The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(31)

At last released by the green signal, my own train began to draw forward. Its pace was stately and I thought that he must have a good seven minutes on me, certainly more than five.

As soon as I saw him, sitting sad but upright in that opposite carriage, my mind went back to the occasion when … to the occasion when … But no. It did not go back. I tried, but I could not find an occasion. Even when I scrubbed the recesses of my brain, I could not scour one out. I should like to be rich in anecdote. Fertile to invent. But there’s no occasion, only the knowledge that a certain number of years have passed.

When we disembarked the platform was slick with cold, sliding underfoot. The bomb warnings were pasted up everywhere, also the beggar warnings, and posters saying take care not to slip or trip, which are insulting to the public, as few people would do it if they could help it: only some perhaps, a few attention seekers. An arbitrary decision had placed a man to take tickets, so that was fumbling, and further delay. I was irritated by this; I wanted to get on with the whole business, whatever the business was going to be.

It came to me that he had looked younger, as though death had moved him back a stage. There had been in his expression, melancholy though it was, something purposive; and I was sure of this, that his journey was not random. And so it was this perception, rather than any past experience—is experience always past?—that made me think he might linger for a rendezvous, that moving toward me and then away, on his Basingstoke train or perhaps from as far as Southampton, he might make time for a meeting with me.

I tell you this: if you are minded to unite at Waterloo Station, lay your plans well and in advance. Formalize in writing, for extra caution. I stood still, a stone in the rude stream, as the travelers crashed and surged around me. Where might he go? What might he want? (I had not known, God help me, that the dead were loose.) A cup of coffee? A glance at the rack of best-selling paperbacks? An item from Boots the Chemist, a cold cure, a bottle of some aromatic oil?

Something small and hard, that was inside my chest, that was my heart, drew smaller then. I had no idea what he would want. The limitless possibilities that London affords … if he should bypass me and find his way into the city … but even then, among the limitless possibilities, I could not think of a single thing that he might want.

* * *

SO I HUNTED for him, peeping into W. H. Smith and the Costa Coffee boutique. My mind tried to provide occasions to which it could go back, but none occurred. I coveted something sweet, a glass of hot chocolate to warm my hands, an Italian wafer dusted with cocoa powder. But my mind was cold and my intention urgent.

It struck me that he might be leaving for the Continent. He could take the train from here to Europe, and how would I follow? I wondered what documents he would be likely to need, and whether he bore currency. Are dispensations different? As ghosts, can they pass the ports? I thought of a court of shadow ambassadors, with shadow portfolios tucked within their silks.

There is a rhythm—and you know this—to which people move in any great public space. There is a certain speed that is no one’s decision, but is set going every day, soon after dawn. Break the rhythm and you’ll rue it, for you’ll be kicked and elbows will collide. Brutal British mutter of sorry, oh sorry—except often travelers are too angry I find for common politeness, hesitate too long or limp and you will be knocked out of the way. It occurred to me for the first time that this rhythm is a mystery indeed, controlled not by the railways or the citizens but by a higher power: that it is an aid to dissimulation, a guide to those who would otherwise not know how to act.

For how many of all these surging thousands are solid, and how many of these assumptions are tricks of the light? How many, I ask you, are connected at all points, how many are utterly and convincingly in the state they purport to be: which is, alive? That lost, objectless, sallow man, a foreigner with his bag on his back; that woman whose starved face recalls a plague-pit victim? Those dwellers in the brown houses of Wandsworth, those denizens of balcony flats and walkways; those grumbling commuters gathered for Virginia Water, those whose homes perch on embankments, or whose roofs glossy with rain fly away from the traveler’s window? How many?

For distinguish me, will you? Distinguish me “the distinguished thing.” Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead. Show me a bone that you know to be a living bone. Flourish it, will you? Find one, and show me.

* * *

MOVING ON, I stared over the chill cabinet with its embalmed meals for travelers. I caught a glimpse of a sleeve, of an overcoat which I thought might be familiar, and my narrow heart skipped sideways. But then the man turned, and his face was sodden with stupidity, and he was someone else, and less than I required him to be.

Not many places were left. I looked at the pizza stand, but I did not think he would eat in a public place, and not anything foreign. (Again my mind darted forward to the Gare du Nord and the chances of catching up.) The bureau de change I’d already checked, and had scooped aside the curtain of the photograph booth, which seemed empty at the time but I had thought it might be a trick or a test.

So nowhere then. Dwelling again on his expression—and you will remember I saw it only for a moment, and in shadows—I discerned something that I did not see at first. It seemed, almost, that his look was turning inward. There was a remoteness, a wish for privacy: as if he were the warden of his own identity.