Mrs. Russell

If in June, 2008, I find myself gazing a mile or two north across Holland Park to my rooming house in Norland Square, here's what I will see.  I will see a man in the early 1970s who had no job, but did have a schedule.  In those days, I left my bedsitter each morning for a therapy appointment in the West End.  At first, my bedsitting room was a very small one.  There was a bed, a sink, a table, a dresser, some shelves and a window.  Mine was a small world, smaller than I was used to.  But my scale was adjusting anyway.  My walking range did not extend beyond the Holland Park tube station in one dimension, the Prince of Wales pub in another.

This meant the morning's descent of the stairs was a long, slow transition.  There was no bounding out the door and up the street.  Everything had to be done carefully, slowly and with vigilance.  The stairway at 41 Norland Square required two flights to get from the ground floor to mine above.  The toilet and shower, shared by other tenants, was on the landing between the flights.  Sometimes I would stop and use the toilet on the way down or up.  Often, I would use the sink in my room.  I never discussed this fact with visitors.  Most probably knew.  In any case, the steps were numerous, the experience formidable and not always solitary.

Sometimes, I would hear a door slam on the landing upstairs, shortly after my own.  In moments, Mrs. Russell would appear, rounding the steeper steps to the upper floors.  She was always dressed to go out.  I am singularly oblivious to details of makeup and attire but capable of grasping the overall effect of a person's presentation.  Mrs. Russell was going out.  She wore a hat, stockings and a skirt of somewhat girlish length and, frequently, gloves.  Her hats were often ornate, a feather, artificial flower or some other adornment setting the tone.  She walked down the steps faster than I did, which was most annoying.  The room-to-outside transition was a precious one, somehow, and a Mrs. Russell seemed like something of an invasion.  Nonetheless, here she was, picking her way down the stone steps with a gait that I now recognize as the combined effect of high heels and arthritis.

"Oh, hello."  She always sounded surprised, albeit pleasantly, to see me.  I was surprised to see myself every morning, still alive and now paralyzed and living in a cold distant climate.  So Mrs. Russell's surprise didn't surprise me.  "It's a fine day," she would say.  Precisely how she knew this always eluded me.  But Mrs. Russell had a window, after all, and had every right to make her own meteorological judgments.  A fine day seemed to mean the rain was not stinging like cold needles, the wind not howling from Siberia.  A fine day meant a day, any day, Mrs. Russell decided to go out.  Which meant every day.  As far as I could see.

I could not see very far.  The therapy I was headed for each morning was of the psychotherapy sort, and mornings were tinged with fear, afternoons sinking into relief.  Mrs. Russell and I were both going out.  I wasn't discussing my destination, nor my 50 supine minutes on a leather couch.  I did not expect Mrs. Russell to discuss hers.  Still, I was a lonely person and recognized this quality in others.  Life was softening me in this way, even teaching me that the slow descent of a stairway was as much an opportunity as a burden.  Mrs. Russell was not going to venture beyond observations of the weather, but I could and would.  For I was young, and this was my prerogative.

Mrs. Russell and I had descended the first flight, and we were now rounding the landing, me sticking my crutch tip against the stone steps that led to the loo.  I told her that I was going to see a play.  Which play, I honestly can't recall.  They were cheap in those days.  I had little money but lots of time, and taking a bus to Leicester Square was no big deal.  So I was going to see a play, and this news seemed to break our pattern, Mrs. Russell's and mine.  "Ohhhhh," she purred, "I was in the theatre."

Several stone steps passed beneath our feet, while I contemplated this.  Amateur theatrics.  Community players.  Lots of people had been in the theater.  What the hell, encourage her.

"Oh," she said in response, "in India, you see.  Before the war, of course.  We played all over, towns and cities.  My husband and I."

Years later, I saw 'Shakespeare Wallah,' James Ivory's famous film about a colonial touring company in the days of the Raj.  But for now, I knew nothing about India and the English hunger for home and people like Mrs. Russell who imported a bit of colonial culture to the land of chapatis and Krishna.  I had little time or energy to encourage her, but this didn't matter because the time was provided, free of charge, by dint of my paralyzed leg and clicking crutch.  As for energy, she provided that.  I learned in the course of descending the stairs many days, over the course of four years, that Mrs. Russell was devoted to her husband, that when they returned from India he could only get small parts in provincial theaters.  She could get nothing.  Eventually they had moved into this rooming house, both of them.  He had died, and now she was on her own, getting dressed every day, going down the stairs.  And out.

Surely she went shopping.  This conclusion was one I reached without much deliberation.  In retrospect, I suppose this was a very American assumption.  Mrs. Russell, living on an old age pensioner's income, had to watch every penny.  There was nothing recreational about shopping.  She went out, that was all.  In fair weather, whatever that meant in London, she could go to one of the parks.  Otherwise, she could simply go.  Up the street, past the shops, among the houses and back.  

I found myself one day changing buses at Notting Hill Gate, the next neighborhood beyond ours.  The streets were crowded, buses belching their diesel smoke in competition with the cabs, maritime weather blowing overhead.  As I gazed across the street, idly staring at people passing the bookmaker's, I saw an elderly woman clutching her purse, her florid hat unmistakable.  She looked up the street, glanced at the newsagent's, seeming to look at everything and nothing, and went on her way, walking remarkably fast and as though she had a purpose.

Near the end of my time in London, after a two-week visit in California, I came home to find my landlady carrying boxes down our stairs.  Eternally flushed in the British way, ever modest, Janet was hard at work.  The cabdriver deposited my bags on the landing.  Janet, with barely a word, picked them up.  I thanked her.  And how's it going?  Oh, she had been busy.  I recognized the pause.  I had been living in Britain long enough to pick up the signals.  I knew it was my turn to say nothing.  Janet took my keys, dropped the bags inside.  On the landing she turned and said that Mrs. Russell had died.  What happened?  Pneumonia.  Janet had nursed her.  She had not asked for much, Janet said.  Only some brandy at the end.

I was tired from a long journey.  In effect, I had been up all night.  It didn't seem right to me that anything in Norland Square could change.  Everything was different when I visited California.  But I expected there to always be an England, always be a Mrs. Russell.  And there was something else.  I told Janet that Mrs. Russell did not seem old enough to have died.  She was 83, Janet said.  She didn't look it, I said.  She did in the end, Janet said.  I watched her pick up the box and head down the stairs.  I didn't ask where she was going with Mrs. Russell's things.  It was enough to see that they were her things, all that was left of her life.  I shut the door.