Tea & Antipathy (16 page)

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 me 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.

O
N 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.”

T
HE 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.

“I shouldn't worry about anything,” Percy Snell said.

“Listen,” I said slowly. “Can't we move out? I mean there was a dining room table here when Jordan saw it first, and it isn't here now. Can't we break the lease and move
out?”

This sent Percy Snell into stitches. “Oh, you can't do that,” he said. “I shouldn't think you could do that.”

“But what about
harassment?”

“I should think he just got nervous and lost his temper,” Percy Snell said.

“But he
said
I spilled water all over the place and I
didn't.”

“
I expect he was upset.”

I discussed this at some length with Jordan.

“First of all,” he said, “I think we should go somewhere for a vacation. I'd like,” he said, in a dreamy voice, “I'd like someplace warm. With a beach, a sandy beach. And the sun, the sun shining all day long. On the hot sand.”