She ran out of breath after fifty yards, and I caught up with her, and held her tight, and kissed her. Her hair was wet, and when she looked up at me her eyes were as gray as the sky.
‘Let’s go see Peter Pan,’ she said. ‘He never died, but he was never happy, either.’
We walked along the criss-cross pathways, between the leafless trees. A group of nannies were sitting under a cluster of umbrellas, surrounded by prams and strollers. A small boy was throwing sticks for a golden retriever. Above our heads, completely obscured by the clouds, a passenger jet thundered on its way to Heathrow airport, almost drowning out our conversation.
‘Here he is,’ said Kate. ‘The boy who never grew up.’
The bronze statue of Peter Pan blowing his pipes was much smaller than I had imagined. He was standing on top of a sculptured tree-stump, which was infested with fairies and mice and squirrels and rabbits.
Kate said, ‘They put up this statue in the middle of the night, so that it would look as if it had appeared by magic.’
A boy who had appeared in the middle of the night, as if by magic. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. Please I’m begging you.
‘You’re thinking about that phone call again.’
‘I feel guilty about it now. Maybe I should have called the police.’
‘Gideon – if there was no call, how could they have traced it? You said yourself there was no way of knowing who the boy was.’
‘All the same, I still feel I should have done something.’
‘Such as what?’
We left Peter Pan with raindrops dripping from the ends of his panpipes and we walked back toward the Albert Memorial.
‘Maybe we should go to the theater tonight,’ I suggested. ‘One of those British farces where everybody winds up in everybody else’s bedroom. I could use a little light relief.’
As we neared the Albert Memorial, I saw two men and a young teenage boy walking toward us on one of the intersecting pathways. The men were wearing heavy overcoats, one black and one dark gray. The boy, who was walking between them, wore a navy-blue duffel coat with the hood up.
I wouldn’t normally have noticed them, but when they were less than seventy-five yards away, the boy appeared to stumble, and both men took hold of his arms to support him. Is he drunk? I thought. It was only eleven fifteen in the morning. A little early to be plastered.
The three of them came nearer and nearer. The man in the black coat was wearing a black cap and dark glasses so it was difficult for me to see his face, but all the same he had a hawklike nose which reminded me of Victor’s friend Jack. The other man had iron-gray hair greased straight back from his forehead, and one of those rough, broad, Slavic faces with sandblasted skin.
They crossed our path only a few feet in front of us. As they did so, the boy turned toward me and for a split second I saw his face inside his hood. Both of his eyes were scarlet, as if he had been hit in the face. One side of his mouth was swollen and his lips were split. Underneath his nose he wore a black moustache of dried blood.
I stopped. The men and the boy continued on their way, walking quite fast. I stood staring at them as they headed away from us. ‘What’s wrong?’ said Kate.
‘Didn’t you see that boy’s face? It looked like somebody had beat up on him.’
‘Gideon …’
‘I’m going to go after them … just to make sure he’s OK.’
‘Don’t, Gideon. Those two men seem to be taking good care of him.’
‘Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. Maybe it was them who beat up on him. I’m only going to ask.’
The men and the boy were already a hundred yards away. When they reached the next intersecting path, they turned sharp right, and for a moment I lost sight of them behind the trees.
‘Look – wait here,’ I told Kate. ‘I’ll only be a minute.’
I jogged off along the path. It was starting to rain again, hard, and when I glanced back I saw that Kate had put up our umbrella.
I glimpsed the men and the boy up ahead of me, between the trees, and I couldn’t believe how far they had managed to walk in such a short space of time. I ran faster, with my shoes splashing in the puddles and my raincoat making a loud jostling noise. A Japanese couple in plastic rain-hats turned around to stare at me.
When I reached the right-hand path, however, the men and the boy seemed to have disappeared, even though the path ran dead straight for over a quarter of a mile. There were two nannies, pushing strollers, and an old woman in a pink nylon raincoat, walking her poodle, but no sign of the men and the boy anyplace.
I thought that maybe they had left the path and made off between the trees. I ran a short way across the grass, so that I could catch sight of them again, but they had vanished.
As she passed me, the old woman in the pink nylon raincoat said, ‘You should be careful, young man. You’ll catch your death.’
I walked back to rejoin Kate. ‘You’re soaking,’ she said. She handed me the umbrella to hold, and she took out an embroidered handkerchief and dabbed my face with it.
‘I can’t understand it,’ I told her. ‘They totally disappeared.’
‘That’s London for you. One minute somebody’s there, the next they’re not. So many twists and turns, not like New York. So many blind alleys.’
I shook my head. ‘That still doesn’t explain how they lost me so quick.’
‘Come on,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll buy you some good old British fish ’n’ chips.’
*
That evening, back at the Philips’ apartment, the atmosphere was noticeably strained, although I couldn’t work out why. Helena made only a light supper of crackers and cheese because we had eaten so much at lunchtime. She seemed fidgety and nervous, and she kept getting up from the table and peering out into the back garden, as if she thought that there was somebody out there.
David didn’t join us for supper, but stayed in his library with the door only a little way open. He was talking on the phone, but with very long pauses in between his sentences. As I passed on my way to the living room, I heard him say, ‘Yes … yes, I know what you want. But I can’t. How can you expect me to agree to that?’
Around 8:30, Kate and I went out for a walk. It had stopped raining, and the wind had changed, so that it was much warmer, and the sidewalks were drying up. We walked all the way down to Chelsea Embankment, and along the Thames. The Albert Bridge was strung with colored lights, and their reflection danced in the darkness of the water.
Kate said, ‘There’s something about London … I always think the people here are very secretive. I think the whole city is secretive. All kinds of things go on behind closed doors, but nobody talks about them.’
We leaned on the parapet overlooking the river. ‘Is David in some kind of trouble?’ I asked her.
‘You heard him on the phone?’
‘Yes … it sounded like somebody was trying to put the squeeze on him.’
‘He is a banker. He must be under a whole lot of pressure, most of the time.’
‘I know. But it didn’t sound like a business call to me.’
Kate said nothing. I watched her for a while, the way the evening wind stirred her hair. Then I said, ‘Would you ever leave Victor? Divorce him?’
‘For you, you mean?’
‘No, for Brad Pitt. Of course I mean for me.’
She was silent for nearly half a minute. Then she said, ‘It would be good, wouldn’t it?’
‘It’s already good. If you left him, it could be terrific.’
‘The trouble is, I can’t. Not yet, anyhow.’
‘Why not? The guy’s an orang-utan. And he’s a Tony Bennett fan, for God’s sake.’
She smiled, and took hold of my hand. ‘Let’s go for a nightcap, shall we? There’s a wine bar just up there.’
‘So you’re not going to answer my question?’
‘I thought I already did. I can’t leave him, Gideon, no matter how much I might want to.’
‘What – he has some kind of secret hold over you? He knows that you cheated in your grade school spelling bee? You had “necessary” written in ballpoint pen on the palm of your hand? What?’
We went to a crowded wine bar called Corkers, sitting next to a couple who had obviously had the row to end all rows, because they spent over a half-hour glowering at each other and not saying a word.
Kate said, ‘I just want you to know that you are more important to me than anybody I have ever met. Ever. And for so many different reasons. And I do want to see much more of you.’
‘But you still can’t leave Victor?’
She gave me the smallest shake of her head. ‘No, I can’t. And if you understood why, you wouldn’t want to see me again.’
‘Kate – I’m a very open-minded guy. At least I like to think so. What can you have possibly done that would make me not want to see you again?’
‘It wasn’t my fault, Gideon. But it’s the one thing you couldn’t bear.’
‘You used to be a man? You had a sex-change operation?’
Again she shook her head, although she gave me a smile, too.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘can we just enjoy these moments together as much as we can, without worrying about the past?’
*
By the time we returned to the Philips’ apartment, David and Helena had already gone to bed, although they had left a lamp on for us in the living room, and Helena had written us a note saying ‘Do help yourself to whatever you want. There is cold chicken in the fridge if you feel hungry. XXX H.’
However, we were both tired and neither of us wanted anything more to eat, so we showered and went to bed, too. We held each other very close for a while, but eventually Kate turned over one way and I turned over the other, and we fell asleep.
I had a dream that I was walking over the surface of a frozen lake. It was almost dark and I knew that I had to reach the other side of the lake before night fell. On my left I could see a dark pine forest, like the forests that lined the road to the airport in Sweden. Ahead of me, on the bank, there was a cluster of strange tents, of all different shapes and sizes, with a haze of smoke rising above them.
As I crossed the lake, every step made a sharp crackling noise, and I was worried that the ice was going to collapse under my feet. I hurried faster and faster, and the crackling grew louder. I could feel the ice giving way underneath me, and I was sure that I was going to fall into the water and drown.
I opened my eyes. I wasn’t crossing a frozen lake at all, but lying in bed, with Kate sleeping next to me. Yet the crackling was still going on, as loud as it had been in my dream. Not only that, the light between the drapes was flickering, as if the street lamp outside the house was just about to sputter out.
I climbed out of bed and went to the window. When I parted the drapes, I could see the Philips’ bedroom windows, at right angles to ours. Orange flames were leaping and dancing in the left-hand window, and it looked as if their bedroom was ablaze.
I shook Kate’s shoulder and shouted, ‘Kate! Wake up! There’s a fire!’
Kate sat up immediately. ‘What? What did you say?’
‘There’s a fire in David and Helena’s bedroom!’
I dragged the drapes right back, so that she could see it. But when I looked across again, I realized that the fire wasn’t inside the Philips’ bedroom at all. It was simply being reflected in the window from outside. In fact, I could see David standing close to the window, staring out. Although it was difficult to make out David’s expression behind the flickering flames, I could see tears glistening on his cheeks, as if he were suffering excruciating physical pain.
What was totally weird, though, was that there was no fire outside. It should have been right in the middle of the brick-paved patio, between the two stone cherubs, but there was nothing there at all.
‘Do you see that?’ I asked Kate. ‘There’s a reflection of a fire in that window, right? But no fire.’
Kate came up behind me. ‘That’s not a fire. It’s only the street.’
I looked again. I could hardly believe it, but she was right. There was a dancing orange reflection in the Philips’ bedroom window, but it was nothing more than the light from a sodium lamp, on the other side of the street, shining through the branches of a leafless tree.
Without a word, I picked up my pants from the chair where I had hung them, and pulled on my sweater. ‘Come on,’ I said, and went along to the Philips’ bedroom and knocked.
There was no reply. I knocked again, and called out, ‘David! It’s Gideon! Is everything OK?’
I was just about to let myself into their bedroom when the door opened. David was standing there in red paisley-patterned pajamas, blinking at me.
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Was there something you wanted?’
‘I saw you at the window,’ I said. ‘It looked like there was a fire.’
‘A fire? Where? What do you mean, a fire? I’ve been asleep.’
‘I saw you. I saw a fire reflected in the window and you were looking at it, and you were crying. Well, you had tears in your eyes, anyhow.’
‘Really?’ said David, ‘I have to admit that I’m mystified. Perhaps what you saw was some kind of optical illusion. You know, like a mirage. We used to see them all the time, when I was in the Sudan. You could see what looked like whole cities sometimes, out in the desert, but they simply weren’t there.’
I didn’t know what else to say to him. I couldn’t really accuse him of being a liar, not in his own home. But I was convinced that I had seen a fire reflected in his window, and I was sure that he had been staring at it, and weeping.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if we woke you up.’
‘Oh, think nothing of it. I’m a very poor sleeper in any case. I usually wake up two or three times a night and have a little read, or have a crack at The Daily Telegraph crossword.’
He closed the door. Kate said, ‘Let’s get back to bed. We have a really full day tomorrow.’ At that moment, the clock in the living room chimed two. ‘Today, I mean,’ she corrected herself.
But I said, ‘Not just yet. I want to take a look outside, in the back yard. If that was an optical illusion, I want to see how it happened.’
I went through to the kitchen and shot the bolts on the French windows. Outside, the night was windy but not too cold. The wind was making the trees thrash around, and it carried the sound of a distant train rattling on its way to one of the London termini, one of the loneliest sounds in the world.
‘You should put on your shoes,’ Kate admonished me.
‘I’m only going to take a quick look around.’
I circled around the back yard. I was trying to work out exactly where the fire must have been located for us to see it reflected in David’s bedroom window. I had been pretty much right the first time: it must have been burning right here, between these two stone cherubs.
I hunkered down and pressed the flat of my hand against the bricks. They were quite cold, but when I examined them more closely I saw that some of them were cracked, as if they had been subjected to a fierce heat, and that there was a dark elliptical shape in the middle of them, which could have been a scorch mark.
‘I believe that there was a fire here,’ I told Kate. ‘The only thing is, it wasn’t tonight.
I stood up. ‘I definitely saw David crying, too, but David says that he wasn’t. He says he was in bed asleep. But supposing what I saw was something that actually took place some other night, instead of tonight?’
We went back into the kitchen. ‘Is this the same kind of experience I had in Stockholm? You know, when I saw Jack abducting Felicia? Can I see things that have happened in the past, as if they’re happening all over again? Or things that are going to happen, but haven’t happened yet? Or even things that might happen, but never actually do?’
Kate said, ‘Only you can answer that.’
I shook my head and said, ‘Don’t ask me. I didn’t pass seventh grade math, let alone advanced physics. But I’ve read about stuff like that. Some couple who lived near Gettysburg swore that on the last night in June, every year, they could hear horses and wagons and soldiers marching past their house, hundreds of them, heading for the battlefield.’
‘Gideon, you realize you’re talking about ghosts.’
‘No, I’m not. Not actual ghostie ghosts, in bed sheets. But it’s like time getting out of sequence. Like dropping a deck of cards and putting them back in all the wrong order. I’m sure that might be possible. Well – I’ve seen it for myself, so it must be possible.’
We went back to bed. I was beginning to feel that I was close to understanding what was happening to me – why some events and conversations seemed so oblique and out-of-sequence. Kate had told me that I had a rare gift, and maybe this was it – an ability to glimpse both the past and the future as if they were happening now. Not just glimpse it, in fact, but live it, complete with sounds and smells and feelings.
Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward, but has to be lived forward. Maybe I was the exception to that rule.
*
The following day was sunny but much colder. Huge white cumulus clouds rolled across London like Elizabethan galleons in full sail. As she had promised, Kate took me to see Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament.
We behaved like typical American tourists, but Kate wouldn’t let me take any photographs of her. ‘I don’t want to come across them in twenty years’ time and be reminded of how young I was, and how happy I was. Life is sad enough as it is, don’t you think? So why take pictures that are only going to make your future self cry?’
‘Kate – I want to remember this day, that’s all, and if it makes me cry, that’ll be my tough luck.’
She kissed me. ‘You’ll remember it, I promise you.’
We had lunch at Rules in Maiden Lane, the oldest restaurant in London, sitting on a red plush banquette, surrounded by gilt-framed oil paintings. We ate native oysters and roast pheasant, with golden syrup sponge to finish with, and felt like two characters out of a Dickens novel.
Afterwards, we took a walk in St James’s Park. We stopped by the lake, where two park officials were feeding fish to a small but greedy cluster of pelicans. The wind rustled noisily in the horse-chestnut trees, almost drowning the noise of the traffic. I felt as if we had found ourselves in one of those strange 1960s art movies, like Blow-Up, in which everything that happens is totally mundane, but inexplicably threatening, too.
Kate said, ‘What would you like to do tomorrow? We haven’t done any shopping yet. We could go to Harrods.’
I was about to answer her when – with a prickling of recognition – I saw the same two men that we had seen yesterday in Kensington Gardens, walking along the opposite side of the lake with the boy between them. As before, one of the men wore dark glasses and a black cap, while the other wore a gray overcoat – although today he also wore a gray scarf, which covered the lower part of his face. The boy was dressed in the same duffel coat, with the hood raised.
‘Kate – look. Would you believe it? It’s those same two guys, with that boy.’
Kate shaded her eyes and said, ‘You’re right, yes. That’s a coincidence.’
Like yesterday, the boy seemed to be unsteady on his feet, and kept stumbling, and every now and then the men grasped his elbows to prevent him from falling to his knees.
We watched them for a while, as they made their way along the path, and then I said, ‘Maybe I should call the police.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Kate. She looked around. ‘Nobody else seems to be worried about them.’
‘Maybe they’re not. But look at the way that kid keeps staggering.’
‘He looks as if he could be disabled. You don’t want to embarrass him.’
‘I don’t know. It all looks pretty damn strange to me.’
Whatever misgivings I had about the two men and the boy, there wasn’t very much I could do. Although there was a bridge across the lake, it was too far away, and even if I ran, they would have been long gone by the time I had crossed over to the other side. The boy may have been unsteady on his feet, but the three of them were walking deceptively quickly. Soon they were nearly opposite us, heading east toward the nearest road.
It was then that the boy turned his head and looked at me directly, and called out. He was too far away for me to be able to hear what he said, but he sounded as if he were distressed.
I said, ‘That’s it. I’m going to call the police.’
But Kate took hold of my arm and said, ‘No, Gideon, don’t.’
‘You can see it for yourself,’ I protested. ‘The kid’s in some kind of trouble.’
‘Gideon, leave it. It’s far too late for you to be able to help him now.’
I stared at her. ‘What do you mean by that? How do you know?’
‘I just do. You were right, what you said last night. This is the same kind of thing that happened in Stockholm.’
‘You know that kid? You know who he is?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
I watched the two men and the boy as they walked to the main road, and crossed over, and were lost from sight amongst the traffic. They seemed to disappear in a matter of seconds.
‘Kate,’ I said, ‘I can’t go on like this. Whatever’s happening, I need to know what it is.’
‘You said that you trusted me. Please, Gideon – don’t stop trusting me now.’
‘I want to. But give me a reason to trust you. Just one.’
‘I can’t. I shouldn’t have to. Trust is trust.’
‘Well … just tell me one thing. Is that kid in any danger? Have those guys been hurting him?’
Kate looked at me but I couldn’t read her expression at all. It was like the statue of Peter Pan, elvish and secretive. Behind her, with a loud explosion of flapping wings, scores of waterbirds suddenly rose from the surface of the lake.
‘He’s not in any danger,’ she said. ‘I can promise you that.’
‘But you can’t tell me who he is? And you can’t tell me how you know him, or where he and those two guys are going, and how they just happened to be in the same park as us two days running?’
‘No.’
‘No? Just like that – no?’
She started to walk away, toward The Mall, and for one stomach-churning moment I was tempted to let her go. I felt angry and frustrated and hurt, and more than anything else I felt that she was lying to me. How could she expect me to trust her if she couldn’t trust me, in return?
I waited until she was almost a hundred yards away, and then I called out, ‘Kate!’
She didn’t answer, didn’t turn around, but stopped, and waited for me.
I caught up with her. She still didn’t look at me.
‘Kate – you can’t expect me to go along with this. Not any more.’
‘I’m not forcing you, Gideon. If you really can’t bring yourself to trust me, then go back to New York, and forget that we ever met. I won’t pretend that everything isn’t going to fall apart, if you decide to do that. But it’s your decision entirely.’
A fire truck went past, with its siren warbling, so I missed what she said next, but I caught the word ‘wasted’.
‘Wasted? What would be wasted?’
She looked at me at last. ‘All the time we’ve spent together. All the visions you’ve seen. If I explained everything to you, before you came to understand it for yourself, then we might just as well not have bothered. It’s one of the rules.’
‘What are you talking about? What rules?’
‘The rules of life, Gideon. The rules of human existence, and what happens after it, when it’s over.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Well – how about this for a rule? Unless you’re terminally sick, or you’ve decided to kill yourself, you never know in advance what day you’re going to die. But that day is determined at the very instant of your conception, and even if you could find out what it was, there would be nothing you could do to change it.’
‘So who makes these rules? Are we talking about God?’
‘We’re talking about who we are and what we are, that’s all. The limitations of being human.’
‘You’re twisting my brain into knots. I don’t follow any of this.’
‘Trust me. Please, Gideon. I know I’m probably asking too much of you, but I don’t know anybody else I can turn to.’
I saw a flicker of lightning, over toward Hyde Park. This was followed a few seconds later by a threatening barrage of thunder. I looked around. I was still angry, still confused, but I didn’t want to let Kate go.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s starting to rain.’
We walked together back to The Mall. As we reached it, a contingent of Royal Horse Guards came trotting past, in their shiny silver helmets and breastplates and bright red tunics, with their spurs jingling. We stood and watched them, and Kate said, ‘There – you can’t say I haven’t shown you London.’
‘What do they say? If you’re tired of London you’re tired of life.’
A black taxi approached us, with its amber FOR HIRE light on. Kate raised her hand and gave a piercing whistle that any New York doorman would have been proud of.