England to Me: A Memoir

by Emily Hahn

  “You will hear him in good time,” said Clara. A few minutes later Luis came sweeping around the comer of the house to romp in the courtyard where we sat. Miss Johnson the governess followed, a great sandy-haired girl from Yorkshire in a white uniform. Mrs. Carvalho chuckled.

  “The monkey,” she said. “This year my flowers will all be quite ruined.”

  “He looks full of beans,” said the Major doubtfully.

  “Oh, he looks strong.” Clara dismissed the subject with a knowing shrug.

  At tea we went into a wonderful big shadowy room with not much decoration on the walls except for some austere plates from India and China, white, with blue crests or a few flowers. The Major’s nostrils quivered at sight of the plates and he went close to get a better view, and Mrs. Carvalho was pleased. There were two very tall cabinets with some pieces of glass and some cups inside; the Major said he hoped the cabinets were locked, and Donna Ines said it was not necessary up there in the mountains. Everyone talked Portuguese about this china and glass, and I felt as if I were gliding on a deep green river, through which I saw slowly swaying black weed at the bottom and a few small, quick rainbow fish. A dim painting of the Christ child, all brown and gray, hung near the ceiling, and I watched it from my chair and felt the sweet hot wind that blew along the river.

  On the table was a large spread, among the silver teapots and creamers, of fine white bread, fruitcake, honey, and various sorts of jam. I was about to help myself when I noticed with some astonishment that Donna Ines had only a glass, a spoon, and a bottle of something brown at her place, and that Clara’s plate was surrounded by small vials and measuring beakers. Our speech was punctuated by the tinkle of a glass rod as Clara mixed a white tablet into water, which she gave to Luis. She then dissolved a powder and drank it. Donna Ines ate very little, but she took a thumping big spoonful of the brown stuff. Furtively I peered at Duarte; he was not taking medicine, but he wasn’t eating much, either. Mrs. Carvalho drank two cups of tea and otherwise seemed to be behaving normally, but I had been badly shaken. Only the sight of Miss Johnson, cheerful and ruddy, champing away at her food, encouraged me to swallow more than a canary’s crumb.

  “What’s that you’re giving the child?” demanded the tactless Major during a pause in the dispensing.

  “It strengthens the bones,” said Clara. “Not that one absorbs very much through the stomach, you understand, but I think it helps. Luis also has his injection of calcium every other day. Miss Johnson gives it to him.” She served Luis with a special plate full of special stewed fruit, and shook her head firmly when he asked for another piece of bread and butter. “He can’t eat like the rest of us,” she said, sighing. “It’s formidable.”

  “And what are you drinking?” persisted the Major to Donna Ines.

  “Oh, this is a very good thing, very nourishing.”

  “But wouldn’t it be better to eat something?”

  She said quickly, “I can’t eat. The slightest thing upsets me.”

  Helplessly I looked toward Miss Johnson. She nodded, understanding me. “When I arrived,” she said, “they were giving the little boy five different medicines every day. Five! You know he’s been much better since I stopped some of that, Miss Carvalho.”

  Donna Ines compressed her lips and did not reply. Later she confided to me that she thought Miss Johnson’s accent rather vulgar, and surely a bad influence on Luis.…

  We had a small expedition in the Dodge after tea, to a vista—a river of clear water that ran over white rocks into a pool, and then on again between high pine-clad bluffs, down to a distant valley. Clara as well as Duarte came with us this time, and Luis. After giving full attention to the vista, we walked back, leaving Duarte to bring the Dodge; it was boulders all the way, and Clara leaped lightly from rock to rock, spurting uphill with never a touch of breathlessness to mar her flow of pretty French chatter. The pines were with us again, and I listened in a light golden haze of fragrant dust, and longed to pick up the cones which lay everywhere.

  “I walk like this every morning with Luis, for the sake of his health,” she explained. “Early in the morning, while it is still fresh. It is absolutely necessary, the doctor tells me, for his strength, so I do it, no matter what the cost. Luis, put on your sweater, do you hear me? These evening shades are treacherous.”

  At dinner, Clara refused practically everything we were eating; she swallowed mysterious substitutes. Donna Ines picked at the entree but paid more attention to her medicine, which this time was pink. My face felt pleasantly burned and stiff from the wind and the sun, and after dinner I welcomed gladly a suggestion, when I knew what it meant, that we go for a footing. “A footing, as you English say,” said Donna Ines merrily.

  There was a full moon. We strolled through a dank and perfumed garden. Giant flowers hung on the bushes, brushing us as we passed. It was difficult to believe that these long, perilous pathways were the disciplined walks I had seen in the afternoon sun. Passing through a stone gateway, I touched it with my finger tips; it was moist with the moisture of centuries. My skirt in the moonlight was almost phosphorescent. Underfoot the road was reassuring. I had known that parched white dust in desert cities of America, and at once I was at home again, and stepped out without more hesitation. We were passing a few outlying houses of Azere, small blocks of white in the white light. Donna Ines greeted people we met in the road, some of them sauntering, some leading oxcarts or burros. In the valley, only a few house lights sparkled.

  Donna Ines walked with the same light athletic step I had noticed in Clara. She walked like a woman for whom physical action is a pleasure, and she looked happily around at her mountains in the moonlight, and talked to me of a certain path across the pass, all among the chestnut trees—”I used to walk that way every day, coming home after visiting my aunt,” she said. “It was lovely.”

  A puff of pine scent fanned our faces.

  She slipped a woolen cardigan over her shoulders—I never saw Donna Ines when she wasn’t either putting on a cardigan or taking it off—and said, “You are sure you won’t take cold? The evening freshness is treacherous.”

  Duarte walked with me and discussed Salazar with moderated rapture and Brazilian literature with definite approval. The moon grew tired and her glow became thin. I found myself scuffing the rust in the road, and was glad to exchange daydreams for those of night.

  Morning light in Portugal is early and vigorous, but our window faced the hillside, with close-up terraces of olives and vines, so it was fairly late before we got up, breakfasted, and came downstairs. Until we passed through the long, shady corridor to the veranda I felt reasonably normal and alert. Out on the veranda, however, all reality promptly faded. Mrs. Carvalho was making a rug, and the colors of the wools were ancient though bright, like a Roman mosaic. From the garden the voice of Luis, playing with Duarte, sounded far-off as it echoed about the pool, under a great tree which had been planted the year Mrs. Carvalho was born. Donna Ines lay on a couch, swathed charmingly in pastel rugs which her mother must have completed in earlier years.

  “I did not sleep,” she said, and she gave us her hand and smiled. “No doubt it was merely a reaction. Today I am better.”

  “I have always been an invalid,” said Mrs. Carvalho as she sewed. “My daughter,” she said, looking with fond pride at Donna Ines, “is following in my footsteps, I fear.”

  “But should you be up at all, Donna Ines?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it have been wiser to stay in bed?”

  “Ah, but you have such little time to spend with us, after so many years your husband has not been here. And I am better. You saw, yesterday I could eat! It was something in the air last night, perhaps, which upset me. The wind—one does not sleep when the wind is coming from the south.”

  “Did Clara sleep?” asked the Major. Clara, knitting, answered for herself; she said she had slept.

  “Clara can always sleep,” said Donna Ines. There was a trace of criticism in her tone, a mere trace.
/>   “Yes,” said Clara, like a little girl who has been reprimanded, “I can always sleep, it is true.”

  Our bags were packed and the tickets for the bus had been bought. We dined once more at the Carvalho table, enjoying alone the delicate wine made from their own vines and the fruit which no one else dared touch. Donna Ines gave me advice about the bus trip, which was to begin very early the next morning.

  “Wrap your head well,” she said, “and stay out of the sun if you can. One catches cold very easily from this sun.”

  “I don’t catch cold easily,” I said. “I’m very seldom ill at all.”

  “Really?”

  An uneasy hush fell over the table. Had their old friend Charles, then, married a plebeian? Miss Johnson surprised us all by breaking into the silence.

  “I’ve never had a cold in my life,” said Miss Johnson.

  After a fresh pause somebody spoke of the concert season in Lisbon.

  We were sitting in the drawing room drinking coffee when the Major suddenly said, “Duarte, what’s the matter with your nose?”

  Looking at the nose, I saw what I had not noticed before, a discoloration marking a definite bump on the end of it. It was still a delicate nose, even so. Duarte still resembled a man of finest porcelain, but as soon as the Major mentioned it the bump became more obvious. Duarte blushed violently.

  “Miss Johnson pulled it,” he said.

  Hastily the governess added, “We were having a bit of a scuffle over Luis; I’m afraid I didn’t know my own strength.”

  “Why, Miss Johnson!” I was loud with incredulous delight. Miss Johnson put her large hands up to her face and giggled.

  Donna Ines did not giggle: she was icy and silent.

  “Pay attention to that little button,” Clara advised Duarte. “It may infect itself, and on certain parts of the face infections are very dangerous. You did not know that, Madame Boxer? Yes indeed. It is because these special areas of the face are so closely connected with the brain. For example, all of the nose and the upper lip are directly connected with the brain. There are little corridors, always open. One cannot be too careful.”

  An oxcart bell jingled faintly from far away, and I had a sudden vision of the world outside, all greenish-white and silent. The brain, with little corridors running into it.… Is it like a honeycomb of greenish-white marble, is it like the chapel of Alcobaga, with light like the moon’s filtering in from the high window, all cold and pure?

  Donna Ines shivered, pulling her cardigan close around her slender shoulders.

  Slowly, with longing for the departed night, the little white street woke up. It was still so early that in the valley beneath, where the side of the road dropped abruptly, a light or two still gleamed through mist. The conductor, slinging bags to the top of the bus, looked shadowy at a distance of a few paces. As for Duarte, where he stood at our window saying good-by, he was almost transparent. I felt that we should not leave him there alone. When we drove away he was frail and unreal. I waved back to him, but it was like saying good-by to a dream.

  All the little pools in the valley flashed, one after another, and I caught my breath. The Major was silent on the seat beside me, huddled in his coat; all the other people in the bus seemed to be asleep. We headed straight for a low-lying cloud. I was free again. I could slide along the dark green water of my river, or drift high above the pines and the clouds. Yet the memory of the delicate wraith at the roadside held me back, and I did an outrageous thing to the Major: I spoke to him.

  “They were charming,” I said.

  The Major made an effort, and nodded.

  “It’s a pity they’re all so sickly,” I said. Words, words, I reflected as I spoke—how short they fall, what distances remain unbridged! Even with the words at hand, one can’t use them. How could I speak of that tragic ghost, fading away in the dim, pine-laden air of the morning? I didn’t want to.

  “So delicate,” I added.

  “Darling!” said the Major, arousing himself. “They’re strong as horses.”

  I turned all the way around to look at him.

  Astonishingly, he went on speaking. He broke all precedent. He made conversation.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if Duarte’s seduced Miss Johnson yet. Do you think so? They usually do seduce the governess.”

  He sank back into his own world and left me in mine. The bus hurtled along.

  13. FIRST LECTURE

  “Hi! Charles!”

  I could see him just whisking around the comer of the little house where the watchman stands, outside the British Museum. He was carrying his attaché case and walking as fast as always. He must have come out of the Manuscript Room a minute before I came out of the North Library. I ran as fast as I could; he was now half a block ahead. I ran down Great Russell Street, familiar old Great Russell Street. Once upon a time I lived in one of the garret flats in a house across the street, but I can’t remember which.

  “Char-ruls!”

  Past Kegan Paul’s with the books about India and China in the window; past the little publishing house that puts out religious pamphlets. People stared at me. London has been changed by the war; it is even dingier than it used to be, and stretches of familiar territory like Great Russell Street seem always to be threatening to show you some dreadful transformation around the next curve or corner—a shop window with the plate glass replaced by boarding, or a line of burnt-out blackened stubs of houses, or a waste of fields that were once solid, dumpy, eternal-looking tenements. The people, though, are still surprised by little things, such as the sight of me with my hair in disorder, running after a man also without a hat, shouting.

  “Oy! Boxer!”

  That Japanese cry stopped him. I half expected him to ask me why I had bothered to run after him at all. We go together every morning to the Museum—Bakerloo tube to Oxford Street, change there for Tottenham Court Road, and separate at the door; where the guard always asks, “Reading Room, sir?” because if you want to see the exhibits you have to go in on the other side, since the war.

  Every morning I make for the Reading Room and the North Library, just the way I used to. It’s still the same hushed churchlike place, with the same bearded old men reading away for dear life. It takes even longer than it used to to get your book after you have applied for it. Lost in a hypnotic dream of the past, I invariably try to turn my books in, at the end of the day, at the counter marked “H” instead of “B.” That day, though, was different, and I would have felt guilty at escaping from my place in the Reading Room, all strewn with books and notes, if I hadn’t unexpectedly run into my husband, also escaping.

  “And where are you off to?” he asked.

  Now, I have a perfect right to leave my books if I like. All Museum readers do when they go to lunch. If I’d been going out merely for lunch at the Plane Tree or the snack bar in New Oxford Street I’d have felt quite easy in my mind about it. But whenever I am bound on a frivolous errand, such as a social lunch, or shopping, I feel exactly as if I were still at the University and just about to cut a class. I blushed at the Major’s question. “As a matter of fact I’m going to the bank, for your week-end money and mine. I’ll take the train to Piccadilly.” It seemed dangerously rakish to take a train to Piccadilly when I had four volumes waiting for me on my desk at the Museum. I wondered if he would say I shouldn’t. I hurried on. “Where are you going? The College?”

  I think he blushed too. “Not today. I’m stopping in at the tailor’s to get my coat pocket stitched up, and as long as I’m there I’ll have a look at that Whampoa print at Parker’s. It’s far too dear, still I’d like to take another look at it.”

  Of course it was a special week: neither of us could really settle down to work.

  “What on earth do you take a train for?” he demanded, tacitly sanctioning my escapade. “You can get a bus direct, down there at Shaftesbury. Really, for a girl who says she knows London!”

  “Well, I don’t like busses. They never stop and I h
ave to jump. Oh, all right, all right. See you tonight.”

  I crossed the street to the bus stop. It was a gray day, one of the darker grays. When I first came to London a terribly long time ago it took some weeks to get over the uneasiness I felt at living in that drop-laden dusk, but now I like it. I was just musing on this when I bumped into Alf and Lisbet. Alf is an RAF officer I had seen in the States since he got out of prison camp, but Lisbet, a navy wife, I hadn’t encountered since 1940, before the deluge, before we were all exiled from Hong Kong. They looked thin and businesslike, carrying a shopping basket and a couple of broken lampshades, the London housewife and her house guest off to market.

  “I thought it was you,” said Lisbet.

  “Brrr, isn’t it cold?” said Alf. “Living in London, are you?”

  “During the week sometimes. Listen, what do you think? Charles is a professor.”

  “I saw the appointment in the Times,” said Lisbet. “Is he working at it now?”

  “His inaugural lecture is tomorrow. Terrific excitement; he’s got a pair of striped trousers like a banker and an Anthony Eden hat. I can hardly wait to see. Listen, can you come? Five-thirty at King’s College. I’m trying to collect a claque.”

  “Of course we’ll come,” said Lisbet.

  “Rather!” said Alf.

  I gave up the bus idea and we all started walking toward Piccadilly.

  “Don’t tell him you’re coming then. He tells everybody to stay away, but he can’t do that legally, it’s a public lecture.”

  “We’ll have a drink after,” said Alf. “In fact we’ll have a drink now. Where, do you suppose?”

  “We could go to our club, but it’s sort of expensive,” I said. “We are just finding that out. How much is beer at a pub? At the club it’s one and three.”

  Naturally, we went to the Hong Kong Restaurant for lunch. The ground floor was full, probably of other old China hands, and we went downstairs where it was warm but stuffy. Alf ordered expertly, and we talked about China, and I looked at the clock and wondered if the librarian at the Museum would take away my reading card if he knew I was eating lunch near Piccadilly Circus with friends.