Well, I was thrilled. Here I was rambling north in a foreign country, every mile was farther north in Britain than I’d ever been, etc., and Porter was dropping a fat green olive in my cup and covering it with silver vodka. “This is real,” I said aloud, and I felt satisfied at how it felt.
“To Norris,” I said, making the first toast, “and the Eden, hoping they’re happy tonight.”
“Agreed,” Porter said, drinking. “But happy’s not the word, mate. Norris is pleased, but never happy. He’s been a good friend to me, these English years.”
“We love him,” I said, speaking easily hearing the “we,” Allison entering the sentence as a natural thing. It was true. We’d often remarked as we’d caught the tube back to Hampstead or as we’d headed toward the Eden that Norris was wonderful. In fact he was one of eight people we knew by name in that great world city.
“Allison seems a dear girl.” Porter said. It was a strange thing, like a violation, the two of us talking about her.
“She’s great,” I said, simply holding place.
“Women.” Porter raised his cup. “The great unknowable.”
I thought about Allison, missing her in a different way. We were tender people, that is, kids, and our only separations had been play ones, vacations when she’d go home to her folks and I’d go home to my folks, and then we moved in together after graduating with no fanfare, tenderly, a boy and a girl who were smart and well-meaning. Our big adventure was going off to England together, which everyone we knew and our families thought was a wonderful idea, and who knows what anybody meant by that, and really, who knows what we meant at such a young age, what we were about. We were lovers, but that term would have embarrassed us, and there are no other words which come close to the way we were. We liked each other a lot, that’s it. We both knew it. We were waiting for something to happen, something to do with age and the world that would tell us if we were qualified, if we were in love, the real love. And here I was on a train with a stranger, each mile sending me farther from her into a dark night in a foreign country. I thought about her in the quilts of our small bed in Hampstead. The first martini was working, and it had made me large: I was a man on a train far from home.
We got drunk. Porter grinned a lot and I actually made him giggle a few times with my witty remarks. The vodka evidently made me very clever. About nine o’clock we went up to the club car, a little snack bar, and bought some Scotch eggs. This was real life, I could feel it. I’d had a glimpse of it from time to time with Porter, but now here we were.
One long afternoon after we’d first met him, he took us on a walk through the Isle of Dogs. He’d had us meet him at the Bridge & Beacon near the foot of London Bridge and we’d spent the rest of the day tramping the industrial borough of the Isle. The pubs were hidden among all the fenced construction storage lots and warehouses. We’d walk a quarter mile down a street with steel sheeting on both sides and then down a little alley would be the entry to the Bowsprit or the Sea Lion or the Roman Arch, places that had been selling drinks for three hundred years while the roads outside, while everything outside, changed. They all had a dock and an entry off the Thames. For us it was enchanting, this lost world at once rough, crude, and romantic. Two steps down under a huge varnished beam into a long room of polished walnut and brass lamps, like the captain’s quarters on a ship, we’d follow Porter and sit by the window where the river spread beneath us. He’d call the barman by name and order three pints. I mean, we loved this stuff. We were on the inside.
“Do you know the opening of Heart of Darkness?” he asked. We’d never read it. “Right here,” he said, sweeping his hand at the window. “At anchor here on a sloop in the sea reach of the Thames.” And then he’d pull the paperback from his pocket and read the first two pages. “Geez, that makes a man thirsty, eh, Mark?” He’d bump me and we’d drink up.
It was a long tour. We left the London Bridge sometime after five and didn’t cross under the river in the tunnel at Greenwich until almost eleven. I remember scurrying through the long tiled corridor far beneath the river behind Porter as he dragged us along in a hurry because the pubs were going to close and we’d miss the last train back to Hampstead. We were all full of beer and Allison and I were dislocated, a feeling I got used to and came to like, as we came out into the bright cold air and saw the Cutty Sark moored there. This was life, it seemed to me, and I ran into the Red Cloak on Porter’s footsteps. I was bursting and so pleased to be headed for the men’s when he took my arm and pulled me to the bar. “Let’s have a pint first, just to savor the night,” he said. I wasn’t standing upright, having walked with a bladder cramp for half a mile, and now the pain and pressure were blinding. I gripped the glass and met his smile. Allison came out of the ladies’ and came over. “Are we being macho or just self-destructive?” she said.