And now it was the middle of October, the one month of the year when New York is at its best. The air has a crispness to it, and the wind changes direction and blows most of the pollution away, and on good days the sky has a distinct bluish cast to it. Spring had been drizzly and summer impossible and it stood to reason that winter, when it came, would be as bad as it always is, but this particular October was the sort they had in mind when they wrote “Autumn in New York,” and I had been looking forward to it for months.
So before the week was out I was on the other side of the Atlantic.
Chapter 2
On my fourth day in London it rained. It had been doing this more or less constantly since my arrival, sometimes with fog as an accompaniment, sometimes without. I got back to the Stokes’ flat a few minutes after six, rerolled the umbrella that Nigel Stokes insisted I carry, and went into the kitchen. Julia was hovering at the stove, and I hovered beside her, as much for the stove’s warmth as for hers.
“I’m just getting tea,” she said. “Nigel’s shaving, I think. It’s desperate out, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How did it go?”
“No luck at all.”
She was pouring the tea when her brother joined us. He was in his early forties, some ten years older than Julia. His guards’ moustache, which added several years to his appearance, was a recent addition; he’d grown it for his role in a farce that had opened a few weeks ago in the West End, and planned to shave it off as soon as the play closed. From the reviews it seemed that this would happen rather soon.