The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street Read Online Free

including Marks & Co. (closed but still standing, and we want photos of you there), and at 2:30 an Autograph Party next door at 86 Charing Cross Road, Poole’s Bookshop.
    On Tuesday evening, André Deutsch will give a dinner for you to meet the Deutsch officers and a distinguished journalist.

    I just got uneasy about remembering all those dates, and got out of bed and made a day-to-day calendar out of a pocket memo book. I’m also uneasy about how I’m going to break the news to Carmen that I don’t have my picture taken. I’m neurotic, I don’t like my face.
    I lie here listening to the rain, and nothing is real. I’min a pleasant hotel room that could be anywhere. After all the years of waiting, no sense at all of being in London. Just a feeling of letdown, and my insides offering the opinion that the entire trip was unnecessary.

Friday, June 18
    The alarm clock went off at eight and I got out of bed and went to the window to see if it was still raining. I pulled back the drapes—and as long as I live I’ll never forget the moment. From across the street a neat row of narrow brick houses with white front steps sat looking up at me. They’re perfectly standard eighteen- or nineteenth-century houses, but looking at them I knew I was in London. I got lightheaded. I was wild to get out on that street. I grabbed my clothes and tore into the bathroom and fought a losing battle with the damnedest shower you ever saw.
    The shower stall is a four-foot cubicle and it has only one spigot, nonadjustable, trained on the back corner. You turn the spigot on and the water’s cold. You keep turning, and by the time the water’s hot enough for a shower you’ve got the spigot turned to full blast. Then you climb in, crouch in the back corner and drown. Dropped the soap once and there went fifteen dollars’ worth of hairdresser down the drain, my shower cap was lifted clear off my head by the torrent. Turned the spigot off and stepped thankfully out—into four feet of water. It took me fifteen minutes to mop the floor using a bathmat and two bath towels, sop-it-up, wring-it-out, sop-wring, sop-wring. Glad I shut the bathroom door or the suitcase would have been washed away.
    After breakfast, I went out in the rain to look at those houses. The hotel is on the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury Streets. It fronts on Great Russell, which is a commercial street; the houses I saw from my window are on Bloomsbury.
    I walked slowly along the street, staring across it at the houses. I came to the corner, to a dark little park called Bedford Square. On three sides of it, more rows of neat, narrow brick houses, these much more beautiful and beautifully cared for. I sat on a park bench and stared at the houses. I was shaking. And I’d never in my life been so happy.
    All my life I’ve wanted to see London. I used to go to English movies just to look at streets with houses like those. Staring at the screen in a dark theatre, I wanted to walk down those streets so badly it gnawed at me like hunger. Sometimes, at home in the evening, reading a casual description of London by Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, I’d put the book down suddenly, engulfed by a wave of longing that was like homesickness. I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die. I used to tell myself this was natural in a writer and booklover born to the language of Shakespeare. But sitting on a bench in Bedford Square it wasn’t Shakespeare I was thinking of; it was Mary Bailey.
    I come of very mixed ancestry, which includes an English Quaker family named Bailey. A daughter of that family, Mary Bailey, born in Philadelphia in 1807, was the only ancestor I had any interest in when I was a little girl. She left a sampler behind and I used to stare at that sampler, willing it to tell me what she was like. I don’t know why I wanted to know.
    Sitting in Bedford Square I reminded myself that