![roxane gay pass death my beloved roxane gay pass death my beloved](https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-ST160_2PgMo_MP_20170331123821.jpg)
Really, it was an inoffensive enough thing to encounter on a Hampstead lawn, and no one else would have afforded it more than a glance. Its having been uprooted in this manner filled me with the same distaste and pity as would an elephant trained to stand up on its hind legs in a circus act. It transported me no further southwards, nowhere more exotic or alluring, than Torquay, that insipid jewel of the “English Riviera” – Torquay of the palm-skirted putting greens and promenades. The presence of the palm, set to very moot advantage by a meandering string of little white pebbles that looped around its base and an arrangement of turquoise-and-yellow flowers so orderly it might have served as a pattern on a woman’s blouse, only underscored how alien it was to its setting. Yet its effect on me, as an uneasiness of spirit invested the matter with an intensity I could not explain, was completely the reverse. The intention had doubtless been to contribute an inkling of exoticism to the dull, housebroken leafiness of NW3, to make of this poor solitary palm tree a synecdoche and symbol of the light and warmth and colour of which the British quotidian round is so starved. But pride of place had been given by the house’s occupiers to, of all improbable trees, a palm. It was laid out, naively symmetrically, with plants in pots and flowers in flowerbeds, to practically none of which I, a writer so often praised for my descriptive powers, could have put a name. It was, however, the garden itself to which my attention was drawn. There was, as I could not help thinking, something most definitely un-Hampstead in such arch and suburban artfulness. This had been contrived out of a single piece of varnished wood which reminded me of some old-fashioned painter’s palette (although the two shapes were in fact quite dissimilar) and on which was carved, in letters not numbers, Forty-Three A. Emphasising its toy like aspect was the number-sign nailed on to the gate. The house in front of which I happened to be standing, and on whose garden wall was affixed the signpost that had caught my eye, differed from its neighbours in appearing tolerably new, certainly newly repainted that combined with a vague Dutch or pseudo-Dutch style of architecture and a very unrambling rock garden lent it a queerly miniaturised look. Only now did I view the need to consider my immediate surroundings as an imperative one. But I had observed none of these, for as I descended the avenue at an uncommonly lively tread my observations had all been of a seethingly internal order. Here and there, too, one passes a church, an orphanage or a convent school. Fitzjohn’s Avenue is almost entirely residential, bordered by large and pleasant if sometimes slightly uncommunicative private houses with rambling and even derelict front gardens and red-brick walls high enough to hide from the undesired gaze of a passer-by all but their rooftops or low enough to expose the whole fa”ade from driveway to chimney pots or else suddenly giving way to a slatted, charred-looking sort of fencing.
#Roxane gay pass death my beloved free
The pavements on both sides of the street were free of pedestrians and no traffic seemed to be travelling in either direction. I had left home, it’s true, with no specific destination in mind, just an enervated conviction that I “had to get out”, and it was no doubt when I reached that stretch of Fitzjohn’s Avenue where it might be said to gather speed, as it were, like a current about to plunge headlong into the ocean of the metropolis that lies beneath it, and when I knew, if only “unconsciously”, that I had been following a longer and straighter path than was feasible within the snug, verdant maze of Hampstead proper, with all its lamplit ‘crescents’ and ‘rises’ and ‘rows’, that an obscure territorial mechanism cautioned me to stop and take stock. Instead, I must have taken Frognal Rise and by some circuitous route of which I had only the very vaguest recollection – possibly by Church Row? – now found myself moving out of Hampstead altogether.