He lives in his white stucco house in an expensive postcode, and goes forth to his club in Pall Mall, to Wiltons or Rules, to Covent Garden (a couple of times a year), to the Royal Academy and the Tate and the British Library and the British Museum. He visits the House of Lords less and less frequently; the debates are tedious, the company dismayingly mixed nowadays, and the food appalling. He uses buses whose routes are familiar to him, finding the Freedom Pass that Rose obtained most satisfactory (one doesn’t need to fumble for change). On the buses his plane intersects with those of many others—people who are ignorant of the British Museum and the Royal Academy, whose own London backdrop would be as alien to Henry as a North African souk or downtown Moscow, just as the destination of many of the buses are entirely mysterious to him—Clapton Pond, Whipp’s Cross, Hackney Wick. London is said to be an agglomeration of villages; not at all, London is a vast entity within which people move around, each upon their own exclusive level, ignoring all that is unknown and irrelevant.
