Tea & Antipathy (23 page)

“‘You mean you actually, physically, made them?'” Bruce said. We went into Boots. A girl in a white coat detached herself from the wall and came over to us. “Yes?” she said. I asked her if she had eye droppers, and she said yes. When she made no move in any direction, I said, “I'd like to buy an eye dropper.”

“I'm afraid that's impossible,” she said.

“But you have them.”

“Oh, yes, we have them, but you see we're cleaning out the cupboard where we keep them, and we've put them in a large box. If you come back next week, I'm sure I can help you then.”

“Couldn't you take one out of the box and give it to me?”

“Oh, dear no,” she said, smiling. “It's quite a large box. But next week we'll have the cupboard all washed out, I'm sure, and then we'll put everything back and you can have the eye dropper.”

“Why didn't they put them in a small box?” Bruce said, as we walked to Harrods.

“Oh, who knows,” I responded irritably.

“‘You mean you actually, physically, made them?'” Bruce said.

B
ACK IN BALDRIDGE PLACE
we called a cab in a flurry of activity. I told Mrs. Grail once more to remember to bolt the front door and take the back door key, since we were taking the other back door key with us, and to be sure to lock the bedroom door and hide that key in the kitchen. She responded to this, all of which she had heard several times before, and some of which she had suggested herself, with a dazed expression. I knew she was anticipating the meeting with Mrs. Stackpole with dread, if not terror. In her eyes, Mrs. Stackpole had taken on a legendary and menacing aspect, to say the least.

“Have you got it all straight now?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Grail said. “Ah, God.”

We scrambled into the cab and went to the station. There we ate ham sandwiches, which to our surprise were very tasty.

“We should have come here for lunch every day,” Bruce said. The milk was cold, too.

We boarded the train and after a while it started up and slid smoothly down the track: there was none of the awkward jerking and shaking we had encountered on American trains.

We shared our compartment with a lady from Philadelphia, who had just come from Greece. She was going to stay for a week at a friend's country house in Devon. She traveled a great deal, and she had known England before the war, when, she
said, life there was easier. She was an admirably calm, intelligent person.

For miles we passed through a landscape filled with low, dark green hills dotted with grazing sheep. The compartment was comfortable and cozy; the train ran quietly. We were enjoying ourselves. Then we began to feel hungry. Jordan suggested that we have tea in the dining car.

“Why not wait until you get to the hotel?” the lady from Philadelphia asked me, with what I thought was a significant look.

“Oh,” I said, “I love to eat on trains. Don't you want to come with us?”

She said she didn't think she would, no.

The others had gone on and I followed them. Outside the dining car, I passed a huge cage thing filled with canvas sacks. If it was the mail, then English people were exclusively occupied in mailing packages of manure to each other. I reeled down the passage to the dining car, where I was overcome by the odor of sour milk, which merged into the other smell. Feeling rather green, I averted my eyes from the kitchen and sat down at a table with Jordan and the boys. I noticed immediately that the waiters were wearing very dirty white coats; in addition, they all seemed to have skin problems, and they were carrying dubious things on their trays.

“What the hell,” I said.

“Don't be such a baby,” Jordan said automatically.

We had once taken a train from Lyons to Paris; the dining car was not very clean, and neither were the waiters' coats, but the food was excellent, and there was good will in the air, as well as a good smell.

“I'm not going to eat here,” I said, getting up.

“Well, I don't know who you're punishing,” Jordan said crossly.

“Sit down, Ma,” Mark said. Bruce and Eric didn't say anything.

I wended my way back to the compartment, trying not to breathe. The lady from Philadelphia looked at me sympathetically. “I wasn't sure I should say anything,” she remarked. I picked up my book, a novel about an Englishman who comes to America to teach at a college and is driven away by the stupidity, narrow-mindedness and ineptitude of everybody on the campus. The book critic for
The Daily Telegraph,
which I read every morning with my breakfast, had praised this novel; he explained that one of the characters, a dishonest hypocritical American English professor, offered a valuable insight into the mind of the American intellectual, and by the same token an insight into what was happening in Vietnam. I had just reached the part where the English protagonist was arrested for taking a walk in the evening, when my family returned.

“So soon?” I asked.

“Ugh,” Mark said.

“I could have dealt with it,” Jordan remarked. “I could have dealt with it. But that boy, you know, the waiter …”

“The one with the fingernails? Yes.”

“Yes, I could have dealt with that, too, but he had this splotch of tomato on his jacket. I don't mean a splotch of ketchup,” he went on, “I mean it was a whole tomato, and somehow it had gotten all splotched up against his jacket. You could see the seeds. I lost my appetite.”

The lady from Philadelphia nodded at him.

We ate candy bars. I returned to my novel. I wasn't surprised to find the protagonist arrested for taking an evening
walk: on various television interview programs, many celebrities returning from the States had earnestly told their audiences that nobody walked in America. One man said he had been arrested for trying to walk a dog.

We began to pass impressively large, rugged cliffs and to catch glimpses of the sea. The lady from Philadelphia left, expressing a heartfelt wish that everything would go smoothly for us. A little while later, the train stopped at Torquay.

W
E TOOK A CAB
and went down winding hilly road after winding hilly road; there were Victorian houses, some with little front yards and some without. Here and there we saw a palm tree.

“I see you have palm trees here,” Jordan said to the cabdriver.

“Oh, yes, it's quite warm here all winter,” the driver said.

“What sort of hotel is the Castle?” Jordan asked.

“Oh, it's a five star hotel. Oh, it's very elegant. Cost a fortune to put up.”

At a considerable distance from the railway station, we drove through tall gates surrounded by greenery and stopped at a portico before the entrance to the hotel, which was constructed of stone. The lobby was carpeted in red with enormous yellow and green flowers, and filled with fat, nineteen-thirtyish “modernistic” furniture.

Upstairs we were escorted to a three-room suite: large and light and spotlessly clean, painted white, with white furniture. Our room had a balcony looking out on to the Castle grounds: these were undulating and heavily planted with evergreen trees, dense and green to the point of blackness. I was reminded forcibly of
The Magic Mountain
. I could see myself lying on a chaise
on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the thick silent forest.

Mark said it was cool.

“I wonder why everything is white,” Jordan said. “It looks like a hospital. You do like it, don't you?” he asked me, anxiously.

“It's marvelous,” I said sincerely. “It's awfully nice.”

It was dinner time, so we went downstairs. The dining room was enormous, with large windows and off-white paneled walls. Through the windows you could see the omnipresent, brooding grounds; the trees were always still.

On the table was a plate of toast, cold and curled, the only form of bread available at the Castle Hotel. We had a cheerful young uniformed waiter. He brought us big soup plates, each with half an inch of clear soup nestled in the bottom.

“Meals must be included,” Jordan said.

After the soup was taken away, we were brought a plate of fish fillet with red sauce. Then came a small slice of meat, faintly lamby, on a large plate. In addition, the waiter passed around two kinds of potatoes and some varieties of bean. At this point some very old musicians filed in, took their places on a low platform directly behind us, and broke into an awful cacophony that raised all the small hairs on the back of my neck. It appeared to be a tune from
Mary Poppins,
played in march tempo.

“What's that?” we asked the waiter.

“Harry Evans and the Orchestra,” he replied. He took away our plates. For dessert we were offered a “choice of cold sweets from the trolley.” They were rainbow-colored and trembled slightly. “We also have Castle Pudding with jam sauce,” the waiter said.

The other diners were middle-aged, and looked strangely out of date: the women had marcelled hair and bosomy print dresses; the men's suits had wide shoulders and wide pleated pants, or trousers. The familiar
Time Machine
sensation crept over me.

“Sometimes in London,” I said, “I felt as though I had gone back eighty years. It was weird. But here … it could be nineteen thirty-five. Don't you think so?”

“I wish you wouldn't overstate things,” Jordan said. “It could easily be nineteen thirty-nine.”

Mark said it was wild.

All eyes followed us as we left the dining room. I felt rather flashy in my Mary Quant dress with the outrageous hemline. We went upstairs and watched television, on a set that we had ordered, for an hour. It was even more horrible than London television: the clergyman who read the evening sermon looked as though he were melting. I put the drops in Bruce's eye and tucked the children in. Then Jordan and I took a cab to the Imperial Hotel: the cabdriver told us it was the best hotel in Torquay.

“Maybe it's more modern than the Castle?” Jordan asked hopefully.

“Oh, the old Castle's gone down,” the driver said. “Once it was five star. Now I think it's only three. But the Imperial's very nice. Royalty stay there.”

The Imperial had a swimming pool and a beach, and no furniture in the lobby. The people wandering about were slender and none of them had finger waves.

“We're full up,” the girl said. “Sorry.” Back we went to the Castle and so to bed.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
we were shown to the same table, which had obviously been assigned to us, with the same tablecloth in the condition in which we had left it the night before. The napkins were the same too, but they had been neatly folded and placed in rings. I was surprised that Eric's napkin had been preserved, but in Rome you know. Jordan and Eric had hot cereal for breakfast and we all had eggs. The toast was cold but not curled. I noticed that an unprepossessing woman at the next table was staring at me fixedly.

“That woman's staring at me,” I said to Jordan.

“Ignore her,” he advised, but it was difficult because I was facing her. She sat and stared; she even stared while she ate.

After breakfast we walked out into the grounds. They were very expansive, and encompassed a golf course. If you went far enough, walked over a little bridge and down a flight of stone steps, you could reach a small harbor just behind the hotel. A boardwalk overlooked the rocky beach with its small stretch of gritty sand. While the children climbed gingerly over the rocks, Jordan and I sat in rented chairs, enveloped by pale watery sunshine. Nobody was swimming; apart from the fact that we could see sharp stones littering the shallow bottom, it was too cold to swim. We were glad that we were all wearing sweaters.

There were a great many young people there. None of them wore shorts: some of the girls were in slacks, but most of them were wearing summer dresses. They carefully folded their skirts back as they sat sunning their white legs. Jordan and I began to talk about the train. I thought we had lowered our voices, until I turned my head and realized that my neighbor had been hanging on our every word.

“She says the train smells of sour milk,” she announced to her companions. “The train's lovely, isn't it?”

I felt I had done my bit for international relations that morning. The sky clouded over and drops began to fall. We called the children and went back to the hotel for lunch. Once more we were served cold curled toast, clear soup, a fish course, a meat course, two kinds of potatoes, and cabbage. The sweets glowed and trembled on the trolley. “Have a Glass of Wine with your Meals,” the menu suggested.

After lunch the children went to swim in the indoor pool, and Jordan and I took a bus into Torquay; we sat on the open top in the light rain. Torquay was filled with shops; we browsed for a while in the paperback section of a large bookstore. Most of the crowd in the streets looked like extras for one of those post-war British films about working-class life. The men wore cloth caps and the women wore curlers. There were posters everywhere announcing a beauty contest in Babbacomb.

We returned to the hotel, helped the children clean up after their afternoon of swimming in the dank and chilly pool room, and descended once again for dinner. This time the soup was Creamed Asparagus, but the bowl was just as big and the portion just as small as the Clear Soups. There was fish in a white sauce, and Grenadin of Veal, tasting faintly lamby. We had the two kinds of potato, and some cauliflower.

The menu had a choice of three entrees on it.

“What's forcemeat and chipolata?” Mark asked.

“Turkey, I think,” Jordan said, “and sausage.”

“I couldn't eat anything called forcemeat,” Mark said.

The woman at the next table was still staring at me. She picked her tooth with her fingernail, wiped the nail ostentatiously on her napkin, and went on staring.