perfume counter, lived with her family (and also had a boyfriend since childhood), and it was the place to which she had to catch a bus after Willie’s miserable sexual moment with her in a Notting Hill tenement. Cricklewood, Willie learned later, was where a big bus garage was; it was also (Willie looking out at this time for news about Cricklewood) where the lovely young actress Jean Simmons was born and grew up: the fact threw an unbearable extra glamour on June at her perfume counter.
Seen now from the clogged Sunday-afternoon roads Cricklewood (or what Willie assumed to be Cricklewood) was an unending level red line of two-storey houses, brick and rendered concrete, with little local shopping areas in between, shops as small and as low as the houses they served: London here, as created by the builders and developers of sixty or seventy years before, a kind of toy land, cosy and confined: this is the house where Jack and his wife will live and love and have their litter, this is the shop where Jack’s wife will shop, this is the public house at the corner where Jack and his friends and his wife’s friends will sometimes get drunk. Nothing like a town, no park or gardens, no building apart from houses and shops. It all seemed to have been built at the same time, and Cricklewood (if it was Cricklewood) ran without change into Hendon, and Hendon into what came after, and it went on and on, with sometimes only a rise in the road over the mainline railway tracks below.
Willie said, “I never knew London was like this. It’s not out of central casting.”
Roger, who had been abstracted for much of the slow, demanding drive, said, “It’s like this east, west, north and south. You understand why they had to create the green belt. Otherwise half of the country would have been gobbled up.”
Willie said, “I wouldn’t want to live here. Imagine coming back here day after day. What would be the point of anything?”
Roger said, as if going against what he had said earlier, “People do the best they can.”
Willie thought it a feeble thing to say, but then his mouth was stopped. Increasingly on the winding main road there were Indians; and Pakistanis; and Bangladeshis dressed as they might have been at home, the men with layers of gowns or shirts and with the white cap of submission to the Arab faith, their lowstatured women even more bundled up and covered and with fearful black masks. Willie knew about the great immigration from the subcontinent, but (since ideas often exist in compartments) he hadn’t imagined that London (still in his mind something from central casting) could have been so repeopled in thirty years.
So this Sunday-afternoon drive through north London was a double revelation. It did away with the fantasy Willie had had for more than thirty years of June going by bus from Marble Arch to the security and glories of her home. And perhaps it was right for the fantasy to be erased, since June herself, as Roger had said, would by now have been much battered (in every sense) by the years, was almost certainly fat and boastful (counting her lovers), changed in other ways too, adapting whatever ancient genteel perfume-counter yearnings she might have had to some new plebeian television pattern. It was more than right for the fantasy to go. And it was for Willie a relief, enabling him to shed the humiliation connected with the fantasy, to put it in its place.
The level red line of repeopled houses and shops went on and on. At last they turned off the main road. And then, quite suddenly, while Willie was still thinking of what he had seen, the red line of buildings and the costumes of the subcontinent, they were at the training centre. A brick wall, iron gates, a paved drive and a few low white buildings in a large garden. When the car stopped and he got out he thought he could hear the traffic from the main road. It couldn’t have been very far away. At one time the park would have been in real country. Then London had grown up and met it; bits of the park would have been sold; and roads had been opened up all around to serve the population. Now the park, much reduced, was in immigrant territory.
Roger said, with a kind of irony, “It’s one of Peter’s property deals.”