Netherland. Joseph O’Neill

       Chapter 1

      The afternoon before I left London for New York – Rachel had flown out six weeks previously – I was in my cubicle at work, boxing up my possessions, when a senior vice president at the bank, an Englishman in his fifties, came to wish me well. I was surprised; he worked in another part of the building and in another department, and we were known to each other only by sight. Nevertheless, he asked me in detail about where I intended to live (‘Watts? Which block on Watts?’) and reminisced for several minutes about his loft on Wooster Street and his outings to the ‘original’ Dean & DeLuca. He was doing nothing to hide his envy.

      ‘We won’t be gone for very long,’ I said, playing down my good fortune. That was, in fact, the plan, conceived by my wife: to drop in on New York City for a year or three and then come back.

      ‘You say that now,’ he said. ‘But New York’s a very hard place to leave. And once you do leave …’ The SVP, smiling, said, ‘I still miss it, and I left twelve years ago.’

      It was my turn to smile – in part out of embarrassment, because he’d spoken with an American openness. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said.

      ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You will.’

      His sureness irritated me, though principally he was pitiable – like one of those Petersburgians of yesteryear whose duties have washed him up on the wrong side of the Urals.

      But it turns out he was right, in a way. Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feeling that life carries a taint of aftermath.

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