A FEW HOURS into our nap, the doorbell rang. Jordan went downstairs to greet Mrs. Stackpole, who had arrived to conduct the inventory. After combing my hair and trying in general to make myself presentable, I followed him down to find sitting at the desk, not the middle-aged lady in tweeds with a firm handclasp whom I had envisioned, but a slender creature whose brown bouffant hairdo peeped from under a little kerchief.
“Mrs. Miller,” she said, fluttering long lashes and leaning toward me with intense sincerity. “There’s such a lot of noise and traffic in the street here. Is that all right?”
I said it was, and we began to go through the inventory of ground floor items: two armchairs, one sofa, two tables…. Jordan interrupted to ask her diffidently what had happened to the dining room table.
“Oh, it’s being mended,” Mrs. Stackpole said. “A little man will bring it round. You couldn’t have used it the way it was.”
“And the slipcovers?” Jordan asked.
“Oh, yes,” she responded vaguely. “Do you like those?” She looked at her watch. “I’m just off to Ascot,” she said, with an apologetic laugh.
We were impressed by that; it sounded suitably upper class. We followed her trim figure in its quiet blue coat down the basement stairs into the kitchen. She began to open cupboards and count things.
“Six teacups,” she read from her thin inventory sheets and pointed to the teacups that were actually mugs, one odder than the others, bearing a picture of a monkey in a dress holding an umbrella. “One, two, three, four,” she said, counting. There was an awkward pause. She consulted the paper. “Six teacups,” she read again. Reassured, she turned back to the shelf. “One, two, three, four….”
We watched her, mesmerized. The paper. “Six teacups.” The shelf. “One, two, three, four….” There was an admirable persistency in Mrs. Stackpole’s character. After another lingering moment of silent count, she took a pencil from her smooth blue calf bag and made an emendation to the inventory sheet. “Four teacups,” she said, smiling at us with all her dimples. We smiled back.
Pointing to the mantel over what we will laughingly call the stove, she said: “Two pots.” Pointing under the wood-enclosed white porcelain sink: “Two casseroles.” She met my eyes with her blue level gaze. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I could only get these two small casseroles.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” I said quickly. “I can use two for one casserole.”
“Two for one casserole,” she murmured, pleased. “Of course.”
We had apparently completed the list of cooking utensils. I had a dim idea that something was missing, but I couldn’t think what it could be. I asked myself, Do I do all my cooking in two pots and two small casseroles? I couldn’t remember.
“Mr. Miller asked me to leave my good dishes,” Mrs. Stackpole went on, whipping open a sliding panel that promptly fell off. “So I have. They can quite easily be replaced if they are broken.” She disclosed a set of interesting china: red peacocks paraded around the rims of the dishes, alternating with yellow doodles. “These can all quite easily be replaced,” she repeated, with slight emphasis. It developed later, in a moment of need, that the set consisted of twenty or thirty luncheon dishes, ten or twelve dinner dishes, a toast rack and a cream jug.
Mrs. Stackpole then turned her attention to the large kitchen dresser, upon which stood some egg cups and a little clay figure with a basket on its back, possibly for toothpicks. “One duck,” Mrs. Stackpole read, enunciating clearly. “I left you some cookery books,” she went on, opening a drawer, and then she explained the stove to me. Actually no one could explain the stove to me; its continued existence in the middle of the twentieth century was, and will remain, a mystery. But she tried. “Your kitchen towel,” she said, pointing gaily to a blackish object hanging limply on the back of a door; then, to a longer, greasy, more frightful object on a hook: “Your apron!”
After explaining that every Thursday we had to wind the large cream-colored thing in the corner, she walked quickly out of the kitchen and down the passage to the laundry room. “There’s your ironing board and iron,” she said. There was a moment of silence. “I’m afraid the washing machine doesn’t work,” she said, smiling.
“Maybe,” Jordan said, “we can get it re—”
“Actually,” Mrs. Stackpole said, “it does work. I told you it didn’t, but it does.” She turned to me, her eyes begging for forgiveness. “Would you mind very much not using it? I saved up for it for ever so long, and it’s ever so precious, would you mind not … ?”
“Of course not,” I said, rather stiffly.
“And here’s your clothesline,” she said, trying to open a door with five or six burglar-proof locks on it.
“We won’t need that,” I said. “We’ll take the clothes to the launderette.”
“Oh, there’s one ever so near,” Mrs. Stackpole cried happily. “It won’t be difficult for you at all.” She moved rapidly back down the hall to the playroom with the blue linoleum floor. “And here are all my children’s playthings,” she said, allowing us to see a blackboard, a rocking horse, a little desk, several touching crayon drawings of crooked houses and lopsided ladies, and a cupboard stuffed with teddy bears. “They’re all ever so precious to them, so you will just keep this door closed, won’t you, and not let anyone use it? It’s just their precious little bits.”
I could feel my smile stiffening again. It’s just their precious little bits, I said to myself, keep your shirt on. Later on, when Eric became frightened by Hamlet’s uncle and refused to stay upstairs alone, he kept creeping into the playroom and nearly drove us crazy playing “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” over and over on Mrs. Stackpole’s children’s precious little phonograph which had a straight pin in it instead of a needle. In addition, he wrote “Ringo” in a wavering hand on the upper left-hand corner of the blackboard and we allowed the desecration to remain.
Before we left the nether regions, Mrs. Stackpole mentioned that she had locked all her precious bits and pieces in the “cupboard,” which proved to be the kitchen pantry. “So you won’t have to be bothered with looking after them,” she explained. “But you can quite easily keep all your groceries and things in here,” she went on, leading us back down the passage toward the laundry room again, and opening a door beneath the stairs to reveal a damp darkness, in the depths of which we could distinctly hear the scurrying of many startled little feet. “That will work out quite well for you,” Mrs. Stackpole said, beaming at me.
We followed her upstairs to the bathroom on the landing to discuss the linen, Mrs. Stackpole remaining ebullient and persistently pleasant as she explained to us why she had left only two sheets for our bed. “If I leave you the other two I own, I won’t have any clean ones when I get back.”
Neither of us understood this, but we both pretended we did. I kept nodding and smiling.
“I’ve bought nylon sheets for the children’s beds,” she told us, aspirating the final syllable of “nylon” in the French way, “and here are your four towels. I’m afraid they’re all I have for you.”
Still nodding and smiling, we descended to the living room or drawing room or whatever it was.
“By the way,” Mrs. Stackpole said, “Miss Pip, the young lady who is renting the top floor in the autumn, has asked permission to bring in a few things one afternoon. Is that all right?”
I nodded, smiling.
“Please tell me if it isn’t,” Mrs. Stackpole said earnestly, leaning toward me in her solicitous way, “because it can quite easily be put off until you are out of the house.”
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right,” I said. “One afternoon?”
“Oh, just one afternoon,” Mrs. Stackpole said. “Is that all right?”
“Certainly,” Jordan said.
“You’re sure?”
We were sure.
“And I’ve left six or seven vases in the back lavatory,” she said. “It seems a lot, but one never knows, one frequently needs many vases.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I do like my vases.”
“Here is a list of things—grocers who will deliver, laundries, things of that sort.”
She produced more papers.
“Plumbers… And Mrs. Grail will be here tomorrow. She’s Irish, and quite honest and dependable. You may give her a key if you like. It’s quite all right.” I could only admire her assurance. I knew that she must be correct; she had an instinct for it. It was an instinct that I notably lacked. “I intend to retain her myself when I return in the autumn,” Mrs. Stackpole added.
“Will she cook dinner for us?” I asked, thinking of The Stove.
She paused to consider. “She’ll have to go home to feed her family. They eat at five or six. I don’t see why she couldn’t come back to serve your dinner at eight.”
Since our dinnertime was approximately the same as Mrs. Grail’s, I could see that I would have to cope with The Stove myself.
“Now the slipcovers…” Jordan began.
“Oh, yes.” She blushed prettily, smiling. “They’re being mended. They didn’t fit properly.”
“Well, would you just jot down the name and number of the shop? In case we need to call them.”
“Oh yes, of course.” She wrote something quickly on the back of our list, and said, “I’ve left some eggs in the refrigerator. It’s so difficult to leave food when one doesn’t know … er … other’s … habits….”
Gathering herself together to depart, she paused to leave us some keys: two front door, three back door, and twelve or fifteen odd-looking gold-and-black ones.
“These are keys to the burglar locks,” she said to me. “You can’t open the windows without them, and you must remember always to lock the windows with these keys when you close them. Please remember never, never to leave the doors or the windows unlocked when you go out. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough. All the houses around here have been broken into at one time or another. They watch, you see, and they know when you go out. Even if you go out for only a few minutes, you must lock all the doors and windows. It’s terribly important.”
“It would be difficult for them to climb in a bedroom window,” I said nervously.
“They’re much more apt to come over the roofs, aren’t they?” she asked calmly. I looked at the houses across the street: the rooftops were peaked, gabled, with crooked Dickensian chimneypots silhouetted against the gloomy sky. Could someone crouch there, behind a peak or gable, and watch … ?
“Please don’t lose the keys,” Mrs. Stackpole said at the door. “These are the only ones and it costs thirty pounds to replace the lock. And do remember to lock the windows. You can open them when you’re in the house, of course.” She called over her shoulder as she went out, “And remember, if you need anything, there’s always Mr. MacAllister, isn’t there?”
“Who’s that?” I asked Jordan, when the door had closed.
“Some man,” he said vaguely. “Her boyfriend, I guess.”
“Her fiancé, you mean,” I said. “I suppose he sends her the flowers for all those vases.”
“I’d better go out and get some bread and butter to go with those eggs,” Jordan said. He looked at his watch. “It’s five-thirty, but I think there’s a delicatessen in South Ken that stays open late.” I should explain that in those days London shops closed at five o’clock, except for Early Closing on Wednesday and Saturday at one in the afternoon.
“Maybe you ought to call a plumber before you go,” I said. “Something’s wrong with the toilet.”
“Nothing’s wrong with the toilet,” he said. “I can tell you that right now. It’s an English toilet, that’s all. Just pump the handle gently up and down and eventually it will flush.”
I found this difficult to believe, because I felt that when the English did something, they had to do it at least as well as Americans. But I let it go, and he went off in the rain to find provisions.
I descended into the kitchen to assemble my tools, and suddenly I realized that Mrs. Stackpole had not left me a frying pan. I thought this was very odd, but there must have been some explanation for it. “I’ll boil the eggs,” I said aloud. This seemed more English to me anyway: boiled eggs for tea. I took down the large pot from the mantel: it had a greenish wet pool in the bottom and several hunks of enamel missing.
“Not to worry,” I said, still cheerful. “The eggs have a shell.” I noticed with a clutch of anguish that there was no electric toaster. I was appalled at my weakness: toast could of course be made under the stove grill, two pieces at a time. “Americans are terribly spoiled,” I said sternly to myself, avoiding the sight of the “hot cloth” hanging, black and dispirited, over the pipe.
Soot was falling down the ancient chimney; it fell behind the stove and blanketed the warming rail. “A real English kitchen,” I said. The boiler exploded softly in the comer.