“Ha ha,” Mark said. “The Queen looks funny in this blue bathrobe.”
My heart missed a beat. There was a frozen silence before Mrs. Bilkington spoke calmly. “Those are official robes actually,” she said. “It’s traditional to wear them.”
The boys and Mr. Bilkington came back from viewing Stingray.
“It was awfully good this time,” Mr. Bilkington said. “They were trapped on a forbidden planet.”
Eventually we thanked the Bilkingtons for their hospitality, and straggled back to the station. We explained to Mark at some length that he shouldn’t have laughed at the Queen. After a while the train came, and we boarded, stuffed with sweets, tired and very crabby. We arrived at Marylebone Station in a sullen silence and emerged into the eerie stillness of the Sunday London streets. We couldn’t even think of dinner until well after ten o’clock.
30
Afternoon at Margaret’s
MARGARET LEECH had invited us to spend Sunday afternoon at her apartment so that Bruce and Eric could play with her son Michael. We felt sympathetic toward Michael because of the pleasure everyone seemed to take in his humiliation after he called a passerby a twit, and because of his projected banishment to an English boarding school: an institution which my reading on the subject led me to consider as a cross between an army camp and a federal penitentiary, with a lot of Latin thrown in.
We took a cab through the deadly silent streets. Nothing stirred, not even a cat. “At least we don’t have to take a train,” Jordan said. When we got out of the cab, we encountered Maud Tweak, slim in very tight Levis and a silk pink blouse, carrying a string bag filled with goodies. She scooped us up and led us upstairs to the flat. Michael, a smallish child with big dark eyes, was waiting in the hall. He threw his arms around Eric’s neck and they went off chummily to an inner room, Bruce and Mark trailing.
The roomy flat had matching Swedish modern furniture and wallpaper with ivy and trellises on it. There was a large window offering a view of the gloomy gray Sunday sky. Margaret served us wine—apparently tea was considered to be middle class or something by whatever caste Maud Tweak and Margaret Leech belonged to. They turned their noses up at the very mention of the stuff.
“I’m glad you wore slacks,” Maud said, glancing at my blue madras pants. ‘They’re regulation Sunday attire around here.” Again I had fortunately chosen the correct uniform, although madras may have been a little over the edge. My conformist American instincts might have been in play here. The British press wrote a lot about American conformism.
“You’ll like the people who are coming today,” Maud Tweak said to us. ‘They’re Jewish.” She went on, after a pause, her eyes snapping with malice. “Such an interesting party you had the other night. Who was that fascinating woman in the floppy green hat?”
“Daisy Goldbrick,” I said. “You seemed so friendly, I thought you had met her before.”
“Never laid eyes on the woman. But she did fasten onto me, didn’t she?”
The doorbell rang, and Albert entered, dressed sportily and reeking of garlic as usual. “I was just talking about the Millers’ party,” Maud told him. “Such interesting people. And of course I took the What’s-Their-Name around afterward. I showed them Fleet Street at night. I think they loved it.”
“Are your friends American?” Albert asked politely.
“He is,” I said, but Nini’s—”
“Dutch-French,” Maud said. “With a strong dash of American.”
“I liked your husband,” I said to Maud.
“Oh, did you? Yes, I daresay he seems very nice on first meeting.”
The doorbell rang again, and a very fat blonde woman with an enormous nose came in, and lay down full length on the floor. She was wearing slacks too, and carrying a velvet handbag. “Don’t say a word,” she said. “I have to do this for my back. It’s the only way it’s comfortable.”
“Poor dear,” Maud said. “Your poor back. Have you had an awful time?”
“I threw her out,” the woman said. “I told her to get out.”
“Her au pair girl,” Margaret said to me. “I have one too. You know, they come here to learn English. Usually from Italy. They’re all impossible.”
“Threw her out,” the fat woman said.
“This is Anastasia Silverman,” Margaret said. We all murmured how do you do. Margaret asked her, “What happened to Gregory?”
“He had to go out,” she responded cryptically. “But I brought George.”
A small blond boy darted around the room with Michael in hot pursuit. I assumed this was George.
“I’m interested that you liked Hugh,” Maud Tweak said to me. “So many people do when they first meet him. Of course he’s very charming to strangers. But you know he didn’t say a word to me all the way home.”
“Is that so,” I said.
Mark came into the room. “They’re killing Bruce and Eric,” he remarked.
Nobody moved, except me. I rose and followed Mark down the hall to a small bedroom where Michael and George were wrestling on an enormous bed. Bruce and Eric were standing in a corner, staring at them. “You’d better be careful,” I said, to Michael and George.
George reached down on the floor and picked up a shoe. He threw it and hit Mark in the head.
“Hey! “Mark said.
Michael laughed hoarsely. “Good for you,” he said. He slid off the bed and lunged at Eric, who slipped behind Bruce. Michael kicked Bruce in the shins. “Ow,” Bruce said. George laughed and jumped on Michael’s back. They began to roll over the floor, kicking out very hard at everyone. “Listen here,” I said.
“What’s the matter with these brats?” Mark asked.
“I think they’re both disturbed,” Bruce observed. “They’ve got problems.”
“Let’s go home,” Eric said.
This was a sensible suggestion, but instead I went into the living room and said brightly, “My goodness, they certainly are lively children. I’m afraid my kids can’t cope with them.”
Anastasia, who was now sitting on the Swedish modem sofa, stared at me coldly.
“They seem to be fighting,” I said, sitting down on the matching chair.
“Boys always fight,” Maud Tweak said. “I helped with Michael’s birthday party. They were rolling all over the floors. Breaking things. I was simply exhausted.”
Everybody smiled indulgently, except Jordan and me.
“Yes, everybody likes Hugh when they first meet him,” Maud Tweak said, “but you don’t know of course what I’ve had to put up with. I mean here is this man with a successful position in advertising, and suddenly he announces that he can’t work anymore. He had been seeing this psychiatrist, you see, and of course that did it, you know. I mean he had to stay home for a year and find himself. There was absolutely no money coming in so I said, ‘Look’, you know, ‘this won’t do’. So he went off to be a guide in Switzerland and Spain and I found my job and now of course it’s better. But I mean, my dear, listening to him. Telling me for hours how impossible I am, how plain I am.”
“That’s very destructive,” I said.
“Oh, my dear, it’s most destructive. And then at one point he wanted me to go off and live on a mountaintop in the Basque country so he could write.” She laughed heartily. “I said, Look, my dear, you’ve got the wrong person for that, you know.”
“I love the Basque country,” Anastasia said. “I’ve been there many times.”
“I went to see his psychiatrist,” Maud went on. “He lived in Swiss Cottage. Of course,” she said significantly, “they all do. And I mean I simply could not get through to the man. Finally I said, ‘Look’, you know, ‘this won’t do at all, just give me a drink and I’ll go’. And I went.”
“My goodness,” I said.
“They’re impossible,” Maud said. “Psychiatrists.”
“You have a lot of them, don’t you?” Margaret said to me. “In the United States.”
“Well, we have them.
We’re psychologically oriented.”
“Yes, you certainly are,” Maud said. “I hope your friends had a good time. We drove them all round Fleet Street last night, the sort of thing tourists love. And we sent them to the theater. Noel Coward.” She looked at me expectantly.
“My goodness,” I said.
“Yes, Noel Coward.” She added cryptically, “I thought that would be suitable. They insisted on taking me to dinner. First we went to a pub, Saturday. They had beer, of course. I didn’t bother with all that nonsense, I drank whiskey.”
She and Margaret laughed heartily. “And what an interesting party you had,” Maud said. “I was wild about that woman in the floppy hat.”
“Is she American?” Margaret asked. She turned to me with a smile. “We always laugh at American women and their funny hats.”
“No,” I said, “she’s English.”
“Are you going to travel from here?” Anastasia asked me. “Are you going to the Continent?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “We can’t afford it.” Something like a film slid over her rather prominent pale eyes; the comer of her mouth turned down, permanently. “Oh,” she said frigidly.
I babbled about the business, while Maud went on talking to Margaret.
“… exhausted, and then that awful evening,” she was saying. “And then the next day that silly ass Walter …”
Mark came into the room and sat disconsolately on a plastic hassock in front of the fireplace. I sipped wine. Suddenly Anastasia’s son rocketed into the room, followed closely by Michael. Both of them leapt on Mark: one clutched him around the neck, kneeling on his lap, while the other seized him from behind, crawling up his back. Mark reacted violently; one of the little tykes fell back against me. The wine spurted everywhere.
“Be careful!” Anastasia snapped at Mark.
“My goodness, Mark,” I said. People began rushing around looking for damp cloths. Maud took my handbag, a natty burlap number, and carefully scrubbed at it. “Here,” she said humbly, handing it back. “I did the best I could. I hope it’s all right.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Forget it.”
Bruce and Eric were discovered standing behind me, looking even more disconsolate than Mark, who now stood by the window, watching the gray rain.
“One hit me on the head twice,” Bruce said. “And the other one kicked Eric. They hit each other, and then they broke a perfume bottle.”
“I want to go home,” Eric said.
“Gracious,” I said to Anastasia.”I hope we never go to war with you. You’d knock us silly.” She didn’t seem to think that was funny. I knew perfectly well that if we went to war with them, we’d knock them silly. I was trying ineptly to suggest that our children were quiet, peace-loving citizens, while theirs were obviously sociopaths of some kind, and I was hoping she would try to get her kid to cool it. But she didn’t.
Margaret and Maud brought out trays with crackers on them, containing dabs of various kinds. While we consumed the crackers, Anastasia kept eyeing Mark with noticeable distaste.
“Now that you’ve eaten,” I said to Bruce lightheartedly, “you can hit the road.”
Maud gave a shriek of laughter. “Yes, that’s good,” she said. “They can understand that, that’s the sort of language they understand. Hit the road,” she said to Eric, who was sucking his thumb in an agony of bleary boredom.
The English newspaper columnists insisted constantly that American children did not know how to behave, that they were wild and undisciplined. While at the same time Americans were dull conformists.
“Michael is going off to boarding school in the autumn,” Anastasia said to me. “That will improve him considerably.”
I said that I hoped so.
After we had all settled into our seats once again, with our two children wandering miserably in and out and Mark huddled by the fireplace, there was a pause, which Jordan rushed to fill: “Boy,” he said, “did we ever see something horrible on television last night. Have you ever heard of someone called Spike Milligan?”
Something told me he shouldn’t have phrased the question in quite that way.
“Oh, Spike Milligan, of course,” Maud Tweak said. “So terribly funny. Charming, really.”
“We love Spike Milligan,” Margaret Leech said.
Spike Milligan mumbled a lot and ran around, acting out jokes. Sometimes he wore a pith helmet and sometimes he wore a fright wig. Sometimes someone would pull out a drawer and find him in it. Some of his jokes were obscene and some were satirical on the level of Mad magazine. Since his TV show recurred with depressing regularity, I assumed he must have a following of some kind.
“You needn’t feel bad about not liking him,” Maud Tweak said generously. “I mean it isn’t because you’re a foreigner or anything. Some English people don’t care for him.”
“I can well believe it,” I said.
“He is one of our great British eccentrics,” Anastasia said, fixing me with a pale cold eye. Margaret and Maud began to regale each other with memorable moments from “The Spike Milligan Show.”
“And the time he ate the frog …”
“And the time he kicked the ball of yarn and it was really a stone…”
I looked furtively at my watch. It was after four. But I didn’t know whether we could leave yet. The rain continued to drizzle down the window. They had gone to some trouble, putting the dabs on the crackers and opening the wine bottle.
“How are you enjoying London?” Anastasia said to me.
“Oh, I’m finding it difficult to entertain the children,” I said, airing my obsession.
“You must take them to Battersea,” she said. “It’s ever so much nicer than Coney Island.”
“I don’t know anything about Coney Island,” I said, with some hauteur. “And of course it’s been so cool. And wet.”
“Yes,” she said, grudgingly. “The weather has been bad.”
“I mean it’s odd to think,” I went on, “that it’s been ninety degrees at home all week. Normally, of course, I don’t like that kind of heat, but—”
“That’s too hot,” Anastasia said.
“Oh, yes, it’s too hot, I know. But you see then it cools off, and the contrast—”
“That’s too hot.”
“Yes, but you see the contrast … It’s—”
“Much,” Anastasia said finally, “too hot.”
I subsided and tried to think of something nice to say. “I do love the fruits and vegetables,” I said. “And the bread. Our bread at home is awful, packaged bread, I mean. But even your sliced bread—”
“I never buy sliced bread,” Anastasia said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Maud put in.
“Oh, no,” I said, “but I mean that even your packaged bread—”
“I never buy bread packaged,” Margaret said.
The door opened and a girl with wild black hair and bedroom slippers appeared on the threshold. “Did you need me?” she asked. “I’ve been on the phone.” It was the au pair girl. Eric slipped into the room again under her arm and stood behind the sofa, sucking his thumb. “I want to go home,” he said.
“In a minute, dear,” I replied. Jordan looked at me helplessly.
The girl went out. “They’re beasts, all of them,” Anastasia said to Margaret. “When Michael is at school you can let her go.”
I had no desire to discuss the private school concept—or anything else—with her, but she apparently wanted to discuss it with me. Or to talk to me about it: Anastasia seemed to prefer to make pronouncements, rather than to engage in discussions.
“Any child,” she said, “who whines about his life at private school should be ignored.”
“Somerset Maugham?” I asked humbly.
“Sheer exhibitionism,” she snapped.
“Did you go to public school?”
“No, but my brother did.”
“And how did he like it?”
“Well, my mother took him out
. He hated it and it was making him ill. I mean,” she elaborated, apparently sensing an inconsistency in her remarks, “we couldn’t allow him to become ill. The doctor,” she added, producing a trump card, “the doctor told my mother to send him to day school.”
Michael and his little friend reappeared. It was time for Stingray, the adventure story with rubber puppets in outer space which the boys had been exposed to in Dampton, Bucks. Here the TV set was in the living room and we were all going to watch Stingray together. Since the British producers intended the show to appeal to the American market, all the sympathetic characters spoke with strong Midwestern American accents.
“Look at that square-jawed American face,” Maud Tweak said, gesturing at the screen. It wasn’t American, it wasn’t even a real face, but it fit her world view.
Anastasia began to tell me all about her projected holiday. “A little beach,” she said, “and the small hotel …”
It sounded really attractive. Jordan seemed to think it did too. He glanced at me and nodded significantly.
“Let’s go home!” Eric cried out suddenly. “I’m sick of this place!”
He had been tried beyond endurance. We all had, if the truth be known.
“How rude,” Anastasia breathed at him.
“Don’t be rude, dear,” I said automatically, and hypocritically. We called a cab and it didn’t come, and it didn’t come. Finally we decided to go downstairs and wait for it in the street; we couldn’t bear the flat any longer. Jordan and the boys went out into the hall. I suddenly remembered that I had not said goodbye to Anastasia, who had been out of the room when we bade farewell to Margaret and Maud Tweak. I went back to the living room and discovered Anastasia and Maud dancing arm in arm in obvious relief at our departure.
“Goodbye, Anastasia,” I said.
They both stopped and quickly separated. “Goodbye,” Anastasia said.
When we got home, I told Jordan I had decided I was not going to pay any more Sunday afternoon visits.
Tea & Antipathy Page 15