“Excuse me, Madam,” he said to Althea. “But the roof is closed now.”
“No, it isn’t,” Althea said. “It closes at one, and it’s only twenty-five to.”
“Well, excuse me, Madam,” the Boy said, “but you have to go down now.”
“Look at this precious statue,” Althea said. “It’s a copy of one in Florence.”
She began to walk about in a carefree sort of way, and we followed her nervously, with the Boy beside us. Her sister hung back near the elevator. Or lift.
“Here, Madam,” the Boy said. “Come on then.”
“Don’t take any notice of him,” Althea said to me. “It’s like this every week.” She stopped to admire a stone arch with a sort of face carved into it.
“It’s all authentic, you know,” she said to Mark. “It’s all copied from authentic things in old gardens.”
“Madam,” the Boy said.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Althea asked. She turned to the Boy. “It’s no good following us about,” she said. “We’re going to stay. Look at those people, they’re still eating. How can the gardens close?’’ She gestured toward the restaurant, where we could see people sitting at umbrella tables on the wide veranda. I couldn’t help thinking she had a good point there.
“You’ve got to go down now,” the Boy said stubbornly. “Silly old clot,” he murmured.
“What’s wrong with them?” the ticket taker said shrilly, gathering up her belongings. “Inconsiderate, I call it.”
“Well, they won’t come,” the Boy said. The elevator door was open; the elderly male operator stood at the ready, looking irritated.
“It’s no good waiting,” Althea said. “We’re not going yet. It’s not even ten of.”
“Listen, Madam,” the Boy said, “I’m going to call the guards. How would you like that?”
“Oh, go away,” Althea said. “My friends from America want to see the gardens.” The children and I were miserably pacing behind her, casting longing looks at the elevator, or lift. The sun shone brightly down on us; palm trees waved in the breeze.
“What do you think of these palm trees?” Althea asked.
“Now get out of this,” the Boy said angrily. “I’ve ‘ad enough. Come on, get out of it.”
“Althea,” I said.
“Well,” Althea said. She stopped and looked around. “We’ve seen enough.” She turned to the Boy. “We’re going because we’re ready,” she said with dignity. “We’ve seen enough. But it’s not one o’clock yet. I know the roof closes at one.”
“Oh, get out,” the Boy said.
We got into the elevator with the silent operator, and were taken down. The Boy came with us.
“Now leave the store,” he said, when we got out.
“Oh, shut up,” Althea said.
We walked through parts of Kensington with Althea, seeing Holland Park and lovely little alleys with shops in them.
“There’s the Commonwealth Institute,” Althea said, pointing to a really beautiful modern building. “You must take the children there, they have movies.”
Eric bought a carton of milk at a milk machine and we parted from Althea and her sister.
When I got home, I phoned Jordan, who was at the office, still struggling with Pressclips U.K. “Basil Goldbrick is definitely in, I think,” he asserted, without much conviction.
“Well, thank God for that,” I replied fervently, thinking that we might then be able to leave town for anywhere.
“Listen,” he said tensely, “I think we should give a party.”
“Urk,” I said. He had mentioned this before.
“I know. But after all, Basil and Daisy have taken me out for dinner several times and we do have the house and I think we should use it. Besides, Walter and Nini will be here.” That was true: Walter and Nini were friends from Chicago, who were going to spend a few days in London before pushing off for Holland, Nini’s native land.
“All right,” I said.
Jordan invited Basil and Daisy and Maud Tweak and Margaret. He also invited Albert, who couldn’t come, and a couple of public relations people, who could. This was Saturday and the party was set for the following Friday evening. Walter and Nini arrived on Monday, and we went to dinner with them. They appeared in our musty entrance hall, relics of Chicago. I felt as though I were seeing them under water.
Life in general had taken on a strange dream-like quality. Every day we rose, washed and ate, and then the boys and I went out and wandered around: we went to Harrods or we went to Selfridge’s on some trumped-up errand like buying a school satchel; if the sun was shining we went to Regent’s Park and the children travelled around and around the pond in a motor boat. Sometimes we went to Hyde Park so that they could play ball or dabble their feet in the Serpentine, a remarkably filthy stream. In the evening I would take home a little roast or some terrible steak or fatty hamburger or excellent fish and cook it on the New World while soot dropped from the old chimney. I would wash the dishes watching people’s legs go by the kitchen window; the glasses were always streaky and faintly coated with grease. I tore my stockings on the orange crate benches Mrs. Stackpole had provided for kitchen dining, and every Thursday we remembered to wind the boiler so it would not blow up.
We wandered the city, on foot, on buses, on the underground, or Tube, and in taxicabs. Twice I saw people reading books: a man walked down the street reading a Mickey Spillane, another man in the cab of a truck was reading Earl Stanley Gardiner. A thin woman on a bus called the children “brats” and got off in an incomprehensible fury; another woman shouted at a grocer for thrusting her package at her in an insolent manner, and the grocer shouted back, and in the supermarket in Knightsbridge which I frequented, a dowager lost her temper with the cashier for taking the money of the next person in line before the dowager had finished bagging her own purchases. I had great difficulty adjusting to this system myself: you frantically stuffed your groceries into your sack while customers behind you stepped on your heels and glared at you because they needed space to stuff their groceries into their sacks.
The buses were of course packed in the rush hour, but there was a rule that no one was allowed to stand in the aisles upstairs, and only a designated number were allowed to stand downstairs. The aged or infirm were not permitted to climb the stairs. Once we saw a very old, crippled man get on a bus with a young woman. The conductor said, “Five seats upstairs. No one can stand down here.” The young woman steered her aged companion toward the stairs. The conductor blocked his way. “You can’t go upstairs,” he said. Several women, including me, offered their seats to the old gentleman in an agitated flurry.
Tempers were short in the city despite the cool weather, but perhaps because of the incessant rain; I heard that this was the rainiest summer in forty-five years. Prices were very high indeed, things cost as much as they did in America, but wages were low by American standards. Living conditions were by and large uncomfortable. An aura of antiquity hung over London; I found it oppressive. I had always had a romantic predilection for the past; now I felt as though I were in a city where time was trapped anywhere between 1900 and 1937. And this despite the Mod influence, which seemed to exist only for the young.
I went happily into a Mary Quant shop in Knightsbridge, where I was surrounded by willowy young things with projecting hipbones and giraffe-like necks. “Am I the only one in here over twenty?” I said nervously to the salesgirl, or shop assistant.
“Actually, I’m twenty-three,” she said evasively.
“But I mean, does anyone over twenty-five ever come in here?”
“Actually,” she said, “no.”
I went ahead anyway, and bought two dresses.
“At home, you know,” I babbled, “at home, I mean in the United States, women wear anything they want to, at any age.” I was trying desperately to convince her. “I daresay English women are more conservative,” she said. “I suppose it’s different in the States.” The seamstress looked up at m
e disapprovingly. “How short do you want it, Madam? You don’t want it too short, do you?”
“They seem to be wearing them quite short,” I said.
“You don’t want to show your knees, do you?” she asked.
“Everybody else is,” I said defensively.
She didn’t reply to that. “About like this, I think,” she said, holding the hem carefully over my knee.
I gave it a stylish elevation. “How about like this?” I said.
Her lips compressed, she pulled it down again. “You don’t want to show your knees,” she said firmly. I had the feeling that if I protested, I would be shown out of the shop; I already felt that a woman of my advanced age (39) was there only on sufferance to begin with.
26
Evening Out
ON THURSDAY, we arranged to meet Walter and Nini at the theater. I had not yet been to the theater because Jordan had seen, walked out of, or fallen asleep during almost all the London productions when he had been alone in the city all winter. But we were going to see The Killing of Sister George, a relatively new play that had gotten excellent reviews. As I was getting ready to go, the phone rang.
“Mrs. Jordan Millah?” a rather bubbly voice screamed; it could only be Mr. MacAllister.
“How are you, Mrs. Jordan Millah?” I think he thought “Mrs. Jordan” was a title, like “the Right Honorable.”
“I had a call here from your husband about the pipe,” he said. “I thought all that had been taken care of long ago.”
“Well, no. We couldn’t get a plumber, you see. We tried and tried, and the water kept coming down.”
Mr. MacAllister gave a sudden shriek of laughter.
“How awful for you,” he said.
“Well, yes. We didn’t know what to do. I called you and I called the plumber and no one was there. Finally my husband looked it up in the directory. He has a directory, you see, because he’s in business.”
“Oh, dear me,” Mr. MacAllister said.
“Yes. So finally we got a plumber, but of course by that time the water had been coming down for quite a while, so I’m afraid the wall has to be repainted and the plumber had to chop a hole in the powder room ceiling to let the water out….”
“A hole,” Mr. MacAllister said.
“Yes,” I went on, unable to resist a rapt audience. “And of course the carpet was soaked, and he had to cut a hole because the ceiling was sagging, and he left a bucket—”
“Sagging,” Mr. MacAllister said.
“—and he left a bucket on the toilet seat but no water is falling in, so I assume it’s all right. We just can’t use the Children’s Bathroom because the tub has a defective drain.”
“I think I’ll just come round and see, shall I?”
“When?”
“Yes, I think I’ll just pop round now.”
“Well, I’m going out,” I said. “To the theater, and I was just leaving.”
“I’ll just pop round,” Mr. MacAllister said, with his ethnic persistence. “See you in five minutes.”
I made a feeble attempt to get Mark to handle Mr. MacAllister so I could leave, but he kept insisting he wouldn’t know what to say to him. Finally, after I spent fifteen minutes fretting on the front stoop in my dangling earrings and silk coat, a small sports car drove up and Mr. MacAllister emerged. He had popping pale blue eyes, colorless thinning hair combed straight back, two chins and a protruding stomach.
“Mrs. Jordan Millah?” he asked, as I stood on the stoop.
I took him down the hall to the powder room; he nearly dislocated his neck trying to peer inside the sitting room where the children were watching TV, such as it was, but I had closed the door nearly all the way. He looked at the blistered paint, the soaked carpet, the bulging ceiling with the hole in it. “Several hundred pounds worth of damage here, I should imagine,” he said.
“Yes, it’s too bad,” I said.
He gave a sudden screech of laughter. I decided that this must be a nervous habit.
We went upstairs and he looked carefully around the Children’s Bathroom. “It seems in order here,” he said.
“Yes, but this is where the water came from. They pried up the floor boards and that’s all dry; you see, we didn’t use this bathroom. The water came from the defective drain. All we did was wash our hair with the telephone shower.”
“But what did the plumber do?” Mr. MacAllister asked.
“He said not to use the tub.”
He gave one of his screams. “How extr’ordin’ry,” he said. “Didn’t he mend it?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“But how extr’ordin’ry!” Another scream, ending in a hiccup.
“Well,” I said tactfully.”I’m late.”
“D’you want a lift?”
“Oh, thanks,” I said feeling that my lateness was his fault anyway. “I’m going to meet my husband at the St. George Theater. Do you know where that is?”
“No, actually I don’t, but I’ll find it.” I climbed into Mr. MacAllister’s little blue car, and we took off, almost literally.
“I can’t understand it,” he said. “Mrs. Stackpole’s children were bathed regularly in that tub for months. By their Nanny,” he added. “And nothing happened.”
“Yes, well,” I said. “Our children didn’t use it.”
I began to detect a note of recrimination; my hackles rose.
“But how did they bathe?” he asked. His tone implied doubt that they did.
“In our bathroom,” I said, adding spitefully, “The Children’s Bathroom is too cold.”
This remark evoked another screech of laughter; we darted into traffic and cut off a large truck. The truck driver turned very red in the face and, leaning out of his window, he shouted something very nasty at Mr. MacAllister, who stared thoughtfully at the truck driver for a moment, and then rolled down his window and poked his own head out.
“What?” he called to the truck driver.
The truck driver turned even redder and repeated his insult with embellishments.
Mr. MacAllister laughed shortly. “Ha,” he said to me. “That fellow. How extr’ordin’ry.” Several horns were honking. We shoved off again, narrowly missing more cars, and weaving wildly about.
“I imagine,” Mr. MacAllister said thoughtfully, “that that tub was filled to overflowing and allowed to remain that way for hours. I imagine that the water was left running for hours.”
I had taken a very strong dislike to Mr. MacAllister and I was sitting with him in a little blue car that he obviously did not know how to drive; our knees were virtually touching.
“By whom?” I asked, grammatical to the end.
“By you,” Mr. MacAllister said. “Or by your children.”
“I have already told you,” I said in a low voice with some controlled rage in it, “that we did not use that tub. Are you calling me a liar?”
Mr. MacAllister shrieked with laughter.
“Did you?” he said in a surprised voice. “Really?”
“Yes, I did,” I said. “The tub had not been used; the plumber said the floor boards were dry; it never overflowed. Why don’t you talk to the plumber?”
“I think I’ll do that,” Mr. MacAllister said.
He laughed again, very loudly. “I don’t know what kind of plumber your husband called,” he said. “The man is listed as a decorator.”
“He was all we could find. We were sort of desperate.”
I could have added a few choice words here, like I called you and you didn’t help, but I didn’t want to go into it.
“Here we are in Trafalgar Square,” Mr. MacAllister said. “You say the theater is near here?”
“Somewhere,” I said, spotting two policemen on the comer. “Perhaps we could ask.”
“Do you mind asking?” Mr. MacAllister said. He stopped the car and after a moment I realized that he wanted me to get out. He sat behind the wheel while I crawled out and slammed the door. Then he whizzed off and left me near
the curb, or kerb. The policemen, who looked to be about fourteen years old, looked up the theater in a book and after some difficulty directed me to it
I hobbled three blocks, or a six minute walk, in my elegant shoes. My face felt as though it were set in concrete, my earrings dangled with rage. “What’s wrong?” Jordan said. “Why are you late? Why is your face so white? What happened?” I told him briefly, through stiff lips, that Mr. MacAllister had accused me of allowing the tub to overflow and then had dumped me out of his car in Trafalgar Square. “I’ll call my lawyer,” Jordan said. “Maybe we can break the lease. This is ridiculous.”
Nini and Walter appeared. I told them about Mr. MacAllister.
“The English,” Nini said “A few minutes ago here comes a boy and steps on my foot. He didn’t even say he was sorry.” She had always been an Anglophobe, and particularly disliked the Queen, for no discernible reason except a competitive preference for the Dutch royal family.
“How rude,” I said.
We went into the theater and I watched the first act of the mediocre play; I think it was mediocre, I was mostly thinking about Mr. MacAllister. In the intermission, or interval, we went out into a very crowded bar. Two men and a woman were standing behind us; one of the men had long bushy sideburns, a sort of Oscar Wilde costume, and an expression of extreme arrogance. We chatted desultorily with Nini and Walter, sipping our drinks, until Oscar’s companion, leaving the bar, apparently decided that Jordan was blocking his way. He unleashed an interestingly long arm and gave Jordan a tremendous shove; Walter, who was nearly seven feet tall, caught him before his nose hit the wall. Oscar Wilde and his two friends stared at us with lifted eyebrows. I felt like an eighteenth century peasant whose two-year-old had just been run over by the Squire’s coach. We walked stiffly back to our seats, Oscar’s drawl ringing in our ears. I heard the woman say loudly, “They must be Americans or something.”
27
The Party
THE NEXT DAY I called Percy Snell, Jordan’s lawyer, to tell him that Mr. MacAllister had made sinister and insulting allegations and I wanted to be protected from them. Percy Snell laughed a good deal; he sounded exactly like Mr. MacAllister. I began to wonder whether I could be losing my mind.
Tea & Antipathy Page 12
