“What’s this?”
“An essay. About Othello.”
“Othello?”
“It’s the one about sexual jealousy. One that loved not wisely, but too well. Desdemona, Iago and all that lot.”
“I know the play.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
An essay about Othello? Just what I need in my life.
“Will you read it?”
“Look-”
“Please,” she says. “I’m desperate to go back to school. And I’m serious about this subject.”
“But I don’t-”
“And I was good at it! I was so good at it! Because I loved it! Books made me feel as though-I don’t know-as though I was connected to the world. Magic, it was. Just give me a chance, okay? Before you decide you don’t want to teach me-read my essay.”
I look at her, wondering what an Essex dancing queen could know about loving not wisely but too well.
“I’m really sorry to bother you. Really sorry to come barging in like this. But if you read my essay and decide you still don’t want to teach me, then I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
So I promise to read her essay just to get rid of her. And as I lead her to the door and she says good-bye to my mother, I feel a pang of sympathy for Jackie Day. She just doesn’t understand. Teaching has got nothing to do with it.
“What a nice girl,” my mother says when Jackie has left. “Bit on the thin side. I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron. But she speaks English already, doesn’t she? What does she need you for?”
“She doesn’t.”
There’s a new barmaid at the Eamon de Valera. Russian. Short red hair. Starting at Churchill’s when the new term begins, Yumi tells me. I watch the young Russian struggling with pints of Paddy McGinty’s Water and packets of pork scratchings before I introduce myself. She’s going to be one of my Advanced Beginners.
By now these conversations have developed their own internal rhythm. Where you from? How you finding London? Any trouble getting a visa (not applicable to students from the EU or Japan)? Do you miss your mum’s apple strudel/prawn tempura/chicken kiev?
Olga tells me what they all tell me. London is more crowded than she imagined, more expensive than she bargained for. Even the kids with rich parents flinch when they see the price of a room in this town. How much harder must it be for a young woman from a former Communist hell?
I can’t help Olga with her accommodation problem. I’m looking for my own place right now, and I’m also struggling to find somewhere I can afford, although I don’t tell Olga any of that. But this standard complaint about the price tag of everything in London gives me my favorite opening gambit.
“This city’s not cheap,” I say, leaning on the bar. “But there’s lots of great stuff that you can get for free.”
“Really?”
“God, yes. You’ve just got to know where to look. For a start there are the parks. The view of London from the top of Primrose Hill. The royal deer in Richmond Park. Holland Park is full of all these sculptures that you suddenly come across. Walking by the Serpentine-”
“The Serpentine?”
“That’s a lake-in Hyde Park, where there are these wide, sandy paths where people ride horses. Next door to Kensington Gardens.”
“Where Diana lived?”
“That’s the one. She lived in Kensington Palace. That’s a fantastic building. People still put flowers on the gates. Then there’s Saint James’s Park by Buckingham Palace-beautiful. And Kenwood House by Hampstead Heath. It’s this gorgeous house full of Rembrandts and Turners and in the summer they have these classical concerts. Mozart drifting across the lake as the sun goes down over Hampstead Heath…”
“Two pints, love,” calls a voice from down the other end of the bar. “When Mozart gives you a moment.”
I change the tempo when she comes back.
“You shouldn’t miss the Columbia Road flower market. Or the piazzas at the British Library.”
“I love pizza.”
“You can watch a trial at the Old Bailey. You should see Prime Minister’s question time at the Houses of Parliament. The markets at Brick Lane and Portobello Road. The meat market at Smithfield. The Picassos and Van Goghs at the National Gallery…”
I make it sound wonderful. And it is wonderful. That’s the beauty of it. I’m not lying to her. It’s all true. You can get anything you like in this city. And you can get it for free. You just have to know where to look.
She goes off to pull a few pints of O’Grady’s bathwater and when she comes back I tell her about the Harrods food hall and how there are always people giving away top-of-the-range nosh. She gets very animated, and at first I think she must really have been on a rotten diet back home, but it turns out she’s just excited about the prospect of bumping into Dodi Fayed’s dad. I tell her about the music at the Notting Hill carnival, the fountains at Somerset House, the way the Embankment of the Thames looks at night.
It’s all going great. It’s only when they ring for last orders that I realize I was meant to have gone to the airport hours ago, to meet Hiroko’s flight from Japan.
The arrival gate is deserted now, but Hiroko is still waiting for me at the meeting point.
It seems very Japanese the way she has stuck it out, a combination of stoicism and optimism. And here I come, ridiculously late, running across the empty hall to hug her, full of shame and relief, wishing she had someone to meet her who was much nicer than me.
She is exhausted after the flight from Narita, but we decide to go into town and have something to eat. We jump on the Heathrow Express and soon we are in a little noodle restaurant in Little Newport Street.
Hiroko is really starting to fade now. Behind her glasses her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. But she has some presents she wants to give me. Two pairs of chopsticks, one large pair for a man and one smaller pair for a woman, thirty years of feminism apparently not yet reaching the Japanese chopsticks industry. Then she gives me a sake set-two small cups and a pot. And a bottle of Calvin Klein’s Escape from duty free.
“Thank you for these lovely gifts,” I say. There is something about Hiroko’s formality that encourages me to be formal too. “I will always treasure them.”
She smiles with delight. “Welcome,” she says, with a little nod of her head. And I feel bad that I haven’t even missed her.
We drag her suitcase down to the Bar Italia on Frith Street for a nightcap. And that’s where we see my father.
At first I think I must be hallucinating. My old man is dressed exactly like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.
White three-piece suit, heavily flared trousers, dark shirt, no tie, stack-heel shoes. In any other part of the country the way he looks would get him arrested. In the middle of Soho he hardly attracts a second glance.
He comes into the Bar Italia, scanning the faces drinking espresso and latte, sweating heavily inside his white disco suit despite the hour and the season. Then he sees me.
“Alfie,” he says.
“This is Hiroko,” I say.
He shakes her hand.
“I’m looking for Lena,” he says. “We’ve been to a club in Covent Garden.”
“Some kind of seventies night?”
“How did you know? Oh, of course. The clothes.”
I feel that I can’t be too hostile to my father in Hiroko’s presence.
“She’s not here,” I tell him. “Get separated, did you?”
“We had an argument.” He runs a hand through his hair. He’s still a good-looking old bastard. “Nothing really. It was stupid.”
“What happened?”
“It was the music. It was all over the place. The DJ was playing stuff from the sixties, stuff from the eighties. As though it was all the same. Then he put on ‘You Can’t Hurry Love.’ ” He looks at Hiroko. “By the Supremes.”
Hiroko smiles and nods.
“And Lena said, ‘Oh, I love Phil Collins.’ ” My old man shakes his head at the memory of this sacrilege. “And I said, ‘Phil Collins? Phil pigging Collins? This isn’t Phil Collins, sweetheart. This is the original. This is Diana Ross and the girls. This is one of the greatest records ever made.’ And she said she had only heard Phil pigging Collins’s version, and who cares anyway? It’s only a bit of pop music. It’s just a bit of fun. Then I wanted to go home. But she wanted to stay.” He looks at us like a man in shock. “Then she left. Just like that. But she’s not there. She’s not at home.” My old man scans the Bar Italia. “And I don’t know where she is.”