The policeman
A white-haired Irish policeman on Long Island who finds Sabina wandering at two in the morning looking for a chemist. He is the only person in the novel who is simply kind to her, and he is the one who tells her about John.
To get her to sleep, which is what he sets about doing and what he refuses to give up on until it works.
The book
At a glance
- A night-duty policeman in the Long Island section
- Never given
- Worked as a bodyguard, and tells rambling stories about it
- He is how Sabina first hears about John
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe policeman appears for a few pages in the middle of A Spy in the House of Love, the 1954 novel by the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin. He has no name. He is on night duty in a comfortable Long Island beach town where the novel's central character, Sabina, is staying alone and cannot sleep.
She has been walking the streets since one in the morning looking for a chemist that is open, because she wants sleeping pills. He picks her up in his car. What he does next is the whole part: he drives home, fetches a glass of water and two aspirin from his own kitchen, shows her the flowers in his garden, and drives her round by the sea until she is too tired to stay awake.
He also, without knowing it, hands her the next section of the book. Making conversation about homesickness, he mentions the other person who has given him trouble that day: a young man who flew all through the war and has been grounded, and who now rides through red lights. That is John, and Sabina goes looking for him.
This profile is drawn from the Swallow Press edition of 1995, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the book.
How the book draws them
- "Boy trouble?"His opening guess, delivered with a white-haired, suave rectitude that Sabina reads as coming from some deeper pride rather than from police training. The words are so inadequate that she gives up on confiding in him and talks about beach towns instead.
- The glass of water and two aspirinHe parks beside a neat white house, tells her to wait, goes inside, and comes back carrying them in the palm of his hand. She takes them obediently and her nerves start to untangle.
- The roses of SharonHe turns his flashlight on a bush in his own garden and tells her to look at it, reverently and in a pure Irish accent, and says they grow only in Ireland and on Long Island.
- Refusing to drop her offShe says she will sleep now and asks to be left at her cottage. He stays at the wheel and says no — they will drive around by the sea until she cannot bear it any more.
- What he says about sleepThat you cannot sleep until you find something to be grateful for, and that you can never sleep when you are angry. It is the plainest piece of advice anybody gives her in the book.
- The story he passes onRambling about his years as a bodyguard, he mentions the second homesick case of his day: a boy of the English Air Corps who volunteered at seventeen, flew through the whole war, and cannot take being grounded. He speeds and breaks traffic laws and the red lights drive him crazy, so the policeman has stopped giving him tickets.