Tea & Antipathy

by Miller, Anita

  “It’s that daughter of that friend of my sister’s, don’t you remember? She’s staying at Jane’s, she’s just arrived. Shall we take her to dinner?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “How about dinner?” Jordan said into the phone.

  “It’s after seven now,” I said. None of us had wanted dinner because of another five o’clock tea.

  “Fine,” Jordan said. “We’ll pick you up in half an hour.” He hung up. “She’s leaving for Ireland in the morning. We could hardly not take her to dinner.”

  “We have to pack,” I said, whining.

  “You can pack tomorrow. The train doesn’t leave until one.” I went upstairs, grumbling, and put on a black dress and stockings. I already felt disassociated from London.

  “We’ll go to the Pickwick Club,” Jordan said.

  “Ah, God,” I said, like Mrs. Grail. “What’s that? Another Dickens Room with omelets and minute steaks?”

  “It’s very nice. Celebrities go there.”

  We hailed a cab and picked up Stephanie at Jane’s place. She was wearing sandals and an upswept hairdo and appeared to be about seventeen years old. She was delighted with herself for coming to Europe alone. I was wearing my dangling earrings and my hair in a bun. Since I was an old habitué of London, I found myself behaving toward Stephanie in a condescending manner. She expressed little curiosity about our situation, and it was shortly apparent that she was laboring under the delusion that we were English.

  “My mother knows your relatives,” she said to Jordan, “or something. I’m from San Francisco myself, but my mother grew up in a place called Boston. It’s in the eastern United States.”

  “Yes, I know,” Jordan said politely.

  “Jordan grew up in Boston too,” I said.

  “Your customs were really quite sticky,” Stephanie went on. “I had to wait for ages.”

  “How do you mean, our customs?” Jordan asked.

  “I mean your customs,” Stephanie said. “The English customs.”

  “We’re not English,” I said, with more emphasis than I would have used two months earlier.

  “I loved Copenhagen,” Stephanie said. “I’m going to Ireland tomorrow.”

  “We’ve been here two months,” I said.

  “My mother’s so worried about me,” she said, laughing. “Actually she thinks I’m a baby or something.”

  “Here we are,” Jordan said. “The Pickwick Club.”

  “Actually, I’ve never been here before,” I told Stephanie. “I don’t know what it’s like.” We went into a bar, and then down some stairs into a cellar-like dining room, empty except for us. We sat in a red velvet banquette against the wall, facing the room.

  “It’s nice that on her only night in London, we take Stephanie to a place where she can’t see anyone,” I said.

  “It fills up later,” Jordan said.

  “What a crazy place this is,” Stephanie said, referring to England. “Have you noticed the boys’ hair?”

  “Certainly,” I said, in jaded tones. “I’ve been here two months.”

  “I can’t stand the boys’ hair.” Stephanie said. ‘They look like girls. Do you like it?’’

  “I like the Beatles,” I said.

  “Oh, the Beatles,” Stephanie said. “They’re all right, I guess. For little kids.”

  “I know some grown women who like them,” Jordan remarked.

  “Oh, I’m not interested in that sort of thing anymore,” she said. “I’ve outgrown it.”

  “Indeed,” I said.

  “I’ve just been to Copenhagen,” she went on. “Have you ever been there?”

  We were forced to admit that we had never been to Copenhagen.

  “It’s awfully interesting,” Stephanie said. “They have this park called the Tivoli. And in Paris I saw this cathedral.”

  “Did you,” I said, patting my bun.

  Suddenly Stephanie shrieked. “Look at that boy’s hair,” she said. Some people had come down the stairs, two women and three men.

  “Yes,” I said. “When one has been in London a while, one hardly notices it.”

  Stephanie gave a small scream.”Look at that hair,” she said.

  The party was being seated at a long table about five feet from us in the middle of the room. The man at the head of the table began to order, in a pronounced Liverpudlian accent. I stared closely at the boy with the long hair. He floated before my eyes, approaching and receding.

  “That’s George Harrison,” I said with Olympian calm.

  “Oh, my God, it’s the Beatles,” Stephanie said. “Oh, my God, it’s John Lennon. And his wife.”

  It was John Lennon and George Harrison and Mrs. Lennon and Patty Boyd, George Harrison’s girlfriend, and Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager. Stephanie sat beside me, moaning.

  “Oh, it’s the Beatles,” she kept saying. “Oh, the Beatles, the Beatles.” She rose slightly from her seat. “I’m going over,” she said.

  “You can’t,” we said. “Sit down.”

  “But it’s them,” she said. “It’s them, it’s them.” She began to rock back and forth.

  “Well, you can’t go over to them,” Jordan said.

  Stephanie turned to me. Her eyes were out of focus, and her upswept hairdo had collapsed over one ear. “I have to have their signatures,” she said. “Nobody will believe me.”

  “Calm down,” Jordan said.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “It’s them, it’s them.”

  “I’m going to call the kids,” Jordan said.

  “It’s late,” I said.

  “I don’t care. I’m going to call them. This will make up to them for the whole summer.”

  He checked first with the management, who said the boys could come if they promised to behave quietly, and then he went out to telephone. The phone gave a few of its double bleeps, and Bruce answered. “Hello?” he said.

  “Bruce?

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, Bruce,” Jordan said tensely. “Listen carefully. I want you to get dressed and give Eric some clothes and tell him to get dressed too. And Mark. Wear something presentable. Get dressed quickly, and go outside and go down to Knightsbridge Road and take a cab, and tell the man you want to go to the Pickwick Club on Great Newport Street off the Charing Cross Road, just above Leicester Square. Remember, the Pickwick Club. Have you got all that?”

  There was a long silence. Then Bruce spoke. “Who is this?” he said.

  “This is your father,” Jordan said, exasperated. “Who else could it be?”

  “Well, I didn’t know,” Bruce said.”You sounded so funny. You sounded so polite.”

  “Did you get what I said?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Bruce said. “Here’s Mark.”

  “Yeh?” Mark said, his customary telephone greeting.

  “Listen, Mark,” Jordan said tensely, “Everybody get dressed, wear something presentable. Go down to the Knightsbridge Road and take a cab, and come to the Pickwick Club on Great Newport Street, off Charing Cross Road, just above Leicester Square. Tell the driver. We’re in the restaurant. I’ll be waiting for you.” He paused. “The Beatles are here. Have you got that?”

  “Okay,” Mark said. “Goodbye.”

  Jordan hung up, wondering whether he would ever see them again, and returned to our banquette, where our food had come and Stephanie was still moaning. “They’ll be here in five minutes,” he said to me.

  “I’m going to sit here until they go,” I said, referring to the Beatles. “I don’t care if I have twelve desserts.”

  “Oh, please, please,” Stephanie said. “Oh, don’t you see.”

  She kept sort of levitating, and we had to hold her down.

  After a while Jordan went out to meet the children, and they all came down the stairs. Jordan had told them not to stare, so they came down looking very solemn; their eyes swiveling occasionally to the right. They lined up on the banquette next to me, facing the Beatles,
and ordered chocolate cake and milk. John Lennon and George Harrison were wearing black turtlenecks and wheat-colored Levis with wide belts. The women, in long-sleeved shirts, had a great deal of teased blonde hair and black eye makeup.

  “This is the unbelievables,” Eric whispered to me. “When I get home I’m going to vomit.”

  “Oh, let me go over there,” Stephanie kept saying. “Oh, my only night in London. Oh, oh, oh.”

  When the Beatles left, we followed them out, and watched them go off in a big black car.

  “Oh, why didn’t I get their cigarette butts,” Mark said. “I wasn’t thinking.” He went back inside to see if he could remedy the situation.

  “When Dad called, Mark screamed and took his sweater off,” Bruce said. “I couldn’t imagine.”

  Mark came back disappointed. The ashtrays had already been emptied.

  We climbed into a cab which started off well and then smashed into a lamp post. Stephanie, sitting limply at my side with her hair hanging down, refused to notice this.

  “I saw Piccadilly at night,” Eric said.

  “Ah, my God,” Stephanie murmured. “My God, my God.”

  33

  Interlude with Chemists

  THE NEXT DAY we were to leave for Devon. Bruce awoke with a large paunchy red eye.

  “I’ll take him to the doctor,” I said to Mrs. Grail, “and then we’ll leave for the station. Mrs. Stackpole will be here at one to meet our lawyer, Mr. Snell. He’ll show her over the house. All you have to do is let them in, and then remember, you lock the front door and go out the back—”

  “Ah God,” Mrs. Grail said, “if you take the little fellow to the doctor, you’ll sit there for hours, it’s very hard on such short notice. Why don’t you go to the chemist, he’ll give you something.”

  “But… buying something in a drug store … ?”

  “Ah, they have wonderful things in the chemist for that sort of eye. I bought something from the chemist for that sort of eye myself once and it worked perfect. If you go to the doctor, you’ll sit all day and you’ll miss your train.”

  I bundled Bruce off down the Brompton Road; Jordan was to come home in an hour and then we were leaving. It was too wonderful to be true. The English Riviera. Even Bruce’s eye could not dampen my spirits.

  We went into a little chemist’s shop.

  “And how long has his eye been like this?” the chemist asked.

  I tried to think. “It was sort of getting red a day or two ago,” I said.

  “A day or two ago!” the chemist said. “We are only given one pair of eyes, Madam, has that occurred to you? Why haven’t you taken this child to a physician?”

  I took a deep breath. “We are leaving for the country this afternoon,” I replied haughtily. “I intend to consult a physician when we arrive. Since we are travelling, I came in here for a stopgap remedy.”

  I had apparently employed the correct tone; the shopkeeper began to fawn and cringe. “Oh, dear me, Madam, quite right. Oh, please do wait; I shan’t be a moment.” He returned with a small box. “Just pop this into his eye two or three times a day. It should do the trick. You’ll need an eye dropper,” he added.

  “I shall have to purchase one,” I said, still talking funny.

  “I’m afraid I’m fresh out.”

  “We have to get an eye dropper,” I said to Bruce, as we left the shop. “I suppose we can get one at Boots.” This was a large chemist chain; the nearest one was about five blocks, or fifteen minutes walk, away.

  “What a rude man,” Bruce said automatically.

  “Oh, well,” I said

  We made our way in a fine drizzle. Ahead of us a young woman, walking fast, was pulling a two-year-old child roughly after her by the hand. The child, trying to keep up, tripped and fell, and the young woman gave her an impatient slap. “Watch out,” she said. Before she could haul her tearful offspring on, a very tall majestic woman wearing a turban emerged from the crowd. “You must not pull your child that way, my good woman,” the lady said. “The poor little thing cannot keep up. Don’t walk so fast. Poor little thing,” she said to the child. She nodded at the mother and went on her way.

  The mother stood rooted for a moment, shamefaced, and then moved on, much more slowly. “Come on,” she said irritably to the child.

  “Did you hear what that man behind me said to the other man?” Bruce asked. “He said, ‘We made them,’ and the other man said, ‘You mean you actually, physically, made them?’ and the first man said, ‘No, of course not.’ What do you suppose he meant?”

  “I can’t imagine,’’ I said.

  “‘You mean you actually, physically, made them?’” Bruce said. We went into Boots. A girl in a white coat detached herself from the wall and came over to us. “Yes?” she said. I asked her if she had eye droppers, and she said yes. When she made no move in any direction, I said, “I’d like to buy an eye dropper.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” she said.

  “But you have them.”

  “Oh, yes, we have them, but you see we’re cleaning out the cupboard where we keep them, and we’ve put them in a large box. If you come back next week, I’m sure I can help you then.”

  “Couldn’t you take one out of the box and give it to me?”

  “Oh, dear no,” she said, smiling. “It’s quite a large box. But next week we’ll have the cupboard all washed out, I’m sure, and then we’ll put everything back and you can have the eye dropper.”

  “Why didn’t they put them in a small box?” Bruce said, as we walked to Harrods.

  “Oh, who knows,” I responded irritably.

  “‘You mean you actually, physically, made them?’” Bruce said.

  34

  The Train

  BACK IN BALDRIDGE PLACE we called a cab in a flurry of activity. I told Mrs. Grail once more to remember to bolt the front door and take the back door key, since we were taking the other back door key with us, and to be sure to lock the bedroom door and hide that key in the kitchen. She responded to this, all of which she had heard several times before, and some of which she had suggested herself, with a dazed expression. I knew she was anticipating the meeting with Mrs. Stackpole with dread, if not terror. In her eyes, Mrs. Stackpole had taken on a legendary and menacing aspect, to say the least.

  “Have you got it all straight now?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Mrs. Grail said. “Ah, God.”

  We scrambled into the cab and went to the station. There we ate ham sandwiches, which to our surprise were very tasty.

  “We should have come here for lunch every day,” Bruce said. The milk was cold, too.

  We boarded the train and after a while it started up and slid smoothly down the track: there was none of the awkward jerking and shaking we had encountered on American trains.

  We shared our compartment with a lady from Philadelphia, who had just come from Greece. She was going to stay for a week at a friend’s country house in Devon. She traveled a great deal, and she had known England before the war, when, she said, life there was easier. She was an admirably calm, intelligent person.

  For miles we passed through a landscape filled with low, dark green hills dotted with grazing sheep. The compartment was comfortable and cozy; the train ran quietly. We were enjoying ourselves. Then we began to feel hungry. Jordan suggested that we have tea in the dining car.

  “Why not wait until you get to the hotel?” the lady from Philadelphia asked me, with what I thought was a significant look.

  “Oh,” I said, “I love to eat on trains. Don’t you want to come with us?”

  She said she didn’t think she would, no.

  The others had gone on and I followed them. Outside the dining car, I passed a huge cage thing filled with canvas sacks. If it was the mail, then English people were exclusively occupied in mailing packages of manure to each other. I reeled down the passage to the dining car, where I was overcome by the odor of sour milk, which merged into the other smell. Feelin
g rather green, I averted my eyes from the kitchen and sat down at a table with Jordan and the boys. I noticed immediately that the waiters were wearing very dirty white coats; in addition, they all seemed to have skin problems, and they were carrying dubious things on their trays.

  “What the hell,” I said.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Jordan said automatically.

  We had once taken a train from Lyons to Paris; the dining car was not very clean, and neither were the waiters’ coats, but the food was excellent, and there was good will in the air, as well as a good smell.

  “I’m not going to eat here,” I said, getting up.

  “Well, I don’t know who you’re punishing,” Jordan said crossly.

  “Sit down, Ma,” Mark said. Bruce and Eric didn’t say anything.

  I wended my way back to the compartment, trying not to breathe. The lady from Philadelphia looked at me sympathetically. “I wasn’t sure I should say anything,” she remarked. I picked up my book, a novel about an Englishman who comes to America to teach at a college and is driven away by the stupidity, narrow-mindedness and ineptitude of everybody on the campus. The book critic for The Daily Telegraph, which I read every morning with my breakfast, had praised this novel; he explained that one of the characters, a dishonest hypocritical American English professor, offered a valuable insight into the mind of the American intellectual, and by the same token an insight into what was happening in Vietnam. I had just reached the part where the English protagonist was arrested for taking a walk in the evening, when my family returned.

  “So soon?” I asked.

  “Ugh,” Mark said.

  “I could have dealt with it,” Jordan remarked. “I could have dealt with it. But that boy, you know, the waiter …”

  “The one with the fingernails? Yes.”

  “Yes, I could have dealt with that, too, but he had this splotch of tomato on his jacket. I don’t mean a splotch of ketchup,” he went on, “I mean it was a whole tomato, and somehow it had gotten all splotched up against his jacket. You could see the seeds. I lost my appetite.”

  The lady from Philadelphia nodded at him.

  We ate candy bars. I returned to my novel. I wasn’t surprised to find the protagonist arrested for taking an evening walk: on various television interview programs, many celebrities returning from the States had earnestly told their audiences that nobody walked in America. One man said he had been arrested for trying to walk a dog.