13 Little Blue Envelopes(6)

“Well, I’m here,” she said.

They nodded at each other for a moment in acknowledgment

of this fact until Richard seemed to be physically struck by a thought.

“You should come in,” he said.

He opened the door wider and grimaced only slightly as he relieved Ginny of the groaning purple-and-green backpack.

Richard gave her a quick tour that revealed that 54a

Pennington Street was just a house—not an artists’ colony, or a commune, or any kind of sociological experiment. It was a fairly plainly decorated one at that. It looked like it might have been shipped straight out of an office supply catalog. Low-pile carpet.

Simple furniture in flat navy blues and blacks. Nothing on the walls. Nothing, that is, until they came to a small, sunny bedroom.

“This was Peg’s room,” Richard said, opening the door. But Ginny didn’t need to be told that. It was a miniature version of the 4th Noodle apartment. In fact, the room resembled the apartment so closely it was almost spooky. It wasn’t that she had furnished it or painted it exactly the same—it was the method.

The walls had been washed down in pink and then covered in an elaborate collage of . . . well, trash, really. (When Ginny’s 27

mom got annoyed with her little sister, she tended to make comments about Aunt Peg’s trash-picking habit. “She’s got other people’s garbage all over her walls!”) But it wasn’t bad, smelly trash—it was labels, bits of old magazines, candy bar wrappers. If anyone else had attempted this, the result would have been dizzying, nauseating. But Aunt Peg managed to arrange it all by color, by type style, by image, so that it all looked like it belonged together. Like it all made sense. One wall had been left collage-free, and on it hung a poster Ginny recognized. It was a French painting of a young woman standing behind a bar. It was an old picture, from the late 1800s. The woman wore an elegant blue dress, and the bar she was tending was opulent—marble, loaded down with bottles. The mirror behind her head reflected a crowd and a show. But she looked terribly, terribly bored.

“It’s Manet,” she said. “It’s called The Bar at the Folies-Bergère.”

“Is it?”

Richard blinked, as if he’d never noticed the poster there before.

“I don’t really know anything about art,” he said apologetically. “It’s nice, I suppose. Nice . . . colors.”

Good one, Ginny thought. Now he probably thought she was some kind of art nerd who was only here because she had

outgrown art-nerd camp. She only knew the name and artist of this one because Aunt Peg had had the exact same picture in her apartment, and the title and artist had been written at the bottom of the print.

Richard was still staring blankly at the poster.

“I don’t really know much about it either,” Ginny said. “It’s okay.”

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“Oh. Right.” He seemed a bit reassured by that. “You look exhausted. Maybe you’d like to have a rest? Again, I’m sorry, I wish I had known when . . . but you’re here, so . . .”

Ginny looked at the bed, with its crazy-quilt cover. This was Aunt Peg’s handiwork as well. She’d had similar items all over her apartment, all made of random, mismatched pieces of cloth. She wanted to stretch out on this bed so badly she could almost taste it.

“Well, I . . . I have to go,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to come with me? I work at Harrods. The big department store. It’s as good a place as any to start seeing London. Peg loved Harrods.

We can sort everything out later. What do you say?”

“Sure,” Ginny said, with one final, sad look at the bed. “Let’s go.”

29





Harrods

Ginny was passing in and out of thoughtful consciousness on the tube. They were stuck in the morning rush, forced to stand.

The rhythm of the train lulled her. It look a lot of effort not to give in to her wobbling knees and slump into Richard.

Richard was obviously trying to make conversation, pointing out things that could be seen at each of the various stops—

anything from the major (Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park) to the minor (his dentist, “a really good Thai takeaway”). His words were dribbling into the ebbing sensory mess that surrounded her. British voices swirled around her head. Her eyes flicked over the advertisements that ran along the top of the car. Though the language was the same, the meaning of many of the posters was lost on her. It seemed like every one of them was some kind of inside joke.

“You look a lot like Peg,” he said, catching her attention.

This was somewhat true. They had similar hair, at least—

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long and deep chocolate brown. Aunt Peg was shorter. She had a slender build and a regal bearing that made strangers assume she was a dancer. Her features were very delicate. Ginny was taller, curvier. Bigger, generally. Less delicate.

“I guess,” she said.

“No. You really do. It’s extraordinary. . . .” He was hanging on to an overhead strap and looking down at her with an intense stare. Something about his look managed to penetrate Ginny’s exhaustion, and she found herself staring back with equal intensity. This move startled them both, and they looked away at the same time. Richard didn’t speak again until they reached the next stop and informed Ginny that this was Knightsbridge. This was their stop.