England to Me: A Memoir

by Emily Hahn

  “No, I mean lessons and all that. There’s dancing, and riding, and school, and Sun Rays. We’ve done that. Is there anything we aren’t doing, do you suppose, that we ought to?”

  The despair in her tone might possibly have been real this time. “I’m sure you’ve thought of everything, Ann,” I said.

  The four of us made our way toward the car park, pushing through crowds in the dark street between the lighted windows. Full of excitement after their skating, the children kept babbling and pointing at things behind the plate glass.

  “Oh, look, Mummy, a wedding dress. A real white wedding dress,” said Carola. “Did the Princess wear a dress like that?”

  “She must have done,” shouted Rose. “That’s the very dress she wore, isn’t it, Mummy? Oh, look at the lovely purple dress. Isn’t that a lovely purple dress?”

  “But the white dress is lovelier,” said Carola, “because it’s a wedding dress. Beautiful Princess.”

  “She married a sailor,” said Rose. “Look, there she is.” We stopped before an enlarged photograph of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh; he was in uniform. “Of course she married a sailor,” said Rose with emphasis. “Sailors are the best.”

  “Not the best, not the very best; my daddy’s a soldier. But sailors are very nice. Aren’t they, Mummy?”

  “Yes, darling, very nice,” I said. “Hold my hand, now, crossing the street.” We started down a steep hill toward the car, my thoughts drifting. I was pleasantly tired. “Would you like to be a princess, do you suppose?” I asked idly.

  “Yes, but only if I could wear a wedding dress, like Cinderella’s in the pantomime. Would you like to be a princess, Rose?”

  “You can wear a wedding dress anyway, silly Billy,” said Rose. “Everybody can, can’t they, Mummy? I shall marry a sailor, shan’t I, Mummy? Shan’t I be married?”

  They were walking behind us down the hill. I heard Ann’s steps hesitate.

  “Oh, dear, I suppose you will, darling,” she said. Her voice died away despairingly.

  16. HAPPY NEW YEAR

  The new scholastic year began for the Major with a mix-up which he was to learn was quite characteristic of academic circles. It concerned his reader, or, as Domingo prefers to be called, his lecturer. When the Major took the chair, it was understood, and he emphasized the point, that he was no good at all at teaching. He didn’t want to be good at teaching. “It’s a research chair,” he insisted, “and I intend to keep it that way. So I must have somebody to do the real work.”

  The Portuguese evidently agreed with this, and somewhat to the indignant surprise of the University—for Portugal had neglected to announce his arrival in advance nor had they been asked for him —they sent Domingo. Their choice was happy, if you like balance in all things, for nobody less like the Major could be imagined. The Major is stanchly a seventeenth-century man, first and foremost a historian. Anything later that 1750 in painting or architecture annoys him, and he never reads anything at all unless it has some connection with his favorite historical period. Domingo being Portuguese, it goes without saying that he has been brought up in the odor of history, but he has turned against old things in reaction, and goes instead for the moderns, or anyway comparative moderns. In sculpture, he will accept anything from Rodin forward; in poetry, he starts with Mallarmé; in fiction— But Domingo’s tastes in fiction are so catholic as to be beyond me. He is capable of raving about the latest out of Brazil, and I cannot follow him there.

  So far so good, but the dignity of the University was ruffled. They had not asked for Domingo, they said, and they weren’t sure they would have him. They jolly well would, said the Major. There was nobody else for the job and he wasn’t going to do without a Portuguese reader, not he. Very well, said the University; in that case it was up to Portugal to pay Domingo enough to live on, over and above what the University paid most part-time readers, which is, I take it, the equivalent of what one pays book reviewers, at a few dollars a page. It was written in the contract, said the University. Portugal did not seem to agree. After weeks of rather languid, vague wrangling, the University authorities tried to look up the contract with Portugal, but they couldn’t find it. There wasn’t a contract, evidently. There was only the rumor of a contract.… In the meantime, nobody was paying Domingo at all. It was a tense situation, and, I am assured, quite characteristic. Personally, I shouldn’t have thought any group but an Army could have got into such a muddle.

  In the end, both sides began to pay Domingo something, so that was all right. Domingo was in a nervous frazzle by that time. He had migraine quite often, at the best of times, and he was prostrate with it now. I have never understood the difference between migraine and headache, but people who have the former are insistent on using the word, so there must be something in it. Domingo had to retire to bed with his migraine, but he rallied after the situation became more firm, financially speaking, and returned to his customary gay spirits, and threw himself with even more enthusiasm into his dearest project, that of swelling the roll of students of Portuguese. How the Major wished he wouldn’t! But Domingo persisted, and promised to do all the paper work himself, and inside one term he had collected four students, no mean feat considering that none of these people had probably even considered studying Portuguese before they met Domingo.

  “He’s a good man for this job,” admitted the Major, “because he does everything I won’t bother about.”

  “Charles must be Portuguese by descent,” said Domingo, “I find no one else in England like Charles. Muy, muite simpatico.”

  It seems very strange now to reflect that I used to think lecturers are grave elderly men with tortoise-shell glasses. Domingo was young and explosive, and rather a responsibility for the Major. He wrote poetry and recited it to himself in the mirror, with the restrained gestures of the Portuguese, who are not absolutely impassive like the Dutch, but neither are they all over the place like Italians. When he first arrived he was almost tongue-tied, not at all from self-consciousness, oh no, but merely because of language difficulties. Soon he was amazingly fluent in English, and cheerfully ready to sit down and write an English lecture, letter, or magazine article. Domingo was very sensitive, though, and quick to notice and resent it if he thought he was being laughed at. The Major knew all about this tendency, as it seems to be a national rather than a personal trait, and he tried to cushion the shock whenever his lecturer was subjected to the extrovert brutality of English teasing. In vain did I try to explain to Domingo that open, cheerful mockery is a sign of affection in the British: Domingo didn’t believe me. The Major’s gentle tact went further, but it gave him an anxious sort of expression when his lecturer was around—an almost maternal expression.

  “I must say,” said my old friend Pamela after a dinner with all of us, “Charles was almost human last night. He does take good care of that boy. He’s far nicer to him than he is to you.”

  “Well, of course he is. Who the hell do you think I am? Only an Englishman’s wife.”

  Most of the time when we were at home, with Domingo as guest, the Major could relax and leave his charge to the mercies of the womenfolk. Domingo talked to me about literature, and to Carola about anything at all; Carola loved him madly and went off into peals of hysterical laughter at everything he said. One of the first things Domingo ever asked me, tensely, was what I thought of the books of Linda March.

  “Linda March? Oh, she’s good,” I said. My tone was probably lukewarm not so much because I don’t really think she’s good, but just because her goodness is such a settled thing. March books are always best sellers, and they seem to last beyond the best-seller stage. I don’t read many novels nowadays in any case.

  “Is that all?” demanded Domingo indignantly. “She is wonderful, I tell you. Only there lacks something, and only I, a Latin, can tell you what it is.”

  I raised my eyebrows questioningly.

  “She has never known a man,” said Domingo.

  “Domingo,
darling. She’s been married three times, twice unhappily. She’s twice your age. She—”

  “I know all that,” he said with scorn. “It proves nothing, or rather it proves that everything I say is true. Mickey, I must meet Linda March. I want to tell her what keeps her from greatness. Introduce us.”

  “Me? Good Lord, Domingo, I don’t know Linda March. Never set eyes on her in my life.”

  “Oh.” He was crestfallen. “Don’t you think you might manage to meet her? For my sake, or no, for the sake of English literature. You think of it. Remember her first book; wonderful, all but the hero. And ever since—all idiots, every one. They are like dolls she dresses in the nursery. And undresses, too, but to no good. They are not men at all. I blame all Englishmen for her failure. She needs to know one man who can tell her, who can make her understand the lights and smells and colors of life. That is her tragedy.”

  Feebly I repeated, “She must be twice your age.”

  “If she were not, do you think I would ask your help?” he demanded.

  “Now listen,” I said to the Major. “I don’t know how far the duties of a professor’s wife go, but this is beyond me. He says you told him I could fix it.”

  “Well, darling, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I told him that. I only said that you knew all these Bohemians and so forth, and that no doubt it might possibly be managed. I thought you knew the woman.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t go on saying ‘Bohemian.’ ”

  “That Chelsea crowd, then.”

  I moaned in anguish. “Bloomsbury, please, Charles.”

  “It’s all the same. Don’t you really know Linda March?”

  “Certainly not. Why should I?”

  “Doesn’t Pamela know her?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think they’re speaking. She married Pamela’s boy friend or Pamela married hers, or wouldn’t marry him, or otherwise insulted her, I can’t remember. I was in China when it happened. I can’t ask that of Pamela.”

  “Well, I can, or Domingo can ask her for himself. I’ll ask them to drinks together at Thirty-one.”

  “I thought you said Thirty-one is too expensive.”

  “So it is, but this is a pressing matter. Domingo never stops talking about that woman morning, noon, or night; he’s all stirred up now. You and I can drink lager at Thirty-one, I suppose.”

  “We can, but after the first one we won’t.”

  “Then I shall arrange it that we go home sharply after an hour. In any case, Domingo won’t drink much. Portuguese never do.”

  There followed an elaborate campaign. We laid siege to Pamela without avail. She never seemed able to arrange an introduction. Domingo wrote poems to Linda, brought them to me for grammatical correction, read them to Lorraine, Carola, Nellie, the Major, everybody in the house, and sent them on, not 10 Linda but to Pamela, because Pamela had assured him it would do no good to send poems or letters to Linda direct. “She gets a thousand fan letters every week,” she explained. “Popular novelists always do.”

  “Do they really?” said the Major skeptically.

  “My dear Charles, where have you been all your life, not to know that?”

  “The seventeenth century,” I said. “Still, Pamela, a thousand sounds a little excessive.” Pamela looked impassive and unmoved.

  “I want to tell her what is wrong with her books,” urged Domingo. “The introduction would not be important except for that. Her books lack—”

  “I know exactly what they lack,” said Pamela. “You don’t think you are the first person to discover it? People are always telling Linda what is wrong with her books. It is just that lack, if you would like to know, which makes her sell everything she writes to MGM for thirty thousand pounds. If I were you I’d leave Linda alone with her lack.”

  Domingo spoke scathingly of cold-blooded English people, and of Linda’s husbands in particular.

  “But, my dear boy, she’s indifferent,” said Pamela. “Hopelessly.”

  “But it is their fault!”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Suppose Linda’s husband comes rushing into her bedroom, mad with passion. Linda lies back against her pillows, looking perfectly ravishing.”

  “Yes! Yes! Then what?”

  “Well, he tears off his clothes in an absolute frenzy, and Linda says, Tick up your trousers, fold them and hang them across the back of a chair, if you please.’ Don’t talk to me about cold-blooded Englishmen, Domingo.”

  Afterward Domingo said that he thought Pamela a most peculiar person. “I shall never really understand or love these English,” he said.

  “Well, inheriting another woman’s husband or handing your own on to her is apt to have a bad effect on the disposition. Surely you can see that?”

  “All these marryings too. I wish you could know the women of Portugal, Mickey, they are wonderful. Absolutely different. Good, so good, and then after marriage completely devoted.”

  He sighed, and began to talk animatedly about a girl he had just met behind the counter in a Bond Street shop.

  We asked Domingo down for the Christmas holidays, and he accepted. “Yes indeed. I have written my parents how kind you are, Charles, and they are so glad there is someone to take an interest in me. It is, after all, my first time away from home, and they are—” He substituted a gesture for the adjective he could not translate. Domingo was always searching for more, better, and finer-chosen adjectives. The one word “sensitive” would cover most of the sensations he wishes to describe, but in Portuguese there are evidently lots more adjectives, with more delicate nuance.

  For a man who likes to pigeonhole his friends and give carefully selected parties, the Major was in for a strangely variegated Christmas holiday. There was Domingo, of course, and then all of a sudden Peggy arrived. Peggy is an old girl friend of the Major’s. They used to know each other when her father was vicar at a neighboring village, and the Major danced at her wedding, or if he didn’t quite dance, he drank. A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge since those days. Peggy was always interested in Communism; she married a member of the Party, and by this time she is Secretary of the Executive, or whatever they call it, in the African colony where they live. Communists don’t lie about their political affiliations in Peggy’s part of the world.

  She came home a few weeks before Christmas and I met her at last, after having heard a good deal about her from the Major. I don’t know what I expected—something lean and rangy, I suppose, with fire burning in her eyes; somebody I could imagine defying the Colonial police on behalf of Communist-inspired natives, as Peggy most certainly did. What I saw was amazingly different. Peggy could have been the vicar’s wife herself. She was well coifed, large, with an imposing bosom and a cultivated voice, rather too soft for the lecture platform. I was staggered. The Major doesn’t stagger quite so easily, but even he was a bit shaken when Peggy and her husband took us to lunch at the Berkeley and complained from cocktail to savory about the food and the service. They looked exactly like what they were—two Colonials who were used to doing themselves rather well, shocked and grieved at the empty fleshpots of home.

  Now Peggy had decided to pay her long-promised visit to Conygar, over the New Year. The question of guest rooms arose.

  “It would be best to put Lorraine in with Peggy, I think, and let Domingo have Lorraine’s room.”

  Lorraine is an old friend of mine from Australia who had been doing our typing after Louise left.

  “Peggy might not like it,” said the Major, “but, after all, it’s a good big room.”

  “I’ll put up a screen between the beds,” said Lorraine.

  Peggy arrived, with a lot of smart luggage and a ravishing new hat, and took the news that she must share her room quite well. That is, one could see she was telling herself to be philosophical. One could see she didn’t like it, but wasn’t going to make a fuss.

  “Though I must say,” said Lorraine, “she does seem to expect a lot of waiting on. I mean, she handed me a sw
eater to get washed, just like that.”

  “She’s used to lots of black servants where she comes from,” I explained.

  “But what about after the Revolution?”

  “She’ll have just as many servants after the Revolution,” said the Major. “She’ll be in on the ground floor. She’ll be a commissar when we’re toiling away in the salt mines.”

  When Peggy came down for dinner, splendid in black sequins, I asked her about the servant question.

  “How do you manage at your house? Do you have lots of boys, or whatever they’re called?” I asked.

  “Why—” Peggy hesitated. “Yes, of course, for the time being. You see the Negroes are terribly underpaid in the mines, and they prefer house jobs. So—for as long as people have domestic servants—we have them. Just for the time being, of course.”

  “You’re lucky,” I said. “I often look back on the dear old days when I could exploit the Chinese natives. And didn’t I, just!”

  “Oh, Europe’s depressing,” said Peggy. “I can’t seem to get a lift, somehow, anywhere in this country. I went to Prague last month trying to get a lift, but I couldn’t. Not even there.” (There had just been a Communist convention at Prague, a few months before the Czechoslovakian coup. None of the rest of us expected the coup. I don’t think Peggy did either.)

  We had received a ham from friends in America. Hams were at a great premium in England. In fact, there just weren’t any, except once in a great while at the houses of Americans, like mine, and I was properly impressed with what I considered my responsibility. I had talked over with Ruth Cooper the way to cook it.

  “Cover it with a paste made of flour and water; it keeps the juice in,” said Ruth. “Bake it for hours.”

  I invited the Coopers to help us eat it. It was eight o’clock on the night. Pleasant smells filled the kitchen air. The table was set. Peggy was putting the last touches to her toilette when the phone rang. I heard the Major answer it.