Tea & Antipathy (2 page)

We went up some more stairs and found ourselves in the master bedroom: a large airy room with tall windows. It might once have been the drawing room. “Everything's got flowers on it,” Mark said.

“That's chintz,” I said. “I mean, that's chintz on the chairs and the settee and those throw pillows.”

“How come it doesn't match?” Mark asked.

“Oh, match, match,” I said. “Why does it have to match? This has a definite charm of its own. There's nothing wrong with mixing a few patterns.”

The bead of the king-sized bed was shoved up against the carved mantelpiece that held two lamps with flounced shades and a lot of dangling crystals. Above it hung a dark, rather sticky-looking painting of a fat lady clutching a book with her eyes turned upward, while some other fat ladies looked over her shoulder and some fat angels floated around them.

“Hey, that's cool,” Mark said.

We looked at him suspiciously.

“I mean it's cool,” he explained. “It's old or something.”

“Oh, it's old all right,” Jordan said quickly. “I mean I'll bet it's a Renaissance painting or something.”

“There's another fat lady over here,” Bruce said, pointing above the chest of drawers, from which the veneer was peeling in strips.

“Boy, is that old,” Mark said, looking at the chest.

“I don't know why everything has to be perfectly new and neat all the time,” I said. I was feeling rather tired. Jordan agreed that that sort of attitude was middle-class.

“When you meet Mrs. Stackpole, Mark, you'll understand. She's certainly not middle-class.”

“I can see that,” Mark said. He opened a door, revealing an enormous bathroom with pale green plumbing and a wallpaper pattern different from the one in the bedroom. But flowered curtains tied the decor of the two rooms together.

“More flowers,” Jordan said, laughing nervously. He pointed proudly to a collection of wires over the bathroom door. “An electric fire. I'll tell you about it some other time. And they call this towel rack a ‘hot rail'. It keeps towels dry.”

Up another flight of stairs were the children's rooms. One, with a flowered carpet, a yellow quilted spread and pictures of dogs all over the walls, was perfect for Mark.

“This must be the Nanny's room,” I whispered, impressed.

“What's that?” Eric asked. “A goat?”

The large nursery had little cots, slippery rugs, and water-colors of Victorian children with long pale ringlets and wistful eyes. A marble sink stood near the window.

“Oh, isn't this charming,” I cried. “It's a little musty, though. Let's open the window.”

I wanted to get the children to bed. It upset me that Bruce and Eric should have been up nearly all night. I was afraid that at any moment something awful would happen to them: they would faint or become hysterical, develop tuberculosis or a tropical disease like ringworm or blight. So it was with great relief that I saw them into their cots, which were made up with strange strips of blue nylon instead of sheets. The fresh air dispelled somewhat the musty odor of the room. I had noticed, however, that the odor grew stronger as one approached the marble sink and that it carried with it more than a hint of sewer gas. I decided to say nothing about it, however, and so, feeling tired but happy, we went to bed, under the sticky painting of the woman with the turned-up eyes.

A
FEW HOURS
into our nap, the doorbell rang. Jordan went downstairs to greet Mrs. Stackpole, who had arrived to conduct the inventory. After combing my hair and trying in general to make myself presentable, I followed him down to find sitting at the desk, not the middle-aged lady in tweeds with a firm handclasp whom I had envisioned, but a slender creature whose brown bouffant hairdo peeped from under a little kerchief.

“Mrs. Miller,” she said, fluttering long lashes and leaning toward me with intense sincerity. “There's such a lot of noise and traffic in the street here. Is that all right?”

I said it was, and we began to go through the inventory of ground floor items: two armchairs, one sofa, two tables…. Jordan interrupted to ask her diffidently what had happened to the dining room table.

“Oh, it's being mended,” Mrs. Stackpole said. “A little man will bring it round. You couldn't have used it the way it was.”

“And the slipcovers?” Jordan asked.

“Oh, yes,” she responded vaguely. “Do you like those?” She looked at her watch. “I'm just off to Ascot,” she said, with an apologetic laugh.

We were impressed by that; it sounded suitably upper class. We followed her trim figure in its quiet blue coat down the
basement stairs into the kitchen. She began to open cupboards and count things.

“
Six
teacups,” she read from her thin inventory sheets and pointed to the teacups that were actually mugs, one odder than the others, bearing a picture of a monkey in a dress holding an umbrella. “
One
, two, three, four,” she said, counting. There was an awkward pause. She consulted the paper. “
Six
teacups,” she read again. Reassured, she turned back to the shelf. “One, two, three, four….”

We watched her, mesmerized. The paper. “Six teacups.” The shelf. “One, two, three, four….” There was an admirable persistency in Mrs. Stackpole's character. After another lingering moment of silent count, she took a pencil from her smooth blue calf bag and made an emendation to the inventory sheet. “
Four
teacups,” she said, smiling at us with all her dimples. We smiled back.

Pointing to the mantel over what we will laughingly call the stove, she said: “Two pots.” Pointing under the wood-enclosed white porcelain sink: “Two casseroles.” She met my eyes with her blue level gaze. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I could only get these two small casseroles.”

“Oh, it's all right,” I said quickly. “I can use two for one casserole.”

“Two for one casserole,” she murmured, pleased. “Of course.”

We had apparently completed the list of cooking utensils. I had a dim idea that something was missing, but I couldn't think what it could be. I asked myself,
Do I do all my cooking in two pots and two small casseroles?
I couldn't remember.

“Mr. Miller asked me to leave my good dishes,” Mrs. Stackpole went on, whipping open a sliding panel that promptly
fell off. “So I have. They can quite easily be replaced if they are broken.” She disclosed a set of interesting china: red peacocks paraded around the rims of the dishes, alternating with yellow doodles. “These can all quite easily be replaced,” she repeated, with slight emphasis. It developed later, in a moment of need, that the set consisted of twenty or thirty luncheon dishes, ten or twelve dinner dishes, a toast rack and a cream jug.

Mrs. Stackpole then turned her attention to the large kitchen dresser, upon which stood some egg cups and a little clay figure with a basket on its back, possibly for toothpicks. “One duck,” Mrs. Stackpole read, enunciating clearly. “I left you some cookery books,” she went on, opening a drawer, and then she explained the stove to me. Actually no one could explain the stove to me; its continued existence in the middle of the twentieth century was, and will remain, a mystery. But she tried. “Your kitchen towel,” she said, pointing gaily to a blackish object hanging limply on the back of a door; then, to a longer, greasy, more frightful object on a hook: “Your apron!”

After explaining that every Thursday we had to wind the large cream-colored thing in the corner, she walked quickly out of the kitchen and down the passage to the laundry room. “There's your ironing board and iron,” she said. There was a moment of silence. “I'm afraid the washing machine doesn't work,” she said, smiling.

“Maybe,” Jordan said, “we can get it re—”

“Actually,” Mrs. Stackpole said, “it does work. I told you it didn't, but it does.” She turned to me, her eyes begging for forgiveness. “Would you mind very much not using it? I saved up for it for ever so long, and it's ever so precious, would you mind not … ?”

“Of course not,” I said, rather stiffly.

“And here's your clothesline,” she said, trying to open a door with five or six burglar-proof locks on it.

“We won't need that,” I said. “We'll take the clothes to the launderette.”

“Oh, there's one ever so near,” Mrs. Stackpole cried happily. “It won't be difficult for you at all.” She moved rapidly back down the hall to the playroom with the blue linoleum floor. “And here are all my children's playthings,” she said, allowing us to see a blackboard, a rocking horse, a little desk, several touching crayon drawings of crooked houses and lopsided ladies, and a cupboard stuffed with teddy bears. “They're all ever so precious to them, so you
will
just keep this door closed, won't you, and not let anyone use it? It's just their precious little bits.”

I could feel my smile stiffening again. It's just their precious little bits, I said to myself, keep your shirt on. Later on, when Eric became frightened by Hamlet's uncle and refused to stay upstairs alone, he kept creeping into the playroom and nearly drove us crazy playing “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” over and over on Mrs. Stackpole's children's precious little phonograph which had a straight pin in it instead of a needle. In addition, he wrote “Ringo” in a wavering hand on the upper left-hand corner of the blackboard and we allowed the desecration to remain.

Before we left the nether regions, Mrs. Stackpole mentioned that she had locked all
her
precious bits and pieces in the “cupboard,” which proved to be the kitchen pantry. “So you won't have to be bothered with looking after them,” she explained. “But you can quite easily keep all your groceries and things in here,” she went on, leading us back down the passage toward the laundry room again, and opening a door beneath the stairs
to reveal a damp darkness, in the depths of which we could distinctly hear the scurrying of many startled little feet. “That will work out quite well for you,” Mrs. Stackpole said, beaming at me.

We followed her upstairs to the bathroom on the landing to discuss the linen, Mrs. Stackpole remaining ebullient and persistently pleasant as she explained to us why she had left only two sheets for our bed. “If I leave you the other two I own, I won't have any clean ones when I get back.”

Neither of us understood this, but we both pretended we did. I kept nodding and smiling.

“I've bought nylon sheets for the children's beds,” she told us, aspirating the final syllable of “nylon” in the French way, “and here are your four towels. I'm afraid they're all I have for you.”

Still nodding and smiling, we descended to the living room or drawing room or whatever it was.

“By the way,” Mrs. Stackpole said, “Miss Pip, the young lady who is renting the top floor in the autumn, has asked permission to bring in a few things one afternoon. Is that all right?”

I nodded, smiling.

“Please tell me if it isn't,” Mrs. Stackpole said earnestly, leaning toward me in her solicitous way, “because it can quite easily be put off until you are out of the house.”

“Oh, it's perfectly all right,” I said. “One afternoon?”

“Oh, just one afternoon,” Mrs. Stackpole said. “Is that all right?”

“Certainly,” Jordan said.

“You're sure?”

We were sure.

“And I've left six or seven vases in the back lavatory,” she said. “It seems a lot, but one never knows, one frequently needs many vases.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “I do like my vases.”

“Here is a list of things—grocers who will deliver, laundries, things of that sort.”

She produced more papers.

“Plumbers… And Mrs. Grail will be here tomorrow. She's Irish, and quite honest and dependable. You may give her a key if you like. It's
quite
all right.” I could only admire her assurance. I knew that she
must
be correct; she had an instinct for it. It was an instinct that I notably lacked. “I intend to retain her myself when I return in the autumn,” Mrs. Stackpole added.

“Will she cook dinner for us?” I asked, thinking of The Stove.

She paused to consider. “She'll have to go home to feed her family. They eat at five or six. I don't see why she couldn't come back to serve
your
dinner at eight.”

Since our dinnertime was approximately the same as Mrs. Grail's, I could see that I would have to cope with The Stove myself.

“Now the slipcovers…” Jordan began.

“Oh, yes.” She blushed prettily, smiling. “They're being mended. They didn't fit properly.”

“Well, would you just jot down the name and number of the shop? In case we need to call them.”

“Oh yes, of course.” She wrote something quickly on the back of our list, and said, “I've left some eggs in the refrigerator. It's so difficult to leave food when one doesn't know … er … other's … habits….”

Gathering herself together to depart, she paused to leave us some keys: two front door, three back door, and twelve or fifteen odd-looking gold-and-black ones.

“These are keys to the burglar locks,” she said to me. “You can't open the windows without them, and you must remember always to lock the windows with these keys when you close them. Please remember
never, never
to leave the doors or the windows unlocked when you go out. I can't emphasize this strongly enough. All the houses around here have been broken into at one time or another. They watch, you see, and they know when you go out. Even if you go out for only a few minutes, you
must
lock all the doors and windows. It's terribly important.”

“It would be difficult for them to climb in a bedroom window,” I said nervously.