After explaining that every Thursday we had to wind the large cream-colored thing in the corner, she walked quickly out of the kitchen and down the passage to the laundry room. “There’s your ironing board and iron,” she said. There was a moment of silence. “I’m afraid the washing machine doesn’t work,” she said, smiling.
“Maybe,” Jordan said, “we can get it re—”
“Actually,” Mrs. Stackpole said, “it does work. I told you it didn’t, but it does.” She turned to me, her eyes begging for forgiveness. “Would you mind very much not using it? I saved up for it for ever so long, and it’s ever so precious, would you mind not … ?”
“Of course not,” I said, rather stiffly.
“And here’s your clothesline,” she said, trying to open a door with five or six burglar-proof locks on it.
“We won’t need that,” I said. “We’ll take the clothes to the launderette.”
“Oh, there’s one ever so near,” Mrs. Stackpole cried happily. “It won’t be difficult for you at all.” She moved rapidly back down the hall to the playroom with the blue linoleum floor. “And here are all my children’s playthings,” she said, allowing us to see a blackboard, a rocking horse, a little desk, several touching crayon drawings of crooked houses and lopsided ladies, and a cupboard stuffed with teddy bears. “They’re all ever so precious to them, so you will just keep this door closed, won’t you, and not let anyone use it? It’s just their precious little bits.”
I could feel my smile stiffening again. It’s just their precious little bits, I said to myself, keep your shirt on. Later on, when Eric became frightened by Hamlet’s uncle and refused to stay upstairs alone, he kept creeping into the playroom and nearly drove us crazy playing “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” over and over on Mrs. Stackpole’s children’s precious little phonograph which had a straight pin in it instead of a needle. In addition, he wrote “Ringo” in a wavering hand on the upper left-hand corner of the blackboard and we allowed the desecration to remain.
Before we left the nether regions, Mrs. Stackpole mentioned that she had locked all her precious bits and pieces in the “cupboard,” which proved to be the kitchen pantry. “So you won’t have to be bothered with looking after them,” she explained. “But you can quite easily keep all your groceries and things in here,” she went on, leading us back down the passage toward the laundry room again, and opening a door beneath the stairs to reveal a damp darkness, in the depths of which we could distinctly hear the scurrying of many startled little feet. “That will work out quite well for you,” Mrs. Stackpole said, beaming at me.
We followed her upstairs to the bathroom on the landing to discuss the linen, Mrs. Stackpole remaining ebullient and persistently pleasant as she explained to us why she had left only two sheets for our bed. “If I leave you the other two I own, I won’t have any clean ones when I get back.”
Neither of us understood this, but we both pretended we did. I kept nodding and smiling.
“I’ve bought nylon sheets for the children’s beds,” she told us, aspirating the final syllable of “nylon” in the French way, “and here are your four towels. I’m afraid they’re all I have for you.”
Still nodding and smiling, we descended to the living room or drawing room or whatever it was.
“By the way,” Mrs. Stackpole said, “Miss Pip, the young lady who is renting the top floor in the autumn, has asked permission to bring in a few things one afternoon. Is that all right?”
I nodded, smiling.
“Please tell me if it isn’t,” Mrs. Stackpole said earnestly, leaning toward me in her solicitous way, “because it can quite easily be put off until you are out of the house.”
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right,” I said. “One afternoon?”
“Oh, just one afternoon,” Mrs. Stackpole said. “Is that all right?”
“Certainly,” Jordan said.
“You’re sure?”
We were sure.
“And I’ve left six or seven vases in the back lavatory,” she said. “It seems a lot, but one never knows, one frequently needs many vases.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I do like my vases.”
“Here is a list of things—grocers who will deliver, laundries, things of that sort.”
She produced more papers.
“Plumbers… And Mrs. Grail will be here tomorrow. She’s Irish, and quite honest and dependable. You may give her a key if you like. It’s quite all right.” I could only admire her assurance. I knew that she must be correct; she had an instinct for it. It was an instinct that I notably lacked. “I intend to retain her myself when I return in the autumn,” Mrs. Stackpole added.
“Will she cook dinner for us?” I asked, thinking of The Stove.
She paused to consider. “She’ll have to go home to feed her family. They eat at five or six. I don’t see why she couldn’t come back to serve your dinner at eight.”
Since our dinnertime was approximately the same as Mrs. Grail’s, I could see that I would have to cope with The Stove myself.
“Now the slipcovers…” Jordan began.
“Oh, yes.” She blushed prettily, smiling. “They’re being mended. They didn’t fit properly.”
“Well, would you just jot down the name and number of the shop? In case we need to call them.”
“Oh yes, of course.” She wrote something quickly on the back of our list, and said, “I’ve left some eggs in the refrigerator. It’s so difficult to leave food when one doesn’t know … er … other’s … habits….”
Gathering herself together to depart, she paused to leave us some keys: two front door, three back door, and twelve or fifteen odd-looking gold-and-black ones.
“These are keys to the burglar locks,” she said to me. “You can’t open the windows without them, and you must remember always to lock the windows with these keys when you close them. Please remember never, never to leave the doors or the windows unlocked when you go out. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough. All the houses around here have been broken into at one time or another. They watch, you see, and they know when you go out. Even if you go out for only a few minutes, you must lock all the doors and windows. It’s terribly important.”
“It would be difficult for them to climb in a bedroom window,” I said nervously.
“They’re much more apt to come over the roofs, aren’t they?” she asked calmly. I looked at the houses across the street: the rooftops were peaked, gabled, with crooked Dickensian chimneypots silhouetted against the gloomy sky. Could someone crouch there, behind a peak or gable, and watch … ?
“Please don’t lose the keys,” Mrs. Stackpole said at the door. “These are the only ones and it costs thirty pounds to replace the lock. And do remember to lock the windows. You can open them when you’re in the house, of course.” She called over her shoulder as she went out, “And remember, if you need anything, there’s always Mr. MacAllister, isn’t there?”
“Who’s that?” I asked Jordan, when the door had closed.
“Some man,” he said vaguely. “Her boyfriend, I guess.”
“Her fiancé, you mean,” I said. “I suppose he sends her the flowers for all those vases.”
“I’d better go out and get some bread and butter to go with those eggs,” Jordan said. He looked at his watch. “It’s five-thirty, but I think there’s a delicatessen in South Ken that stays open late.” I should explain that in those days London shops closed at five o’clock, except for Early Closing on Wednesday and Saturday at one in the afternoon.
“Maybe you ought to call a plumber before you go,” I said. “Something’s wrong with the toilet.”
“Nothing’s wrong with the toilet,” he said. “I can tell you that right now. It’s an English toilet, that’s all. Just pump the handle gently up and down and eventually it will flush.”
I found this difficult to believe, because I felt that when the English did something, they had to do it at least as well as Americans. But I let it go, and he w
ent off in the rain to find provisions.
I descended into the kitchen to assemble my tools, and suddenly I realized that Mrs. Stackpole had not left me a frying pan. I thought this was very odd, but there must have been some explanation for it. “I’ll boil the eggs,” I said aloud. This seemed more English to me anyway: boiled eggs for tea. I took down the large pot from the mantel: it had a greenish wet pool in the bottom and several hunks of enamel missing.
“Not to worry,” I said, still cheerful. “The eggs have a shell.” I noticed with a clutch of anguish that there was no electric toaster. I was appalled at my weakness: toast could of course be made under the stove grill, two pieces at a time. “Americans are terribly spoiled,” I said sternly to myself, avoiding the sight of the “hot cloth” hanging, black and dispirited, over the pipe.
Soot was falling down the ancient chimney; it fell behind the stove and blanketed the warming rail. “A real English kitchen,” I said. The boiler exploded softly in the comer.
4
Slipcovers
THE NEXT MORNING we were awakened early by a messenger delivering an enormous bouquet from Mrs. Stackpole.
“I told you she was kind,” Jordan said.
“Really thoughtful,” I murmured, overwhelmed by this huge assortment of lilies and roses and I didn’t know what all, not being horticultural. “It’s a good thing she left all those vases.”
While we were dealing with the bouquet, the bell rang again, this time heralding the entrance of Mrs. Grail, the cleaning woman, a pleasant-looking, plump person with short curly gray hair, decently attired in a black sweater and skirt. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said, in a rich brogue. “She’s told me where everything is. Ah! The lovely flowers!”
“Yes, aren’t they? Mrs. Stackpole sent them.”
“Ah, God,” Mrs. Grail said. “They must have cost her a pretty penny. And she hasn’t that much to spare.”
“Yes, it was kind of her.”
“It looks like a funeral.” Her eye swept the sitting room. “She’s cleared it out, hasn’t she? And where are the slipcovers?”
I picked up the list from the desk. “They’re being mended,” I said.
“Mended, is it?” said Mrs. Grail. “They looked new to me.”
‘They’re being mended. She wrote the name of the shop right here.” I turned the paper over. In her large clear hand, Mrs. Stackpole had written, “Glenairlie, Pitwee, Firth.”
“There must be some mistake,” I said. “I think this is her address in Scotland.”
“There’s no mistake,” Mrs. Grail said grimly.
I went upstairs to Jordan, who was shaving in the bathroom.
“Look,” I said. “She wrote her Scottish address here instead of the name of the shop with the slipcovers.”
“Oh, she’s so absent-minded,” Jordan said, with a chuckle.
“I don’t think Mrs. Grail likes her,” I said.
“Ridiculous,” he responded. “It’s probably just Mrs. Grail’s way.”
The phone rang, two short bleeps. Eric answered it and handed it to me. It was Mrs. Stackpole.
“Which child was that?” she asked. “I don’t know which child that was.”
I told her it was Eric, the youngest.
“Ah,” Mrs. Stackpole said fondly. “The wee one.”
“Well, he’s seven. And we do want to thank you for the flowers. They’re so beautiful.”
“Oh, it was because Mr. Miller seemed to miss so many of my little bits. Pictures of the children, and so on. I’m afraid it looked a bit bare.”
“Well, it was kind of you. By the way …”
“Might I have a word with your husband?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Only I don’t know how it happened, but you wrote your—”
“I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry,” Mrs. Stackpole said pleasantly. “I would just like a word with your husband.”
“Ask her about the slipcovers,” I whispered, handing him the phone.
“Yes,” he said. “Oh, it was lovely of you. You didn’t need to. Yes, I have your address. Yes, I’ll drop it in the mail. Yes. By the way—oh, yes. Listen, you forgot to leave the number of the slipcover man. Yes, you remember. His phone number. Oh. Well, what’s his name and address then? Yes, but I’d like that in case he doesn’t return them. When were they promised? Oh, but that’s a month from now. I mean, it’s only early June now. Give me his address and I’ll try to hurry him.”
There was a pause. “Oh,” Jordan said. “Well, all right if you … Yes.”
He hung up, looking puzzled. “She says he’s not on the telephone, he’s just a little man. I couldn’t exactly get his address. Anyway, she finally said she’s got a spare pair, locked away in a cupboard. She’ll come and get them out.”
“Do you mean they’ve been here all the time? Why didn’t she put them on the furniture?”
“Maybe they’re too ratty-looking,” Jordan said. “How about that little man who’s not on the telephone? I suppose he’s too little to reach the receiver?”
He went off to the office, amid waves of merriment. Soon the doorbell rang, and Mrs. Stackpole appeared in the hall, her hair blown, her eyes wild. “I must rush,” she cried, leaping up the stairs. In a moment she leaped down again, empty-handed. “I’ve brought the key to the wrong cupboard,” she cried. “I’ll be back.”
“What a shame,” I said to Mrs. Grail. “She’ll miss her train.”
Mrs. Grail grunted, leaning on her Hoover. “It’s too many cupboards and too many keys,” she said. “You won’t see her again.”
“Oh, but she said …”
Mrs. Grail turned to her machine. “It’s the English, you know,” she said enigmatically, and pushed the switch. I hung around for a while, peering out the window through the glass curtain. I was just about to go upstairs and get dressed, when the bell rang again, and Mrs. Stackpole vaulted into the house like an alarmed gazelle. She bounded up the stairs, Mrs. Grail trailing after her, dragging the Hoover. In a few minutes Mrs. Stackpole came panting down, her arms filled with polished chintz slipcovers: large green flowers on a cream-colored background. They looked perfectly presentable to me.
“I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said, breathing heavily. “Here they are. The larger one is for the sofa and the smaller one is for the armchair.” She paused to let that information sink in. “The very small ones cover the cushions, of course. Mrs. Grail can help you. I must fly. Just tell your husband Mr. MacAllister will call round for the money,” she added, and was gone.
I began laboriously to stuff the cushions into the slipcovers. Mrs. Grail came into the sitting room and stood behind me.
“They’re very nice for a spare pair, aren’t they?” I said.
Mrs. Grail sniffed. “Well, they’re the very ones,” she said. “They’re the very ones was here the day I came to see her. They’re the only ones she’s got.”
“But … Maybe they’re identical….”
“Well, I stood there just now when she got them out, you know. I said, ‘Aren’t those the very slipcovers I saw, Mrs. Stackpole?’ And she said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Grail. I’m afraid they are.”’
“She lied to us,” I said, dumbfounded.
“It’s the English, you know,” Mrs. Grail told me seriously. “They’ll do you every time.”
5
Pat Foyle
FEELING RATHER SHAKEN, I went upstairs to get dressed. Our first afternoon in London was already arranged for us. The children and I would meet Jordan for lunch and then I would shop for groceries. The office manager’s assistant, a girl named Jane, was coming to take us to the city.
When the bell rang, I tripped down the stairs to meet Jane. I had expected a junior executive type, sort of Debbie Reynolds with a dash of Rosalind Russell: crisply efficient, in a knit suit, small pearl earrings, and white gloves. (This was the mid-sixties, remember.) Instead I found a young person with bangs touching her nose, a great deal of long straig
ht hair obscuring the rest of her face, wearing a cotton two-piece dress several sizes too big for her, baggy green textured stockings and lopsided shoes with run-over heels. Eric immediately fell completely in love with her: what you could see of her face was very pretty. She addressed me in incomprehensible tones, with a faint smile. I nodded and smiled back, although I had no idea what she was saying, and off we went, for our first ride on a red double-decker London bus. We sat on top, and lurched forward for half an hour on what seemed to our transatlantic eyes to be the wrong side of the road, past massive buildings, colored gray.
We clambered down in the middle of the financial district. “I could have had us get off farther up and saved a walk,” Jane said. “Sorry about that.” We didn’t mind a walk; it was all new and exciting. Everybody looked exotic to us. The children kept edging close to newspaper stands looking for Beatle magazines; Jane strode on with never a backward glance. We turned a corner and came to a very large building with a marble entryway. Jordan’s offices were on the ground floor. You had to walk past the elevator—a sort of circular cage cut into the center of the floor—and then you came to the offices of Pressclips U.K. Ltd.
The offices seemed a bit grimy; cold light filtered through grayish glass. But there was a great deal of activity: frazzled people with lumpy hair scurried about carrying things. I didn’t remember seeing so many people rushing about in Jordan’s Chicago premises. At the end of the corridor, behind a door with a frosted glass pane, we found Jordan in the office he shared with Bill Dworkin, a Chicago employee—originally a native of New Jersey—whom Jordan had brought over to run Pressclips U.K. I noted that Bill had grown a beard. He was drinking tea from a blue cup with a broken handle. A very tall Englishman slouched in a straight chair, with his legs thrust out before him. Jordan introduced him as Pat Foyle; he said he had written me about him.
Tea & Antipathy Page 2
