13 Little Blue Envelopes

54a Pennington Street, London

She was standing somewhere in Heathrow Airport. She’d been shuffled off the plane, had pulled the notorious backpack from the luggage carousel, waited in an hour-long line to get her passport stamped, and been ignored by some customs officers. Now she was staring at a London tube map.

It looked like a nursery school poster designed to attract the eyes of toddlers. It was stark white, with bright primary-colored lines snaking around it. The stops had solid-sounding names, like Old Street and London Bridge. Royal sounding: Earl’s Court, Queensway, Knightsbridge. Entertaining: Elephant & Castle, Oxford Circus, Marylebone. And there were names she recognized: Victoria Station, Paddington (where the bear lived), Waterloo. And there was Angel. To get there, she’d have to change at a place called Kings Cross.

She pulled out her £10 note, found a ticket machine, and followed the instructions. She walked up to one of the entrance aisles and faced a pair of metal doors, almost like saloon doors. She looked around, unsure of what to do next. She tried to push the gate gently, but nothing happened. Then she saw a woman next to her put her ticket into a slot on the little metal box next to her, and the doors opened. Ginny did the same. The machine sucked in the ticket with a satisfying swoosh, and the doors clapped open and she passed through.

Everyone was moving in the same direction, so she kept going, trying not to stumble against the backs of the bags other people were wheeling. When the train slid up to the stark white platform, she didn’t think to unhook herself from the pack, so when she got on, she could only fit on the very edge of a seat.

It wasn’t like the subway she had taken in New York. These were much nicer. The doors made pleasant bonging noises as they opened, and a British voice warned her to “mind the gap.”

The train moved aboveground. They were riding along behind houses. Then it was back underground, where the stations became more crowded. All kinds of people shuffled on and off, some with maps and backpacks, others with folded newspapers or books and blank expressions.

The cooing British voice said, “Angel,” a few stops later. She couldn’t turn around, so she had to back off the train, feeling for the space with her foot. A sign suspended from the ceiling said WAY OUT. As she approached the exit, there was another set of metal gates. This time, Ginny was certain that they would yield when she approached, kind of like an automatic door. But they didn’t. Not even when she walked right into them.

An annoyed British voice from behind her said, “You have to put in your ticket, love.”

She turned to face a man in a navy blue uniform and a bright orange work vest.

“I don’t have it,” she said. “I put the ticket in the machine. It took it.”

“You’re supposed to take it back,” he said with a sigh. “It comes back out.”

He went over to one of the metal boxes and touched some unseen button or lever. The gates clapped open for her. She hurried through, too embarrassed to even look back.

The first thing that hit her was the smell of a recent rain. The sidewalk was still wet and was fairly thick with people who politely moved around her and her backpack. The street was jammed full of real London traffic, just like in the pictures. The cars were tightly packed together, all going in the wrong direction. An actual red double-decker bus lumbered along.

As soon as she turned off the main road, everything became much quieter. She found herself on a narrow street with a zigzagging line that cut down the middle. The houses were all chalk white and were nearly identical except for the colors of their doors (mostly black, but occasionally there was a red or a blue) and they all had multiple chimney pots poking out of the top, along with antennas and satellite dishes. The effect was weird—it was like a space station had crashed into a Charles Dickens story.

Number 54a had a jagged crack running down the six concrete steps that led to its front door. Several large pots lined these steps, each containing plants that didn’t exactly look like they had been condemned to death on purpose. They were weak and small but still making an effort. Someone had obviously tried, and failed, to keep them alive.

Ginny paused at the base of the steps. This had a very good chance of being a major mistake. Aunt Peg had some very unusual friends. Like the performance artist roommate—the one who ate her own hair onstage. Or the guy who spent a month communicating only through interpretive dance as a form of protest (against what, no one really knew).

No. She had come this far. She wasn’t going to give up on the very first step. She walked up the stairs and knocked at the door.

“Hang on a moment,” a voice called from inside. “Just a moment.”

The voice was British (which really shouldn’t have surprised her but still did). It was also male. Not an old voice. She heard a thumping—someone running downstairs. And then the door swung open.

The man standing in front of her was in the process of getting dressed. The first thing that surprised Ginny was that he was wearing half a black suit (the pants). A silver gray tie hung loosely around his neck, and his shirt was only half tucked in. Aunt Peg’s friends did not usually wear suits (or even parts of suits) and ties. It was less of a surprise that he was handsome—tall, with very dark, slightly curly hair and highly arched eyebrows. Aunt Peg attracted people with lots of personality, lots of charm.

The man gaped at her for a moment, then hurriedly tucked in his shirt.

“Are you Virginia?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Ginny said. The yeah came out too broad, and she suddenly heard her own accent. “I mean, yes. That’s me. I’m Ginny. How did you know?”

“Just a guess,” he said, his eyes lingering over her bag. “I’m Richard.”

“I’m Ginny,” she said again. She gave her head a quick snap to try to get the blood flowing up there again.

Richard clearly had a moment of confusion over what kind of greeting to give her. He finally stuck out his hand for her bag.

“It’s a good thing you caught me. I wasn’t sure when you were coming. I wasn’t even sure if you were coming.”

“Well, I’m here,” she said.

They nodded at each other for a moment in acknowledgment of this fact until Richard seemed to be physically struck by a thought.

“You should come in,” he said.

He opened the door wider and grimaced only slightly as he relieved Ginny of the groaning purple-and-green backpack.

Richard gave her a quick tour that revealed that 54a Pennington Street was just a house—not an artists’ colony, or a commune, or any kind of sociological experiment. It was a fairly plainly decorated one at that. It looked like it might have been shipped straight out of an office supply catalog. Low-pile carpet. Simple furniture in flat navy blues and blacks. Nothing on the walls. Nothing, that is, until they came to a small, sunny bedroom.

“This was Peg’s room,” Richard said, opening the door. But Ginny didn’t need to be told that. It was a miniature version of the 4th Noodle apartment. In fact, the room resembled the apartment so closely it was almost spooky. It wasn’t that she had furnished it or painted it exactly the same—it was the method. The walls had been washed down in pink and then covered in an elaborate collage of…well, trash, really. (When Ginny’s mom got annoyed with her little sister, she tended to make comments about Aunt Peg’s trash-picking habit. “She’s got other people’s garbage all over her walls!”)

But it wasn’t bad, smelly trash—it was labels, bits of old magazines, candy bar wrappers. If anyone else had attempted this, the result would have been dizzying, nauseating. But Aunt Peg managed to arrange it all by color, by type style, by image, so that it all looked like it belonged together. Like it all made sense. One wall had been left collage-free, and on it hung a poster Ginny recognized. It was a French painting of a young woman standing behind a bar. It was an old picture, from the late 1800s. The woman wore an elegant blue dress, and the bar she was tending was opulent—marble, loaded down with bottles. The mirror behind her head reflected a crowd and a show. But she looked terribly, terribly bored.

“It’s Manet,” she said. “It’s called The Bar at the Folies-Bergère.”

“Is it?”

Richard blinked, as if he’d never noticed the poster there before. “I don’t really know anything about art,” he said apologetically. “It’s nice, I suppose. Nice…colors.”

Good one, Ginny thought. Now he probably thought she was some kind of art nerd who was only here because she had outgrown art-nerd camp. She only knew the name and artist of this one because Aunt Peg had had the exact same picture in her apartment, and the title and artist had been written at the bottom of the print.

Richard was still staring blankly at the poster.

“I don’t really know much about it either,” Ginny said. “It’s okay.”

“Oh. Right.” He seemed a bit reassured by that. “You look exhausted. Maybe you’d like to have a rest? Again, I’m sorry, I wish I had known when…but you’re here, so…”

Ginny looked at the bed, with its crazy-quilt cover. This was Aunt Peg’s handiwork as well. She’d had similar items all over her apartment, all made of random, mismatched pieces of cloth. She wanted to stretch out on this bed so badly she could almost taste it.

“Well, I…I have to go,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to come with me? I work at Harrods. The big department store. It’s as good a place as any to start seeing London. Peg loved Harrods. We can sort everything out later. What do you say?”

“Sure,” Ginny said, with one final, sad look at the bed. “Let’s go.”

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