He gave one of the copies to Vivian, and when she asked him to sign it for her, Ferguson laughed and said, I’ve never done this before, you know. Where am I supposed to sign it, and what am I supposed to say?
The title page is the traditional spot, Vivian said. And you can say whatever you like. If you can’t think of anything, just sign your name.
No, that won’t do. I have to say something. Give me a minute, all right?
They were in the living room. Vivian was sitting on the sofa with the book in her lap, but instead of sitting down beside her, Ferguson began pacing back and forth in front of her, and after a couple of backs and forths he left the area around the sofa and walked to the farthest wall in the room, turned right and walked to the next wall, then turned right again and walked to the next wall after that, and then he turned around and walked back to the sofa, where he finally sat down next to Vivian.
Okay, he said, I’m ready. Give me the book and I’ll sign it for you.
Vivian said: I think you’re the strangest, funniest person I’ve ever known, Archie.
Yeah, that’s me. A genuine laugh riot. Mr. Ha-Ha in a purple clown suit. Now give me the book.
Vivian handed him the book.
Ferguson found the title page and reached into his pocket for a pen, but just as he was about to begin writing, he paused, turned to Vivian, and said, It’s going to be short. I hope you don’t mind.
No, Archie, I don’t mind. Not in the least.
Ferguson wrote: For Vivian, Beloved friend and savior — Archie.
The earth spun around sixteen more times, and on the evening of March third they celebrated his twentieth birthday with a small dinner at the apartment. Vivian had offered to invite as many others as he wished, but Ferguson had said no others, thank you, he wanted to keep it in the family, which meant the two of them along with Lisa and the absent Albert, who was wandering around the South trying to track down members of his father’s family, and even though Ferguson knew it was ridiculous, he asked Vivian if they could set a place for Albert, in the same spirit as the place that was set for Elijah at Passover, and Vivian, who didn’t think it was ridiculous, asked Celestine to set the table for four. A moment later, she decided to increase the number to six so that Ferguson’s mother and stepfather could be included as well.
He had two days to live, and it was the last time he would ever talk to them, but the phone call had been arranged in advance, and one hour before he sat down to dinner with Vivian and Lisa on the night of the third, his mother and Gil rang from New York to wish him a happy birthday and good luck on his trip to London. Ferguson told Gil that he would be carrying along Our Mutual Friend with him (the ninety-first book on the list), which would keep him company on the two long trips across the Channel (eleven hours each), but he doubted he would have much time for it in London because his schedule had become so crowded there. In any case, there would be only nine books left after this one, and he and Vivian were planning to get through all of them by the end of May, but what a pleasure it was to be living inside that Englishman’s teeming brain, he remarked, and after he and Professor Vivian had polished off number one hundred, he wanted to catch up on all the Dickens novels he still hadn’t read.
Then his mother came on and started talking to him about the weather. England was a wet place, she said, and he should remember to carry an umbrella with him at all times and wear his raincoat and perhaps even buy a pair of rubbers to protect his shoes and feet. On any other day, Ferguson would have felt annoyed. She was talking to him as if he were a seven-year-old child, and normally he would have brushed her off with a groan or laughed her off with some droll and acerbic comment, but on this particular day he didn’t feel annoyed but amused, both warmed and amused by the unending motherness that continued to burn inside her. Of course not, Ma, he said. I won’t go anywhere without my umbrella. I promise.
AS IT HAPPENED, Ferguson left his umbrella on the train after he arrived in London on the morning of the fifth. He hadn’t meant to lose it, but in the scramble to gather up his belongings and rush out onto the platform to look for Aubrey, the umbrella had been forgotten. And yes, rain was falling on the city that morning, just as his mother had predicted it would, for England was indeed a wet place, and the first thing that struck Ferguson about it were the smells, the assault of new smells that entered his body the instant he left the air of his compartment for the air of the station, smells that were altogether unlike the smells in Paris and New York, a harsher, more stinging atmosphere charged with the mingled emanations of damp woolen jackets and burning coal and moistened stone walls and the smoke of Player’s cigarettes with their too-sweet Virginia tobacco in contrast to the bluntness of Gauloises and the toasty fragrances of Luckys and Camels. A different world. Everything utterly different, and because it was still early March and not yet spring, a new sort of chill in the bones.
And then Aubrey was smiling at him and throwing his little arms around Ferguson’s body, declaring that the bonny boy had alighted at last and what a good week it was going to be for both of them. Off to the cabstand outside, where they huddled together under the dome of Aubrey’s black umbrella and waited their turn, talking first about how happy they were to see each other again, but a few moments later Aubrey the publisher was telling Ferguson the author that the first reviews of the book had started coming in over the past days and that they had all been good except for one, an excellent piece in the New Statesman, a rave in the Observer, but nothing less than good with any of the others except for the pissy nonsense in Punch. How nice, Ferguson said, understanding how much those opinions meant to Aubrey, but he himself felt curiously detached from it all, as if the reviews had been written about someone else’s book, another person with the same name as his, perhaps, but not the person who was stepping into a London taxi for the first time, one of the fabled black elephant cars he had seen in so many films over the years and which turned out to be even bigger than he had imagined, another British thing that was different from American and French things, and how enjoyable it was to be sitting in the huge area in back listening to Aubrey rattle off the names of magazine editors and reviewers he knew nothing about and who were no more real to him than walk-on characters in an eighteenth-century play. Then the cab took off and started heading toward the hotel, and suddenly it was no longer enjoyable but disconcerting and even a bit scary. The steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, and the driver was driving on the wrong side of the road! Ferguson knew perfectly well that the English did it that way, but he had never experienced it himself, and by force of long habit and a lifetime of built-in reflex reactions, his first ride through the London streets had him flinching every time the driver made a turn or another car approached them from the opposite direction, and again and again he had to close his eyes for fear they would crash.
A safe landing at Durrants Hotel at 26 George Street (W1), not far from the Wallace Collection and St. James’s Roman Catholic Church. Durrants as in currants, and Aubrey said he had chosen it for Ferguson because it was so quintessentially British and respectable, not Mod London but an example of what he called Plod London, with a wood-paneled bar on the ground floor that was so stodgy and spectacularly arcane that C. Aubrey Smith was a regular there, even though he had been dead for twenty years.
And besides, the ruler of the elves continued, the beds are ever so comfortable.