in Oxford. Of course I asked her to marry me. I even moved into larger rooms in a college-owned house, very comfortable ones with a fireplace in the living room and the bedroom, and a large window that looked out onto the garden. When the day of the move arrived at last, I went to pick her up at her room. Aside from her desk and the meager bits of furniture, everything she owned fit into a couple of battered suitcases already standing by the door. Giddy with the prospect of our lives together, full of hope that we were seeing the last of that wretched desk, I kissed her face, the face I was always so overjoyed to see. She smiled up at me. I’ve arranged for the desk to be moved to Oxford by van, she said.
By some miracle, some miracle or nightmare depending on the perspective, the movers managed to negotiate the narrow corridors and staircases of the house, groaning with pain and shouting obscenities that rose up on the crisp autumn breeze and were carried in through the open window of the room where I sat, waiting in horror, until at last I heard a pounding at the door, and there it was, resting on the landing, its dark, almost ebony, wood gleaming with a vengeance.
Almost as soon as I brought Lotte to Oxford I realized it had been a mistake. That first afternoon she stood with her hat in her hands, and seemed not to know how to proceed. What use did she have for a stone hearth or overstuffed chairs? I would get up in the middle of the night to find the bed empty, and discover her standing in the living room holding her coat. When I asked her where she was going, she would look down in surprise at the coat and hand it back to me. Then I would lead her back to bed and stroke her hair until she fell asleep, just as I would do forty years later when she forgot everything, and afterwards I would lie awake against the pillows, staring into the shadows of the room to where the desk waited like a Trojan horse.
ONE SATURDAY not long after, we went to London to have lunch with my aunt. Afterwards the two of us took a walk on the Heath. It was a bright autumn day; the light lent itself to everything. As we walked, I told Lotte an idea I had for a book on Coleridge. We crossed the Heath and stopped for a cup of tea in Kenwood House, where afterwards I showed Lotte the late Rembrandt self-portrait, the one I’d first visited as a boy, and which I came to associate with the expression “a ruined man,” a phrase that, in my childish mind, took hold and became my own private, glorified aspiration. We emerged from the Heath, and took the first turn, which happened to be onto Fitzroy Park. As we made our way toward Highgate village, we passed a house for sale. It was in poor shape, suffering from neglect, the whole thing engulfed by brambles from all sides. On the peaked roof above the door, a strange little gargoyle crouched with a terrible grimace. Lotte stood looking up at it, kneading her hands in a way she sometimes did when she was thinking, as if the thought itself were lying inside her hands and she had only to polish it. I watched her studying the house. I thought maybe it reminded her of somewhere, perhaps even her home in Nuremberg; once I knew her better, I understood that would have been impossible—she avoided anything that reminded her. No, it was something else again. Perhaps the look of it simply appealed to her. Whatever it was, I could see immediately that she was taken by the place. We walked up the little front path, crowded by overgrown shrubs. A severe-looking woman let us in after some hesitation—it turned out she was the daughter of the old woman, a potter, who’d lived in the house for years, but had grown too frail to go on living alone. There was a stuffy, medicinal smell and the ceiling of the hall had been badly damaged by water, as if someone had accidentally diverted a river to flow right above it. In a room that led off from the hall I glimpsed the back of a white-haired woman sitting in a wheelchair.
I had a small inheritance