Tea & Antipathy (11 page)

West Ruyslip was the end of the line. We disembarked, surprised to smell trees and flowers, and walked half a block down a hill to the American Air Force base. There large people in uniforms blocked our way, looking at us suspiciously. Some of them wanted us to go away, but I stood my ground and finally an officer told them that the day camp was open to civilians, and it was all right. A uniformed person took us across the camp to a wooden building. The ground was brown and bare; it had started to rain, and an icy wind was blowing.

I signed the boys into the camp for one week and hung around in a large auditorium while the lady from Texas sorted all the children into groups. Bruce and Eric were in the same group. She gave them all paper Indian headdresses and told
them to run around in a circle. At this point I went out into the hall because I could feel Bruce trying to catch my eye. I sat down on a bench in the hall and started to read. The rain beat on the tin roof of the building and the winds swirled about it. I was reading a British reprint of an American novel about a sensitive man who lived in New Jersey and felt stifled. His wife joined the PTA and he was booed at meetings.

I visited the lavatory and was shocked to find lewd things written all over the walls; severe notes from the authorities were posted threatening to shut the ladies off from a lavatory entirely if they did not mend their ways. Finally, suffering from cold, headache and general malaise, I went to the base cafeteria for lunch, to find that they would not take my English money. A young American girl gave me some American change, and we sat together to eat.

“I've been here three years,” she said. “I hate it. They call us Yanks, we call them Blokes. The children beat up my little sister. I have to stay here because I'm getting married and my fiancé hasn't finished here. Everybody makes fun of my accent. I do telephone ordering for the base; yesterday a man said he couldn't understand a word I said. He said he didn't know what language I was speaking.”

She went off moodily and I went back to my draughty hallway and my book. After an hour or so I wandered into the office to thaw out. The girls there were chatting. “I'm getting out,” one said. “I'm going to college in the States. I feel awfully sorry for my mother, though; she's got another year here. She wants to come with me and settle me in college, but my father won't let her because he's afraid she won't come back.”

“I just got back from Manchester,” another one said. “We had a ball.”

“You liked Manchester?” I said.

“Oh, it was great. The people are friendly up there. Not like London. They're almost like Americans up there.”

I huddled in the office until four o'clock when I collected Eric, who said he had had a good time, and Bruce, who was too miserable even to complain, and we walked back to the underground where we changed trains once, traveling on a monumental escalator, and then reached South Ken where we took a cab home. The house was dark and very cold. Eric went into the little lavatory on the ground floor.

“Hey, it's all wet back there,” he said.

I went back. Water was running down the wall between the lavatory and the small study.

“Oh, dear,” I said, “I'll call Mr. MacAllister.”

“ … and there's quite a lot of water coming down the wall,” I said to him on the phone.

For some incomprehensible reason, Mr. MacAllister laughed.

“How awful for you,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, do you know a plumber?”

Mr. MacAllister's voice became rather frigid. “I don't
know
any plumbers,” he said. “I do know
of
a builder.”

“Well, do you think you could call him? Someone is here every day until two o'clock.”

“Well, I could try to call him, yes.”

“Because you see,” I said slowly and distinctly, “there's quite a lot of water coming down the wall.”

Mr. MacAllister laughed, and we rang off.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I phoned the day camp, as I had been instructed to do, to find out what their field trip plans were, and whether, if they were coming to London, we could meet them somewhere. Bruce was barely speaking to me, because he had spent his entire day running around in circles wearing a paper hat. Eric had been more vocal on the subject. “No, I didn't like it,” he said, “but at least it was something to do.”

The people at the day camp informed me that they were going to be at Madame Tussaud's in an hour. This was not good news. Eric was still afraid of Hamlet's uncle. He wouldn't go upstairs alone and every time we went out, he asked whether we were going near Madame Tussaud's.

Now I had to announce that the day camp was going there.

“I want to go to Madame Tussaud's again,” Bruce said instantly.

“So do I,” Eric said. He looked doubtful.

“But it frightened you,” I said.

“I want to go,” Bruce said. “Eric doesn't have to go, but I want to.”

“I want to, too,” Eric said. He still looked doubtful.

I began to rationalize. “Maybe,” I said, “maybe if you go again, you'll see how you built the whole thing up in your
mind, and you'll realize how silly it is to be frightened. Do you think so?”

“Yes,” Eric said.

“I mean,” I went on, gaining confidence, “that was the only time you went, and we had just arrived, and everything seemed so strange to you. But if you go again, with a lot of other children, you'll see it in a different sort of light.”

“Yes, I will,” Eric said.

“No, he won't,” Bruce said. “He'll be scared out of his wits.”

“Maybe he won't, Bruce,” I said. “Why don't we give it a try?”

“There's a lot of water coming down the wall of the lavatory,” Mrs. Grail said, coming into the room. “The carpet's getting soaked.” I told her that I had called Mr. MacAllister.

“I think someone will come in today and fix it.”

“Ah, that awful thing,” Mrs. Grail said automatically.

“Yes, but he knows
of
a builder,” I said. “He doesn't
know
any plumbers.”

“Ah, the snobs,” Mrs. Grail said.

Half an hour later we found the Air Force children bunched up in a disorganized un-English way in front of Madame Tussaud's. The distracted Texas lady was waiting for us.

“I couldn't decide whether Eric should go,” I said, “but we all decided it would take the curse off it for him if he went again, especially with a lot of other children.”

“Why, it surely would,” the Texas lady said.

“I mean,” I said, “we are assuming that he was frightened the first time only because it was a strange sort of day and we were all three alone here. We think that with a lot of children he will feel different, and anyway—”

“Why, surely,” the lady said, counting heads. “Don't worry about a thing.”

She herded them away while I was still saying, “It's possible that….”

Eric waved gaily to me as he went in.

I was free at last.

I could go shopping. I could wander around looking in shop windows. I knew already that everything was expensive. I returned to Knightsbridge and stopped at a shoe store. There were black patent leather sandals in the window. The very thing. The man who greeted me at the door was friendly to the point of being obsequious; he handed me and the shoe in question to a young saleslady, or shop assistant, who eyed me with distaste.

“Yes?” she said.

I told her that I wanted the shoe in question in my size.

“I don't know what sizes we have left,” she said.

“Perhaps you could measure my foot,” I said, adding apologetically, “If I could sit down….”

She hesitated and then led me down some stairs to another shoe salon. She measured my foot, vanished, and reappeared with a rather large sandal, which she placed on my foot and then whisked off, just as I was about to stand.

“It doesn't fit you,” she said. “We don't have it in your size.”

“Do you have anything else that would fit me?”

“Not an open shoe like that,” she said, and rose briskly.

“How about a closed one?” I asked.

She went away, looking annoyed, and came back almost immediately to say firmly, “We don't have anything for you in
black.” Unwilling to annoy her further by requesting a color, I went out into the street again, and decided to buy some glasses for an evening party that Jordan wanted to give. There was an enormous crush in the shop. I ruined a young man's day by asking him if he were free, or if he could get me a salesperson. He was wearing a suit so I thought he was a manager. His hand flew to his throat. “I'm not …” he murmured, “shop … assistant….”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were—”

“I hope,” he breathed, “I don't look like one….”

“No, no,” I said. “It's just that I'm confused. I don't know what I'm doing.”

This seemed to offer him solace, and on that note I pushed off, deciding to forget the glasses and go to Jordan's office, where, I had heard, all sorts of subtle class distinctions and various hostilities had cropped up. Mark had mentioned that some people were behaving badly toward Vincent and other employees of color. Obviously I couldn't do anything about that, but I thought I might be able to cheer Jordan up. Anyway, I didn't have anywhere else to go.

Harried streams of ladies in lumpy cardigans pushed pleasantly past me in the narrow corridor. Jordan and Bill Dworkin were crouched glumly in their tiny office. A faint odor of mold pervaded everything. Mark was busy reproducing Beatle photographs on the copy machine.

“How are things?” I asked, without much hope A faint sigh stirred the dampness.

“It's like a swamp in here,” I said. Jordan muttered something.

At this point Eric and Bruce entered.

“What are you doing here?” I said, startled. “It's not even two o'clock.”

“He got scared,” Bruce said. “He got scared all over again at Madame Tussaud's and we had to leave. I wasn't scared, I was enjoying it, but I had to leave because of him.”

“I got scared,” Eric said, smiling self-consciously.

“So we took a cab,” Bruce continued. “We took a cab over here and I had enough money, and a shilling tip. And Eric left his raincoat and his sweater in the cab.”

“His new raincoat,” I said. “His new sweater.”

“I noticed it right away,” Bruce said. “I called the man, but he just drove off.”

“What kind of idiot just drives off without checking the back seat after little children?” I demanded indignantly of Jordan. He gave another weary sigh and waved his hand weakly. “You'd better take them away,” he said. “Things are fouled up enough around here as it is.”

“Come on, boys,” I said, with my big false grin. “Let's go to Selfridge's and have a nice drink or something. They have tasty scones at Selfridge's,” I said to Jordan in an aside. I had had tea there once with Marilyn, an American friend. Her husband was doing research at the British Museum and she consequently spent a lot of time in London, studying Yoga and flower arranging and hanging around. I had asked her how she liked being there. She said she did and she didn't. She found housekeeping difficult and she didn't like shopping. She and her husband ate a lot of cabbages.

I confessed that I was afraid to go into a butcher shop.

Marilyn said that she had always been afraid to go into butcher shops in London. “But you have to be firm with them,” she said, ‘‘you can't let them bully you.” A week earlier, her
husband had said he was sick of eating cabbage. When they went out for an evening walk, he had pointed out a roast in a butcher's window and told her to go in the next day and buy it for dinner. “So,” she said, “the next morning I went in there and there was this butcher.'' She put on a face of eighteenth-century hauteur, and lounged languidly behind an imaginary counter.

“So I said, ‘You know that roast in the window?' And he said …” She drew herself up, her face froze, and her voice dripped icicles. ‘That is a … stuffed … rolled lamb, Madam.' So I said to him, ‘Well, there's a fly on it.' And I left. You have to be firm with them.”

“So,” I said, “you didn't actually buy the meat.''

“Well, no. We had cabbage for dinner. But it's all a question of handling them. For instance, I buy this cheese at a market. They sell it in this big block, and I have to slice it. So I asked them to slice it. I said, ‘Could you slice it?' and they always said, ‘Oh, no, Madam, we couldn't possibly slice it.' So I thought about it, and the next time I said, ‘You couldn't possibly slice it,' and the man said, ‘Oh, yes, of course we can, Madam.' You have to know how to handle them.''

All in all, it had been an entertaining tea, and the scones were delicious, so I decided to take the boys to Selfridge's. “You couldn't come, could you, Mark?” I asked wistfully.