Free While England Sleeps by David Leavitt Page B

this neighborhood were conspicuously drained of bright color: ashen trees, brown brick houses, closed windows only occasionally enlivened by some halfhearted flounce of curtain, or a child’s face suctioned against the glass. It was like walking in a film.
    The Phelans’ house, when we reached it, was indistinguishable from the ones around it, so much so that I wondered if I might ever be able to find it again without Edward to guide me. He hit the brass knocker a few times, turned his key. The door creaked open. I followed him into a stuffy, humid corridor redolent of wet dog and boiled cabbage. A calico cat sitting on the sill stared at us and licked itself.
    We hung up our coats. Quite suddenly a child of about four came barreling out of another room into the hall, braked furiously, then stood stock-still at our feet. I smiled down at the child. Its face contorted. “Now, Headley, don’t you start that,” Edward said, and of course that did it: Headley burst into a fit of hoarse, enraged weeping. “Headley, you be a nice boy,” Edward said. “This is my friend Mr. Botsford.” I reached a hand toward the child, who shrieked in horror and ran out a swinging door. “You’ll have to excuse Headley,” Edward said, then nudged me through the same swinging door into the kitchen, which was small but cheerful, brightly lit, and the scene of some pandemonium. Conflicting noises: the high-pitched bird song of a florid woman in a pink kimono (Lil, I presumed) as she strove to console Headley with baby talk; an irregular thudding as a young girl with a rigid oval face and hair the color of dirty water (Sarah?) chopped carrots; the barking of the aforementioned unseen dog; the shrieking of the aforementioned, very recently seen Headley. And what smells! Cabbage and beef, child’s vomit, the echo smell of a fart that had apparently happened several minutes earlier. Indeed, the only person in the room not emitting some fearsome noise or odor was the baby, the unfortunately named Pearlene, who sat very still in her high chair, her not uncurious huge gray eyes staring out at me as mucus dripped unheeded from her nose.
    Edward introduced me to Lil, who without getting up warmly shook my hand with one of hers while with the other she patted Headley’s back. Headley had his face tightly buried in her kimono. A dark wet stain seeped out from where he had planted his screaming and vampiric mouth. Edward had talked of Lil so often that she’d taken on an independent life in my mind. For some reason I’d envisioned her as fat, and bloated from drink, and old, when in fact she was—or at least looked— young, with flushed cheeks, freckles, eyes green as Edward’s, and stiff blond high-piled hair, and bright teeth. Though Headley’s head consumed, for the moment, the entirety of her ample bosom, the shortness of her kimono gave a good view of her legs, which were elegant and slender, very much the legs of a music hall dancer. I felt ashamed—was it only because of her class that I assumed Lil would be hideous? Yet I also missed the Lil I’d invented, and vowed to preserve in my journal a description of her; what we imagine buckles and crumbles so easily, after all, under the sheer massive weight of the real.
    Sarah, on the other hand, was exactly as I expected her to be, shy and plain, furiously concentrating on her carrots so as to avoid at all costs the ordeal of contact or conversation with a stranger.
    “Now, Sarah,” Lil said, “don’t be shy. Say hello to Mr. Botsford.”
    “Pleased to meet you,” Sarah said, almost inaudibly.
    “Do sit down,” Lil said, clearing a chair of old newspapers. “I’m afraid my kitchen’s no Buckingham Palace, but it’s home, and I try to keep it cheerful and comfortable-like. As I’m sure Edward’s told you, I’ve been down with the influenza. A killer, that influenza; it’s just a blessing the children never got it. Now, Headley, enough, darling, get off.” But removing