Without Reservations (26 page)

After an hour or so of Mousehole-watching, Letty and I decided to take tea at the Golden Pheasant Hotel. Seated in front of a window overlooking the street, we watched the townspeople go by. We talked without constraint, the two of us, the way travelers often do when they meet someone they like but know they’ll never see again.

After asking me about my trip, Letty told me she regretted not having traveled more. “I always wanted to go to China,” she said. “When I was a little girl I read about the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, and, oh, just the names caused quite the stir in me. Then there were the books later—what I call the Pearl Buck influence—that made it all seem so romantic.” She laughed. “I was always sure if I went to China I’d meet an exciting foreigner who’d sweep me off my feet.”

I told her that I thought Paris was my China; that for as long as I could remember Paris was the city I’d dreamed of making my home. “Maybe that’s why Paris—even on my very first visit—always seemed familiar to me,” I said. I described visiting Père-Lachaise to search, always unsuccessfully, for Proust’s grave. “Maybe I don’t want to find it,” I said, as much to myself as to Letty. “Maybe I like the idea of having unfinished business in Paris.”

Letty poured more tea into our cups. “I wonder if the tea in China tastes different,” she said, lifting the white porcelain cup to her lips.

I laughed. “Oh, Letty, wouldn’t it be fun if you could pop over to Paris when I’m there. It’s not that difficult now, you know. And you could stay with me.”

“Yes, being with you would be grand,” she said, leaving it at that.

Later, when Letty and I walked down the High Street, our arms linked, to purchase the almost-forgotten lemon curd, we stopped again at the pristine rows of lavender outside the Church of St.
John the Baptist. It was almost time for me to board the bus back to Oxford.

I began saying good-bye to Letty when suddenly she bent over and broke off a stalk of the purple flowers. “There’s lavender,” she said, handing me the blooms. “That’s for remembrance.”

Impulsively, I kissed Letty on the cheek. “I could never forget
you,”
I said. Then to lighten up the moment, I added, “We may not have Paris, but we’ll always have Mousehole,” and we both laughed.

Later that night as I sat in my rooms writing in my journal and spooning lemon curd onto a biscuit, I read the white paper wrapped round the lid of the jar: “Specially prepared for Aubrey Newman at Christmas Court. 94, High Street, Burford, Oxfordshire.” Carefully, I flattened the paper and pressed it, like a flower, between the pages of my notebook.

I thought of Letty, of her remark about how she loved living in a town where you could walk about and “always meet someone you know.” In some ways, it was the opposite of what lay behind this trip—my wish to break away from being a known entity. And yet in London, from time to time, I’d felt the tug of familiarity and the wish to belong somewhere.

It was a cold night and I sat wrapped in a quilt listening to the wind outside. Distracted, I got up and walked to my window. There, gathered in an adjoining courtyard, were a dozen or so young people, some wearing frock coats and others in costumes that had an Elizabethan look about them.

Despite the cold they seemed to be rehearsing something in a
small amphitheater at the next college. I could see them gesturing theatrically as they entered and exited with great flourish, but even after opening my window I could not make out the words above the wind.

For a long while I stood watching at my window.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, I decided, finally. That’s what they’re rehearsing.

I closed the window, and walked across the room to the view I loved most. I could see the majestic dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St. Mary’s spire, both lit from below. The lights from the rooms surrounding Brasenose formed changing patterns on the emerald-green grass below. As people turned off their lights to retire for the night, pieces of the pattern disappeared. Then, as late-night concertgoers returned to their rooms, switching on the lamps inside, other patterns took their place.

I inhaled the air, deeply, as if to take it all in and make it a part of me.

But perhaps what I really wanted was to make me a part of it: of Oxford and its history, of this windy starry night, of these rooms in Brasenose College that for this brief time belonged to me.

That night I dreamed. One of those crazy, mixed-up dreams that if you were going to your analyst the next day, you’d spend the whole hour talking about—partly because you wanted to understand what your unconscious was telling you and partly because you wanted to experience again the feelings unlocked by the dream.

It is a sunny Saturday morning and Ducky Harris and I are walking along Clay Street, a small alley near the YWCA that is home to several wholesale florists. Suddenly Ducky bends over to pick up a discarded snapdragon stalk.
When she stands up I notice she has on a hat, a green plaid tam-o’-shanter, one just like Grandmother wore when we went Christmas shopping downtown at Hutzler’s department store.

But Ducky doesn’t look like Grandmother. She also doesn’t look like Ducky. She looks like some movie star I’d seen on the posters outside the old Century movie house.

She says something to me, the red-haired woman who’s wearing Grandmother’s tam-o’-shanter. I try to make out exactly what the words are, but there’s just too much unconscious dream static in the way. I can see her mouth moving, forming words, but the sound disappears before reaching me.

Then suddenly I could hear her. “Hello, it’s me,” she said, smiling. “I’m still here.”

O
ne night at dinner Albert asked if anyone in the group would like to take a lesson in ballroom dancing. Immediately a groan went up from one end of the table. Oxford was filled with concerts and plays and lectures, so why, the groan suggested, would anyone be interested in ballroom dancing? Particularly, as someone pointed out, when a Chopin concert was being offered at a nearby hall.

Often it was fun to go to one of the concerts or plays that seemed to take place in every church or hall in Oxford. But occasionally I liked to break away from the group and see what I could find on my own.

Sometimes I was lucky. The night, for instance, I watched a movie—
The Bodyguard
—with a group of American college students. They were spending the summer at Oxford, taking courses and quartered in a dorm on the other side of Brasenose in the New Quad—so named because of its recent arrival on the Oxford landscape: circa 1878. I met the students on my way back from a visit with a friend quartered in the New Quad. After approaching them to ask where I could buy a soft drink, we began talking about what they were studying and what I was studying. Before long, pizzas arrived and the whole lot of us were watching a movie in a large room furnished with worn armchairs and sofas. I looked around at the
boys sprawled barefooted across the sofas, taking huge bites out of pepperoni pizzas, and the girls sobbing softly when Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston were forced to part. It reminded me of home; I felt deliciously comfortable.

Sometimes, though, I wasn’t so lucky. There was that night when I bumped into a couple from Baltimore who were in Oxford for one night. I knew them vaguely—we’d met at a large party given by mutual friends—and when they suggested dinner at a pub, it sounded like a good idea. Three hours later, after listening to a minute-by-minute rundown of every detail of their week-long tour of the Cotswolds, I yearned to be put out of my misery.

On the night that Albert suggested we try ballroom dancing, I had nothing planned. Several people, mostly couples, were quite enthusiastic about the idea. They asked me to join them.

“It’ll be fun,” Ellen said. “And, besides, I could use the physical contact.”

My answer was immediate and not entirely honest. “Oh, I’m too tired for dancing,” I said, although I wasn’t. “I think I’ll just take a short walk and then read a bit.”

As I walked back to my rooms I wondered why I had dismissed the idea and why I’d felt the need to offer a phony excuse. Actually, I loved to dance. When I was sixteen, a girlfriend and I used to sneak out on weekends to a Latin American ballroom. Dressed and made-up to look like twenty-one—which was the age requirement at the ballroom—we’d sit at a table sipping 7Up, hoping that the silky-looking young men circling the room would ask us to dance.

Although I had no real idea of how to mambo, samba, or tango, I had learned, to my surprise, that I could follow anyone who did. I thought of it as a gift, this ability to follow such intricate steps without any instruction; a gift similar to playing the piano by ear.

I knew my mother would kill me if she found out about my
dancing at the ballroom, but frankly I didn’t care. In these moments of dancing I saw myself as a sophisticated, independent woman destined for a life of adventure—probably as a writer living in some foreign land.

Secretly I prided myself on being a good dancer; it made me feel in control of my body. Sometimes, however, I suspected what I liked about dancing was the opposite: that when I was dancing I didn’t need to control my body. On the dance floor I simply closed my eyes and gave myself up to the exciting, pulsating music.

It was only at the Latin American Ballroom, among strangers, that I allowed myself such sensual freedom. At the school dances I stumbled over my partner’s feet, almost drowning out the music with a steady stream of apologies:
Sorry. My fault. Excuse me.
It was like leading a double life: in one, I was a bold, sensual woman, unafraid of my attraction to danger; in the other, an uncertain teenager, full of conflicts about the physical world of touch and feeling and intense longing.