Tea & Antipathy (13 page)

“Michael got his comeuppance the other day,” Albert said happily.

“Oh, good,” Maud replied. “What happened?”

“He was playing in the area and a man came by, the father of one of the children. Michael hit the boy, and the father spoke to him, and Michael called him a silly twit.”

I was on top of this: Michael was Margaret's son, the same age as Eric.

“Called the
father?”
Maud said.

“Yes, and then Michael ran upstairs and the man followed him. He knocked on the door, and Michael hid. But I dragged
him out, and the man gave him a tongue-lashing, and I put him to bed without supper.”

Everyone laughed, except Jordan and me.

“Oh, marvelous,” Maud said.

“Yes,” Albert lisped. “I'm so pleased the man followed it through.”

“I am too,” Margaret said. “He could simply have let it go.”

“Yes, he could,” Maud remarked. “Awfully good job he didn't.”

“Children should be struck regularly, like gongs,” Albert said, and launched into a Swiftian discussion of child behavior. With his hooked nose, tall frizzy hair, long pointed shoes turned out on his thin ankles, to say nothing of his lisp and his habit of delivering pronouncements, he seemed to have stepped from the pages of the early Evelyn Waugh. I had been delighted with these creations during my long period of Anglophilia, now fast waning. I had never expected to
meet
one. I didn't know they were
real.

“Michael's going to boarding school in the fall anyway,” Margaret said.

“Oh, wonderful,” Maud said enthusiastically. ‘That'll straighten him out.”

“Away from Mama,” Albert said joyously, “it's sink or swim. No one to pat the head….”

From there they moved on to a discussion of a recent act of Margaret's which they considered monstrous: she had had an operation performed on someone named Tom, who turned out, to my relief, to have been her cat. Albert was exquisitely witty about it, Maud was gleeful, and Margaret castigated herself good-naturedly.

“But they spray the walls,” I said, to help Margaret out. Nobody paid any attention to me except Jordan, who gave me a funny look. They talked about the cat for a while longer and then Maud went to a small table in the corner and began to serve dinner: egg salad, cold cuts and sliced tomatoes.

“Your vegetables here are delicious,” I said sincerely. “I can't get enough tomatoes.”

“How was Russia?” Albert said to Maud.

“Oh, thrilling,” she replied. They began a swift geographical conversation, travelling rapidly from Russia to Scotland; they talked faster and faster, cutting each other off. I heard something about the Outer Hebrides.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold it. I'm lost. What are you talking about?”

Maud and Albert paused and looked at me.

“We're talking about the last war,” Maud said. “I was stationed in Scotland, and I was ill there. The people were so kind, so thoughtful. That is the reason,” she said, turning to Albert and sipping her wine, “that I shall
never
sneer at the people of the Outer Hebrides.” She paused for an effect and went on. “I was in Dublin for my leaves. Of course there was one ball after another. I remember one evening I went to a ball at the German Embassy. I danced with the most
divine
young man. He said, ‘What do you do?' and I said, ‘Actually, darling, I'm in the British Army.”' She turned to me. “What do you think of your expatriates?” she asked abruptly.

I couldn't think of anyone except Henry James and T.S. Eliot.

“Your expatriates,” she repeated. “What do you think of them? Bill, for instance. He's awfully funny, you know. I asked
him how long he plans to live here and he said, ‘For the rest of my life, I hope.'” She laughed.

“Yes, he likes it here,” I said, smiling.

“I asked him what he liked so much,” Maud said. “He said, ‘Your parks. Your theater.”'

She and Margaret and Albert exploded into hearty laughter at this, and we smiled again, to be polite, although we didn't see anything funny about it. The London parks were beautiful, and there was a lot of good theater at good prices. When Jordan and I had been in London two years before, we had seen five plays in five days and enjoyed them all.

“I never go to the theater,” Maud said. “No real Londoner does, you know.”

“I don't think it's a very good season this year,” I said, trying to be tactful.

Maud gave me a swift look. “Is it a good season in New York?” she asked sharply.

I really didn't know. “Those expatriates,” Maud said to Albert. “You remember that dreadful cow that was here last month? Looked through my books and said some of them were on the Index. Dreadful cow.” She looked at me. “She was travelling on an Irish passport. But she was one of your expatriates.”

“Why was she on an Irish passport?”

“Oh, I suppose she hung round them and pestered them to death so they gave her one.”

“But don't you have to be a citizen to get a passport?”

“Oh, they're not all that stuffy about it. She kept after them and they gave her an Irish passport to get rid of her. Stupid creature. And that friend of hers spilled wine all over the carpet.”

“I don't have any desire to travel,” Margaret said to me. “I've been to all the places worth seeing, and if anyone told me
they'd give me a trip, I couldn't think of a place I wanted to see.”

“Have you been to America?” I asked, stepping into it.

“No, I haven't,” she said, smiling at me.

“We discovered a place to swim practically across the street from us,” I said to Maud. “In the Serpentine.”

“Pronounce it Serpentyne,” she said.

“Serpentyne,” I repeated. “We bought bathing suits at Woolworth's and it's been raining ever since.”

“It's the rain that makes the flowers and vegetables so good,” Jordan remarked.

“Oh, the raw materials are excellent,” Albert said. “But what's done with them! Do you realize that I have had to give up eating canned peas because they're filled with green lead dye?”

“But they can't be,” I said. “The government …”

“Ah, yes,” Albert said. “Your government protects you with the Food and Drug laws. We don't have that kind of protection here. There are poisons, poisons, everywhere.”

“Green lead dye,” I said.

“Don't take any notice of him,” Maud said kindly to me. “He's mad.”

“As a good socialist,” Albert said to Maud, “you ought to concern yourself with legislation against this sort of thing. I'm afraid to eat anything except garlic. It purifies the blood.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at us, his great nose trembling with emotion.

“Of course change is coming,” Maud remarked.

“Oh, change comes, everywhere,” Albert said. “I mean actually the whole world is changing. For instance,” he went on, “we've dropped all our nineteenth-century social snobberies
in England since the war. And I suppose,” he said graciously to us, “that in about two hundred years America will catch up to us, and drop
her
nineteenth-century class distinctions.”

“We don't have nineteenth-century class distinctions in America,” I said.

“No …” Maud poured wine into everybody's glass. “ … you have distinctions based on money.” She gave us a sympathetic smile. “It's awful,” she said, wrinkling her nose at me.

“Yes,” I said, “our distinctions are based on money, for the most part.”

“I think rigid class distinctions are worse than money snobberies,” Jordan observed.

Maud and Albert exchanged quick glances; Maud smiled.

“A lot of you Americans come over here,” she said, “and run up bills at Fortnum's and Harrod's and all the big shops. Of course they don't have a bean. We just sit back and watch ‘em till we're tired of them and then,” she concluded with noticeable ferocity, “we dump ‘em back!”

There was a really long pause after this remark.

“My goodness,” I said, looking at my watch, “nearly eleven! We've really got to go.”

We went into the bedroom to collect my coat.

“I just love your apartment,” I said.

“And I did it all myself,” Maud responded proudly.

“And it was so kind of you to have us.”

“Well, it's meeting people, you know,” she said.

O
N FRIDAY MORNING
, Mrs. Grail arrived, brandishing an envelope. “Ah, the cheek,” she cried, as soon as she got in the door. “The cheek of her! It came this morning. Burn it, my husband says, she's got no claim on you, she doesn't pay your wages.”

“But what is it, Mrs. Grail?”

“Read it,” she said, stuffing the envelope into my hand. “Ah, it's Them. The cheek of them, they'll do you every time.”

The letter was from Mrs. Stackpole. It began with many expressions of hope for Mrs. Grail's health and well-being. Then:

I do hope the Family are not proving too much for you. I hear they disagree a lot. I am so anxious to have you with me when I return, dear Mrs. Grail, I hope you will not hold me responsible for them. I shall be in London the last week in July. Please write and tell me whether I shall come to you, or when you can come to me. I am so anxious to talk with you.

“What does she mean, we disagree a lot?” I said indignantly. “Among ourselves or with other people?

“Ah, the wicked thing,” Mrs. Grail said. “I'll never see her, I'll never write to her.”

“I suppose Miss Pip said something,” I said. “I suppose she said we're disagreeable people.”

“Ah, you're not. I'll do for you until you leave, until September fourth. But I'll never work for her, never.”

“My husband has to stay until September because of his business,” I said, looking through the window at the gray street. “I mean actually the children and I don't have to stay that long really.”

“Well, I'll do for him then, the dear man,” Mrs. Grail said. She seized the letter which I had vaguely thought of preserving for a lawsuit involving invasion of privacy and libel or something, and tore it to fragments. “That's for her,” she said, “the horrid, horrid thing!”

I went upstairs and reported Mrs. Stackpole's latest perfidy to Jordan, who was dressing to go to the office.

“She's kind of awful,” he said weakly.

“
Kind
of awful!” I cried. “She's a big fink. Spying on us. Isn't there a law against that?”

“Don't know,” he said.

“Can't you ask your lawyer?”

He gave me a hopeless glance.

“Well, can't you?”

“It wouldn't do any good to ask him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those people in Birmingham are supposed to call this week,” he said, changing the subject. “Maybe they'll buy into the business.”

“And if they don't?”

“Oh, I guess they will. But if they don't, Basil said he would do something.”

“What can Basil do?”

“I don't know.
Something,”
he said, with a note of hysteria in his voice. He made an effort to calm himself, and asked, “What are you going to do today?”

“Well, we went to the Comedy Theatre the other day—Eric calls it the Comedy Feeler, isn't that funny?—but the show only lasts an hour, it's hardly worth the trip. Except the trip takes up time too, which is good. But it's right near Madame Tussaud's, and it makes Eric nervous to be so near Madame Tussaud's, so I'm not sure we ought to go to the Comedy Theatre again.”

“Well, don't then.”

“Mark said he would like to go to Madame Tussaud's, but I don't see how I can take him there with Eric feeling like this.”

“I'm sure you can work it out,” Jordan said

“I don't think I can work things out much longer,” I said. “I'm going crazy.”

“Maybe we can go to the country again,” Jordan said. “It's bound to be better next time.”

“At least I'm glad Mark is going to spend the day with us today. He's practically an adult; he can share things, you know.”

“I wish he'd be a little more adult around the office,” Jordan said gloomily. “He keeps making copies of Beatle pictures on the copy machine.”

Mark and Bruce were insistent upon going to Madame Tussaud's; Mark had not yet been there. So we went to Baker Street on the bus. They went to Madame Tussaud's and Eric and I went to the Comedy Feeler where they were showing a Laurel and Hardy movie which did not amuse him or anyone else in the audience, for that matter. Eric squirmed in his seat; he kept glancing at the entrance.

“Let's go,” he said after ten minutes.

“We have to stay here until it's over,” I said. “We're giving Mark and Bruce an hour at … at … the place where they are, and this movie runs for an hour.”

“Where are they?” Eric asked in a throaty whisper.

“You know where they are,” I said testily. “They're at Madame Tussaud's. Watch the movie.”

“Madame Tussaud's is right down the street,” Eric said.

“I know it.”

“Let's get out of here.”

“They're made of wax,” I said, for the fifteenth time. “They're not real. They can't leave the building. Watch the movie.”

“I want to go.”

“We have to wait.”

“Why?” I threw in the towel and we left and stood outside Madame Tussaud's, a location that Eric for some reason found preferable to the Feeler, for fifteen or twenty minutes, until Mark and Bruce emerged, full of praise for the slot machines.

“Gosh, is that cool,” Mark said. “There's nothing like that in Chicago.”

“No,” I said loudly, for Eric's benefit, “there is no Wax Museum in Chicago.”