London

London in the novel is more than the backdrop to a private affair. It is a city of cramped rooms, dinner parties, unfamiliar social codes, and precarious belonging, where the characters’ intimate lives intersect with histories of exile and political surveillance. Its meaning sharpens through contrast: London can feel alien to those who live there, yet it also becomes a vantage point from which to reconsider home, freedom, and identity.

Private Rooms and the Affair

An exchange about the room in which a love affair is taking place turns London’s private space into a practical measure of intimacy. Asked to describe the room, one participant points out that it is too small for two people to conduct an affair in; the reply imagines finding a house with a bed. The brief exchange makes the setting both comic and constraining. The affair has to fit inside a limited physical space, while the wish for a house suggests a more expansive arrangement that the encounter itself does not provide.

The city’s intimate geography is also recalled through a previous life in New York City, where the lovers describe themselves as having been criminals on Eighty-first Street. That memory makes London part of a continuing relationship rather than a wholly separate chapter: a later conversation about life in London reaches back to the lovers’ earlier shared past. The recollection does not erase the difference between the cities, but makes the affair’s history travel with them.

Exile, Work, and Political Pressure

A Czech-born woman’s account gives London a longer history of migration and dislocation. She describes leaving Czechoslovakia for the United States after Russian tanks arrived in 1968, living on the Upper East Side, and later returning to Europe. After she came to England, the man she had married in order to get out of her former circumstances expected her to be happy to have been rescued. Instead, she was miserable, missed her friends, and struggled to make a life in a society whose ordinary social world felt difficult to enter. She took various jobs, including typing and selling books at Foyle’s, but was dismissed from the bookshop after arguing with its manager. Her story makes arrival in England no simple passage from danger to safety: escape is followed by loneliness, economic uncertainty, and the effort to live among people with whom she feels she has little in common.

Her recollections also connect London to political pressure that began elsewhere and followed her across borders. In Czechoslovakia, she says, she was taken for questioning after being found at a hotel with Philip. The authorities asked how she knew him and whether she had slept with him; she remembers being twenty-one, frightened, and unable to know what might happen. Years later, while working in the American Library, she learned that the organization overseeing foreign employment was in reality a branch of the secret service. After two years in the job, she was called back and pressed to sign a document making the discussion a state secret. She refused, as she also refused an approach from the Americans. The choices placed before her show how political institutions could reach into ordinary employment and personal life; her refusal left her facing an uncertain future at work.

London is where she can tell this history to Philip, but telling it does not make the original fear disappear. Her account ranges from the library and the competing approaches to her past questioning and the consequences of her earlier contact with him. The movement between present conversation and remembered events gives the city a layered role: it is the place where the story is spoken, while the pressures being described were formed across several countries.

A City That Remains Opaque

For Nathan, London is at once a daily workplace and a social world he cannot quite read. In a later phone conversation, he describes spending the day writing in his room and attending cultural or social events in the evening, which he finds opaque and English to him. His former lover’s correction that such social events are called dinner parties turns cultural estrangement into a small, revealing joke. The difficulty is not simply that he lacks a schedule or company; even the name of a familiar social form marks the distance between participation and belonging.

Dinner parties also carry a particular complication for him: he is seated beside other men’s wives. The detail brings the city’s public social ritual into contact with the hidden arrangement of his private life. A place meant for polite conversation becomes a reminder of the affair and of the boundaries that govern its disclosure. London’s social life thus does not resolve the separation between public respectability and private desire; it repeatedly stages it.

The conversation also presents London as a condition of heightened sensitivity. A speaker compares the person living away from home to someone especially susceptible to a spark, defining a tinderbox as material that readily catches fire. The response describes working at translation for three hours after returning from the office, completing house duties, and putting a daughter to bed, in an effort to make life more meaningful and useful. The exchange joins displacement to the daily labor of language: translation occupies time and effort, while the dictionary becomes part of the routine through which a person tries to make a life in another place.

London, Home, and Jewish Belonging

The city’s distance from home becomes clearest in a later contrast between London and New York City. Nathan describes his London life as culturally opaque, while his words about Jewish identity imagine New York City as a place of force, appetite, anger, argument, and unaccommodating public presence. He contrasts that brashness with what he experiences as England’s excessive Christianity, and says that even Tel Aviv seems too Christian by comparison with New York City. The comparison is deliberately expansive and comic, but its emotional direction is clear: London’s difference intensifies his longing for a Jewish environment in which outspoken, unapologetic behavior feels familiar and restorative.

That longing appears not as a neutral description of either city but as a measure of Nathan’s own displacement. In his account, seeing people push to be first and encounter one another with unembarrassed pugnacity helps him remember what it means to be human. London, by contrast, is associated with the feeling of being out of place and with social manners he experiences as foreign. The contrast gives urban belonging an intimate scale: it is registered in speech, argument, and everyday conduct as much as in geography.

The City in a Wider Narrative Geography

London also sits within a larger pattern of movement between places. Nathan’s account of a 1975 police stop in Prague describes his refusal to go to a police station, his escape aboard a trolley, and his return to his hotel after a Czech friend reassured him that the police had meant only to intimidate him. The friend was questioned that night, and Nathan later found that he could no longer obtain a visa. The episode gives political surveillance a concrete consequence: a brief street confrontation alters Nathan’s future access to Czechoslovakia. Set beside his life in London, it shows that travel and residence are shaped not only by personal choice but also by state power.

The novel’s London is therefore neither simply a refuge nor merely a foreign setting. It gathers private encounters, memories of other cities, accounts of coercion, and the repeated labor of trying to belong. Its cramped rooms contain an affair; its dinner parties expose the tension between that affair and public life; and its unfamiliar social world makes the desire for home newly audible. London’s significance lies in holding these experiences together without making them coincide: the city offers a place to live and speak, but it does not automatically become home.