by Dyan Sheldon
“Yes, Mum, yes, I know, but there was a bit of a delay…”
On the wall next to the hatch there was a photograph of the Pitt-Turnbulls in the snow. They were all wearing sunglasses, knit hats and parkas and holding skis. They could have been in a breath-mint ad. I studied the Czar. The photo looked like it was a few years old, so it was before he went to India and changed, and it was hard to make out his face with the glasses and the hat and everything, but he looked kind of interesting.
“Of course, Mum…” Caroline’s voice was soothing like a hot bath. “How could I forget about you?”
There wasn’t much more to see (a refrigerator’s a refrigerator even if it isn’t twenty years old and covered with photographs) so I sat down at the table by the window to wait for Caroline to finish apologizing to her mom.
There was a blue and white checked cloth on the table and another vase of roses.
I looked out the window. In Brooklyn we have a backyard, but the Pitt-Turnbulls had a garden. Mr Young would have been ecstatic. The garden looked like it was melting in the rain, but you could still tell that it wasn’t the kind of garden where you throw a few seeds down and hope for the best. It looked as planned as the kitchen.
Caroline sighed. “Yes, I’ll be over after lunch. Of course I will. Yes. Yes, I’ll ring when I’m leaving the house… Of course I will. I promise.”
I looked over as Caroline hung up the phone. “Your mom giving you a hard time?” I figured this was something we could bond on. My mother’s always giving me a hard time.
Caroline looked surprised. “Pardon?”
I nodded towards the phone. “It sounded like your mom was giving you a hard time. Jake’s always on my case about something. It’s really wearing.”
Caroline shook her head and her smile went with it. “Oh no, no, she wasn’t giving me—it was nothing like that. Poor old Mum, she’s been in constant pain since she hurt her back. It’s made things very difficult… For her. Very difficult for her.”
OK, so mothers being stress machines wasn’t going to bond us but maybe bad backs could.
“That’s a real bummer,” I sympathized. “My gran – Sky? – she threw her back out jive dancing a couple of years ago. She said it was like the tenth circle of hell, only she couldn’t even say that she thought she deserved it.”
“Really? Jive dancing?” Caroline gazed at me vaguely for a few seconds, probably wondering what jive dancing is, and then she turned up the smile. “Well, now,” she said. “How about that tea?”
In my house you help out or you starve to death. I automatically got to my feet. “What can I do?”
“Do?”
You’d think nobody ever offered to help her before, she looked so surprised.
“Yeah. You know. Get out the mugs or put the milk on the table – something like that?”
“Oh, don’t be silly, Cherry. You just sit down and relax. You’ve had an arduous journey.”
Arduous? Sitting in a plane? In Brooklyn you have to break sweat for something to be counted as arduous. But I didn’t argue. Being waited on was something I totally wasn’t expecting either. I sat back down. I might have trouble getting used to sleeping in Barbie’s bedroom, but I figured I wasn’t going to have any trouble getting used to not having to do much.
Caroline filled what looked like a plastic pitcher with water.
“Oh it’s not a pitcher,” said Caroline. “It’s an electric kettle.”
An electric kettle? What would they think of next?
Then she put a bright yellow teapot on the counter and took a canister that said tea from the cabinet.
I was fascinated. “I’ve never seen anyone make tea in a pot before.”
“Oh, we never use bags.” She smiled at me kindly, the way the Queen does in those pictures of her being given bunches of flowers by small, barefoot children. “I’m afraid we’re a bit fussy about our tea. My mother always says it’s one of the most important symbols of our civilization.”
“Really?”
Sky always told me that the most important symbols of English civilization were colonization and genocide.
Caroline nodded. “She says you can tell a lot about a person from the way they make a cup of tea.”
“Really?”
I guessed it made as much sense as being able to tell what people are like from the shoes they wear.
If you come from Brooklyn you pretty much think making tea is only slightly more complicated than opening a bag of potato chips, but British ingenuity had obviously given the world more than the steam engine and the electric kettle. Caroline took me step-by-step through the intricate and mysterious process of tea making that had been developed over centuries as an important symbol of English civilization.
First of all, you have to make it in a pot. Then the water has to be absolutely boiling. If it’s not absolutely boiling all is lost. After the water’s boiled, you have to warm the pot. There’s no sense putting absolutely boiling water in a cold pot, is there? I said I guessed not. And then, after you’ve warmed your pot you put in four perfectly equal scoops of tea.
“One for each cup and one extra,” Caroline instructed.
I asked if the extra one was for good luck.
“For the pot.” Caroline smiled and put a quilted cover that looked like a cat over it. Mr Young was obviously right. Only a really advanced civilization would clothe its cooking utensils.
“Now what?”
Caroline looked at her watch. “Now we have to let it steep for precisely seven minutes.”
What happened if it only steeped for six? Did the world come to an ugly end? Did we give up and reach for the cyanide?
Caroline got three cups and saucers from one of the cabinets and put them on the table. They were as sparkling and clean as brand new.
“Holy schmoly.” Would my fascination never end? “We don’t even own any cups. We just have mugs.” And they’re all chipped or broken and have other lives as paint pots and things like that.
The phone rang twice while we waited for the seven minutes to be up.
The first time I said that Jake never answers the phone when she’s busy. “Why don’t you just let the machine get it?”
“Oh no, no… I couldn’t do that.” Caroline’s smile seemed to have got stuck on apologetic. “It might be important.”
It was her mother. It was her mother the second time, too. She sure seemed determined that Caroline wasn’t going to forget about her.
Robert came in as if he’d been summoned just as Caroline started pouring out the tea.
“For God’s sake, Caroline, what are you doing? Milk first, Caroline.” He sat down across from me. “You know that. Milk first. We don’t want Cherry going back to Brooklyn not knowing how to make a proper cup of tea, do we?”
“God, no.” I laughed. “Nobody’d believe I was really here. They’d think I went to the Jersey shore and just said I’d been in England.”
Robert nodded. “Precisely. There’s a proper way to make tea and a wrong way. So don’t forget, you must always put the milk in first.”
“Only I don’t see how it would taste any different,” I said. Maybe it was the jetlag, but I couldn’t stop myself. I’ve been raised by a woman who regards sell-by dates as a suggestion. “I mean, it doesn’t really make sense that it would taste different, does it?” Did it?
Apparently, it did.
“It may not make sense,” Robert informed me, “but it’s true.” He handed me a cup. “You just taste this and see if it isn’t the best cup of tea you’ve ever had.”
I put the cup to my mouth and took a big swallow. From the major deal they made about it I guess I was expecting something that tasted like the nectar of the gods – or at least something drinkable.
“Oh, dear! I am so sorry!” Caroline rushed over faster than a speeding bullet and slapped me on the back. “Is it too strong?”
“Oh, no … no … It’s delicious … it … it just went down the wrong way.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand. “I guess I drank it too fast – you know, because it’s so good?”
“There you go,” said Robert. “What did I tell you?”
Had I Crossed the Ocean Or Fallen Down a Rabbit Hole?
When I went up to my room after my encounter of the third kind with a cup of tea, my bags (OK, my duffel and my box) were sitting in the middle of the floor, just where Robert had left them, but it was like I was seeing them for the first time. They looked really out of place. They looked like a builder in his work clothes in the Queen’s bedroom. You were afraid they were going to put their feet on the spread or break something just by being there. They pretty much looked the way I felt. Like they’d been beamed down from another planet. It was a planet that was a lot less clean, a lot less neat – and a whole lot less pink.
But there was no point in going into lonely and homesick mode. So what? Feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to make things better. Things were what they were. What would make them better was to get myself settled. You know, find my space. Relocate my spiritual centre. Then everything wouldn’t feel so strange and uncomfortable. Besides, I was only going to be here for six weeks, not the rest of my life. And it wasn’t like I was in a war zone or anything. Six weeks I could do.
So to start with, I took a shower.
It wasn’t a Brooklyn shower (attached to the wall), it just sort of fit into a holder and instead of regular faucets it had some kind of dial thing, but I eventually figured out how to turn it on and get hot water and it worked OK – which was a lot more than I could say about the tea.
What didn’t work was my hairdryer. I stood there holding it in my hand, staring at the socket in the wall. The plugs were different.
I started to revise my idea of having been beamed down from another planet. It was more like I was Alice in Wonderland. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole and into a world where everything kind of looked the same but wasn’t. I figured that one of the really major advantages of Europe over close-to-Europe was that in Europe I’d know I was in a strange country but here everything was vaguely familiar so I didn’t think it was really a strange country – only it was. I mean, if I was in Italy I wouldn’t understand what they were saying because they were speaking Italian, but in England they spoke English and I still didn’t understand them.
I dried my hair as well as I could with a towel and clipped it up, and then I changed into some clothes that didn’t smell like I’d had a rough ocean voyage.
Then I unpacked my stuff. I put Gallup’s painting and Tampa’s box on the bedside table so they’d be the first things I saw when I woke up. I set up my altar to the Earth Goddess on top of the dresser, to keep me safe from the forces of pink.
I didn’t know what to do about the bears. Well, that’s not totally true. I knew what I wanted to do with them (stuff them all into my duffel and stick it in the closet), but I couldn’t make myself do it. Partly because I knew I’d imagine them all crunched together like battery hens pitifully calling out to me in the night, and partly because I didn’t think Caroline would be exactly overjoyed when she found out what I’d done. I mean, they were Sophie’s beloved childhood toys, weren’t they? I didn’t want to act like they were the natives and I was a colonist.
So I sat them all in the armchair and turned it around so I couldn’t actually see them staring at me when I was in bed.
Caroline was setting the table in the dining room when I got downstairs.
“Wow,” I said. “Is somebody coming? My gran’s got a dining room but we only eat in it if it’s a special occasion – you know, when there’s too many people to fit in the kitchen.”
“No, it’s just us.” Caroline shrugged. “I thought it would be nice to have a proper lunch, as it’s your first day.”
I could only hope her idea of a proper lunch wasn’t anything like her idea of a proper cup of tea.
“Oh, right,” I said. “I just thought because there are four plates—”
“Oh, that…” She straightened out a fork. “I just thought that perhaps Xar might remember…”
Remember what? Where he lived?
Caroline decided to change the subject.
“I have an idea.” Her smile had faded for a second there but now it was back in force. “How would you like to see my garden?”
I could see the garden just great from where I was through the French doors (and through a lot of water), but I could tell that wasn’t what Caroline meant. She had the same look in her eyes that Gallup gets when any living creature that isn’t a human or a plant comes into the conversation – obsessional.
“Sure.” My head was still pretty wet so it wasn’t like I was going to ruin my hair or anything. “I’ve never seen a real English garden before, but Mr Young – he runs the grocery where I got the peaches box? – Mr Young says they’re really something.”
Caroline hauled out two pairs of green boots and a floral umbrella from the closet under the stairs.
Caroline stepped through the French doors and opened the umbrella, and I went with her. I could see us as though I was hovering over our heads, Caroline and her flowery dress and green galoshes, and me in my black jeans and T-shirt and Sophie’s green galoshes, and the umbrella swaying above us like a giant bouquet. It was pretty surreal.
“Of course there won’t be many birds about in this weather,” said Caroline as she stepped onto the stone path, “but we have robins, blue tits, great tits, long-tailed tits, a great spotted woodpecker, jays, magpies, wood pigeons, starlings, wrens, green finches, dunnocks, black caps, blackbirds, red wings, coal tits – we even have parakeets and a sparrowhawk.”
“Wow, that’s really cool.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. “We mainly just have sparrows and pigeons at home. Pancho Villa, that’s our cat, he’s always leaving dead bodies in the kitchen.”
Caroline hummed “Um…” and marched onward.
“That’s Rosa Constance Spry and over there is Rosa Brother Cadfael…” Caroline held the umbrella over us with one hand and pointed with the other.
“They’re nice.” The Alice in Wonderland experience was deepening. I wasn’t used to flowers having proper names like people. “They look like roses.”
Caroline laughed. “They are roses. English roses. And that’s Laurus nobilis … Hedera helix …”
I asked if they had English names.
“Oh, Cherry, I am sorry. I’m afraid I get carried away. Of course they have English names.” She stepped gingerly over a puddle. “That’s the bay and that’s ivy of course. And over there are the rhododendrons and the dwarf conifers.”
It was my turn to hum. “Um…” I stepped quickly over the puddle, trying to stay under the umbrella.
“And this is the pond.” She said it the way someone in LA showing you her house would say, “And here’s the Olympic-size pool.”
It wasn’t that much bigger than the puddle, but we stood side by side looking at the pond as though it was one of the wonders of the world.
Caroline pointed out the rocks and the ferns and the grass in case we didn’t have any of those things in Brooklyn.
I peered into the gloom. “Is there anything in there?”
“Oh, yes.” Caroline’s head bobbed, which made the umbrella bob, which made water drip down my back. “There are the frogs, of course. And water snails and the daphnia.”
Two out of the three were familiar, which was good enough for me. “Cool.”
“Those are the water lillies … and the water irises … and the water forget-me-nots…” With every plant she named Caroline tilted the umbrella and water dripped down my back. “And there’s the holly … the lavender … the jasmine…” She gave a little gasp of what I can only describe as dismay. “Oh, dear. The wild geraniums are looking rather poorly aren’t they?”
I wouldn’t recognize a wild geranium unless it was labelled. But I tried to console her. “Maybe it’s just because of the rain. I mean, nothing looks that great in the rai
n, does it?”
“I suppose not.” She started walking again, determined that I was going to see every inch of the garden, monsoon or no monsoon. “Foxgloves … azaleas … willow … lilac…”
“I’ve never seen a garden like this. You know, not in real life.” If this garden were to take on human form it would be an army on parade, everybody where they were supposed to be and at attention. It was so neat and orderly that the only thing that looked real was the rain.
“Oh, I am sorry.” Caroline looked like an Aleut trying to imagine a world without snow. “Don’t you have a garden at home?”
“We have a backyard.”
“Oh, I am sorry…”
I was starting to feel like I brought her nothing but misery. I pointed to the tiny house against the end wall. “We’ve got a shed though.” I decided not to mention that it was made of old doors.
“Oh, that isn’t a shed.” Now Caroline’s smile looked like it was trying to keep up its spirits. “I use it for my studio.” She gave a little laugh. “For what my family calls my little hobby.”
Hobby? Stamp collecting? Boats in bottles? Knitting? She’d have to be knitting a car.
“My painting.”
“Oh, right.” Jake is only a part-time artist because we need to eat and stuff like that, but she would never call it a hobby. She says it’s the heart of her life. “I saw the portrait of Mr Bean in the dining room. It’s really cool.”