Tea & Antipathy (3 page)

“They're much more apt to come over the roofs, aren't they?” she asked calmly. I looked at the houses across the street: the rooftops were peaked, gabled, with crooked Dickensian chimneypots silhouetted against the gloomy sky. Could someone crouch there, behind a peak or gable, and watch … ?

“Please don't lose the keys,” Mrs. Stackpole said at the door. “These are the only ones and it costs thirty pounds to replace the lock. And do remember to lock the windows. You can open them when you're
in
the house, of course.” She called over her shoulder as she went out, “And remember, if you need anything, there's always Mr. MacAllister, isn't there?”

“Who's that?” I asked Jordan, when the door had closed.

“Some man,” he said vaguely. “Her boyfriend, I guess.”

“Her fiancé, you mean,” I said. “I suppose he sends her the flowers for all those vases.”

“I'd better go out and get some bread and butter to go with those eggs,” Jordan said. He looked at his watch. “It's five-thirty, but I think there's a delicatessen in South Ken that stays open late.” I should explain that in those days London shops closed at five o'clock, except for Early Closing on Wednesday and Saturday at one in the afternoon.

“Maybe you ought to call a plumber before you go,” I said. “Something's wrong with the toilet.”

“Nothing's wrong with the toilet,” he said. “I can tell you that right now. It's an English toilet, that's all. Just pump the handle gently up and down and eventually it will flush.”

I found this difficult to believe, because I felt that when the English did something, they
had
to do it at least as well as Americans. But I let it go, and he went off in the rain to find provisions.

I descended into the kitchen to assemble my tools, and suddenly I realized that Mrs. Stackpole had not left me a frying pan. I thought this was very odd, but there must have been some explanation for it. “I'll boil the eggs,” I said aloud. This seemed more English to me anyway: boiled eggs for tea. I took down the large pot from the mantel: it had a greenish wet pool in the bottom and several hunks of enamel missing.

“Not to worry,” I said, still cheerful. “The eggs have a shell.” I noticed with a clutch of anguish that there was no electric toaster. I was appalled at my weakness: toast could of course be made under the stove grill, two pieces at a time. “Americans are terribly spoiled,” I said sternly to myself, avoiding the sight of the “hot cloth” hanging, black and dispirited, over the pipe.

Soot was falling down the ancient chimney; it fell behind the stove and blanketed the warming rail. “A real English kitchen,” I said. The boiler exploded softly in the comer.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
we were awakened early by a messenger delivering an enormous bouquet from Mrs. Stackpole.

“I told you she was kind,” Jordan said.

“Really thoughtful,” I murmured, overwhelmed by this huge assortment of lilies and roses and I didn't know what all, not being horticultural. “It's a good thing she left all those vases.”

While we were dealing with the bouquet, the bell rang again, this time heralding the entrance of Mrs. Grail, the cleaning woman, a pleasant-looking, plump person with short curly gray hair, decently attired in a black sweater and skirt. “Don't worry about a thing,” she said, in a rich brogue. “She's told me where everything is. Ah! The lovely flowers!”

“Yes, aren't they? Mrs. Stackpole sent them.”

“Ah, God,” Mrs. Grail said. “They must have cost her a pretty penny. And she hasn't that much to spare.”

“Yes, it was kind of her.”

“It looks like a funeral.” Her eye swept the sitting room. “She's cleared it out, hasn't she? And where are the slipcovers?”

I picked up the list from the desk. “They're being mended,” I said.

“Mended, is it?” said Mrs. Grail. “They looked new to me.”

‘They're being mended. She wrote the name of the shop right here.” I turned the paper over. In her large clear hand, Mrs. Stackpole had written, “Glenairlie, Pitwee, Firth.”

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “I think this is her address in Scotland.”

“There's no mistake,” Mrs. Grail said grimly.

I went upstairs to Jordan, who was shaving in the bathroom.

“Look,” I said. “She wrote her Scottish address here instead of the name of the shop with the slipcovers.”

“Oh, she's so absent-minded,” Jordan said, with a chuckle.

“I don't think Mrs. Grail likes her,” I said.

“Ridiculous,” he responded. “It's probably just Mrs. Grail's way.”

The phone rang, two short bleeps. Eric answered it and handed it to me. It was Mrs. Stackpole.

“Which child was that?” she asked. “I don't know which child that was.”

I told her it was Eric, the youngest.

“Ah,” Mrs. Stackpole said fondly. “The wee one.”

“Well, he's seven. And we do want to thank you for the flowers. They're so beautiful.”

“Oh, it was because Mr. Miller seemed to miss so many of my little bits. Pictures of the children, and so on. I'm afraid it looked a bit bare.”

“Well, it was kind of you. By the way …”

“Might I have a word with your husband?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Only I don't know how it happened, but you wrote your—”

“I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a hurry,” Mrs. Stackpole said pleasantly. “I would just like a word with your husband.”

“Ask her about the slipcovers,” I whispered, handing him the phone.

“Yes,” he said. “Oh, it was lovely of you. You didn't need to. Yes, I have your address. Yes, I'll drop it in the mail. Yes. By the way—oh, yes. Listen, you forgot to leave the number of the slipcover man. Yes, you remember. His phone number. Oh. Well, what's his name and address then? Yes, but I'd like that in case he doesn't return them. When were they promised? Oh, but that's a month from now. I mean, it's only early June now. Give me his address and I'll try to hurry him.”

There was a pause. “Oh,” Jordan said. “Well, all right if you … Yes.”

He hung up, looking puzzled. “She says he's not on the telephone, he's just a little man. I couldn't exactly get his address. Anyway, she finally said she's got a spare pair, locked away in a cupboard. She'll come and get them out.”

“Do you mean they've been here all the time? Why didn't she put them on the furniture?”

“Maybe they're too ratty-looking,” Jordan said. “How about that little man who's not on the telephone? I suppose he's too little to reach the receiver?”

He went off to the office, amid waves of merriment. Soon the doorbell rang, and Mrs. Stackpole appeared in the hall, her hair blown, her eyes wild. “I must rush,” she cried, leaping up the stairs. In a moment she leaped down again, empty-handed. “I've brought the key to the wrong cupboard,” she cried. “I'll be back.”

“What a shame,” I said to Mrs. Grail. “She'll miss her train.”

Mrs. Grail grunted, leaning on her Hoover. “It's too many cupboards and too many keys,” she said. “You won't see her again.”

“Oh, but she
said
…”

Mrs. Grail turned to her machine. “It's the English, you know,” she said enigmatically, and pushed the switch. I hung around for a while, peering out the window through the glass curtain. I was just about to go upstairs and get dressed, when the bell rang again, and Mrs. Stackpole vaulted into the house like an alarmed gazelle. She bounded up the stairs, Mrs. Grail trailing after her, dragging the Hoover. In a few minutes Mrs. Stackpole came panting down, her arms filled with polished chintz slipcovers: large green flowers on a cream-colored background. They looked perfectly presentable to me.

“I'm terribly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said, breathing heavily. “Here they are. The larger one is for the sofa and the smaller one is for the armchair.” She paused to let that information sink in. “The very small ones cover the cushions, of course. Mrs. Grail can help you. I must fly. Just tell your husband Mr. MacAllister will call round for the money,” she added, and was gone.

I began laboriously to stuff the cushions into the slipcovers. Mrs. Grail came into the sitting room and stood behind me.

“They're very nice for a spare pair, aren't they?” I said.

Mrs. Grail sniffed. “Well, they're the very ones,” she said. “They're the very ones was here the day I came to see her. They're the only ones she's got.”

“But … Maybe they're identical….”

“Well, I stood there just now when she got them out, you know. I said, ‘Aren't those the very slipcovers I saw, Mrs. Stackpole?' And she said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Grail. I'm afraid they are.”'

“She lied to us,” I said, dumbfounded.

“It's the English, you know,” Mrs. Grail told me seriously. “They'll do you every time.”

F
EELING RATHER SHAKEN
, I went upstairs to get dressed. Our first afternoon in London was already arranged for us. The children and I would meet Jordan for lunch and then I would shop for groceries. The office manager's assistant, a girl named Jane, was coming to take us to the city.

When the bell rang, I tripped down the stairs to meet Jane. I had expected a junior executive type, sort of Debbie Reynolds with a dash of Rosalind Russell: crisply efficient, in a knit suit, small pearl earrings, and white gloves. (This was the mid-sixties, remember.) Instead I found a young person with bangs touching her nose, a great deal of long straight hair obscuring the rest of her face, wearing a cotton two-piece dress several sizes too big for her, baggy green textured stockings and lopsided shoes with run-over heels. Eric immediately fell completely in love with her: what you could see of her face was very pretty. She addressed me in incomprehensible tones, with a faint smile. I nodded and smiled back, although I had no idea what she was saying, and off we went, for our first ride on a red double-decker London bus. We sat on top, and lurched forward for half an hour on what seemed to our transatlantic eyes to be the wrong side of the road, past massive buildings, colored gray.

We clambered down in the middle of the financial district. “I could have had us get off farther up and saved a walk,” Jane
said. “Sorry about that.” We didn't mind a walk; it was all new and exciting. Everybody looked exotic to us. The children kept edging close to newspaper stands looking for Beatle magazines; Jane strode on with never a backward glance. We turned a corner and came to a very large building with a marble entryway. Jordan's offices were on the ground floor. You had to walk past the elevator—a sort of circular cage cut into the center of the floor—and then you came to the offices of Pressclips U.K. Ltd.

The offices seemed a bit grimy; cold light filtered through grayish glass. But there was a great deal of activity: frazzled people with lumpy hair scurried about carrying things. I didn't remember seeing so many people rushing about in Jordan's Chicago premises. At the end of the corridor, behind a door with a frosted glass pane, we found Jordan in the office he shared with Bill Dworkin, a Chicago employee—originally a native of New Jersey—whom Jordan had brought over to run Pressclips U.K. I noted that Bill had grown a beard. He was drinking tea from a blue cup with a broken handle. A very tall Englishman slouched in a straight chair, with his legs thrust out before him. Jordan introduced him as Pat Foyle; he said he had written me about him.

The name was familiar, but the details were lost in a welter of letters about Pats and Teensies and Allans and Basils. It seemed to be easy to make friends in London. Or at least it seemed to be easy for Jordan, who was trusting and gregarious. We strolled off to a restaurant, Jordan in front with the children and me behind with Pat. Bill had stayed in the office, sipping moodily from his blue cup. “Look out for American tourists,” he called after us. “They'll jostle you off the curbing.”

“What do you think of all this?” Pat asked, gesturing vaguely.

“Oh,” I said, “it's very exciting. I've always loved England.”

“Jordan will have you living here yet,” he said, chuckling.

“Well,” I said doubtfully.

There was a long pause. “I can't get used to no screens on the windows,” I said finally, having thought of something to say. “I keep expecting mosquitoes.”

“Skeeters?” Pat asked. “I think the time is past for skeeters.”

“You do have them here then?” I asked, surprised.

“Skeeters? Oh, I expect so.”

“What?”

“I'll ask,” Pat said.

We went into the upstairs room of a restaurant filled with Victorian atmosphere. It seemed fitting: in spite of the heavy traffic, all the streets had a touch of Victorian ambience. Workmen wore large caps and long aprons; each office had a snub-nosed boy to run errands. To my surprise, I did not find this exhilarating. Despite my romantic predilection for the past, I felt a little strange, a little out of place. And I didn't feel hungry; that was proof that something was wrong.

I sampled Bruce's steak and kidney pie: to my vast disappointment, it tasted like liver. “Bring cokes for these young Americans,” Pat said expansively to the waiter. The cokes came with lemon and no ice.

“It's got lemon in it,” Eric said loudly. “And it's warm.”

“I suppose you want ice,” Pat said. He turned to me. “And you want ice water, I suppose.”

“I'd like some gin with anything,” I said.

“Ice water is what makes Americans effete,” Pat said, joking.

“I hate this coke,” Eric said.

“Wait until you meet my little girl,” Pat said to Bruce and Eric. “You'll love her.”

He slouched back in his chair. “She's beautiful,” he said. “I haven't seen her for a while, but I'm going to see her Friday, I think.”