Tea & Antipathy (12 page)

“Yes, I could,” he said promptly.

“We need you here,” his father said lugubriously.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” Mark said.

“The poor little tyke is all yellow,” I said. “He needs fresh air.'' Actually, we were all a bit yellow, because the sun rarely shone and the air was permanently soggy.

The ladies were coming around with their cracked cups and slices of cake, as they seemed to do every hour in that office. We left Jordan moodily drinking his brown tea, while Bill entertained him with a story about two more rude Americans who had pushed in front of him in the post office.

“YOUR FATHER'S VERY NERVOUS
,” I said to Mark.

“That place gets on your nerves,” he said. “Tomorrow I'm going to Carnaby Street to buy some clothes”

“What's that?”

“Carnaby Street. It's where all the Mods buy their clothes. They have cool clothes. The Beatles' tailor is there, the Stones shop there. This is a very cool place,” he said contentiously. “The music is great. You don't appreciate it.”

“I do appreciate it,” I said, stung. “All my life I've loved England.”

We took a cab to Selfridge's and fought our way through the crowds to the Jungle Room on an upper floor. “It doesn't look like much,” I said apologetically, “but the scones are good.”

“I want some ice cream,” Mark said.

“They have ice cream.”

We sat down next to the wall; there were large jungly-looking leaves on the wallpaper.

“Boy, is this creepy-looking,” Mark said. When the waitress came to our table, Bruce and I ordered scones. Eric said he wanted chocolate milk. He was always demanding outrageous things: chocolate milk, coke without lemon, more toast, no prawns…. Now at Selfridge's, I was telling the waitress, “He'll have chocolate milk.”

“Oh, we don't do chocolate milk,” she replied. She was a pretty girl, with a fresh complexion. “We
do
do chocolate sodas,” she added, kindly.

“Well,” I said, “if you make … if you do chocolate sodas, you must have chocolate syrup.”

“Y e-e-s,” she said doubtfully.

“And if you have milk, all you have to do is take a few spoonsful of chocolate syrup and put it in the milk and stir it up, and you've got chocolate milk.”

There was a pause.

“What?” she said.

“You see,” I said, “you have the chocolate syrup in a jar or something. You pour a glass of milk. Then you take a spoon and you put syrup on the spoon and put the spoon into the milk and stir it up and you have chocolate milk.”

“You mean,” she said, “that you mix … ? You put … ?”

“Yes, you put the chocolate syrup on a spoon, into the glass of milk, a few times, and you mix it or stir it, and that makes chocolate milk.” I didn't look at the children while this conversation was taking place.

“I'll go and check,” the waitress said. “See if it can be done.”

She went off, and after a while she came back with a dramatic announcement. “We can do it!” she cried triumphantly.

“It's all in handling them,” I said smugly.

“I don't believe this,” Mark said.

She brought the scones, some tea, a chocolate soda for Mark, a glass of milk for Bruce and a glass of heavily chocolate milk for Eric.

“The soda looks good,” I said to Mark. It was tall and topped with whipped cream and a cherry.

He took a deep swig through the straw and his face turned purple. “It's all hot chocolate on the bottom,” he said, when he could talk. “Only the chocolate came through, and they
heated
it.”

I said they couldn't possibly have heated it. “Well, it's awfully warm. Visualize this: you take a deep drink, you're thirsty. You expect a cool swig of ice cream. You get hot syrup. Faugh.”

“Mix it up,” I said. “You take a spoon and you put it in, and you move it—”

“There's too much chocolate in this milk,” Eric said. “I can't drink it.”

“You have to drink it,” Bruce said. “Look what she went through.”

“Pour it in your shoe,” Mark said. “She won't know.” We went home, to find the wall streaked and peeling, and the carpet black and soggy.

“The plumber didn't come,” I said. “I'd better call him myself.”

I studied Mrs. Stackpole's lists and came up with a telephone number.

“Is Mr. Kradge there?”

“No, I'm afraid he's away.”

“Oh. Well, this is Mrs. Miller. I'm renting Mrs. Stackpole's house for the summer, and she left Mr. Kradge's name….”

“Mr. Kradge is on holiday.”

“When do you expect him back? Or could you send someone else? You see, there's a lot of water….”

“When he comes in,” she said, losing her patience, “I'll send him round.”

“But when do you expect him? I think it's an emergency.”

“He's on holiday. When he comes back,” she said, evidently through clenched teeth, “I'll … send … him … round.” There wasn't any business section in the phone book, so we were dependent on Mr. Kradge.

The next day the Air Force camp was going to the zoo. We had already been to the zoo on a Sunday, but we decided to go again because there was nothing else to do and the Air Force children cheered us up. They were a pleasant lot, friendly and agreeable. The London Zoo was a very good zoo and we roamed around, enjoying it. It was a sunny day. Eric found a stand that sold cold milk, and he kept buying and drinking it.

“It's really cold,” he said, surprised.

The elephants were interesting: they stood near a railing and ate what people gave them. All the children gave them peanuts. Eric gave his elephant all the peanuts he had. “Now give them the bag,” a little boy said to Eric. Before I could stop him, Eric, impressionable as always, put the little empty peanut bag in the elephant's trunk.

“Oh, Eric,” I said, reaching toward him, “that wasn't … you really shouldn't …”

Before I could go on, I was shoved rather roughly aside, and a man in his fifties with a brown moustache and popping eyes had seized Eric's arm. “You mustn't do that,” the man gasped, shaking all over. “You mustn't tease animals. If you … if you tease animals, they'll be angry with you, and … and … hit you!”

“The elephant spit it out, mister,” one of the children said soothingly.

The man released Eric's arm and trembled off, on the verge of tears.

“I want to go home,” Eric said.

I noticed a violent reaction in myself. Crazy English animal lover, I thought.

At this point the chimpanzees provided a distraction. One of them grabbed a pocket handkerchief and pretended to cry into it, and the other one came up to the bars and spat at the crowd which screamed and ducked. I was fascinated with this spectacle and when I finally turned away, I discovered that we had lost the Air Force camp. We wandered around for a while looking for them and buying cold milk; finally I got a map and tried to find the exit. I am very bad at reading maps and soon we found ourselves in the wilds of Regent's Park. It was incredibly large and empty. We walked and walked, sitting on benches periodically to recoup our strength. Eventually, we stumbled on a place that sold cold bottled drinks and near that a large pond with boats for rent. At last we had found something both children enjoyed.

I sat on a bench and Bruce and Eric swirled round and round the pond in motor boats. I read a paperback, looking up occasionally to watch the boat boys, in rubber hip boots, disentangle boats and give people starts. These boys were thin and rather undersized; they were surly with the customers and nasty to each other. A very elegant lady came up, holding a little girl by the hand. An obvious nanny was with her, pushing a boy about a year old in a stroller. The nanny went off in a boat with the little girl, and the elegant lady sat down beside me, arranging the baby, who had a fat face and was wearing a small blue overcoat with brass buttons. He bounced up and down and pointed to the water.

“Oh, Oliver,” the lady said. “Do sit still. Don't squirm so.”

“Wah, wah!” Oliver said. “Blah. Wah. Goo goo.”

“Oh, Oliver,” the lady said, with distaste. “Do be sensible.”

W
E CAME HOME FROM THE PARK
in a cheerful mood for a change, ignoring the peeling wall and the soaked carpet. Jordan and I were going out that evening. A woman named Maud Tweak had invited us to dinner. She was in public relations; that was how Jordan had met her: she used his newspaper clipping service. She had phoned me the week before to set up a date between Eric and a little boy named Michael, the son of Margaret, a friend of hers. We were supposed to meet Michael and Margaret on a Saturday afternoon to see a film called
Dr. Who and the Daleks,
which was all the rage in London. We were to meet in the theater lobby; Margaret would be wearing a white carnation or something, and holding little Michael by the hand. I said “Fine,” and Maud and Margaret said “Jolly good,” and it was arranged.

We had arrived to find a line, or queue, extending from the box office all the way around the side of the theater into a small alley, or mews. We had to wait almost an hour in the alley, but it wasn't boring. A group of itinerant musicians called The Happy Warriors traveled up and down the queue, playing music. They were all old and shabby and their music was terrible. A very old man with watery eyes moved in front of them, holding out a ragged cap, his ancient overcoat dragging in the
gutter. They were a London institution. Bruce took one look at them and turned a pale shade of green.

“They're
beggars,”
he whispered, and dumped all his money into the filthy cap.

“Some people think they're charming,” I said to Bruce.

“Charming!” he said.

“I want to know the difference between a movie and a show,” Eric said suddenly.

“Well, it depends what you mean,” I said. “Some people call a movie a show. When I was little, I called a movie a show.”

“But what's the difference?” Eric asked.

“Sometimes there isn't any. But a show can be—”

“A show is on a stage and a movie is a movie,” the woman behind us said impatiently. She turned to her children and said loudly, “This little boy is being silly and asking stupid questions.”

I had noticed and was to notice a free and easy attitude toward other people's children in London.

We finally got into
Dr. Who and the Daleks,
which we enjoyed. We were surprised to see people sitting and standing in the aisles, but none of them appeared to be wearing white carnations, and we went home without meeting Margaret and Michael. Now we were going to meet Margaret, because she and her friend Albert were picking us up in a minicab to take us to Maud Tweak's. We kissed the children goodnight, and went off happily.

“I hope you don't mind garlic,” Albert said as we climbed into the minicab. “I eat it all the time.” He looked rather like a cartoon: his hair was very curly and stood straight up on his head; he had an enormous thin nose and a pointed chin, and
he was wearing long pointed shoes on his long skinny legs. He also had a lisp.

“Where were you Saturday?” Margaret asked me. Next to Albert she seemed surprisingly unexceptional: a large plump dark-haired woman in a black dress.

“My goodness, there was such a crush,” I said girlishly. “No one could find anyone, could they?”

“We waited for you for forty minutes,” Margaret remarked lugubriously.

“We couldn't even get into the lobby,” I said.

“We waited in the lobby,” Margaret replied.

“The reason I eat garlic,” Albert explained, “is that it purifies the blood. It's very healthy. It counteracts the poisons.”

He told us what poisons all the way to Bayswater where Maud Tweak lived. I was looking forward to seeing her apartment; somehow I had gotten the impression that it would exhibit sophisticated modern British decor. The minicab stopped in a rather crummy street outside a shop. “What's this?” I asked, confused.

“It's Maud's place,” Margaret said.

“Oh, isn't she lucky to have it?” Albert cried.

“Oh, dreadfully lucky,” Margaret remarked.

We went up to a little door next to the shop, and they rang the bell. It was a sort of antique shop, filled with queer odds and ends. Through the window I could see a school clock, a pine chest, and a very large doll with long yellow hair and staring china blue eyes, dressed in yellowed ruffles.

“This sort of thing is becoming all the rage in London now,” Margaret said obscurely.

“We have this section called Old Town, in Chicago,” I said.

The door opened suddenly. A small, very thin woman with sharp features stood before us. Her brown hair was bouffant, she was wearing silver slippers and a pretty blue dress with white dots. She radiated friendliness and warmth.

“Oh, my dear,” she cried, seizing my hands, “I'm so happy to meet you. I'm Maud Tweak of course. Oh, do come in.”

We climbed up four or five floors to a small attic apartment. From the hallway I could see the tiny sitting room: an interesting modern painting made a bright splash of color over the low fireplace next to built-in bookshelves and desk.

“Oh, it's charming!” I said. I had found the rather musty atmosphere of London so oppressive that the least touch of lightness and freshness sent me into an ecstasy. I understood too well Mark's fascination with the Playboy kitchen. The rest of the furniture was an old settee, painted white and furnished with cushions apparently made of cement, and two armless modern armchairs slipcovered in striped rayon.

We settled down and Maud poured wine for everyone. “I'm so delighted to meet you,” she said to me. “How are the children?”