The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

by Helene Hanff

  Jean and Ted Ely still astonish me. They invited me to dinner in New York after they read the book. They live in a very spacious Fifth Avenue apartment, all polished mahogany and old carpets and warm colors, and I thought they were the most beautiful couple I’d ever seen. Both of them are slim and straight, both have thick gray hair, regular features and serenely smooth faces—and when Jean told me casually they were in their mid-seventies I was stupefied. They are as improbably handsome and untouched by time as the parents of the debutante in a 1930 s movie.

  We talked about PB through dinner. I sent him a note to tell him I’ll be here another two weeks, Jean said maybe he’ll take the three of us somewhere.

  A chauffeured limousine drove me back here; I do not know how anybody expects me to adjust to life on Second Avenue when I get home.

  Ena phoned, How’s Sunday morning, am I free to Sit? The things I agree to with a little gin in me.

  Friday, July 16

  Just got back from Nora’s buffet supper—where I arrived an hour and a half late and I was the guest of honor, I mean this evening got off to a horrendous start.

  Nora had phoned this morning to say a car would pick me up here at seven-fifteen, so as usual I was dressed and waiting in the lobby at seven. No car came at seven-fifteen, no car came at seven-thirty, and by seven-forty-five I decided Nora’s friends must have forgotten to pick me up and I called her. She said she’d ordered a cab for me “to bring you out in style.” It never came. She told me to go out in the street and hail a cab and come on out.

  I went out in the street and hailed a cab and got in. But North London is apparently equivalent to the far end of Brooklyn, and London cab drivers are grimly equivalent to New York cab drivers. I gave the driver Nora’s address, and he stared at me mask-like.

  “I don’t know where that is, Madam,” he said in a flat voice. I innocently explained it was in Highgate. He stared straight in front of him this time and repeated in the same expressionless voice:

  “I don’t know where that is, Madam.”

  I got the message and got out of the cab and waited ten minutes for the next cab to come along and got in. I gave the driver Nora’s address, and we went through the same charade. But this driver was so anxious to get rid of me that when I got out of the cab he shot off before I’d gotten both feet on the ground, and I fell and split my leg open. So there I was, blood all over my leg at eight-fifteen of a seven-thirty supper in my honor. I couldn’t go back up to the room and clean the wound and put on fresh stockings because that would have made me fifteen minutes later still.

  I went back into the lobby and consulted the desk clerk and he said what I needed was a minicab, they take you anywhere. Minicabs are the London equivalent of New York’s limousine services (and cost as much). The clerk phoned the minicab service for me and a cab arrived ten minutes later. The driver told me his name was Barry, he’s a hospital intern, he drives a minicab nights to earn a little money. He took the hills of North London like he had a death wish for both of us, but never mind, he got us there and gave me a high old time on the way.

  He told me he studied at McGill in Canada and spent summers working in Manhattan. The first day he landed in New York he found himself on the traffic island at Broadway and Forty-second Street, he didn’t know where he was, he just knew he wanted to go to Times Square. There was a cop directing traffic, and Barry, wanting to ask directions, stepped up behind the cop and tapped him on the shoulder. Whereupon the cop, true to the tradition of courtesy and helpfulness of New York’s Finest, turned around and stuck the muzzle of a gun in Barry’s stomach.

  “I only want to ask directions to Times Square, Officer,” said Barry.

  “Izzat right,” said the cop.

  “I’m a tourist, I don’t know my way about,” Barry explained. “I’m British.”

  “No kiddin’,” said the cop without taking his gun out of Barry’s stomach. So Barry gave up and said:

  “Officer, if you’re going to shoot me, please step back so you don’t kill the four hundred people behind me.”

  The cop let him go then, and Barry crossed the street and asked a passer-by how to get to Times Square. The passer-by studied the problem thoughtfully and then said:

  “Walk one block, turn left, walk one block, turn left, walk one block, turn left and you’ll be there.”

  So Barry walked around the block and that’s how he discovered he’d been standing on Times Square all the time. He’d been looking for an English Square—with a park in it. What the passer-by didn’t know was that in London you can walk one block, turn left, walk one block, turn left, walk one block, turn left—and be nowhere near where you started from.

  He sold Britannicas and fountain pens door-to-door. Most of the housewives slammed the door in his face. (“I used to have to call, ‘Madam, will you please open the door so I can get my tie back?’”) so he switched to demonstrating fountain pens at Woolworth’s. He discovered the way to beat that system was to get very good at it and be promoted to teacher. “Teaching other guys how to demonstrate,” he explained, “you at least got to sit down.”

  He dropped me at Nora’s and said he’d pick me up at midnight for the return trip.

  I could have brained Nora, she hadn’t told the guests I’d been ready-and-waiting since seven-fifteen. One woman turned to me and said politely:

  “Do you mind my asking what held you up?” and I was so stunned I couldn’t answer her, I just fled upstairs with Sheila and hid out in her room till I got calmed down. I have no poise.

  All the rare-book dealers regaled me with stories of the trade. They told me that after the war there were too many books and not enough bookshop space, so all the dealers in London BURIED hundreds of old books in the open bomb craters of London streets. Today the buried books would be worth a fortune if they could be recovered, if the new buildings could be torn down and the rebuilt streets torn up. I had a sudden vision of an atomic war destroying everything in the world, except here and there an old book lying where it fell when it was blasted up out of the depths of London.

  Everybody brought me small gifts and I think I made a faux pas with one of them. A very charming woman who deals in autographs gave me a beautifully bound pocket notebook. I needed one, since I’d converted my old one into a calendar, and when the rare-book man from Quaritch’s gave me his name and the address of the shop, I wrote them down in the new notebook. From the quality of the silence that followed, I think writing in that notebook was a kind of desecration. I had a horrible feeling the notebook was one of those antique items you’re not supposed to use, you’re just supposed to look at it. What the hell do I want with a notebook you can’t use? I get in trouble this way all the time.

  Barry arrived on the dot of twelve and drove me home. He told me to visit his hospital if I get down that way, it’s St. Bartholomew’s, he said Go in by the Henry VIII gate and see the chapel, it’s beautiful. I wrote his name—Barry Goldhill—in the desecrated notebook and asked him what he’s specializing in. He said, “Gynecology.” I said, “Too late, honey, I can’t do a thing for you.”

  Saturday, July 17

  Note in the mail from Rutland Gate, he’s back.

  See you here, Monday, 19th, at 11 promptly for sherry with Charles II and lunch with Charles Dickens.

  In haste—

  P.B.

  I thought I’d better bone up on Dickens first, so after breakfast I walked out to the Dickens House in Doughty Street. It’s only a few blocks beyond Russell Square, I just never had enough interest in Dickens to go there before—which you don’t tell to ANYbody over here, it is flat heresy not to like Dickens. I mean Dickens is the national household god.

  Except for PB, not one single Londoner has ever mentioned Shakespeare’s pub to me. Nobody mentions the Pepys landmarks, nobody mentions Wimpole Street—and nobody knows what you’re talking about when you ask about the house where Shaw courted his “green-eyed millionairess.” But every living soul tells you where Mr.
Pickwick dined and where the Old Curiosity Shop is and Do see the house on Doughty Street where Oliver Twist was written and This is Camden Town, where Bob Cratchit lived and The-porter-will-show-you-where-Dickens-wrote-Great-Expectations.

  Doughty Street is another of those streets lined with the gentle, narrow brick houses that still shake me. The Dickens House is furnished much as it was when he lived in it, and the room at the back of the house where he worked has a complete set of Dickens first editions. Walls of every room are crammed with cases of Dickens memorabilia—letters, drawings, cartoons, theatre programs with his name in the cast list. (Never knew he was such a rabid amateur actor.) All the tourists going through the house, mostly from “the U.K.,” knew every character and every incident depicted in every drawing and cartoon. Just incredible.

  I had lunch at Tanjar’s, the curry place on Charlotte Street, and then walked down to Covent Garden to see Ellen Terry’s ashes. The church is called St. Paul’s Covent Garden but when you get to the Market there’s no church in sight. Wandered around, peering at my map and then at Covent Garden Market. A young man with a brown beard came breezing along, went past me, wheeled, came back and inquired:

  “Lost, luv?”

  I told him I was looking for the Actors’ Church and he said: “Are you an actress?”

  I said No, but I’d been a frustrated playwright in my youth and I loved the Shaw-Terry correspondence and wanted to see Ellen’s ashes.

  “Isn’t that dear of you,” he said. “Nobody ever comes looking for our church but people in the profession.”

  He’s an actor. Out of work. He said Just keep going round the Market till you come to an alleyway, cross it and turn the corner and you’ll see the church.

  I thanked him and wished him luck and he said, “Luck to you, too, luv!” and went breezing on his way—and looking after him I purely hated myself because I hadn’t bothered to ask his name. People oughtn’t to breeze into your life and out again in ten seconds, without leaving even a name behind. As Mr. Dickens once pointed out, we’re all on our way to the grave together.

  I picked my way through the rotting fruits and vegetables lying on the pavement in front of the Market, walked to the corner and came to the alley, a kind of open square used for parking produce trucks and littered with garbage. I crossed the alley and turned the corner and there it was—a small church in a green churchyard, with a garden beyond.

  The church was empty. For which I was grateful. I am emotional, and if you’re emotional you never know what may suddenly move you to tears. I thought Ellen’s ashes might.

  There was a pile of mimeographed sheets on a table, and a sign invites the visitor to take one and sit down and read it so you’ll know “something about where you are.” The church was built by Inigo Jones back in the 1630’s. William S. Gilbert was baptized there, Wycherley is buried there, Davy Garrick worshipped there—and Professor Enry Iggins first saw Eliza Dolittle selling her flaaars under the church portico in the rain.

  I went along the right-hand wall reading plaques to the memory of long-dead actors and composers. Almost at the end of the wall, near the altar, in a niche behind iron grillwork in a silver urn polished to a pristine gleam, Ellen Terry’s ashes. Surprised to find myself smiling at the urn; it’s a luminous, cheerful sight.

  I crossed the nave and came back up along the left-hand wall and read more plaques clear to the door. Just inside the door as I was leaving I came upon the most recent plaque:

  VIVIEN LEIGH D. 1967

  and was suddenly moved to tears.

  Sunday, July 18

  Sat.

  Ena picked me up in a clattery station wagon and drove me to Russell Square and parked at the entrance. The station wagon has sliding doors which I naturally tried to open outward, nearly broke the door and my arm both. Ena was convulsed, and said: “You’re exactly like Leo!” It seems he never gets the hang of anything mechanical either.

  I got out and she climbed out after me, all five feet of her, lugging a six-foot easel, a four-foot box of paints, a palette, some magazines and a radio the size of a portable TV set. I wasn’t allowed to help: the Subject is not permitted to fetch-and-carry.

  We set up deck chairs—lounge chair for me, straight-backed one for her—and I was surprised and relieved to learn that when you Sit you don’t have to sit still and hold a pose. Ena told me I could lie back, sit up, stretch, move, smoke, anything as long as I kept facing her. She then went into great detail about how to operate the radio; it turned out she’d brought the radio and magazine for me, to keep me from getting bored. It struck me funny.

  “I don’t get bored in Russell Square and I don’t get bored with you,” I told her. “Can’t we talk while you work?”

  “Oh, I’d love that,” she said. “None of my subjects ever talks to me. They sit in silence hour after hour.”

  “With me,” I said, “that is not likely to be your problem.”

  My friend the ticket taker came over to stand behind her and watch her paint. So did two English ladies, an Indian student and a middle-aged Jamaican with a walking stick.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked them, only wanting to be sociable. But being spoken to directly seemed to embarrass them and they mumbled, “Very good,” and, “Very nice,” and melted away. Ena thanked me, she said the gallery made her nervous. So from now on my function is to shoo away what New Yorkers call the Sidewalk Superintendents. In London you shoo them away by talking to them. In New York talking to them would just get you their life stories.

  It’s fascinating to watch a portrait painter work. There Ena sat, her red-and-white gingham dress flouncing around her, looking completely relaxed, talking, laughing, asking questions as she painted—and all the time, her eyes were darting with incredible speed up to my face, down to the easel, up to the face, down to the easel, up-down up-down up-down, in a motion as quick and sharp and rhythmic as a metronome at high speed. Hour after hour she talked and laughed and painted, and the quick up-and-down darting of the eyes never stopped for an instant. I tried it myself for about twenty seconds and my eye muscles were sore.

  She painted till one and then drove me down to Kensington for lunch. We didn’t try to talk on the way; the station-wagon clatter was as deafening as a New York subway. English cars are blissfully quiet going by you in the street but very noisy to ride in. American cars exactly the opposite.

  She took me to a little Italian place for lunch, down near where she and Leo live, called Panzer’s Pasta and Pizza, it’s their favorite neighborhood hangout. I had the best martini I’ve had in London and a chicken-with-garlic-butter they can serve me in heaven.

  Ena was shocked that I hadn’t been to a single gallery and firmly dragged me to the National Portrait Gallery after lunch—where I amazed myself by going clean out of my mind meeting old friends face-to-face. Charles II looks exactly the dirty-old-man he was, Mary of Scotland looks exactly the witch-on-a-broomstick she was, Elizabeth looks marvelous, the painter caught everything—the bright, sharp eyes and strong nose, the translucent skin and delicate hands, the glittering, cold isolation. Wish I knew why portraits of Mary and Elizabeth always look real and alive, and portraits of Shakespeare, painted in the same era and the same fashion, always look stylized and remote.

  I stared at every face so long we never got out of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We’re going back next week for the eighteenth and nineteenth, I am now passionately determined to see everybody.

  The Colonel phoned, he’s driving me into the country for dinner on Wednesday.

  Monday, July 19

  Got to Rutland Gate at eleven. That’s a lie. I’m always so afraid I won’t get there “promptly” I always take a cab, I always get there twenty minutes early and walk around the neighborhood till it’s late enough to ring his bell. I enjoy it, it’s an interesting neighborhood.

  He took me to the Old Wine Shades in Martin Lane, Cannon Street, for sherry-at-eleven. It’s the only pub in London that survived the Gr
eat Fire of 1666. It was built before 1663 and doesn’t seem to have changed since. There are ancient wine kegs over the bar, the wooden tables and benches are age-stained, even the menu sounded archaic, I could imagine Sam Pepys ordering the Veal and Sweetmeat Pie.

  He took me to the Bank of England, where the doormen and floorwalkers are dressed in red waistcoats and breeches, and bow as they bid you good morning. (Aside from them, it’s just one more folksy cobra.)

  We had lunch at the George & Vulture where, it quotes on the menu, “Mr. Pickwick invited about five-and-forty people to dine with him the very first time they came to London.” The restaurant is the headquarters of the Pickwick Club. Dickens cartoons on the walls; steaks and chops done over an open fire in a great stone fireplace.

  Around the corner from the George & Vulture is “the Church of St. Michael Cornhill with St. Peter Le Poer and St. Benet Fink.” I’m putting St. Benet Fink on my Favorite Saints list right under the two New Orleans saints.

  Back around 1801, when the U.S. bought Louisiana, American firms moved in on the Catholic icon business and began sending crates of church statuary down to New Orleans. The crates were labeled FRAGILE and EXPEDITE. New Orleaners were French, they couldn’t read English and they didn’t know what the two words meant. They decided the words must be the names of two new saints whose icons were inside the crates. Next thing anybody knew, the most popular saints in New Orleans were St. Fragile and St. Expedite.

  St. Fragile lost ground after a while but the last I heard you could still pick up a New Orleans newspaper any day and read in the Personals Column:

  Thanks to St. Expedite for special favor granted.