At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor’s flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions.

I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.

Footsteps.

A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.

I backed.

“Terribly sorry. Wrong flat.” I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, “It’s all right. Second floor.” I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.

I walked back to the pub, and later I went to an Italian restaurant Alison and myself had used to go to. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers’ staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.

I went and had one more look at the fiat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.

The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The fiat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July—ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.

“Must have been sharing,” said the clerk.

And that was that.

And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her?

But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone calls, not the smallest sign.

I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps that they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; then it angered me that I was worried.

The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the wall, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that.

At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist’s board. It was a scruffy attic “flat” over two floors of sewing rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the 1930’s vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been “a close friend"—"God, the times I’ve had to put him to bed, poor sod.” I didn’t believe her. “Dylan slept (or slept it off) here” is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her—"My name’s Joan, everyone calls me Kemp.” Kemp’s intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place.

“Okay,” she said at the door, after I’d agreed to take the rooms. “As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week.”

“Good Lord.”

She nodded. “Them.” I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner.

I also bought an old MG. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw’s Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and—at least to begin with—stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone.

A long August passed, and I had fits of acute depression, fits of torpid indifference. I was like a fish in stale water, stifled by the grayness of England. Just as I looked back, Adam after the fall, to the luminous landscapes, the salt and thyme of Phraxos, I looked back to the events of Bourani, which could not have happened, but which had happened, and found myself, at the end of some tired London afternoon, as unable to wish that they had not happened as I was to forgive Conchis for having given me the part he did. Slowly I came to realize that my dilemma was in fact a sort of de facto forgiveness, a condonation of what had been done to me; even though, still too sore to accept that something active had taken place, I thought of “done” in a passive sense.