Of all the scenes that I recalled from my week abroad, I found myself for the most part stuck, last week, on memories of creeping along the Uxbridge Road through Ealing and Southall on the way out to Heathrow for the return flight. If the driver had told us that we’d be taking a five- or six-mile detour, and that it would take nearly a half hour to get from the North Circular Road to the Parkway, I’d have been much less disturbed than I was. Perhaps because I was disturbed — not because I was afraid that we’d miss our flight but because I hated being in a car on a congested suburban road, with stoplights every three feet and no end of buses. What I hated was the open-endedness of it: it promised to go on forever, just as my mother’s shopping expeditions used to do and there was nothing for her to do but park one or both of us in the back seat of the car. What made it unbearable, it seems, was the recurrence of something to which I was no longer at all accustomed — traffic in unfamiliar surroundings.

The people on sidewalk appeared to be of South Asian background, but otherwise the setting seemed to come straight out of an old English film. There were a few modern structures — St Bernard’s Hospital, sprawling on its verdant slope, could have been anywhere in America — but the shopping areas were what I remembered from before the days of malls and parking lots. We might have been in Westchester County somewhere, but the scale of everything was smaller, shorter, narrower — pinched, somehow. I imagined Celia Johnson in a trenchcoat, carrying a string bag of turnips and looking utterly worn down by cares. The colors were green and brick, but I saw them as shades of grey.

This was not the part of London that I wanted to be in or to know, but it is the part that stuck. It was foreign to a degree that Bloomsbury couldn’t be,  and yet it was unpleasant simply because it grabbed me like an impatient parent and reminded me of my childhood. Eventually, we came to the end and, spinning round a roundabout, pulled on to a proper motorway. It was a deliverance.  

***

This morning, I awoke at six, and meant to get up. Lowering dreams left me washed with depression, though, and I felt very safe where I was. I decided to think things over, but since there was nothing on my mind, I drifted into a series of dreams. In one of these, I was stretched out on a mattress in an apartment downtown that contained no other furniture, just the bed and my baggage. I didn’t want to be there, and I thought that I really must gather my stuff together and head uptown to where I really lived, but I was sleepy and drifted off. When I woke up, I was in my bed at home, both awake and still in the dream. It was deeply luxurious. Just like that, things had worked out perfectly. There were more dreams, most of them not so nice but none troubling. Then, for some reason, I was reminded of Maggie Smith and Rowan Atkinson in Keeping Mum, in which a murderous mother-in-law gives her daughter’s husband some useful pointers on public speaking. Something inside me giggled, and I could no longer stay in bed.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2012 at 6:00 am.