“It’s after hours,” I said.
“This is the most interesting city in the world,” he said. “Certainly we can find a pint.” He stopped a cab and spoke to the driver and herded us inside, saying, “See you in nineteen minutes.”
And so we were delivered to the Hotel Eden. That first night we waited in front on the four long white stone steps until we saw him turn onto the street, all business on his bicycle, nineteen minutes later. “Yes, indeed,” he said, dismounting and taking a deep breath through his nose as if sensing something near. “The promise of lager. Which one of you studied with Julie Mills?”
Allison said, “I did. I do. I finish next year.”
“Nice woman,” he said as he pulled open the old glass door of the hotel. “I slept with her all my senior year.” Then he turned to us as if apologizing. “But we were never in love. Let’s have that straight.”
I thought Allison was going to be sick after that news. Professor Mills was widely revered, a heroine, a goddess, certainly someone who would have a wing of the museum named after her someday. Then we went into the little room and met Norris and he drew three beautiful pints of lager, gold in glass, and set them before us.
“Why’d you eat with the cooks?” Allison asked Porter.
“That’s the owner and his brother,” Porter said. His face was ruddy in the half-light of the bar. “They’re Sikhs. Do you know about the Sikhs?”
We shook our heads no.
“Don’t mess with them. They’re merciless. Literally. The man who sat at my right has killed three people.”
I nodded at him, flattered that he thought I’d mess with anyone at all, let alone a bearded man in a turban.
“I’m doing a story on their code.” Porter drank deeply from his glass. “Besides, your Mr. Roger Ardreprice, Esquire, has no surplus love for me.” He smiled. “And you…” He turned his glorious smile to Allison, and reached out and took her shiny brown hair in his hand. “You’re certainly a Lake. We’ll have to get you a tortoiseshell clip for that Lake hair.” Lake was the prime sorority at Hilman. “What brings you to London besides the footsteps of our Miss Mills?—who founded Lake, of course, a thousand years ago.”
Allison talked a little about the Egyptian influence on the Victorians, but it was halfhearted, the way all academic talk is in a pub, and my little story about my degree in meteorology felt absolutely silly. I had nothing to say to this man, and I wanted something. I wanted to warn him about something with an exacting and savage code, but there was nothing. I wasn’t going to say what I had said to my uncle at a graduation party, “I got good grades.”
But Porter turned to me, and I can still feel it like a light, his attention, and he said, with a kind of respect, “The weather. Oh that’s very fine. The weather,” he turned to me and then back to Allison, “and art. That is absolutely formidable.” He wasn’t kidding. It was the first time in the seven months since I’d graduated that I felt I had studied something real, and the feeling was good. I felt our life in London assume a new dimension, and I called for another round.
That was the way we’d see him; he would turn up. We’d go four, five days with Allison working at the museum and me tramping London like a tourist, which I absolutely was, doing only a smattering of research, and then there’d be a one-pound note stapled to a page torn from the map book London A to Z in our mailbox with the name of a pub and an hour scribbled on it. The Flask, Highgate, 9 p.m., or Old Plover, on the river, 7. And we’d go. He would have seen the Prince at Trafalgar Square or stopped a fight in Hyde Park and there’d be a bandage across his nose to prove it. He was a character, and I realize now we’d never met one. I’d known some guys in the dorms who would do crazy things drunk on the weekend, but I’d never met anybody in my life who had done and seen so much. He was out in the world, and it all called to me.
He took us to the Irish pubs in Kilburn, all the lights on, everyone scared of a suitcase bomb, the men sitting against the wall in their black suits drinking Guinness. We went to three different pubs, all well lit and quiet, and Porter told us not to talk too loud or laugh too loud or do anything that might set off these powder kegs. “Although there’s no real danger,” he added, pointing at Allison’s L. L. Bean boots. “They’re not going to harm an American schoolgirl. And such a beautiful member of the Lake.”
Maybe harm was part of the deal, the attraction, I know it probably was for me. I’d spend two days straight doing some of my feeble research, charting rainfall (London has exactly fifteen rain days per month, year-round), and then, with my shoulders cramping and my fingers stained with the wacky English marking pens we bought, I’d be at the Eden bent over a pint looking into Porter’s fine face and it would all go away. He showed up early in March with his arm in a sling and a thrilling scrape across his left cheekbone. Someone had opened a car door on him as he’d biked home one night. The gravel tracks where he’d hit the road made a bright fan under his eye. His grin seemed magnified that night under our concern.