon, a short story began taking shape in my head. Fortunately, before I reached the point of making notes on my napkin, my second cappuccino arrived, and I turned my attention to the
Trib.

After glancing at the front-page headlines and passing over articles on the Treaty on European Union and Alan Greenspan’s position on inflation, I paid my check and left.

In the old days—the days before this trip—articles about lost cats would have passed quickly through my system, leaving me free to digest the meatier opinions of know-it-all politicians and pundits on the state-of-the-world-and-all-those-problems-that-threaten-it.

Not anymore. I’d given myself license to assume the world and its problems could struggle on without me, at least for the rest of the year. I was reminded of E. B. White, who commented, after leaving
The New Yorker
for a simpler life in Maine, that he hadn’t been able to keep up with the papers because he was “building a mouse-proof closet against a rain of mice.”

As I headed up the King’s Road toward the Underground
station—keeping an eye out for a pedigree chinchilla silver-tipped cat—I spotted a few mice, along with two black cats, a gray tabby, and one unusually big furry creature that may or may not have been of the feline persuasion. I also saw a man who looked like my personal idol: John Cleese, the great British actor and comedian of
Monty Python
fame. Upon closer inspection, however, I decided that, like all those faux Miss Arielle copycats, the handsome charismatic man on the King’s Road was not the real thing.

When I reached the Sloane Square station I had to run to catch my train. Halfway down the steps I could hear it rumbling onto the tracks below; the sound set everyone into motion. Like a herd of wildebeest startled by a hunter’s shotgun, we stampeded down the stairs and onto the platform. I hopped aboard just as the doors were closing and quickly moved to a seat at the window.

I looked at my watch. It was about eleven. By this time my brother, Shelby, and his wife, Pat—who was like a sister to me—would have arrived in London after an overnight flight from Texas. The thought of seeing them during the next few days put me in a good mood.