“Let’s take a cab,” Mark said.
“I think we should walk. It’s not raining for a change. Let’s stroll down.”
We asked the waiter in the hamburger place how far it was to Manchester Square. He said it was a ten-minute walk. I explained to the children that English people reckoned distances in terms of time because they didn’t have our geometrical block system.
“Also they don’t have our attitude toward walking,” Mark said. “Ten minutes means half an hour.”
We strolled off and just as we began to fail physically, we came upon Manchester Square.
“There it is,” I cried triumphantly. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“I have a stomachache,” Bruce said.
“My feet hurt,” Mark said.
“I feel good, I want to see the Museum,” Eric said. “Are there any wax figures there?”
“No, of course not,” I replied irritably. “Do you think I’d ever take you to see wax figures again? There’s some really lovely armor and some beautiful pictures … and the building itself ….”
“Oh, goody, armor,” Eric said. “I love armor.”
We went inside.
“I feel sick,” Bruce said. “My stomach hurts. I want to go home.”
“We’ve come this far,” I said. “Why not look at it? You’ll love it.”
“Just a lot of pictures and some armor?” Mark asked.
“And the building itself,” I said. “Look around. And some French furniture, of course.”
“Oh, furniture, furniture,” Bruce said. “That’s all you care about, furniture.”
“Why don’t you smack him one?” Mark asked.
“My feet hurt, my stomach hurts, and all you care about is furniture,” Bruce said.
“Let’s try to be quiet,” I said. “Everyone is looking at us. Oh, my, look at this beautiful painting. And what do you think of this clock?”
“If I ever talked to you that way, you’d smack me,” Mark said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Bruce said.
“Ask the man,” I said.
“I want to see the armor,” Eric said sweetly. “Oh, what a lovely place.”
“Eric likes this place,” I said, eyeing him suspiciously. “If I don’t sit down, I’m going to faint,” Mark said.
“I don’t think you should sit there,” I said.
“Why not? There’s no cord over it or anything. It’s a chair, isn’t it?”
“Here, you can’t sit there,” a guard cried, darting forward. “You can’t sit on that chair.”
“I told you,” I said.
“I’m going to faint,” Mark said.
“Shall we go upstairs? They’ve got Gainsboroughs….”
“How can I look at paintings when I’m going to faint?”
“Oh, here’s Bruce,” I said cheerfully. “Feeling better?”
“No, I’m not,” Bruce said, scowling. “I feel worse. My stomach hurts and I want to sit down.”
“Why don’t you both go out in the courtyard and sit on a bench?” I suggested. “I’ll show Eric the armor.”
I showed Eric the armor for quite a while. He seemed to admire it.
“Oh, look at the big horse,” he said. “Look at the armor on the big horse. Look at the big curved sword. Did they cut off people’s heads with it?”
“That must have been the intention,” I replied. “See how beautifully it’s carved?”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Eric said suddenly.
“Oh, dear. It’s right down that way, I think.”
“I can’t go by myself. I’m afraid of Hamlet’s uncle.”
“Hamlet’s uncle isn’t in the bathroom. I mean the lavatory. He isn’t anywhere. I mean he’s in Madame Tussaud’s…. No, he isn’t, I didn’t mean that—”
“I want Mark to go with me,” Eric said loudly.
“Shhh,” I said.
We sought Mark out where he sat in the courtyard with Bruce on an institutional-looking oak bench. It was drizzling.
“I want to go home,” Bruce said.
“Shhh,” I said. “Eric has to go to the bathroom.”
“So what?” Mark said.
“Shhh. He wants you to go with him, Mark. He’s afraid.”
“He’s afraid? In broad daylight? In a museum?”
“I’m afraid of Hamlet’s uncle,” Eric said.
“You are not,” Mark said.
“He is too,” I said.
“He’s crazy,” Mark said.
“That’s beside the point,” I replied. “The point is, the child is frightened and you’re old enough to understand, you’re sixteen years old….”
“Hurry up,” Eric said.
“Why am I only fifteen if I want to do something interesting and sixteen if you want me to do something?”
“You’re all crazy,” Bruce said. “Look at that man staring at us.”
“Mark!” I said.
“Oh, all right. Come on, you miserable hateful little brat.”
“Mommy!” Eric called back loudly. “He’s pulling me!”
“Shhh. Stop pulling him.”
Bruce and I were left alone in the drizzle.
“You see this interesting courtyard,” I said. “This used to be somebody’s house, imagine that, and the lady left it as a museum to the public. These horrible benches were not here when the lady lived here, of course. It must have been beautiful then.”
“I’m getting all wet,” Bruce said.
“I can’t help it,” I responded testily.
“Yes, you could too help it,” Bruce said. “We didn’t have to come to this awful place.”
“What awful place? England?”
“No, not England. I love England. You hate it, but I love it. I mean this awful place.”
“I thought you would like it,” I said sadly.
“Well, I don’t,” Bruce said. He got up and went back to the lavatory. I sat on the bench in the rain and read one of Mark’s rock and roll magazines until they all came back.
“Do you want to go upstairs?” I asked.
Eric said he did. Suddenly I felt rather tired.
“We’ll do it next time,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We walked around the corner and passed the hotel where Jordan and I had stayed on our first visit to London. I pointed it out to the children; it looked much better to me than it had the first time.
“Oh, it’s lovely, Mommy,” Eric said. “Can we stay there now?”
“Hey, it’s cool,” Mark said.
“You stayed in this awful dump?” Bruce asked. “What for?”
24
Plumbing
SEVERAL DAYS HAD ELAPSED, and the water was still streaming down the lavatory wall. Mrs. Grail alternated between telling me to leave it for Mrs. Stackpole, whom she kept seeing slinking around Knightsbridge, and urging me to do something so that Mrs. Stackpole would not fly into a vindictive rage and do something terrible to us. I had heard neither from the plumber nor from Mr. MacAllister. I decided to try the plumber again.
“He’s away on holiday,” the woman said.
“But this is an emergency. Isn’t there someone else I could call?”
“When he returns, I’ll send him round.”
“But water has been coming down the wall for days! Can’t you give me another name to call? Isn’t there anyone else there?”
“I’ve already told you, Madam. When … he … returns….”
I hung up and told Mrs. Grail about it.
“At home,” I said, close to tears, “at home plumbers are listed in the phone book. They have emergency numbers. Here, they’re all on vacation at the same time….”
“Ah, the cheeky things,” Mrs. Grail said.
I tried to call Mr. MacAllister.
“He’s away on holiday,” the girl said.
The doorbell rang. It was the laundry man.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s two o’clock and the last time Mrs. Grail
said you came after two. You see, she leaves at two, and the girl in the office said you would be here before two.”
“They don’t know nuffink in the office,” he said, growling.
“Well. Still. If you could manage to be here before two …”
“I can’t know what time I can be here.” He was becoming upset. “‘Be here then, be here now.’ It’s all I can do to get all them calls. What do you think I am? I can’t make promises, I can’t say this or that. I’m not going to be picked at, they don’t know nuffink in the office.”
“Oh, forget it,” I said. “Calm down.”
“‘Be here now, then go there.’” He thrust a pamphlet into my hand. “I already said I didn’t know what time. I can’t kill myself, I won’t.”
“I said forget it,” I said, looking at the pamphlet. “What’s this?”
“That’s your book,” he said, scowling horribly. “Don’t lose it.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s your book.” He went out, slamming the door hard behind him.
“What a rude man,” I said to Mrs. Grail, who was in the basement putting her coat on.
“Ah, it’s the English. They’re all like that.”
“What is this thing he gave me?”
Mrs. Grail looked at it. “Ah, that’s your book, dear. Don’t lose it.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s your book,” Mrs. Grail said.
I went upstairs and phoned Jordan. “And Mr. MacAllister is out,” I said. “Everyone is away on holiday. What on earth are we going to do about the water? Call the fire department?”
“Maybe I should look up a plumber in the directory,” he said.
“You mean you have one?”
“They’re given to businesses.”
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me this before? The carpet is soaked, the paint is blistered….”
“Please,” he said, “don’t bug me. I’m going crazy. If Basil Goldbrick doesn’t buy into this goddamn thing, we’ll sneak out of the country under cover of darkness.”
“Well, if we have to leave, we have to leave.” I thought of what it would be like to be at home: the sun would be shining brightly, I could wear a cotton dress and no coat, the children could play outside. I could buy real meat and cook it on a real stove. “We’ll just have to make the best of it,” I said gamely.
While I was putting the book in a safe place, Jordan phoned to say a plumber was coming the next day. “I called a place in Chelsea. It says Plumbers and Decorators. I guess it’s all right.”
“Thank God,” I said. There was moss growing on the downstairs bathroom floor.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with these people here,” Jordan said, referring to the office. “One of the ladies has an upper-class accent and she keeps ordering the others around. She sits and tells them to get things for her.”
“I suppose they do it.”
“Yes, how do you know that?”
“Oh, I just sort of know.” A month in the British Isles was giving me all sorts of knowledge. I kept thinking about all those English novels I had read, and all the English movies I had seen. I remembered how we had thought that opening a business in England was a splendid idea; we might want to move there someday….
The next day was the last day of camp. I went with the boys to West Ruyslip on the underground. That took an hour. I left them there and set off for North Lambeth to retrieve Eric’s sweater and raincoat. This trip took more than an hour. I sat next to a young man in sneakers. He had a large duffel bag with him, with a Canadian flag on it.
“I’m just going back,” he said, sniffling. “I was on my way to France and I forgot my passport. Now I have to go all the way back and get it. I’m a Canadian,” he said unnecessarily. “I live in Montreal. I’m going to spend the summer in Europe. What do you think of London?”
“Well…”
“They don’t like you because you’re an American. Americans are hated everywhere. That’s why I have that flag on my bag. I don’t want to be mistaken for an American. It’s so damp here,” he said, sneezing. “I caught a cold. I’ve been here a week and I caught a cold, and now I have to go to France. After that I’m going to Germany and Austria, and then I’m going to Italy, to Rome. I have an audience with the Pope.” He sneezed again.
“It sounds interesting,” I said. “You’re lucky.”
He nodded without enthusiasm. “I wish it was over,” he said.
He leaped up, seized his bag, waved at me and charged out. I travelled the rest of the way to North Lambeth in silence. When I finally got there, I found the police station after several errors and climbed the stairs to confront a man in a glass cage, like a movie theater cashier. Since I knew the day and even the hour of the loss, the man went straight to a cubby hole and redeemed the items, wrapped in brown paper and tied with heavy string.
“Oh, good,” I said, reaching for the parcel.
The policeman held onto it. “We charge two shillings a pound of the worth of the item,” he said. “It’s a reward to the driver for turning it in.”
It became clear to me why the driver had not stopped when Bruce called to him, and why he had not checked the seat after his juvenile passengers.
“Would you say the items are worth ten pounds?” the man asked.
“No,” I said churlishly. “I got them at Marks and Spencer.”
“All right, five pounds?”
They weren’t worth five pounds, or roughly twelve dollars, but I couldn’t remember what I had paid for them. I ended up paying nine shillings in a state of total confusion and feeling like a liar.
“It’s to reward the driver,” the policeman called after me, “for his honesty.”
I walked back about five blocks to the underground and travelled hastily to Baldridge Place to see what the plumbers were doing. They said that the trouble stemmed from the Children’s Bathroom, unheated, but with darling decals of Little Bo-Peep and Little Mary Quite Contrary all over the wall, which was peeling. The tub had a telephone shower, an awkward contrivance that you hold in your hand. Since it was the only shower in the house, Mark and I had used it to wash our hair.
The plumber said that the bathtub drain was defective and the tub was not properly caulked. We had never filled the tub, but of course the telephone shower emptied into the drain, so we decided that that was what was causing the leak. We were rather suspicious of the toilet, too, so we called the entire Children’s Bathroom out of bounds. It did have an airing cupboard (“There’s your airing cupboard,” Mrs. Stackpole had said proudly), an entity I remembered from my days of reading Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. Apparently some hot water pipes travelled through it, and you were supposed to put things in there to dry them out. It was fully as damp as the rest of the house; maybe a little damper.
We were now reduced to one bathroom: ours. Since it was on the second floor or two flights up from the basement kitchen by American count, we were all rather put out, especially since Eric always had to go to the bathroom during meals and television programs and he refused to go up alone because of Hamlet’s father, and also because of the wax Queen Mother, whose beady little eyes seemed to follow him still.
25
Roof Garden and Knees
THE SATURDAY MORNING rolled around when we had arranged to meet Althea on the roof of Derry & Tom’s department store. When I arrived with the children at the appointed time of eleven o’clock, Althea was there with her sister, a plain, pleasant person in a dark raincoat. Althea apologized for asking us to meet so early; the roof closed at one o’clock on Saturday.
We bought tickets from a woman ticket taker stationed at a table near the elevator, or lift, and walked quickly through the garden to the restaurant. There were bushes, flowers and trees growing amid fountains, stone benches and Tudor archways, high above the city.
“You haven’t seen anything like this before, have you?” Althea asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
She smiled. “I daresay it’s the only one of its kind in the world,” she said.
The restaurant was light, airy and very clean. We adults ordered croissants and coffee, which was very good; Bruce and Eric had milk with their croissants, and Mark had a chocolate sundae, produced to his satisfaction without any problem. This time, I thought gratefully, we were in luck. It really was a charming restaurant. Althea said that during the week, salads were served there for lunch. She said this was an American innovation that was beginning to catch on.
“How have you been getting on?” Althea asked me.
“Well,” I said, “there isn’t very much to do, and the weather’s been awful. We’ve had some trouble with the landlady. Actually,” I said, surprising myself, “I wish we could get away for a while. I’d like to go somewhere. I’d like to go to Paris,” I said, dreamily. “I was there once for five days; it was so beautiful. And the food … but of course you’ve been there. I mean you’re so near to France.”
“Oh, dear no,” Althea said. “I’ve never been there. I’ve never been out of England. I wouldn’t go there, I wouldn’t dream of it. All those foreigners, all those strange customs.”
I looked at her. “It’s a very common English attitude,” her sister said, smiling. “You’ll find it’s not at all unusual.”
“I should like to go to America,” Althea said. “I’d enjoy that. But those foreigners. Oh, dear, no, I couldn’t stand it.”
“Well,” I said, “anyway, I’d like to go somewhere. But travelling is so expensive.”
“Why don’t you go to Devon and Cornwall?” Althea suggested. “It’s beautiful.”
“Oh yes,” her sister said. “Devon. It’s lovely there. Motor down, and travel through.”
“You’d love it,” Althea said. “You really should see the English countryside.”
After we finished lunch, it was twelve-thirty.
“We’d better hurry,” Althea said. “The roof closes at one.”
We all went out into the gardens and Althea began to point out flowers and little pools with fishes in them. We followed her. Suddenly a Boy came up, with a snub nose and a funny accent, like a Boy in Dickens.
Tea & Antipathy Page 11
