William found the nearest hotel and headed for the phone banks in the back of the lobby. Fifteen listings in London for “B. Thompson.” He started at the top and began working his way down, hoping that the phone wasn’t listed under Bea’s mother’s name, which he suspected was a possibility. He had no idea what her name was, though. She would have changed it, certainly, when she married. Mother had told him that she had recently divorced. What did women do then? He had no idea.
He hung up almost as soon as each person said hello, as he was searching for Bea’s voice or, maybe, her mother’s. He didn’t know what he thought her mother would sound like, but it certainly wasn’t the gruff, half-asleep voice at 2 Wellington Mews or the child’s whisper at 14 Kelross Road. He crossed each name out, right in the phone book, as he worked his way through, getting more and more desperate. He reasoned he could call his mother and see whether she had an address for Bea, but he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want Mother to know he was here.
And then there it was. “Hello?” she said, and it was Bea, it was her voice and he couldn’t hang up. That voice. “Hello?” Bea said again, when she didn’t receive a response, and he recognized that edge, that sliver of annoyance. “Is anyone there?” she asked, and it was Bea, although she sounded much more British, especially the more irritated she became. And then: “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Don’t call here again,” and the phone was slammed down in his ear, and in spite of everything, William smiled.
He circled the entry and tore the page out of the phone book, but he had already memorized the address: 283 Liverpool Road, and as he opened the hinged door to the phone booth, he noticed the hotel gift shop to his right. Wouldn’t be right to arrive at her doorstep without bringing something special, he could hear his mother saying, so he went in and looked about, thinking about this or that, wondering what Bea might like, and slowly realizing that he had no idea. She was certainly no longer the girl who left New York six years earlier. She had become someone else. Perhaps she had a boyfriend. Perhaps she was married. Perhaps he was a fool.
In the end, he left the hotel with directions from the hotel clerk, and no gift. But he passed a florist’s shop on the way to the Underground, and he asked the fellow to put together a nice bouquet. Not too large a bouquet, as by now he had decided that Bea did, of course, have a steady boyfriend, and when he rang her doorbell, she would be there with him. They both would be on the couch, her bare legs stretched across his lap, and he would be massaging her feet. This fellow would be at home in her apartment. Did her mother like him? Probably. Bea rarely made decisions that others disapproved of.
But still. He wanted to get her flowers. He never bought her much of anything, really. Her very last night in Maine, the one when they didn’t creep back into the house until the sun appeared at the edge of the sea, he picked her some wildflowers, and when they got back from taking her to New York, he found them in her room, the water evaporated, a yellow pollen-dust circle around the vase. He took them and pressed them into some book that meant something to a lovesick boy—Romeo and Juliet, maybe, or Love’s Labour’s Lost—and then two years later, when he was taking a Shakespeare class, he turned the pages to find the flowers and he sat there, in Widener Library, with tears almost running down his cheeks.
But now, fresh flowers in hand, he found the right Tube station and descended into the bowels of the earth, it seemed, and then he ascended in another part of the city, somewhere else entirely, a neighborhood, with baby carriages and bicycles and a pub on every corner. Buildings covered in ivy. Flowers bursting out of window boxes. Her neighborhood. He couldn’t quite believe that just yesterday he had been in Paris, looking out at that skyline. He walked the wrong way from the station but asked a fellow for help, and then he arrived at her building, and just before he was about to ring the bell that said Thompson, 3A, in black ink, a woman came rushing out, a kerchief covering her rollers, and she held the door without a smile and he walked inside and up the narrow, dark stairs. To her door.