Love from London (8 page)

I smile and nod and we say goodbye. I put my hands in my pockets and take a deep breath of January air. One thing I’ve noticed that’s so different here is that the faculty members aren’t constantly bolstering the students. At Hadley, we — or I at least — take for granted how interested the teachers are in having us succeed. Here, it’s like they’re along to guide me, but they’re not invested — or maybe they just want to be realistic. I mean, how many people can really go on to be the next great thing?

At Littleton Square, several students are already shouting and gesturing wildly.

“No, no, no!” yells Patrick De Rothschild, our very campy, very chic Stage Rage teacher. “You’re too exaggerated. Real anger comes from deep inside.” He points to himself. “Not in the chest, in the stomach.”

Keena sidles up to me and whispers, “Speaking of stomachs, I am so hungry. I bet if we’re really quiet, we could sneak out and go to HEL.”

“What?” I whisper. “Did you say go to hell?”

Keena giggles. “No — not like that. Come on — I’ll show you.”

And just like that, I ditch my first class, even though it was fun. Keena subtly takes a couple of steps backward, just enough so she’s at the corner of a large stone building (behemoth ancient buildings are everywhere in this town), then suddenly disappears. I meanwhile pretend to focus on the scene in front of me (read: three students bickering, onlookers gawking, and Patrick de Rothschild tapping others on the shoulder at will and saying things like, “Now, you’ve just been slapped for no good reason — go with it!”). While I ever so casually lean on one of those cylindrical, red post boxes, I listen to the shouting and wonder if I’d have it in me to scream publicly were it not for a good grade or going yellular on my cell phone back home. For a split second, I blush, remembering a certain incident of cell-yell back on Martha’s Vineyard, and how my disappearing summer boy, Charlie, scolded me for that display. Ah, good times.

When I’m safely away from the Stage Rage crowd, I slink into a small side street where Keena is waiting.

“Finally,” she says and undoes her bundle of hair from its rubberband and lets it spill onto her shoulders, only to gather it up a millisecond later. She watches me watch her and says, “I know, I know, I have a hair-playing habit. Drives my mum crazy — but then I guess all mums are like that.” She smiles.

“I don’t know,” I say. I’m never sure whether to casually drop the bomb of my mother’s no-show in my life thus far or brush it aside.

“Is yours more laid back, then?”

“You could say that,” I say and half-laugh. My hair falls in front of my eyes and I bite my top lip where it itches in the middle. “She’s not really in the picture at all.”

“Anymore or ever?” Keena gets right to the point.

“Ever.” I say the one word as a complete sentence and wish I had more to say about it, but I find myself sighing as usual. “Listen, there are a million journal entries here but the basic gist of it is that she…left.” This is the first time I’ve ever said that out loud. “From what I gather — and I’m only just really beginning to gather all this information — my dad’s been really secretive about it, probably to save me from feeling like shit, leading to emotional scarring and irreparable damage…it seems like she had me and left me with my dad.”

Keena’s eyes are wide and round like a cartoon characters. “Wow. That’s pretty instense.” She reaches her hand out and gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Well, I have enough mum for the both of us — Arabella, too. You can borrow ours.”

She means well but it’s an offer that I could never take her up on and she knows it, but then she adds, “Besides, my mum…” she puts on a deep authoritative voice, “the revered international author — thinks you’re a force to be reckoned with.”

“She’d be horrified that you ended with a preposition,” I jab and Keena grins.

“A force with which to be reckoned. Fine, you really are meant to study with her.”

Keena goes back to playing with her hair and then swats her own hand away as if PMT is there to criticize her. Despite the fact that it sucks when people pick at your habits — I wish I had my dad, or Mable — my mother, even, around to pick on me.

We keep walking, over zebra crossway (aka white and black striped crosswalk except cars HAVE to stop or they get a ticket) and under a little archway until we’re in a small enclave.

“I thought your mother figured me for some rude American,” I say.

“A Damn Yankee?” Keena jokes. “No. She likes you. Even if she has a funny way of showing it.”

“Yeah, like criticizing my first paper and ripping my modern method debate to shreds?”

“Yup, like that.” Keena nods. “So, what do you think?”

All around us are potted plants hanging from silk ribbons. Bright pink cyclamen create a floral cloud above a wooden bench covered with peeling aqua paint. Tucked behind a long swag of swirling ivy, I can just make out the letters E and L.

“This is HEL,” Keena says and manages to find a semi-hidden door underneath the overgrown foliage, which would never stay so green and lush in the winter back home.

“How it’d it get its name?” I ask and scan the inside for a table. HEL is bout the coolest café I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is under a bridge, I guess, so the ceiling is curved and the walls are painted brick. The décor is like something out of The Prisoner, that Mod sixties show, with bubble-chairs, tables made from thick plexiglass circles that stem up from the splatter-painted cement floor like mushrooms. Very Wonderland. Keena goes up to the counter, which you wouldn’t know is a counter unless you’d been here before — you write your order on a slip of paper, clip it to a wire clothesline, and turn a handle on the wall that makes the whole thing snake its way along until it reaches a hole in the wall that leads to the kitchen.

“Looks like Jackson Pollock was here,” I say to Keena when she’s halfway back to our pod-table and point to the floor.

“He was, actually,” comments a woman with coiffed silvery-blonde hair and eyes rimmed in liquid liner who has appeared from nowhere.

“This is Love,” Keena says, her voice musical and animated. “She’s visiting us this term from the states, in case you couldn’t tell.”

“Hi,” I shake the woman’s hand and she holds mine for a minute — I expect a Monti moment, with aura-reading or some other whacked out thing, but instead she just smiles. “You look familiar.”

I shake my head. “Oh. Okay. I’ve never been here before though.”

The woman shrugs and sits with us. “I’m Clem.” She pauses, possibly for dramatic effect, possibly to consider — again — where she could have seen me before. “Clementine Highstreet.”

I raise my eyebrows. “And I thought I had an interesting name. I swear, since I’ve been here, I’ve met more people with…”

Clementine interrupts. “That’s my stage name.”

“Oh, like your heiress name? At home that’s a sort-of silly thing where you take your first pet’s name and pair it with your mother’s maiden name or the street you grew up on and that’s what name would be if you were some famous heiress.” I pause because half of the people I’ve met so far are probably real heiresses.

Keena laughs and Clem smiles. “I’d be Muffy Kinder Strasse. Pretty good.”

I crack up. “Yup, that’s perfect.”

“Oddly enough, that’s how I chose my —career name. I’m not an heiress, of course, but I had an Irish setter, bright orange thing I called Clementine, and I first lived on High Street.”

“What’s your real name?” I ask, suddenly realizing we’re having this conversation with a complete stranger. It’s as if all my inhibitions and regular ways of functioning have melted away and I have to relearn how to be in this place.

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Clem says. She snaps her fingers in the air and instantly, a server wearing a Pucci-print apron rushes out and slings a thin-crusted pizza in front of us. Ah, real food. The Buttery, the campus dining hall, is — as promised — revolting — so I’m glad for a change. “Mergatroid Hicks. And let me tell you — when I was discovered, that was the first change I had to make.”

Keena leans forward. “In case you didn’t know, Clementine Highstreet was like
the
hot thing in the late sixties.”

“We call clemetines satsuma’s here, you know, but that doesn’t sound mod, does it?” Clementine laughs and fiddles with her hoop earrings. “Plus, I always had a thing for that American song — my darling Clementine. It’s sweet and sad and soulful…”

The lightbulb goes off in my dim head. “As in Like the London Rain?” I ask. I always tell myself that if I were to meet a famous person, you know be seated next to them on a plane or something, that I wouldn’t gush — and under no circumstance would I quote their movies back to them or sing their songs which must happen all the time. But since meeting stars rarely happens (Monti is the exception, but since she was more a model slash icon slash muse, there wasn’t much to imitate, unless I happened to bed down with a Rolling Stone or something), I don’t have the practical implementation of this theory. Which is why, as soon as Clem nods, I burst out singing with her song :

Yeah, yeah, the London rain falls down to the ground

Spilling all around, if you’ve never seen the sun,

You can’t just blame the moon

time goes slipping by, rain ends all too soon

You and I were time away from time

You never know what will happen until you fall

Like the London rain

Thoughts collide on the pathway to your mind

In the barrel of my heart, love collects

Like the London Rain…

Keena is clearly mortified. Being around famous people is like knowing people are really rich — you’re not supposed to talk about it — it’s just something everyone knows and can tell by the private jet or the label clothes or the impulse buys or the multiple houses. You’re not supposed to reference the fame, the music, the moneyed heritage, the film or whatever — it’s just supposed to lurk there, a silent shared knowledge. Like we’re all so cool and on the same level we don’t need to acknowledge it. Leave it to me to not only talk about it, but do the flashing lights, horns honking reference.

But to my surprise, Clementine sighs and says, “If I had a pound for every time someone sings that bloody song into my face, I’d be filthy rich.” She laughs. “And I do, in fact, have a pound for each time…”

“Sorry,” I say.

“No need to say sorry. People try and act so cool these days. Back in the mo’ — that’s moment — you’d get students and mums and bankers coming up to you on the street singing and asking for autographs and trying for a quick feel. Or singing the song as if they were the first in the world to have discovered it.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Was it really that crazy? Like in all the movies and swinging’ sixties and seventies? Or is all blown out of proportion?”

Keena slides a piece of caramelized onion pizza my way and I gratefully accept it.

“It was even wilder,” Clementine’s eyes are round and wide. “More sex, more drugs, more, more, more — everything was more.”

I’m about to ask her to tell me more, more, more, but I take a way-too-big mouthful of cheesy glory and when I’m wiping the oil from my chin, I look up to see a familiar figure in the doorway.

“Asher Piece, get your bum over here!” Keena cries.

“Daaaarrling!” Clementine trills. It occurs to me that Clem and Monti probably ran in the same circles (or slept there) so she must know Arabella and Asher.

Wearing worn jeans, a blue and white checked button down with the cuffs undone, and a navy blue — cashmere? — sweater and looking very Anglo-comfy-sexy complete with tousled hair, Asher walks over to our table. He leans down to kiss Keena on both cheeks, then Clem gets three kisses for some reason, and I get — none. Despite my lack of mathematical prowess, I do know that four comes after three and I think about complaining. Instead, I manage, “Hello, Asher,” and try to stifle the building goosebumps plus crush-induced nausea (plus caramelized onions) and the sinking feeling I get when I remember Arabella’s wishes: even if he were interested (which he clearly isn’t) Asher is (according to my best friend and English host and the sister of my loveject) OFF-LIMITS!

“Love,” he says with nary a glance in my direction. He reaches into his bag — a leather satchel sort of item — and pulls out a large manila envelope which he hands to Clem. I expect him to produce a semi-nude photo from his catalogue shoot in St. Tropical, for him to brag about his island pursuits, swimsuits, or lack of suits — but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s not the kiss and tell kind of guy — for my sake, I hope he isn’t. “The details are all there,” he says to Clementine, who appears to know what he’s talking about. “We need to leave by half-three — Lundgren Shrum will pick you up — just so we get there in time for dinner.”

“Have Lundgren drive
you
— I don’t need to revisit
that
ancient history.
My
driver will get me there in plenty of time, not to worry,” Clem replies. I’m curious to know what kind of past she has with Lundgren — who I met all of once, during my sleep-cloud post-Heathrow. Clementine stands up, managing not to disturb the plexiglass table, and hugs us all goodbye. “Love, I do hope to see you again,” she says to me. Then, softer, she says, “Though I’m sure I have before — in another life perhaps?”

Um, okay. Whatever. “Sure — see you soon,” I say.

“You’re not coming are you?” Asher asks me, with something that sounds like dread.

“Where?”

“Oh, you must!” Clem smiles as she walks away, a blur of polished teeth and classic-scented perfume. “Do come to Bracker’s Common this weekend. We’ve got the
Celebrity Life
shoot — you know, all the has-beens from the real era of rock n’ roll…myself and Monti included.”

“Maybe,” I say to her. “I have a bunch of work and I know Arabella’s away with…” I stop myself from saying Toby’s name and look busy by buttoning my jacket, wrongly I might add, and then fixing it. “She’s just got a lot of work, too.”

“I’ll bet she does,” Asher says.

“Monti would love it, I’m sure! I won’t accept no for an answer,” Clem says and gives a wave.