“Well, I gotta admit, all these paintings all together like this, it does make the place look pretty ghosty,” he said. “Don’t you ever get nervous when you’re here by yourself?”

“Never,” she answered at once, facing him again. And the vehemence of what she said next—all in those crystal tones—astonished him.

“I love it here,” she told him. “This is where I want to die.”

9

A strange feeling came over him now as he wandered home, a thundercloud of foreboding. Nothing felt right to him. Nothing felt good or clear. The sensation rose from the center of him and seeped out into his surroundings. Everything began to seem dead to him and strange.

He traveled back on foot, along the thoroughfares. Piccadilly. Knightsbridge. The wide streets were rushing and rumbling with black cabs and double-decker buses. The sky was roiling, grandiose, over the Wellington arch, over the statue of the Iron Duke mounted, watchful. The dome of Harrod’s was lit by little white lights like Christmas, and the sidewalks underneath were bustling and wintry. And yet it all looked flat and dead to him, dead and strange.

On the Fulham Road there was an old hospital, a looming brick Victorian monster, ponderous with history. There was a brick wall beside it, overhung with robinia branches. As Storm passed it, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, a black mongrel barked at him. The owner, an old woman, tried to rein the dog in, but it strained against its leash and snarled, backing Storm to the wall. Slowly, the old woman managed to drag the hound away. She called apologies to Storm over her shoulder. He walked on. But the incident upset him. Hounded, that’s how he felt.

What was he doing here? he asked himself. In this foreign city, with all these foreign people around him. What had he come here to find? Ghosts? Really? A smart guy like him? Was he really looking for ghosts? Well, it had seemed a reasonable idea at the time. After all those movies he’d made. It had seemed like a logical step. Sort of like what Sophia had said about the Enlightenment and the Romantics: this was his own private quest on behalf of faith and the human spirit, his answer to the relentlessly rational, the implacable scientists, the doctors with their bland, pitiless expressions. It realty had struck him as a sensible thing to do.

Now it seemed ridiculous. Ludicrous, useless, stupid. Here he was, five thousand miles from home, hanging around with an eccentric old crazy woman, breaking his heart over a girl half his age, running away, wasting his precious days …