Lost in London
by Lev Raphael
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 1
It wasn’t long after moving into my flat in Central London that I realized it might be trying to kill me.
I came there to teach creative writing and a course on classic horror novels for summer-abroad students from Southern Michigan University, which everyone on campus called SMU. The literature students would be reading what I was calling New Gothic: The Haunting of Hill House, Misery, and Rosemary’s Baby, favorite books of mine I felt sure they would devour, given how many of my students raved about TV series like The Walking Dead and The Game of Thrones.
I’d have plenty of time to myself during the month abroad when I wasn’t in class or reading student papers, and I looked forward to all the great museums in London and the theater. I had been given a sizable per diem, so I had plans to see Canterbury, Stonehenge, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham Cathedral, and if scheduling worked out, maybe even train up to Edinburgh for a weekend.
Since I was only an assistant professor of English at SMU, way down the pecking order, I was actually surprised to have been invited to the summer program. I expected a plum like that would stay within the sacred circle of tenured faculty.
“You haven’t been here long, Paul, but you seem to be very popular with the students,” the chair had explained, squinting disdainfully at me as if she couldn’t quite understand why and doubted the student evaluations. Was I wrong to personalize it? Maybe.
Lara Abbondanda’s face was typically a mask of rejection, and she stalked the halls of our department as gloomily as the Phantom of the Opera nursing his grievances, despite being a clone of the young Julia Roberts. Maybe it was her looks that made the chair mean: she likely assumed colleagues thought nothing of her extensive scholarship on Virginia Woolf, that she’d advanced so far so fast only because of her movie star resemblance.
“And you did have to take some time off last semester.” She eyed me suspiciously.
“I had a gallbladder attack and was in so much pain in the ER they had to give me morphine. I never had it before and, uh, it made me ill. I couldn’t teach until I was completely recovered.”
She knew all that, of course, but she sneered as if I’d suddenly revealed a pitiable weakness.
It was a good thing that she didn’t know I’d hallucinated at the hospital.
But her contempt stung me anyway because I had an ugly secret: my family’s history of... well, let’s call it “instability.” My grandfather had killed himself by drinking Clorox after his wife of fifty years died of a stroke. A teenage cousin had jumped off a bridge when his girlfriend ghosted him. My twin sister Ruth had suffered from depression and been hospitalized after her second divorce.
That’s why I hadn’t told anyone — neither family, nor friends — about the nature of my hallucinations. I didn’t want to raise any alarms especially since I sometimes hallucinated when I was slammed by a migraine. At those times, I would imagine I was a cracked glass about to split wide open and spill whatever was inside. The sensation of being on the verge of bursting was so real it scared me shitless until the migraine medication finally knocked me out.
What had happened in the ER overnight was very different, though. After being treated for stabbing pain so bad I couldn’t stand up straight and could barely breathe, I’d had a long conversation with my late father, a chat with a lovely lady who brought me a picnic basket, and I safely landed a plane that was on fire. I didn’t have to ask the nurse in the morning who those people were, because I knew they were phantoms, and I sure as hell had never even dreamed of taking flying lessons.
“We’re done here,” the chair said in her typically brutal style of ending a meeting.
And so we were.
But not really, because I knew that the courses in London had to be a wild success or it would hurt me when I went up for tenure in two years. Now and then, while planning for the summer, I wondered if the chair was actually setting me up for failure, if she was one of those people who could sense a vulnerability and exploit it without even knowing its exact nature.
I had never handled anything as ambitious as teaching abroad. What if the stress was too much and I fell apart? Trepidation plagued me now, ever since those dark hours at the hospital, and even though I’d never felt afraid of flying before, just before boarding the plane for London, I imagined the horror of crashing into the North Atlantic and drowning amid hysterical passengers. I couldn’t sleep on that flight and barely ate anything we were served.
* * *
I arrived a week before classes were to begin at upscale Regents College, situated in picturesque Regents Park. Their regular students were children of oligarchs and sheiks, or so I’d heard. I arrived early not just to give myself time to recover from jet lag but to get comfortable and oriented. I quickly found a terrific gastro pub, The Queen’s Arms, a few streets away from my Pimlico flat on Warwick Square. Based on the way that customers bantered with the servers, it seemed more like a neighborhood hangout than a tourist spot. To me, it was like something out of a movie with its indigo paneling outside and that evocative name.
The Gin & Tonics were sumptuous, and the menu was one I would be happy to work through from top to bottom, starting with the pan-fried sea bream and the chicken, ham and leek pie.
There were also two inviting Italian restaurants, one casual and one upscale, not far from the flat, which meant that I would have great alternatives to microwaving my dinners. Or cooking for myself if I felt that inspired.
And across the street from my flat was a Victorian-era church advertising classical music recitals through the summer, which sounded very tempting. If I were a painter, I would have been eager to capture its heavily rusticated façade on canvas, though simply passing by made me smile. There was nothing as beautiful or historic in my suburban Michigan town, and even though I wasn’t much of a church-goer, I looked forward to trying a Sunday Mass there.
When I entered the flat that very first time, I discovered what Americans call a duplex and the British a “maisonette.” The word looks like something charming the French might have invented. I don’t think they did. Of course it appeared completely innocent on the outside, situated as it was on the top floor of a building in one of those pristine white 19th-century rows facing a gated little park or garden, each building’s entrance graced by a little two-columned portico. It was something right out of Jane Austen or maybe Trollope, certainly not Stephen King.
On the surface, I had a truly lovely temporary home filled with the scent of lavender from various bowls of potpourri. Antique architectural prints in ornate frames hung in almost every room, marble-topped half-moon console tables were matched by gilt wall sconces, and pairs of marble obelisks like the kind you’d see on a fireplace stood guard on each of those tables.
Chinese-themed wallpaper in different patterns and colors covered most of the walls, and fringed Persian rugs lay atop the shiny, slippery herringbone parquet floors. I wondered if the flooring was original and well-preserved, or something more recent.
Expensive-looking vases of all sorts were almost as numerous as the deluxe art books filling shelves in the high-ceilinged living room. The furniture was eclectic: graceful gleaming antiques mixed with expensive-looking modern pieces, and while it wasn’t Downton Abbey, it was definitely posh. But everything seemed slightly out of size, as if rescued from a more spacious home.
And it had an indefinable atmosphere of a kind of private small museum filled with history, remembrances, and something else I couldn’t quite identify. Something unsettling, odd, forlorn.
Overall, I was initially impressed by SMU’s choice of Warwick Square for faculty teaching in London. SMU professors always stayed here, I had been told, but as I toured my new home, I had the strange tingling sensation of being an intruder, the wrong piece for the right puzzle. Unless that feeling was simply jet lag.
The layout didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and I wondered if it hadn’t been remodeled to fit someone’s idiosyncrasies. There were three bedrooms of various sizes and a foyer and half-bath hung with hunting prints on the main floor. The large combination living room/dining room and kitchen were one floor above (the opposite would have made more sense to me), along with a master bathroom that looked recently refurbished in marble tiles, both countertop and floor. There was one of those “rainfall” shower heads in the large walk-in shower. Everything in that room glowed with newness.
Ditto the small galley kitchen which was a bit of a shock, eye-opening with bright-red cabinets and matching red quartz countertops. I suppose it would clear your head after a night of heavy drinking or pep you up if you were morose. Or possibly make you feel worse if your mood was intractable, since there was something a bit ghoulish about that much red in a comparatively small room. Even the tea kettle on the electric range was red.
The fireplace with a white and black marble surround and matching mantel evidently didn’t work, since it was filled with a Delft-looking vase of pink silk peonies. Above it hung what was a valuable painting, if it wasn’t a fake. I recognized the signature of the Edwardian portrait painter Boldoni because I’d seen his portraits at various museums before and his gauzy brushstrokes were familiar. But there was something a little off about it. Boldoni’s women were typically young, charming, sexy, dressed as if for a ball and ready to sweep down a staircase to greet an admirer or two.
The portrait’s gold frame was wildly baroque in sharp contrast with the portrait itself which was surprisingly stark. Against a background the color of dried blood, an elderly woman with some sort of elaborately feathered and beribboned hat with a wispy veil sat on an over-stuffed chair of almost the same color behind her. The prim black gown didn’t match the hat. Her pale, oval face with thin nose and lips was fixed in a ferocious scowl.
But what really gave me the creeps were her eyes: very dark and cold even behind the veil. She seemed to be demanding an explanation: What was I doing intruding on her domain? As if that wasn’t enough, there was some sort of dyspeptic little terrier in her lap who looked like the nasty kind of dog that would let you pet him before snapping off a finger.
“Great,” I thought, “we’re going to be roommates. Fun times!”
A balcony filled with majolica pots of bright red, orange, and yellow begonias overlooked the quaint gated garden below, and their sweet spicy fragrance alone was like a vacation. There were towering, wide-spread lime trees with their lovely heart-shaped leaves inside the gates, cozy-looking benches, graveled paths, and a profusion of flowers my garden-loving mother would have appreciated: lush peonies, foxglove, phlox, clematis, lavender, larkspur, delphinium and her favorite: big fat roses. She had taught me their names as if imparting our family history, but I’d never had success growing anything more than a beard, and even that was just a chin strap.
The view of all that verdant space dotted with color was spoiled for me, though, because a dumpster loomed at the corner of the park gate closest to me. No matter the time of day, it was always overflowing with black plastic trash bags, as if the dumpster refused to be emptied no matter how often trash was collected by the city.
At times, there were so many gross bags huddled all around it that the very image put me in mind of a raft that shipwreck survivors were clinging to in order to stay afloat. If I looked at it too long, I could almost feel dizzying, choppy waves and taste the panic of my fellows yearning for rescue.
Luckily I couldn’t smell the trash from my balcony, though I thought I might, given the weather. London was having a crushing heat wave. To my dismay, the flat not only lacked AC, it was on the top floor. By afternoon, the temperature was over 90 degrees in there. That’s what one of my apps told me.
* * *
I was barefoot, having stripped down to shorts and a t-shirt, trying to stay cool my second day there, when my iPhone rang. It was the London rental agent our university worked with, Jocasta Folkston-Jones. We’d had a few emails about arrangements, like how to contact her in emergencies, but we hadn’t met in person, and I doubted we would have to.
“And are you madly enjoying your new digs?” she asked as cheerfully as if they were a birthday present. “I imagine they’re quite a change from Michigan.” She pronounced it “Mitch-i-gun.” I didn’t correct her.
“I’m still tired from the flight and I wasn’t prepared for the heat.”
“Ah, one never is, in London; but it builds character, don’t you think? You’re an English professor; surely you must know what George Bernard Shaw once said: ‘An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.’” Before I could respond or figure out exactly what she meant, Jocasta rushed on, “Isn’t the décor brilliant?”
I agreed that it was impressive, except for the portrait, which seemed grossly out of place.
The agent laughed what romance novelists call “a silvery laugh” and said, “Oh, yes, she’s rather a baleful cow, isn’t she? That’s Granny, and there’s quite a story. The family lived in some great big Georgian pile in Sussex, I believe. The husband gambled away everything they had except for the flat you’re in, and some of the bibelots and furnishings. Plus the painting. The husband died soon afterwards and it was widely believed his wife was involved, though nothing was ever proven of course. She must have been a misery, and everyone hates that painting, which I’m sure is a perfect likeness. Do you want my advice?”
“Uh... yes, okay.”
“Ignore the old trout! It’s what I tell all of you Michigan professors staying there in the summer. Now, do call if you need anything. Ciao!”
Putting down my phone, I found myself once again locking eyes with “Granny.”
Who would want a portrait of herself looking so stern, forbidding? And why did the owners of the flat hang it so prominently? Didn’t they see what I did? Wouldn’t it spook guests?
Maybe it was hung there as some kind of joke, maybe her family enjoyed mocking her for some reason. I was not amused.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Lev Raphael
