I closed the notebook in my lap, lowered my head and felt almost relieved: so I could go back to my real job—if they’d still have me—and reality. But instead of firing me, Aimee threw a cushion playfully at my head: “Well, what can we do about that?”
I tried to laugh and admitted I didn’t know. She tilted her head toward the window. On her face I saw that look of constant dissatisfaction, of impatience, which later I would get used to, the ebb and flow of her restlessness became the shape of my working day. But in those early days it was all still new to me, and I interpreted it only as boredom, specifically boredom and disappointment with me, and not knowing what to do about it, looked from vase to vase around that huge room—she packed every space with flowers—and at the further beauty outside, at the sun glinting off the slate-gray roofs of Knightsbridge, and tried to think of something interesting to say. I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom. The walls were hung with many dark Victorian oils, portraits of the gentry in front of their grand houses, but there was nothing from her own century, and nothing recognizably Australian, nothing personal. This was meant to be Aimee’s London home and yet it didn’t have a thing to do with her. The furniture was of plush, generalized good taste, like any upscale European hotel. The only real clue that Aimee lived here at all was a bronze near the windowsill, about as big as a plate and the same shape as one, at the center of which you could see the petals and leaves of something that at first seemed to be a lily on its pad but was actually the full cast of a vagina: vulva, labia, clitoris—the works. I didn’t dare ask whose.
“But where do you feel the most comfortable?” she asked, turning back to me. I saw a new idea painted on her face like fresh lipstick.
“You mean a place?”
“In this city. A place.”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
She stood up: “Well, think about it and let’s go there.”
The Heath was the first place that came to mind. But Aimee’s London, like those little maps you pick up at the airport, was a city centered around St. James’s, bordered to the north by Regent’s Park, stretching as far as Kensington to the west—with occasional forays into the wilds of Ladbroke Grove—and only as far east as the Barbican. She knew no more of what might lie at the southern end of Hungerford Bridge than at the end of a rainbow.
“It’s a big sort of park,” I explained. “Near where I grew up.”
“OK! Well, let’s go there.”
We cycled through town, winding round buses and racing the occasional courier, three of us in a line: her security detail first—his name was Granger—then Aimee, then me. The idea of Aimee cycling through London infuriated Judy but Aimee loved to do it, she called it her freedom in the city, and maybe at one traffic light in twenty the adjacent driver would lean forward on the wheel, put down his window, having noticed something familiar about the blue-gray, feline eyes, that dainty triangular chin . . . But by that point the lights would change and we’d be gone. When she rode she was in urban camouflage anyway—black sports bra, black vest and a grungy pair of black cycling shorts, worn at the crotch—and only Granger seemed likely to catch anybody’s attention: a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black man wobbling on a titanium-framed racer, stopping every now and then to take an A?Z out of his pocket and furiously study it. He was from Harlem, originally—“where we got a grid”—and the inability of Londoners to likewise number their streets was something he couldn’t forgive, he’d written off the whole city on account of it. For him, London was a sprawl of bad food and bad weather in which his one task—to keep Aimee safe—was made more difficult than it needed to be. At Swiss Cottage he waved us on to a traffic island and peeled his bomber jacket off to reveal a pair of massive biceps.
“I’m telling you right now I got no idea where this place is at,” he said, slapping his handlebar with his map. “You get halfway down some tiny little street—Christchurch Close, Hingleberry fucking Corner—and then this thing’s telling me: turn to page 53. Motherfucker, I’m on a bike.”
“Chin up, Granger,” said Aimee, in a terrible British accent, and pulled his big head down on to her shoulder for a moment, squeezing it fondly. Granger freed himself and glared at the sun: “Since when is it this hot?”
“Well, it’s summer. England can sometimes get hot in summer. Should’ve worn shorts.”
“I don’t wear shorts.”
“I don’t think this is a very productive conversation. We’re on a traffic island.”
“I’m done. We heading back,” said Granger, he sounded very final about it, and I was surprised to hear anyone speak to Aimee this way.
“We are not going back.”
“Then you best take this,” said Granger, dropping the A?Z in the basket at the front of Aimee’s bike, “’Cos I can’t use it.”
“I know the way from here,” I offered, mortified to be the cause of the problem. “It’s really not far.”
“We need a vehicle,” Granger insisted, without looking at me. We almost never looked at each other. Sometimes I thought of us as two sleeper agents, mistakenly assigned to the same mark and wary of eye contact, in case the one blew the other’s cover.
“I hear there’s some cute boys up in there,” said Aimee in a sing-song voice—this was meant to be an imitation of Granger—“They’re hid-ing in the tree-ees.” She put her foot to the pedal, pushed off, swerving into the traffic.
“I don’t mix play with work,” said Granger sniffily, getting back astride his dainty bike with dignity. “I am a professional person.”
We set off back up the hill, monstrously steep, huffing and puffing and following Aimee’s laughter.
? ? ?
I can always find the Heath—all my life I’ve taken paths that lead me back, whether I wanted it or not, to the Heath—but I’ve never consciously sought and found Kenwood. I only ever stumble upon it. It was the same this time: I was leading Granger and Aimee up the lanes, past the ponds, over a hill, trying to think where might be the prettiest, quietest and yet most interesting place to stop with a too-easily bored superstar, when I saw the little cast-iron gate and behind the trees, the white chimneys.
“No cycles,” said Aimee, reading a sign, and Granger, seeing what was coming, began again to protest, but was overruled.
“We’ll be, like, an hour,” she said, getting off her bike and passing it to him. “Maybe two. I’ll call you. Have you got that thing?”
Granger folded his arms across his massive chest.
“Yeah, but I ain’t giving it to you. Not without me being there. No way. Forget about it.”
As I got off my bike, though, I saw Aimee put out her adamant little hand to receive a small something wrapped in cling-film, closing her palm around it, which something turned out to be a joint—for me. Long and American in design, with no tobacco in it at all. We settled under the magnolia, right in front of Kenwood House, and I leaned against the trunk and smoked while Aimee lay flat in the grass with her black baseball cap low over eyes, her face turned up toward me.
“Feel better?”
“But . . . aren’t you going to have any?”
“I don’t smoke. Obviously.”
She was sweating like she did on stage, and now grabbed at her vest, lifting it up and down to create a tunnel of air, so that I received a glimpse of that pale strip of midriff that once so mesmerized the world.
“I’ve got a coldish Coke in my bag?”
“I don’t drink that shit and neither should you.”
She got up on her elbows to take me in more fully.
“You don’t look all that comfortable to me.”
She sighed and rolled over on to her stomach to face the milling summer crowds going down to the old stables for scones and tea or through the doors of the great house for art and history.