IF MY CALCULATIONS ARE correct, that day, the “day” in “give it just one more day,” would have been a Thursday, a little more than a week after we’d first arrived in England. Fatefully, it passed without extraordinary event. As I recall, we took the last of our guided walking tours, this time through the heart of the old city, a kind of historical survey hung on a schematic of buildings and ruins of buildings, Guildhall and the Roman temple of Mithras. Though the rain had cleared out, it had left behind overcast skies, much cooler air, and an official suggestion that some large progress had been made in heaven and we were all moving on to the next thing. The Hotel Willerton had become for me a kind of five-story Victorian electromagnet: I could escape its walls, but I couldn’t quite leave entirely its field of attraction. Now, with the change in the weather, it had added warmth to its drawing powers. Shivering down quaint cobblestone lanes and ancient alleys, I wanted only to be back at our flat, wanted night to come so I might plumb the darkness, the silence of sleeping souls, so I might listen for voices. During the tour, there was a moment when I seemed to “see” us as if from a distance: A small group of people (in the form of a ragged half-moon) stand looking at a plaque on some damp old building, they listen as the guide (surely an aspiring stage actress) explicates the bit of history it commemorates; one man among them has lowered his head and thus seems turned uncomfortably inward; could he be praying? no, he’s only studying his wrist-watch.
The night passed without incident as well. Late in the afternoon, I had shopped for vegetables, pasta, and lots of garlic, and I cooked dinner in the flat. We went to the theater, the Royal Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, returned to the hotel, and telephoned Jordie, whom we found in good spirits. She and Ellen talked first, at great length, and by the time I was handed the telephone, she said, “Well, I told Mom everything already. I love you, I miss you, get her to fill you in on the details …”
… and we went to bed mostly happy and very tired. Absurdly, I caught myself thinking that the Hotel Willerton knew I needed this promised, contingent day to pass uneventfully, in order to justify our staying and not changing hotels. I thought about how the day had begun, about the dreamlike expedition to the third floor and the dreaming, somnambulant Melanie, the frightened chambermaid, the dreamer within the dream. I thought of the illusional white glove on the stairs and the unnecessary lie told to Ellen in the kitchen. (Why couldn’t I have said I heard voices in the hallway, went to investigate, and found Pascal and the chambermaid downstairs? What infantile pathology was I acting out by keeping these superfluous secrets from my wife? It seemed—or so I feared—that I wasn’t simply lying but that I was losing the ability to tell the truth.) I fell asleep while Ellen was still writing in her journal, with the bedside lamp still burning.
The next morning, sunlight returned to London, and after my twenty-four-hour reprieve, my uneventful day, I’d been blessed (or cursed) with a kind of amnesia; it was as if we’d only just arrived in England and I’d been handed a spiritual and moral clean slate. I think that when, midmorning, I stood at Hannah’s desk downstairs, asking her about the hotel’s history, I actually had convinced myself that my inquiry was one of healthy, not to say idle, curiosity.
“Dear me, no,” Hannah said, faintly distressed. “I don’t think anyone has ever prepared a history. I can tell you that we’ve been a hotel for about fifty years. The two houses served as a nursing home during the war, and private homes before that. Excuse me.”
She pulled a pearl hemisphere from her earlobe and answered the telephone. Into it she said, “Yes … yes … yes … no … yes … good-bye,” with the sort of litany-like monotony that could only have been a response to mundane, domestic questions from someone recently left at home.
“You want to talk to the Chopins,” she said to me when she was finished.
“The Chopins?” I said.
“The little couple from Hong Kong,” she said. “You’ve seen them, I’m sure. They’re generally here every morning for breakfast … live in the neighborhood. Have done forever, and know everything there is to know about … well, about most everything. She does anyhow. I’m afraid he’s a bit round the bend. You might speak to Pascal, as Pascal’s friendly with them. Excuse me again.”
The telephone was again ringing. Quickly, I asked, “Where’s Pascal now?” and Hannah, answering the phone, pointed silently to the little video monitor. In it I could see Pascal out front, leaning against one of the canopy’s brass poles.
It was just after ten. Ellen was still upstairs, taking an even longer than usual amount of time getting dressed for the day. This was to be our first day of separate ventures. Ellen’s fictional sleuth-priest (or priest-sleuth), Flora (true to her name), was an ardent horticulturist; Ellen had decided that some significant business was to take place in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and planned to travel down there for a tour. I had elected the British Museum—theoretically at least. (I had never been to the British Museum, and I’d heard that in the King’s Gallery there were some famous old manuscripts, English literary masterpieces; I also wanted to see the Elgin marbles filched from the Parthenon, and the Rosetta Stone.) While Ellen finished getting ready, I, great volunteer that I am, went downstairs to see if I could find her a brochure on Kew Gardens. Thus I had arrived at Hannah’s desk and, once there, realized there were things other than Kew Gardens I wanted to learn about.
I stepped into the vestibule, which was quite chilly. Pascal stood in the sunlight at the edge of the canopy, his long shadow stretching across the sidewalk and corrugating up the steps at a sharp angle toward me. I was in shirtsleeves, and cold, so I rapped my knuckles against the glass of the door. Pascal, in a woolen overcoat and sea captain’s hat, turned, smiled, and came forward, his breath illuminated by the sun.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Selway,” he said, once inside, removing his hat and holding it over his heart—a gesture, I thought, of exaggerated devotion.
“Pascal,” I said, “you and I have been through some things together already. Please call me Cook.”
“Cook?” he said.
“That’s my name,” I said.
“Cook?” he said again, obviously unhappy. (I suppose my name put me among the ranks of staff, and so I’d come down in his eyes.)
“Yes,” I said. “Cook. That’s my name.”
“Excuse me, monsieur,” he said, “but Cook is a person who prepares the food.”
“Yes,” I said. “I prepare food on occasion.”
“You are a cook?”
“Sort of,” I said. “I’ve been known to be. But that’s not why I’m called Cook. My given name is Cookson. I was called Cook long before I ever cooked.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Pascal,” I said, “Hannah tells me you know the Chopins.”
“The Chopins,” he said, putting more emphasis on the second syllable of the name. “Yes.”
“I wondered if you could introduce me.”
“Of course,” he said. “Come.”
“Come where?”
“They are now here,” he said.
“The Chopins are?”
“In the dining room. Come.”
We were stopped in the entryway by Hannah. “Oh, Mr. Selway,” she said. “I was wondering … did you ever find your girl?”
“No,” I said. “No, I didn’t.”
“How peculiar,” said Hannah. “I wonder who she might have been. I do wish I had seen her. A teenager, was she?”
Impulsively, I wanted the topic dropped right away, so rather rashly I said, “It’s okay, Hannah … don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, dear me,” said Hannah. “I wasn’t worried.” She turned her attention to Pascal. “Pascal,” she said, “the Davisons need a parcel brought down.”
“J’arrive,” said Pascal, and continued down the hallway to the dining room.
“Jah-reeve, jah-reeve,” I heard Hannah mumbling as we went.
Pascal told me to wait outside the dining-room door. I supposed he meant to prepare the Chopins for my introduction. I stepped into the sitting room opposite and wandered idly over to the window facing the street. I cannot say what, if anything, I saw outside the window, I stood there (the sheer pulled back) looking, as if I were seeing something outside, but completely absorbed, in fact, by my emotions—which were, at that moment, performing some pretty surprising and inexplicable feats. My sense of time and place grew vague, and I found myself at a window (some window somewhere) and looking out with a prisoner’s woe, gazing from his cell; I was experiencing a kind of emotional déjà vu, suddenly overtaken by deep distress and sadness. As best I can recall, these feelings didn’t attach to any event or condition of my actual life, they didn’t ride on any detail in the narrative of loss and self-destruction I might have composed out of the threads of my past. Simply, I felt grief-stricken, apart from any clear reference, and I felt I would cry—no, “cry” is too easy and modern a word—I felt I would throw myself onto the carpet and weep. Simultaneously, I had a strong and fearful sense of someone at my back. When I turned, however, it was only Pascal.
“Monsieur Cook,” he said, “are you sick?”
“No, no,” I said. “I was just having the oddest feeling is all.”
Pascal’s black hair was mussed. He still held his cap in one hand, and his cheeks were still red from his having stood out in the cold; his eyes seemed to glisten as he continued to inspect my face. He reached for my arm and said, “Come … out of this room.”
We walked back into the hall, Pascal clutching me at the elbow and guiding me as if I were blind or infirm. He brushed lint or something from my shoulder—he meant to improve my appearance, make me more presentable.
“You feel okay now?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“The air is not good in that room. Very stale.”
“Yes,” I said, not at all certain that the air in the sitting room was any staler than in any other room.
“The Chopins are just leaving,” he said. “They asked me why you wished to be introduced to them.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I—”
“I did not know the answer.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said that you were an American.”
“That’s an explanation?”
He shrugged. “I told them you were a nice American guy and that you had a beautiful wife. They said I might bring you around to the flat for—”
At that moment, the dining room door swung open, and the older Asian couple I’d seen once before emerged.
“Oh, here they are … ,” said Pascal.
The Chopins, seeing us, smiled disparate smiles that were in some way to characterize them for me ever afterward—hers reserved, lips pressed together, much more an event of the eyes than of the mouth, his great and unabashed, full of yellow teeth.
“Monsieur Selway,” Pascal said, “Monsieur et Madame Chopin.”
I realized then, seeing the Asian couple before me, that Pascal was saying not “Chopin” but “Sho-pan.”
In this first encounter, the nearly entirely bald Mr. Sho-pan said not a word. (I must say “nearly entirely,” with all its botchery, because I did notice a single white hair, approximately three full inches long, sprouting dead center from the crown of his head.) Mrs. Sho-pan did all the talking, and she was very well-spoken indeed, no trace of a foreign accent. Her hair (that is, all her hairs together), jet black, was pulled tightly to the back of her head; she stood two or three inches taller than he, but that may not always have been the case—I had the feeling he’d shrunk a bit in recent years. Neither of them was especially short or frail, as Hannah had led me to believe with her description of them as the “little couple from Hong Kong.” They both were dressed as I’d seen them dressed before, in understated, expensive-looking tweed suits. I mean here that she, too, was wearing a man’s-style suit (with pants), and a silk shirt beneath, buttoned at the neck. The old man’s necktie had a golfing figure in it.
“I’ve asked Pascal to bring you and your wife round to the flat for tea,” she said. “We’re only a stone’s throw, you see.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean today?”
“Yes,” she said, blinking her eyes rapidly several times. “Today … if that will do.”
I noticed that Mr. Sho-pan’s face grew inquiring, almost apprehensive, at that moment, and then, in the next, when I accepted his wife’s invitation, returned to its previous wrinkled, toothy ecstasy.
“Thank you,” I said, genuinely surprised by this immediate hospitality. “Thank you very much.”
“See you at five, then?” she said, offering her hand.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Five-ish,” corrected Pascal.
“Five-ish, then,” said Mrs. Sho-pan, and went up gracefully on tiptoe to kiss Pascal’s cheek.
Mr. Sho-pan offered his hand to me, a pleasant, silky, malleable thing you might like to hold on to (and even knead) during a court trial or funeral. Pascal and I then saw both the Sho-pans back to the entryway, where Pascal went to fetch their coats.
Though it was apparent that they required no other explanation of me than the one Pascal had given them—that I was American and had a beautiful wife—and that their obvious trust and affection for Pascal was all the entree I needed, I took this opportunity to explain that I was interested in learning something of the Hotel Willerton’s history. This seemed to please Mrs. Sho-pan enormously.
“And a very interesting history it is,” she said, smiling.
“Really?” I said.
“Oh, yes indeed,” she said. With her index finger, she touched the corner of her eye and added, “Very much more than meets the eye.”
In that moment I noted that the powerful and unsettling feeling I’d had in the sitting room had thoroughly passed and, secondly, that the Sho-pans’ attention had shifted from me to someone just behind me. I expected to see Pascal there, holding their coats, but instead it was Ellen, holding our coats.
“Oh, hello,” I said, and quickly introduced them all. “The Sho-pans have kindly invited us over to tea this afternoon,” I said.
“How nice,” said Ellen, perplexed.
She had taken Mrs. Sho-pan’s hand, and I noticed—in an almost imperceptible tug and surrender of Ellen’s wrist—that Mrs. Sho-pan seemed to retain Ellen briefly. Their eyes met, and they exchanged a little inquisitive (I would say almost probing on Mrs. Sho-pan’s part) gaze. Then Mrs. Sho-pan nodded and said two words: “My dear.”
Pascal reappeared and began helping them on with their coats. We said our good-byes and see-you-laters, and they were gone.
“Tea?” Ellen said, surprise and delight in her voice. “Who are they?”
“The Sho-pans,” I said. “Like S-h-o-, you know, p-a-n. From Hong Kong, I guess. Friends of Pascal’s. They live around here. Pascal’s taking us over to their flat around five.”
“Fun,” Ellen said. “How handsome they are. Did you see the way she looked at me?”
I walked Ellen to the District Line train she would take down to Kew. On the way, she asked me if I’d been able to find a brochure about the gardens. I noted a first impulse to lie, to say, No, there wasn’t any brochure, but I corrected myself and said, “I’m sorry … I forgot to ask.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll get what I need when I get there.”
It seemed so simple and rewarding a thing, telling the truth. I decided to remember that fact in the future. As we passed through the square, the flower vendor, a small old man in a striped apron, held up a bouquet of roses and indicated, with movements of his eyes and head, that I should buy these for Ellen. I smiled, declining the flowers, but I thought there must have been something about Ellen and me, about the way we looked this morning together, that suggested romance. Maybe we looked happy together, maybe in love. There was a pleasant crispness to the air, the shadows of the trees in the square made lovely trembling lace patterns on the walkways, and I put my arm around Ellen’s waist as we went along. This is how things should have been from the start, I thought. A holiday.
We said good-bye on the sidewalk, outside the tube station. After we kissed, Ellen said, “Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind and come with me?”
“Do you want me to?” I asked.
“Only if you want to,” she said. “I mean I want you to do what you want to do.”
“Well, I’ll come if you really want me to,” I said.
We both laughed then. She said, “I’m happy to go alone. I just want you to know you’re welcome to come.”
“I know,” I said, and kissed her again. “Have fun.”
“I’ll be back by four,” she said. “I’m looking forward to our tea.”
She entered the station, and I stood watching through the open door as she purchased her ticket, went through the gate and toward the stairs. Just before she started down them, something (the intensity of my watching?) made her turn and look back. Over some distance and through the busy counterpoint of the travelers, she saw me in the doorway and waved. Then she was gone. I stood still a moment longer, until a stranger, a woman in a bright-red coat, scolded me for blocking the station door. As I walked away, across the street and toward the square, I did something I’d done from time to time over the years: I recalled Jordie’s birth—that is, I recalled Ellen’s giving birth to Jordie. It came to me, as it always had, in brief segments, in random order: my touching Ellen’s brow with a wet cloth (asking permission each time); her clutching the front of my shirt, her rapid-fire “I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t … ,” even as the top of Jordie’s head appeared in the broadening portal like a huge lavender egg, the doctor’s “Reach down, Ellen, and take your baby”; Ellen’s white arms, her Eureka-like, awestruck “My baby … my baby …”
By the time I turned the corner into Willerton Way and saw Pascal at his post (at his pole, actually) beneath the edge of the canopy, the memory of Jordie’s birth had taken me to a certain insight, to a certain metaphor—not, I’m the first to admit, brilliant by any means, but helpful in an indefinite, comforting way—a view of my years with Ellen (of our years together) as a stream that splits from time to time for durations of various length, some brief, some painfully sustained, into two smaller streams, then reunites, splits and reunites, with a happy recognition, despite any amount of babbling and gurgling, of gained power, of gained breadth and depth in each reunion. This marriage-as-river analogy made me very happy, and it occurred to me (along with about eleven billion Buddhists before me) that all turbulence, all turmoil, occurs in the mind, and all that’s ever really needed for happiness is a satisfactory way of thinking about things—or a satisfactory way to stop thinking about things, I suppose. Having forgotten altogether the fleeting “oddest feeling,” the deep invading grief of the sitting room, I was happy with my marriage, happy to be in England, happy to have recovered a self that could once again manage life in a reasonable way and be at peace. In short, I felt restored, with the help of a pantomiming flower vendor, to my right mind. My interests in the unusual aspects of the Hotel Willerton were being pursued in a sane fashion at last, a simple course of inquiry, aboveboard, and I wasn’t walking around obsessed and ashamed for most of a day.
Pascal had just put someone into a taxi, and now, hat in hand, he waved full-armed at me, as if he were hailing me from the deck of a ship. As I stepped off the curb and began to cross the street, something caught my eye from above, in the vicinity of the windows to our flat—a quick movement … a change of light … something—but when I looked up, I saw nothing at all; I thought maybe a pigeon had flown from the ledge outside our windows. The taxi passed just in front of me. Its passenger was the chambermaid, Melanie, whom I hadn’t seen since our early-morning encounter on the third floor. As the cab passed by, she looked through the window at me. I gave her a friendly-greeting kind of smile, but she pointedly did not smile back. Rather ominously, I thought, she even turned her head as the cab went along, keeping her eyes on me for a ways up the street. Staying true to my sane and simple course of inquiry, I decided, then, crossing the street, to interview the chambermaid later, to get the details of whatever it was that had frightened her.
When I reached the canopy, however, Pascal looked at me in a resigned sort of way, gazed down to the corner where the cab had disappeared, and said, “This girl had some problems, you know.”
“What do you mean, ‘had’?” I asked.
“She is going back to Mama,” he said.
With disappointment, I told him I’d wanted to talk to the girl, about what had frightened her.
He dismissed this idea (and my disappointment) with a smirk and a shake of his head. “She had fantasies,” he said. “Please don’t think about it. You know, Monsieur Cook, I have heard something about young girls like this. They have the … comment dit-on … the horrormones, you know. The imagination of a young girl …”
Pascal, I should point out, couldn’t have been more than two or three years older than the chambermaid. Her departure—my sudden witness of it—had prompted me to dive into something I hadn’t planned to dive into, not right then anyway, and the rest of our conversation under the canopy proceeded with a good deal of self-consciousness on my part, since in it I revealed myself, in completely conventional terms, as a looney-tune. I corrected his pronunciation of “hormones” and told him I wasn’t at all sure that Melanie’s experiences were the product of an overwrought adolescent imagination.
“Harrmones,” he said. “What do you mean, you are not sure?”
“I mean,” I said, “that I’ve had some strange experiences of my own.”
“What kind of experiences?”
“If I tell you, Pascal, I want you to promise to keep it to yourself. I don’t want Ellen frightened unnecessarily.”
“Sure, okay,” he said.
“Well, I know how this sounds,” I said, “but I do think there is some kind of … I don’t know … spirit or something living in the flat.”
A little laugh escaped him, and then he made a scary face and an oooooo sound, antics that were clearly nervous reactions, not intended to ridicule. I thought he was probably regretting having hooked me up with his friends the Sho-pans, now that I had revealed my true colors.
“You mean a ghost, monsieur?” he said at last.
“Whatever,” I said, rejecting the word’s pedestrian, storybook flavor. “That’s why I wanted to talk to the girl. To see if her experience was anything like mine.”
He scratched the top of his head, put his hat back on, and looked across the street. He seemed to be thinking hard, serious now, and then he said, “You are not having me on, monsieur?”
“No, Pascal,” I said. “I’m not having you on. I know how it sounds, but I’m not joking. I promise.”
He shrugged his shoulders. When next he spoke, he was self-defensive: “She told me an evil spirit had tried to molest her, monsieur. It sounded crazy.”
“Molest her?”
“She said he touched her in a bad way and scratched her face. And I—” He gazed sadly down the street for a moment. “I was mean to this girl, monsieur.”
“It’s okay, Pascal,” I said. “It’s best that she went home anyway.”
He shook his head quickly, as if to say, No, no, you don’t understand. “I was mean to her,” he said. “I treated her very badly.”
About half an hour later, just as I was finishing a sandwich before setting off to the museum, he came knocking at the door. He declined to enter the flat, however, saying that he was wanted downstairs.
“This girl,” he said, “she was an artist. I found this in her room.”
He handed me a pencil sketch on stiff watercolor paper: a bit crude, the fierce demeanor perhaps a bit exaggerated, but without a doubt a portrait of the bearded man I’d seen in the bed.
Somehow Pascal seemed already to know what it was he’d handed me. And somehow the expression on his face conveyed a perfect and remarkable blend of contrition and skepticism. He said, “I want to meet this spirit, monsieur.”
I didn’t know what to say, but Pascal didn’t wait for a reply, in any case.
When he’d gone, I took the drawing into the kitchen, ignited a burner on the range, held one corner of the drawing over the flame, and set it afire; at the last second I tossed it into the sink, then crushed the ashes with a scrub brush and washed them down the drain.
Throughout this procedure, I had a sense that someone was watching me. I’d felt the same thing a few minutes earlier, as I made and then ate my sandwich. I felt it still as I went back to the sitting room and found my coat. Finally, I left the flat, locking the door behind me.
Waiting for the elevator to come, I thought that my little reformation, my brief hours of being “left alone” by the Hotel Willerton, my convenient amnesia, my decision to pursue my ominous interests reasonably and sensibly—all this—had been a unilateral change on my part; and with some vague fear (and possibly with some amount of solipsism), I thought my presence at the hotel, my eager nurturing of unusual events, had set something in motion, something that wouldn’t necessarily conform to my changing attitudes. I could hear the elevator coming and could see, through the window in the door, the moving cable, I observed with interest that knowing the cable to move was not actually a thing seen but a thing not seen: when it was stationary, you could see the braids in the metal rope; when it was moving, it appeared solid, without any pattern. Impulsively, I patted the hip pocket of my pants and discovered I’d left my wallet inside the flat. Lamenting the fact that the elevator would come and go while I retrieved my wallet, and then I would have to wait for it again, I returned to the other end of the hall, inserted my key, and opened the door.
On opening it, however, I closed it again quickly, thinking stupidly for a split second that I’d entered the wrong apartment, the moment was disorienting and oddly embarrassing, like thinking you’re pushing open the door to a men’s room, when it turns out to be the ladies’. What I’d seen—all I’d seen, actually—was a room with a gaudy wallpaper, extremely floral, bright-pink peonies or some equally broad effulgent flower on a gray background. Of course I immediately realized it couldn’t have been the wrong flat, as it was the only flat on the floor and I had myself opened it with my own key. I pushed open the door again.
Directly across the room, outside the tall window opposite, staring straight at me through the glass, was the girl I’d met in the sitting room downstairs. She was brightly lit by the sun and dressed as before, in the sailor dress. The sight of her so startled me that I cried out loud, just as if I’d been punched in the stomach; I may have even doubled over with the force of it, for somehow I banged my head, hard, on the edge of the door. I quickly shook the little stars from my eyes, went to the window, and threw it open. Breathless, I put my head out, looking right and left along the stone ledge and down into the street. But the street was empty, and she was gone.