“Oh, look!” I called gaily. “Oh, my goodness, Bruce, look at this big shield!”
“Oh!” Bruce cried. “Isn’t it big? My goodness, you mean they really carried that?”
“Indeed they did,” I said. “Doesn’t it look heavy? My goodness…”
“Oh, look!” Eric cried. “Look at this big sword!”
“Oh, goodness!” I cried back. “Look, Bruce!”
After about ten minutes of this, I was going on about a large iron gauntlet, when Eric spoke in a low, despairing voice.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Silently, we slunk past the Church Plate and out into the street. A light rain was falling, and it was cold. We went to a little restaurant and ordered hamburgers. They came, gray slabs of meat in a square metal dish, covered with greasy gravy. No bread. And the milk was warm.
“We’ll go to Harrods,” I said cheerfully, “and I’ll buy something delicious for dinner. And we’ll look around Harrods.”
So we trudged to Harrods, and we looked around. Everything seemed very expensive; prices seemed to have doubled since Jordan and I had come to London as tourists, two years before. Finally we went down into the food halls. I gathered up my courage and approached the meat counter. A woman in a white coat was sitting on a high stool behind the roasts, chewing on something.
Using my tentative polite approach, I edged in a few feet to the left of her, eyeing her with my right eye, and clearing my throat hopefully. She chewed on, staring straight before her. I edged a few inches closer to her line of vision and said, “Uh …”
She glanced at me irritably and said, “Oh, move along, madam, move along. Get down to the end of the counter. Get away!”
“Well!” I said, gasping.
“Oh, get away,” she responded.
I moved down to the end of the counter, still gasping, and a meek butcher cut a roast for me. The woman in the white coat sat glaring at me during the entire transaction. “What a rude woman!” I said to the butcher. He smiled at me meekly. Apparently, I had blundered into her tea break.
Gathering up my roast, I sailed with my little tykes toward the exit in the drug department. Near Drugs was Hairbrushes. Bruce and I each needed a hairbrush. Surprised to discover that English hairbrushes cost more in London than in Chicago, I weighed two in my hand while I thought about it. “If you can’t decide, it’s better to leave it,” the saleswoman said coldly. “We close in ten minutes.”
I put the hairbrushes down and we exited through Drugs.
11
Further Adventures
THE NEXT DAY two telephone men came, hollering to each other as they dragged rubbery coils around. Mrs. Grail complained to me bitterly. I responded that I really couldn’t see why all this should go on. “It was only supposed to take an afternoon for her to move in.”
“Ah, that’s the way of them,” Mrs. Grail said. “That’s the British for you. She’ll have it nice and easy when she comes in September and you’ve had all the mess and all the aggravation. And I’ve swept down them stairs three times already and they’ve tracked in all the mud. And now you can’t get the sheets, and them twisty rags on the boys’ beds. I wouldn’t put them in a kennel. And you paying all that rent.”
“A woman yelled at me in Harrods yesterday,” I said moodily. “At the meat counter.”
“Oh, I’ve been here twenty-five years,” Mrs. Grail said. “And I’ll never get used to it. Never.”
“The children are holding up very well, though,” I said. “My husband and I were discussing it yesterday. Well, Bruce’s stomach is upset—maybe the milk is too rich—but Eric is doing well. He’s such a good traveler. We’ve taken him to Wisconsin and Boston and Maine and never a bit of trouble with him. He loves to travel.”
“Ah, the dear little tyke,” Mrs. Grail said.
“He’s kind of fresh, though,” I said.
“Ah, they’re all awful,” Mrs. Grail said. “I had four of them and I love them dearly, but if l had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have any. I’m a Catholic but you’ve got to use common sense. They’re all a great trial.”
“Well,” I said. “Anyway, Eric seems to take it all in his stride.”
“The dear little thing,” Mrs. Grail said. “But why do they like the Beatles so much? I can’t stand them, but Elvis Presley is lovely, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is,” I said, measuring out drops for Bruce’s stomach. “I think I’ll take them to Madame Tussaud’s today. The Victoria and Albert wasn’t good.”
“Oh, they’ll love Madame Tussaud’s. You go out here to Knightsbridge and take a Number Nine bus…” We gathered ourselves together and straggled off in the rain, leaving Mrs. Grail wrapped around the doorpost, her eyes begging us not to leave her alone in the house.
Madame Tussaud’s seemed to be a success; the children waited quietly in the long lines before every exhibit. Eric looked nervously at the image of the Queen Mother; its eyes were glittering strangely under the lights.
“Who’s that?” he cried, pointing.
“It’s the Queen Mother, dear,” I said loudly. “She’s an awfully nice lady.”
They wanted to go to the Chamber of Horrors, and on the way we stopped in the Diorama Room before the diorama of Hamlet. Hamlet was standing on a stony platform, and the Ghost loomed in the background. “Do you see that?” I said, showing off. “That’s Hamlet, and that’s the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and he’s telling Hamlet that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius murdered him by dropping poison in his ear and…”
After I finished giving a summary of the play, we went on down to the Chamber of Horrors which the boys seemed to like. When we got home, I cooked hamburgers in an electric frying pan that I had found hidden in a cupboard in the laundry room. It was rather greasy, but I washed it thoroughly, plugged it in, and it worked.
The next morning we received a letter from Mrs. Stackpole. She seemed angry because of the Great Sheet Controversy and repeated the point of view delivered to us by Mr. MacAllister. “As for the frying pan,” she wrote, “I am terribly sorry not to have provided one, but I am afraid that is an object I never use!” There was a good deal more in the same vein. Shortly after we finished reading the letter, the telephone rang. Jordan spoke genially for a few minutes, and then hung up. “It’s Miss Pip,” he said. “The lodger. She wants to bring a few things in. I told her someone would be here until two o’clock, so don’t forget to tell Mrs. Grail.”
“They’ve already driven us crazy with the telephone,” I said, “dragging dust and fluff all over the stairs, and them twisty bits of rag …”
“Well, we said she could move a few things in,” Jordan said reasonably.
I took the children to see a Jerry Lewis movie in Piccadilly. It was in color: we watched the California sun beat down on everyone, and it was an adjustment emerging into the gray London streets.
“Let’s go and have a nice lunch,” I said enthusiastically. “We’ll go to Fortnum’s Fountain Bar.” This had been recommended to me as one of the best places in the city for lunch.
We established ourselves at the bar and tried to attract the attention of the waitress, who was lounging against the counter, chatting with a blond chinless youth. “I really hate it here,” she was saying. “The kitchen is filthy.”
I cleared my throat.
“Are you going to Boopsie’s on Saturday?” the waitress asked wistfully. The youth said he was thinking of it. “I wish I could go,” she said. “I’m so exhausted all the time. It’s so difficult here, and the other girls …”
“How about some scrambled eggs?” I asked Eric, who sat droopily beside me, his chin resting on the counter.
“I’m not hungry,” he said faintly.
“You haven’t had anything to eat all day,” I said, puzzled. “See? It says here, ‘Scrambled Eggs, Prawns, on Toast with Green Salad’… You don’t like prawns or salad, so we’ll just have the eggs and toast. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“All ri
ght,” he said.
“I want the stuffed Canadian bacon with cheese sauce,” Bruce said. He fell off his stool, which collapsed on top of him. Eric continued staring moodily into space. I climbed down and helped Bruce up, righting his chair.
“I want to go home,” Bruce said.
“If I am able to go to Boopsie’s on Saturday…” the waitress was saying.
“Miss,” the woman sitting next to Eric said apologetically, “I’m afraid my lobster’s full of sand.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” the waitress said reluctantly to her friend. She turned to the woman next to me, inspected her lobster, and agreed that it was full of sand.
“Could you take our order?” I asked.
“One moment,” she replied frostily, and went off with the sandy lobster.
“I never had sandy lobster before,” the woman said to me. She was a compatriot of ours, and very embarrassed about making a fuss. Another waitress came up to us. “Yes?” she asked.
“He wants the Canadian bacon with cheese sauce,” I said. “And he wants the scrambled eggs. Can he have it without prawns, please?”
“We don’t have scrambled eggs,” the waitress said.
“Yes, you do,” I replied. Eric sat drearily next to me, his chin still on the counter. “Here,” I said, pointing to the menu. “Scrambled eggs and Prawns on Toast, with Green Salad.”
“Oh, scrambled eggs with prawns,” the waitress said. “Yes, we have that.”
“Can he have it without prawns, please?”
There was a pause.
“All you have to do is take the prawns off,” I said encouragingly.
She hesitated. Finally she made a decision.
“I can take the prawns off,” she said firmly, “but you’ll have to have the green salad.” “All right,” I said. “We can push it aside,” I whispered to Eric, who was still staring moodily into space.
When the eggs came, on toast, with the green salad, I was relieved to see him tuck it in with good appetite. Bruce was enjoying the Canadian bacon. Eric dug the toast out from under the eggs, ate it, and asked for another piece.
The waitress hesitated again.
“We do do toast,” she said. “But I don’t know if you can have toast. With that,” she added. “I’ll go and check.” Eric sighed. In less than twenty minutes, she was back, triumphant, bearing a plate of sliced, buttered tea toast. Eric consumed it, still moodily.
But that night, he didn’t touch his dinner. “What’s wrong?” Mark asked him.
“I want to go home!” Eric said, and before our horrified eyes, he dropped his head on the table and began to sob. “I’m afraid of King Claudius! I want to go home!”
A dull cloud of gloom descended over the kitchen.
“Let’s all go upstairs and watch television,” Jordan said heartily. “We’ll see what’s on.”
Puppets appeared on the screen. One was lying on a stretcher, moaning and sobbing as he was being pushed through swinging doors. “Oh, oh, oh!” he shrieked. “Don’t take me to the hospital, don’t, don’t! I’m afraid, I’m afraid of the hospital!” Another door opened and another puppet, decidedly African in appearance, swathed in a long white medical gown, approached the screaming sufferer. He was holding a huge hypodermic needle, nearly as long as his leg. The camera shot him from below, so that he appeared to be very tall. “Ho ho ho!” he said. “I am the doctor. I am going to stick you with this needle.”
“Oh no!” howled the sufferer, who had great goggly eyes and resembled a frog. “Oh don’t! Oh, I’m frightened of the hospital! I’m frightened of the doctor! Oh, please, please don’t! Oh—!”
The enormous puppet approached, raising the needle. The toad on the stretcher went into a frenzy of screams. Mark broke the frozen spell in which we sat, crawled over to the set and turned it off. “My God!” he said. Eric turned to me with a weak smile. “That was Sammy Snake,” he said. My flat American voice rose in the cold, chintzy, mildewed air of 16 Baldrige Place. “Doctors are our friends,” I said. Jordan did not meet my eyes.
12
Miss Pip
THE NEXT DAY Mrs. Grail bustled in, full of news and indignation. ‘That creature turned up,” she said. “You never told me she was coming.” I had already realized that I had forgotten to tell Mrs. Grail about Miss Pip, who had phoned Jordan, full of complaints about Mrs. Grail.
“Here the doorbell rings,” Mrs. Grail said, “And me all alone in the house, and here is a dreadful creature on the stoop, a man. Ah, the face on him.” She shuddered. “And the coat! So I wouldn’t let them in. You never told me. And here she comes. Ah, the creature! And they wouldn’t go away. So I slammed the door in their faces. But they rang and rang. So I let them in, but I followed them all about. Tracking dirt and fluff, up and down the stairs, carting bits and pieces.”
“They’re coming back today,” I told her.
“I know,” Mrs. Grail said grimly. “The creatures. And they’re never married, are they?”
“I doubt it,” I said primly. “She’s taken the rooms alone, I think. I’m sure that’s what Mrs. Stackpole said.”
“Oh, yes. Alone. And then the monkeyshines start! Probably asked to leave her other rooms, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“My husband told them you’d only be here until two. So just let them in today.”
We had grown weary of rushing our two sheets off the big bed to the launderette where Jordan went in a cab and spent the evening, invariably missing the only good TV programs that were ever on. “I’m going to call a laundry,” I announced to Mrs. Grail. “While the sheets are out, we’ll use that funny-looking embroidered thing and that other funny thin blanket instead.”
“Ah, that’s right,” she said. “I should force them to give you sheets but if they won’t, just use them bits and pieces off the bed. More bits and pieces on this bed. Look at that,” she said, kicking a drooping ruffle.
I examined Mrs. Stackpole’s list. “Here’s a laundry,” I said.
“Don’t call her laundry. Call the Sunlight Laundry. Ah, they’re lovely.”
I called the Sunlight Laundry off and on all morning and got a busy signal each time. I decided to call the general operator. “It must be out of order,” I told her. “It’s a place of business. A laundry.”
“Just a minute, dear,” the operator said. She called another operator. There were a lot of clickings and buzzings.
“It’s engaged,” the second operator said.
“She says it’s a laundry, dear,” the first operator remarked.
“Oh, a laundry?” the second operator asked.
“It’s been engaged all morning,” the first operator told her.
“Well, just a minute, dear,” the second operator said. “I’ll look into it.”
“Oh, thank you, dear,” the first operator said. “She’s just looking into it,” she assured me.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t mind waiting; I was reading a book. After a while the second operator returned. “It’s out of order, dear,” she said, apparently to the first operator.
“Oh, is it? Thank you so much, dear.”
“Well, not at all, dear. That’s all right.”
“Goodbye, dear.”
“Goodbye.”
The first operator came back to me. “It’s out of order, dear,” she said, unnecessarily.
“How long will it take to fix it?”
Her voice lost some of its good humor. “Well, I don’t know, dear. A day or two. Maybe three. It’s hard to say. It depends what’s wrong with it. It’s out of order, you see. It’s not working.”
By this time it was a quarter of two and time for us to be on our way, wandering aimlessly about London, looking for toilets for Bruce and Eric, whose stomachs were upset, possibly from the rich milk.
“I’m all through now,” Mrs. Grail said. “What about them creatures?”
“It’s ten minutes of two. If they were coming, they wouldn’t come this late. They know you leave at two.
”
We all bundled into raincoats and gloves and scarves and opened the front door. On the stoop stood what were unquestionably the two creatures: a very tall, very thin girl with long red hair and a horrified expression, and a shorter, thicker male, wearing a cardboard-looking checked jacket and wild curls.
“Yes?” I said.
“Mrs. Miller?” the girl said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you going out?” the girl asked, her look of horror deepening.
“Yes,” I said, adding, so as not to sound like Dr. Bott, “I am.”
“But it’s not two o’clock yet. Your husband said there would be someone here until two.”
“It’s six minutes of.”
There was a silence. They stood on the stoop, staring at us with aversion and terror, and we crowded sloppily in the doorway, a welter of scarves and coats, caps and umbrellas, un-English and undisciplined.
“Don’t you want to come in?” I asked.
“We did want to bring in a few things, yes,” Miss Pip said, for I had to assume this was she.
“Well, we’ll wait for you.” We all, including Mrs. Grail, went into the sitting room and sat down, in our coats. Miss Pip and her nameless friend rushed up and down the stairs, carrying small shabby objects. They rushed frantically, silently, poker-faced. Mrs. Grail perched on the edge of Mrs. Stackpole’s fat-armed sofa and murmured to me insidiously. “This is the second trip. And the telephone men. Ah, you’re too soft with them. I shouldn’t allow it.”
“Mrs. Stackpole told me—one afternoon to bring in a few things,” I replied, working myself into a rage. “She didn’t say anything about the telephone men. And two afternoons.”
“And all the money,” Mrs. Grail said. “And the washing machine. And them twisty rags. And no sheets to your bed. Ah God, it’s the English, they’ll do you every time.”
Miss Pip and her friend came downstairs, still looking upset, and stood facing us near the tiny entrance hall. We all rose. “Thank you very much,” Miss Pip said, staring into my eyes with an expression of disbelief. “We’ve finished.”
Tea & Antipathy Page 5
