The Hotel Eden(4)

“Nothing,” he said of it. “The worst is I can’t ride for a week. It puts me in the tube with all the rest of you wankers.” He laughed. “Say, Norris,” he called. “Is there any beer in here?” I saw Allison’s face, the worry there, and knew she was a goner. And I was a goner too. I’d never had a scratch on my body. Porter was too much, and I knew that this is the way I did it, had crushes, and I’d fallen for two or three people before: Professor Cummins, my thesis chair, with his black bowl of hair and bright blue eyes, a cartoon face really, but he’d traveled the world and in his own words been rained on in ninety-nine countries; and Julie Mills, who worked so closely with Allison. I’d met her five or six times at receptions and such, and her intensity, the way she set her hand below my shoulder when speaking to me as if to steady me for the news to come, and the way there was a clear second between each of her words, these things printed themselves on me, and I tried them out with no success. I tried everything and had little success generating any conviction that I might find a personality for me.

And now Allison kidded me when we’d have tea somewhere or a plowman’s platter in a pub: “You don’t have to try Porter’s frown when you ask for a pint,” she’d say. “This isn’t the Eden.” And I’d taken certain idiomatic inflections from Porter’s accent, and when they’d slip out, Allison would turn to me, alert to it. I would have stopped it if I could. I started being assertive and making predictions, the way Porter did. We’d gone to Southwark one night, and after a few at a dive called Old Tricks, we’d stood at the curb afterward, arm in arm in the chill, and he’d said, “Calm enough now,” and he’d scanned the low apartment buildings on the square, “but this will all be in flames in two years. Put it in your calendar.” And when I got that way with Allison, even making a categorical statement about being late for the tube or forgetting the umbrella, she’d say, “Put it in your calendar, mate.” I always smiled at these times and tried to shrug them off. She was right, after all. But I also knew she’d fallen too. She didn’t pick up the posture or the walk, but Allison was in love with this character too.

One night in March, he met us at the Eden with a plan. I was a meteorologist, wasn’t I? It was key for a truly global understanding of the weather for me to visit the north Scottish coast and see the effects of the Gulf Stream firsthand. “Think of it, Mark,” he said, his face lit by the glass of beer. “The Gulf Stream. All that water roiling against the coast of Mexico, warming in the equatorial sun, then spooling out around the corner of Florida and up across the Atlantic four thousand miles still warm as it pets the forehead of Scotland. It’s absolutely tropical. Palm trees. We better get up there.”

Well, I didn’t have anything to do. I was on hold, taking a year off we called it sometimes, and I looked at Allison there in the Eden. She raised her eyebrows at me, throwing me the ball, and smiled. Her hair was back in the new brown clip Porter had given her. “Sounds too good to pass up,” she said. “Mark’s ready for an adventure.”

“Capital,” Porter said. “I’ll arrange train tickets. We’ll leave Wednesday.”

Allison and I talked about it in our flat. It was chilly all the time, and we’d get in the bed sometimes in the early afternoon and talk and maybe have a snack, some cheese and bread with some Whitbred from a canister. She came home early from the museum the Tuesday before I was to leave with Porter. There was a troubled look on her face. She undressed and got in beside me. “Well,” she said. “Ready for your adventure?” Her face was strange, serious and fragile, and she put her head into my shoulder and held me.

“Hey, don’t worry,” I said. The part of her sweet hair was against my mouth. “You’ve got the people at the museum if you need anything, and if something came up you could always call Roger Ardreprice.” I patted the naked hollow of her back to let her know that I had been kidding with that last, but she didn’t move. “Hey,” I said, trying to sit up to look her in the eyes, comfort her, but she pushed me back, burrowed in.

PORTER AND I left London in the late afternoon and clacked through the industrial corridor of the city until just before the early dark the fields began to open and hedgerows grow farther apart. Porter had arrived late for the train and kicked his feet up on the opposite seat, saying, “Sorry, mate, but I’ve got the ticket right here.” He withdrew a glass jar from his pack and examined it. “Not a leak. Tight and dry.” He held the jar like a trophy and smiled at me his gorgeous smile. “Dry martinis, and we’re going to get very tight.” Then he unwrapped two white china coffee cups and handed me one. There was a little gold crown on each cup, the blue date in Roman numerals MCMLIII. He saw me examining the beautiful cup and said, “From the coronation. But there are no saucers and—in the finest tradition of the empire—no ice.”