“I shouldn’t worry about anything,” Percy Snell said.
“Listen,” I said slowly. “Can’t we move out? I mean there was a dining room table here when Jordan saw it first, and it isn’t here now. Can’t we break the lease and move out?”
This sent Percy Snell into stitches. “Oh, you can’t do that,” he said. “I shouldn’t think you could do that.”
“But what about harassment?”
“I should think he just got nervous and lost his temper,” Percy Snell said.
“But he said I spilled water all over the place and I didn’t.”
“I expect he was upset.”
I discussed this at some length with Jordan.
“First of all,” he said, “I think we should go somewhere for a vacation. I’d like,” he said, in a dreamy voice, “I’d like someplace warm. With a beach, a sandy beach. And the sun, the sun shining all day long. On the hot sand.”
“How about Glencoe, Illinois?” I asked, bitterly.
“And a hotel,” he went on. “A beautiful hotel, very modern. Very, very modern. With balconies. With lots of glass. With carpets.” There was a pause. We both remembered how we had whiled away many an American evening laughing our heads off at wall-to-wall carpeting and teak furniture.
“Oh, boy,” I said faintly.
“We’ll go down to American Express,” Jordan said, “and see where we can go. Next week.”
Soon it was Friday, and time for our party. Cynthia happened to phone me for some reason, so I invited her to come.
“Nini and Walter are here,” I said. “You’ll be able to see them.” She had expressed fondness for Nini and Walter in the past.
“Who wants to see them?” Cynthia said.
“I thought you liked them.”
“I don’t want to see them,” Cynthia said.
“Don’t you want to come to our party?”
“Well, it’s a long ride. I’ll see. Maybe it won’t be so bad if I bring Cyril Bernstein. I’ll have to let you know.”
I decided that England had brought out the worst in Cynthia. I added her to a list of people I never wanted to see again. The list consisted so far of Mr. MacAllister, Mrs. Stackpole, Dr. Bott, the elephant lover at the zoo, Jane and her mother, and now Cynthia.
I walked across the street to Harrods and bought ham and chicken and some pastries. We counted out our scanty collection of mugs and cups, and Jordan rented some glasses from the pub on the comer.
Nini and Walter came early, followed by some normal-looking public relations people, and then Maud Tweak, towing a large man in tweeds.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, in a low, agitated voice. “My husband is here; I didn’t expect him. Actually he’s a guide in Switzerland, but he came home, so I brought him along.”
We said we were delighted to meet Mr. Tweak, who seemed affable.
Basil Goldbrick, elegantly turned out and with a small white moustache, arrived with his wife Daisy, who was wearing a very large floppy hat and a lot of perfume. We served drinks to everyone, and they disposed themselves about the sitting room. Nini, who was a take-charge person, had pulled various throws and other swathings off a few armchairs. I had never unveiled these, assuming Mrs. Stackpole had swathed them because they were in an advanced state of dilapidation. Now I was surprised to see that they were new, or at least newly upholstered.
A lot of screeching drifted in from the street, and some theater people turned up, friends of the public relations guests. There was an actress with bangs touching her nose and a very short skirt. She looked to be about eighteen years old. The man who was with her got a drink and promptly fell through the seat of one of Mrs. Stackpole’s antique chairs. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. We pulled him out, and he sat on a dining room chair and that broke. Needless to say, this occasioned a good deal of merriment.
We all sat down eventually and conversations ensued. “How have you been getting on?” Maud Tweak asked me, smiling all over her face.
I hesitated.
“I expect you’ll get used to it,” she said.
I took a deep breath, mindful of Jordan’s having commented that I had said critical things during the dinner party at her apartment. “Look,” I said carefully, “I’m afraid I gave you a false impression the other night. I don’t want you to think I don’t like it here … I’m afraid I must have sounded like the most awful malcontent.”
“Oh, my dear,” Maud Tweak said, glinting at me. Walter came over to us and settled himself for a chat.
“My goodness,” he said, in his friendly, rather prissy way, “this is such a charming house.”
“Yes, charming,” Maud Tweak replied. “Really excellent taste. Of course, it’s very expensive here. I’m afraid,” she went on with no change of expression, “that you’ll find a very different attitude among your people toward Vietnam when you get home.”
“Will we,” Walter said.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Maud said. “I’m afraid world opinion is definitely against you.”
“Is that an Angelica Kauffman I see on the wall?” Walter asked. He uncoiled his considerable length and drifted off.
“And those race riots,” Maud Tweak said to me.
Jordan and I were completely out of touch with what was going on in the world. He had been immersed in English Pressclips, and I had spent months studying for my Master’s exams. A few nights before, on TV, we had glimpsed what looked like American soldiers shooting at something in a jungle, and I had asked whether we were in some kind of war. Jordan wasn’t sure about it.
“What’s the race situation here?” I asked, to say something.
“It’s most unfortunate,” she responded promptly. “All these colored people coming here. Many of them don’t even speak English.”
“Yes, that’s bad,” I said. “At home blacks are part of American culture.”
“Oh, come,” Maud Tweak said in a shocked voice.
“I mean they speak English,” I said defensively. “They’re born there.”
She continued to look at me, amused.
“When you say ‘colored people’,” I said, “you mean East Indians, don’t you, and Pakistanis and Malaysians, as well as Africans.”
“No, we don’t,” she said firmly.
“You don’t? But in A Passage to India, for instance—”
“You’ve been reading a lot of books,” she said accusingly. “None of it is true. One of my best friends is an Indian woman.”
“I don’t mean you personally. I mean the situation generally. What is the situation generally?”
“Well, it’s certainly different from the States. I mean they can go to any hotel anywhere, and they aren’t kept out, you know. They can eat anywhere. But,” she said, “if for instance one should come here and want to rent this house, Mrs. Stackpole would not rent it to him, and quite rightly.”
I stared at Maud Tweak, the good socialist.
“After all,” she went on, possibly sensing my reaction, “this place has carpets and so on. You can’t have people killing chickens in the corner and that sort of thing.”
“But aren’t any of them middle class? I mean educated ones, doctors. In America there’s a black middle class …”
She glanced vaguely around the room. I noticed that her eyes were rather small and set close together.
“I suppose so,” she said. “Some Embassy people perhaps.”
This silenced me for a while. “I’d like to ask you something,” I said finally. “We had a rather strange encounter at the theater the other night. There was this character with long hair—”
“Of course our men wear their hair longer than Americans. They prefer it that way.”
“Yes, I know; I wasn’t talking about that. I mean he had these sideburns, you know, side whiskers actually, and a sort of Edwardian get-up, a high collar and everything. I always associated that sort of thing with the Beatles, you know, Mods, rockers, sort of democratic people, protesting—�
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“There’s nothing to protest,” she said stiffly.
“No, I mean the class thing,” I said.
“There isn’t any class thing in this country.”
“There isn’t any class thing in this country?”
“Of course not, there hasn’t been for fifteen years.”
That meant the class thing had suddenly keeled over in 1950.
“Well, anyway,” I said, going on for some reason which escapes me now, “you see, this fellow in the theater with the sideburns and the collar, he was speaking in this strange affected drawl—”
“We say you drawl,” Maud Tweak interjected swiftly. I had been intending to ask her if there was a Victorian Dandy movement afoot: snobbish Teddy boys or something, but I dropped it.
“Look,” she said in a businesslike voice, “you come over here, asking a lot of questions, reading a lot of books. Nothing you think is true. It’s all terribly out of date; you take me back fifteen years, you really do.”
“But,” I said, “there must be something to protest. There is, everywhere. How about the Royal Family? Doesn’t anyone ever protest about them?”
“Of course not,” Maud said, twitching restlessly. “No one.”
“But the Beatles do,” I said, conscious that our conversation had left logic far behind.
“They do not,” she said.
“They do too,” I replied, irritated. I considered myself an authority on the Beatles. “George Harrison said it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Royalty is stupid.’ You can’t get a plainer statement than that.”
“He didn’t mean it.”
“He did too mean it. Why would he say it if he didn’t mean it? Aren’t the Beatles a sign of something? Change?”
“The Beatles.” She smiled indulgently. “Those boys aren’t intelligent.”
“Not … ? But—”
“Oh, they’re witty and all that. But they’re not intelligent. They’re just …” The phrase “working-class” hung in the air, beating its wings desperately. It didn’t dare to light anywhere.
“Surely,” I murmured, “there is discrimination based on accent?”
This stopped her cold for a minute.
“Look at the people in this room,” she said finally. “None of them cares a fig for class.”
I looked around at them. Daisy Goldbrick came from Liverpool and talked like Eliza Doolittle at a middle stage in her evolution; Manchester kept slipping in and out of her husband Basil’s voice. The actress with the bangs spoke in a sort of die-away whisper. Maud’s husband, who sounded forthrightly Yorkshire, was complaining bitterly about England. I felt myself irresistibly drawn to him.
“Our policemen are so dirty,” he was announcing loudly. “Why do they have to wear those awful heavy dark dingy clothes? It’s depressing to come here from France, their gendarmes are so spruce …”
It was time to descend into the basement and bring up food. Jordan and I took turns. I found it was impossible to hold the handrail while carrying a heavy tray up the steep winding staircase. A couple of times I had a bad off-balance moment: I saw myself ending here, a pathetic heap on the cheap linoleum, covered with imported ham and fragments of yellow-doodled china, dead, so to speak, among the alien corn. Luckily, I managed, barely, to regain my balance and toil upwards. It was very depressing after one emerged, white-faced and clammy from a brush with death, to find that someone needed a fork and have to pick one’s way down again, carefully, with all that gin sloshing around inside one. Nobody offered to help us.
Everybody tucked into the food with good appetite. I sat down close to the actress, who, in addition to the skirt four inches above her knees, wore a bow over her bangs, long white stockings and flat Mary Jane shoes. The little of her face that was visible was heavily covered with eye makeup and white foundation. She looked even younger than at first impression— about fifteen years old. Maud had told me she was actually thirty-eight.
“What do you think of our television here?” she asked me in her faint, throaty voice.
“Oh, it’s interesting. Of course it’s only on for a limited time. And it rains so much, we could use more of it.”
“But of course in the States, your children watch television so much that it’s a health menace. Isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t. They’d rather be outside in good weather. They don’t watch it.”
“No?” I had a feeling that her eyebrows were raised, although I couldn’t see them. “We hear that it’s a health menace in the States,” she said firmly.
“I don’t know why people in this country are so reluctant to try anything new,” Hugh Tweak said, over his plate. “There’s no initiative. They hate change; they want to do everything the way they always have.”
“They are sort of rigid,” I said cautiously.
“My God, yes,” he said belting down some Scotch. “My God, they’re rigid.”
“I see you have a colored telephone,” Maud Tweak said loudly to the company at large. “The telephone company is so helpful. They wake me every morning for work. I just leave a call, you know. The phone rings every morning at seven, and I pick up the receiver, and the operator says, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Tweak, it’s seven o’clock.’ And I say, ‘Good morning, what’s the weather this morning?’ And she says—”
I thought to myself that I could guess what the weather was like.
“You pay for that service,” Hugh Tweak said, looking at his wife rather blearily.
“Only a token,” she said.
“This morning,” said Walter brightly, “we saw such an interesting thing, the Changing of the Guard.” Walter was more than a bit of a wag. It was often impossible to tell when he was being serious.
“Oh yes, Buckingham Palace,” Maud Tweak said. “They had to put the sentries inside the gates.”
“Well, you know,” Hugh said, “a sentry stepped on an American woman’s foot.”
Everyone laughed very hard at this except Jordan and Walter and me. Hugh sprang up and walked the length of the room, lifting his feet high and setting them down hard with every step.
“Right on her foot,” he said. “American woman got very close to him, with her camera, you know, and he … brought his foot down …” He brought his own foot down sadistically. I winced.
“Embassies were alerted,” Maud Tweak said, expiring with laughter.
“Notes were written,” her husband said.
“Of course they must take their photographs,” one of the public relations people said. “They’d be lost without cameras.”
“I have an irresistible desire,” Walter said, “to be photographed with the Archbishop of Canterbury, if he can be persuaded to put on his full regalia.”
Jordan and Nini and I laughed first, then the other English people, with the exception of Maud Tweak, realized it was a joke, and joined in. Maud was looking in vain for an eye to catch; when she couldn’t catch one, she realized belatedly that Walter was not serious and began to laugh very heartily.
Hugh Tweak wiped his eyes. “Stamped right on it,” he murmured reminiscently.
The evening wore on. Daisy Goldbrick and Maud became involved in a cozy conversation in a corner. I looked surreptitiously at my watch; it was nearly one in the morning. At any minute they’ll start to leave, I thought, and we can go to bed. My calf muscles and my shoulders were aching from my heavily laden treks up and down the stairs.
“I return to Switzerland tomorrow,” Hugh said, while Jordan filled his glass again. I thought hopefully that he really ought to get some sleep. “I’m guiding a tour of Bell Telephone people round Switzerland.”
“Yes, Americans,” Maud said to Daisy. “A group of Americans.”
Everybody began to flag except Maud and Hugh; Daisy and Basil were the first to leave. “Goodbye,” Maud said to Daisy, with a hand-squeeze and an affectionate look. “I’ll call you.”
“Had you met Daisy before this?” I asked Maud
, when they had left.
“Heavens, no,” she said, rather disdainfully. “I never saw the woman before.” She turned with some enthusiasm to Nini. “My dear,” she said, “I should so much like to show you and your husband some sights.”
Walter and Nini had been to London many, many times.
“That would be nice,” Nini said.
“Do give me a ring tomorrow,” Maud said, “and we’ll set something up. I should like so much to see you again anyway, and I think I can show you a few things you aren’t likely to see otherwise.”
“What is it you do?” Hugh asked Walter, who replied that he taught English in a college. “Oh, that’s interesting,” Hugh said. “Tell me, is Shakespeare ever taught in schools in America?”
The next time I glanced at my watch, openly this time, I saw that it was nearly four o’clock. The conversation had dulled down considerably; they all looked tired except Maud Tweak, but no one seemed ready to go home. I knew that Nini and Walter wanted to stay to the last and talk about everybody, but why didn’t the rest of them leave? Jordan shot me a look of despair. It was a Friday night, and he had been up since seven.
Finally, after another fifteen minutes or so, Walter gave up and rose to leave. All the others shot up with him. We babbled goodbye in the hall; Walter said something I didn’t catch and everyone around him shouted with laughter. Maud Tweak clutched her husband’s arm. “Oh, Hugh,” she cried, “they’re laughing at your umbrella!”
Actually, they were laughing at something else, but I thought it was rather interesting that she should have thought this. It seemed to me to reveal a somewhat defensive state of mind.
We finally crawled into bed at five a.m., more dead than alive.
I kept dreaming that Maud Tweak, with an enormous bouffant head, was trying to stamp on my foot. I was very restless and got up about ten with a splitting headache. The sky was overcast, everything looked gray. There were dirty dishes, full ashtrays and smudged cups and saucers everywhere.
28
The Portobello Road
Tea & Antipathy Page 13