The Grand Tour: Missed trains and pet cemetaries

My first night in London, April 2nd, found me reunited with long lost chum of Thailand travels, Deirdre McNamara, an Irish lassie with a great thirst for the creature. Back in Ban Phe, De, Sean, and I (what became a little triumvirate) would routinely drink a local slurry called 1000 Pipers (some chose to call it whiskey), Beer Leo, Beer Chang (which became notorious for its "chang-overs"), and whatever else our host Just surreptitiously placed before us until we were half-blind with drink. This continued for a month. Good times.

As expected, most of the night passed in a dream of laughing reminiscence, both of us pleasantly surprised to find that six years of estrangement had little effect on our rapport. It was as if we had never gotten up from our adjacent places in that farce of a classroom in central Thailand.

Oxford Circus is the main shopping district in London. I don't know why De brought me there. Neither did she. As we emerged from the Underground into the glitzy madness, we made a 36o with perplexed faces, spied a trendy bar, had a couple of pints of "Star" (apparently the new Stella--this unfortunate Belgian now has the dubious distinction of being referred to as "wife-beater") and made another 180 back underground and over to her borough, Steppeny Green, for some Thai food, then to smarmy, vibrant Brick Lane with its chicken shops and dark faces and early signs of gentrification--London's Silver Lake? Perhaps. Throw about 10000 Pakistanis and North Africans into the mix and there you have it. Dodging the scattershot street litter, De and I headed over to The Vibe bar and sat outside (incredible how mild it is here) with a couple more pints, then moved inside, then were summarily booted bc, it being Wednesday, no one was there and they wanted to go home. Apparently this is not unusual. After a frantic and ultimately futile search for another open bar, we were reduced to buying a couple of bottles from an off-license (read: liquor store), which we drank in the Tube as we waited for the 12:24, the last train--or so we were told by the weary attendant. Letting the 12:20 pass, we finished our beers (I had a Peroni this time) and said goodbye as the 12:24 sped in. Thankfully, De noticed it was the wrong line or I'd've ended up in Somewhere-ham, completely stranded. So I leaped out at the last second and De proceeded to gently scold the old crone who had misled us--the stooping cockney was evidently unfazed by our admittedly limp ire--and made our way out. At last, we hailed a cab--De was sporting enough to ride with me back to Victoria so as to split the ludicrous expense--and so ended our evening.

***

Studying the weathered gravestones of Henry James's pets (Tosca, Nick, and Peter, as well as E.F. Benson's dog Taffy) in a deep corner of the garden at Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, with the clearest of blue skies above and the scent of honeysuckle and cut grass wafting over me, I finally felt akin to the Master in a spiritual way. His fiction, strange to say (strange bc I have made it my livelihood to read, analyze, and write about it), has never touched me the way that other writers have, a recognition or reflection of some hidden angle of myself in the worlds they conjured. While squinting over a byzantine paragraph by the Master, on the other hand, I have been challenged and maddened and provoked to think harder, and more deeply, but never have I thought, "that is me." Reading is essentially a narcissistic operation--at least at first--in which we seek either models for ourselves, better-articulated, more imaginative explanations for our own beliefs and behaviors, or validation for preexisting habits, ideologies, etc. What I have recognized of myself in James is pure icy philosophy, a theoretical overlap of our metaphysical assumptions--that all is vanity, simply put, and hence value lies only in actions (a kind of understated existentialism)--but nothing in his characters or in his "plots" or in his excessive attention to the subtle movements of consciousness have I ever found terribly convincing or sympathetic. Only the theory of it has attracted me.

But his love for his pets--now that I can get on board with. Strolling slowly over the pebbled paths I felt for the first time that I am very much like James in very important if subtle ways. His garden is a paradise, his house ancient and warm, and I would give just about anything to retire in such picturesque fashion. The centuries-old church still stands within spitting distance of the front door, with a view of the many mossy and time-eaten gravestones from the stoop, the names and dates all but erased over the years and tilting as if weary of their post. The cobbled streets are too quaint. That James would choose to settle in such a town--this storybook hamlet--comes as no surprise.

I had a pint before the tour, which started at 2 (I rolled into the tiny station at 1 after a 2.5 hour train ride through the countryside), and another after (I missed my train because I misjudged how long it would take me to pop into Woolworths for a bottle of water and to pee: as I emerged from the bathroom I witnessed the rear end of my train saluting me with a glint of mockery as it shrank into the distance). All told, it's a good thing that I missed that train bc it enabled me to catch the tail end of the Rye flea market where I found an Arsenal FC scarf for 5 quid and overheard Cockney quibbles between spouses as they packed up their shabby goods for the day. Afterward, I wandered over to the Cinqe Port pub for a Shepherd Neame Master Brew from the pump (my first pumped pint) and read, beguiling the hour as I could. I observed as I sat there that the local dialect sounds weirdly like French. Something in the throat and the drawl.

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