“Action?” And at this hour of the morning. I looked around nervously. Where was his mother? Why wasn’t she here seeing that he ate a proper breakfast and kept his mind on the higher things in life?
“Yeah!” His eyes gleamed. “I want to slip the leash on those dodos and get where it’s all happening. Like, where is it, man? Where’s Carnaby Street?”
“Carnaby Street?” I went limp with relief. That was all he wanted to know—the way to Carnaby Street. Perhaps he wasn’t so precocious, after all. I wondered if I should tell him how long ago the parade had passed Carnaby Street by, but I decided against it. If I did, he might want to know where it was happening now—and I wasn’t sure I knew myself, it moved so fast. He’d be surrounded by enough American tourists snapping pictures of each other to be convinced that he was seeing Life in Swinging London.
“If I were you,” I said, man-to-man, “I’d take a taxi there on a day like this.”
“Good thinking, man.” Elaborately leisurely, he stood. “I might do just that.” The quick, telltale glance around the room gave him away. He wanted to get out of here before his mother arrived and stopped him.
“Have fun,” I said, and watched him clear the dining room and the front lobby safely.
I began to feel cheered. One less in the minibus must mean a certain lightening of the atmosphere. It was a pity we couldn’t lose a few more of them.
I paid my bill and wandered out into the lobby. Jim Davis was reading a newspaper. Kathryn Lamb was in the sedan chair making a telephone call. I thought she looked rather tense, but perhaps it was just the effect of shadows from the light outside.
It was ten o’clock and no one from the tour was in sight. That was the essence of Larkin’s Luxury Tours, of course—leisure. There was no chivvying the clients about—no starting out at unearthly hours of the morning. It had been gently suggested to them that assembly in the lobby at ten A.M. would mean an early start. That was the Larkin method. When enough tourists were milling about in the lobby, checking their watches and grumbling, some of them would volunteer to go and chase the laggards themselves. Thus the tour was chivvied out more or less on time, while Larkin’s didn’t get the blame. If some of them hated each other by the end of the trip, well, it would have been the same on any tour, and they’d had an extra hour or so to sleep. Which was fairly luxurious, compared with what a lot of other tour companies offered.
Turning the page, Jim glanced up, saw me, and jerked his head. Obediently, I crossed over to him.
“Do me a favour today,” he said. “Bag the seat behind me. And don’t let them move you. I can’t drive with someone breathing down my neck.”
I grinned. “Having trouble?”
“She thinks my accent is ‘cute.’ ” His shoulders writhed under some unhappy memory.
“Can’t you tell her you’re a happily married man?”
“I did, but she won’t believe it. Her just having had her fourth divorce, herself. She says there’s no such thing as a happy marriage. If you’re happy, it just means you haven’t found out all the truth yet.”
I could see he’d had quite an afternoon yesterday. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try to get that seat.”
“Don’t try, mate,” he said. “Bleedin’ well do it.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “If I don’t succeed, perhaps you can put in for danger money.”
“Lot of good that’ll do me when I’m—” He looked beyond me and groaned. “Oh, gawd, ’ere she comes.”
I turned around slowly. Paula Drayton was bearing down on us determinedly. In her wake, not quite so determined, but still with some strangely disturbing resemblance to her mother, Donna drifted. She seemed to be looking for someone or something. Paula had found what she was looking for.
“We’re here,” she said, beaming at Jim, “and you’re waiting for us. Isn’t that nice?”
“You mean nobody else is around yet?” Donna’s question was one Jim looked as though he’d rather answer. “Not anybody at all?”
“Am I late?” Tony Christopher hurried up to us. “I’m not keeping you waiting, am I?”
“You’re not,” Paula said pointedly. Donna glanced at him, then looked toward the lifts again. He was not the one she was waiting for. I had an inkling who that might be, but didn’t say anything. Once would be enough to explain where he had taken off to.
“Oh, them again, huh?” Unlikely allied, their glance of mutual exasperation told me a lot about the way the tour was going.
This was confirmed when the schoolteachers hurried out of the lift. They, too, exchanged glances and slowed down, pausing to buy a newspaper at the desk before strolling over to join us.
“I guess we’re not as late as we thought,” Billie Mae said.
“We never are,” Winnie said.
Marie Manzetti was next out of the lift. She, too, was in no hurry after sighting our group. She nodded, rather gloomily, to the others, but didn’t speak.
So the tour was neatly split into two factions: the college side and the others. A variation, perhaps, of the town-versus-gown situation; with which the gown, at least, was already familiar.
“I suppose we might as well sit down,” Tony said.
“If you ask me,” Paula said, “I think we ought to go without them. It would serve them right. They’re always pulling this stunt. Who do they think they are?”
“Maybe they’re in a state of shock, after what happened,” Billie Mae said. The schoolteachers were in the middle in any town-and-gown controversy. It was neither their town nor their gown, but they obviously felt vaguely that they ought to be on the side of the education group, even though they couldn’t wholeheartedly agree with them.
“Shock—hell!” Paula said bitterly. “The nosy old bitch got just what was coming to her!”
There was a nasty pause while we all digested this. Then Tony Christopher cut in abruptly, “That’s no way to talk about a poor lady that committed suicide. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
“Oh, be honest,” Paula snapped. “She was a drag all the way—always moping around, moaning about something, shoving her nose into everybody’s business. The only trouble is that she didn’t do it sooner—like, before she had time to ruin the trip for everybody else.”
“She was an unhappy woman,” Marie said. “Very unhappy. Be sorry for her.”
It was smoothly, neatly, covered—but the implication was there. Again, I felt as though I’d stepped off a kerb I hadn’t noticed.
Paula shrugged and turned away; the conversation was over. Donna stayed where she was, facing the lifts, her face set in the half-defensive, half-defiant expression young people get when they feel their elders are behaving badly. Come to think of it, the lines of her face were already well set in that mold. With Paula for a mother, the expression must be habitual.
Kate emerged from the sedan chair phone booth and looked around, counting noses. She didn’t miss the general restiveness, but Larkin policy forbade any direct action.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, while we wait for the others to come down?” she suggested.
Tony checked his watch. “Maybe I ought to go and try to get them? If we want to get started today, that is.”
“Well …,” Kate hesitated gracefully.
“Right!” He wheeled on his heel and started for the lifts. Just as he reached them, one opened and the gown contingent moved out of it and across the lobby in a solid phalanx. I fought an impulse to retreat before them. There was something decidedly unsettling in the determined tread of their advance. Whatever was coming boded no good.
For once, Professor Tablor was in the rear—another little signal that indicated a stormy passage. Hortense Rogers marched across the lobby, the others trailing behind her. She, alone, appeared to have any enthusiasm for what was about to happen. She stopped short and faced Kate and myself challengingly.
“We’ve talked it over,” she said. “We’ve been conferring for hours—and it’s no good. We want
to go home.”
“You mean, break up the tour?” Paula Drayton snapped to attention. “You can’t do that.”
“Now, let’s not be too hasty,” Tris Tablor said. “As a matter of fact, we’re not one hundred percent agreed on this step. This is just a sort of preliminary sounding out—”
“We voted.” Hortense whirled on him. “The Board of Governors are all agreed”—she faced down John and Sandra Peters and Ben Varley until they gave small, unhappy nods—“that it is really the best step to take. We feel it only right that we should be home for poor Carrie’s funeral on Thursday.”
“Carrie was the last person in the world”—Tablor was still in there pitching—“who’d have wanted any fuss. She’d never have expected us to give up—” “What about the rest of us?” Paula demanded. “What happens to our tour? It’s supposed to last for two more weeks—Scotland, Wales, and Ireland we’ve got to do yet. Where does that leave us, if you quit and go home?”
“I’m sure,” Hortense said smoothly, “that the tour can continue without us. If not, then I’m sure you’ll be given your money back.
“By the way”—she turned to me—“I’m assuming that there will be some adjustment in the way of a refund for us. After you’ve transferred us from the ship to a plane, there should still be a substantial amount due to us.”
It was just as well she hadn’t made that comment to Kate Lamb. Kate, who was aware of the small profit margin Neil Larkin had to operate on during these first few years of getting started, had gone deadwhite. Fortunately, my own face had no other colour to change to. My first year in PR had turned it permanently ashen.
“I’m sure we can come to a satisfactory arrangement,” I said smoothly, neglecting to designate which side would be satisfied by it. “Meanwhile, now that we’re all here, shouldn’t we make a start? We’re visiting Canterbury and the cathedral today.”
“Following the trail of Chaucer’s pilgrims,” Kate said, coming back to life, automatically dropping into her monologue.
“We’re not all here.” Hortense looked around. “Horace promised he’d meet me downstairs. He isn’t here yet. We must wait for him.”
“Er … Horace has gone off on his own today,” I told her reluctantly.
“Gone—where?”
“He … mentioned Carnaby Street,” I admitted.
“Carnaby Street!” It was an agonized wail from Hortense, an envious one from Donna. There was no doubt about it, the place spelled Mecca to the American young and Gomorrah to their parents.
‘I wanted to go to Carnaby Street,” Donna said. “He promised he’d take me.”
Both mothers immediately saw the bright side—it could have been a lot worse.
“Horace probably forgot,” Hortense said quickly. “I’m sure he had a lot more than that to think about.”
“You’ll stay here,” Paula said, “and go to Canterbury with us. It will do you a lot more good. And I must say it’s going to be nice to get one side trip without that little wise guy making nasty cracks about everything.”
“Horace is not overawed by history, just because it’s old,” Hortense said. “I brought him up to have a mind of his own—and I’m delighted to see him using it. Too much awe of the past indicates a complete lack of background.”
“Is that so?” Paula snapped. “Maybe my ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower—but I wouldn’t believe yours did if you showed me their tickets. And furthermore—”
“Ladies, ladies—” I began, then caught Jim’s glance and remembered what I had promised him. I nodded and followed him out to the minibus, bagging the seat behind him and putting my briefcase and camera on the place beside me.
“Shall we board the coach now?” Kate took up where I had left off and herded them out to the bus.
When they boarded, I was well settled-in, camera and flash bulbs spread all over the seat beside me, the picture of business.
Paula hesitated, then took the seat behind me. I could see Jim relax slightly.
For the most part, everyone took the positions they had had yesterday. I loaded the camera, stood up, and faced them cheerfully.
“All right, everybody,” I said, “let’s get a picture before we start. Everybody smile.”
They hadn’t much to smile about, but Americans are camera-trained. Teeth bared, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, up and down the aisle. There were the usual gasps from the unwary, who always look directly at the flashbulbs, and the minibus rolled off along the Pilgrim’s Way.
Chapter 6
Down the Old Kent Road, past the outskirts of London, through the Weald of Kent—and all in abstracted silence. No questions, no comments. Kate, who was obviously growing a bit desperate, was reduced to throwing a couple of expurgated Canterbury Tales into her talk. Even these brought no reaction. I began to miss Young Horace; even a snigger would have seemed more companionable than this.
True, they had a lot on their minds. Half the tour wanted to pick up their marbles and go home; the other half didn’t. I could see both points of view. Saying so wouldn’t make me popular with either side. The only thing to do was play it straight and let Neil sort it out. Presumably, he would have covered himself in some way, in case of absolute disaster. And if it could get much more disastrous than this, I didn’t want to know about it.
We stopped for lunch at the usual Ye Olde. Under the thatched roof, some of the sharpest brains in the business had reduced the slivering of roast beef to a fine art. If it got much finer, it would be nonexistent. The tour apparently accepted it as a matter of course. All of them still seemed to be pretty much preoccupied with their own thoughts.
Mindful of my debacle yesterday, I got as far from the tour as possible. There was a small table in the corner, where I lighted with Jim. Even so, we were a bit too near the main group.
Kate had had to sit at the table with them, and occasionally, we heard her solitary voice, still trying to keep a semblance of conversation going. She was getting very little help. It was too bad I wasn’t feeling noble enough to join her. At least, we could have talked to each other.
I was foolishly relaxing, rash enough to lift my head and look around the room. That was when my gaze rested on the doorway, just as Paula and Donna entered—they must have stopped off.
Paula met my eyes and immediately headed for us, ignoring the rest of the tour. Donna followed, as she always seemed fated to.
“There now.” Without asking, Paula pulled out a chair and seated herself with us, and so did Donna. “Isn’t this nicer?”
Nicer for whom? If my smile was a bit sickly, Paula didn’t seem to notice it. Or perhaps she never got a whole-hearted smile from anyone and was unequipped to assess the candlepower of what she was offered. At that, I did better than Jim. He stretched his lips in a valiant effort, but it was still more of a grimace than a smile. I didn’t mind about Paula, but something in Donna’s frozen wariness made me aware that she could spot nuances that her mother would never know existed. For her sake, I decided to make an effort.
“I’m afraid we’ve ordered,” I said, handing Paula the menu, “but the waiter will be back—”
“Don’t worry”—she passed the menu to Donna without a glance—“I’m on a special diet, anyway. Since I don’t have to sit with the others, I’ll have cottage cheese salad.”
I tensed. Not another one with something wrong. What was this—the Invalids’ Tour?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Er”—she didn’t appear to have a spare pound on her frame—“is it a medical diet?”
“That’s right,” she said. “A doctor gave it to me. I have this weight problem, see, ever since my second husband. It’s related to deep anxiety—”
Then it wasn’t medical—just the usual American neurosis. I relaxed with cautious optimism. “Jolly good,” I said, “then—”
She giggled. “You’ve got a cute accent, too. It’s not the same as his”—she indicated Jim—“but it’s cute. Where did you get such a cute acce
nt?”
“It came with the throat,” I said. “It was a matched set.”
She giggled again, but Donna moved restlessly. Well, that good resolution hadn’t lasted long. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Your accent is different, too, I notice. Not Southern, like the others. Not New York …?”
“San Francisco.” She rose to the bait immediately. “That is, originally. I live in La Jolla now—still California. I moved down there after my third divorce. After my first divorce, I lived for a while in Nevada, seeing as I was in Reno already.”
“You’ve been around,” I said, and instantly wished I’d phrased it better.
“You can say that again,” she giggled. I ignored the invitation. Once was enough, and Donna had given the impression of restraining a wince that time, too. Jim wasn’t looking very happy, either, although he was obviously relieved that she had decided to concentrate on me, this time round.
The waiter took their orders. Donna, almost defiantly, ordered the American standby—steak and french fries. I could see the waiter waver, tempted to beat her down into admitting that what she really wanted was chips, but something in the quiet desperation of her manner restrained him.
If I’d been feeling friendlier, I’d have tried to warn Paula about what the English called salads, but she’d put me off thoroughly—and the day was young, yet. Let her find out for herself—she was on a diet, anyway.
The one to worry about was Jim. From the way she was eyeing him, she had put him down on the menu for dessert. Well, he’d be nonfattening.
“You must like California,” Jim said nervously. “You keep going back there, after living all those other places.”
“California is better,” she said. “It’s a community property state. You get a straight split, right down the middle, without any argument at all.”
In the face of this recommendation, we both twitched slightly. “Me”—Jim wasn’t going down without a struggle—“I think there’s no place like England. It may be wet, and cold, and foggy, but I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world.” As a warning shot across her bows, it was as good as any other, I suppose.
Tourists Are for Trapping Page 5
