ON MONDAY we were awakened very early by another telephone man; this one brought several hundred yards of cable into the kitchen and left it there.
“The tenant was only supposed to come one afternoon,” I said to Mrs. Grail, when she arrived at ten.
“Well, they’ll do you, you know,” she said. “Every time.” Her voice dropped. “I saw her this morning,” she said. “In Knightsbridge.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Stackpole. I saw her this morning. In the Knightsbridge Road.”
“But she’s in Scotland.”
“Ah, she never is. I saw her this morning, the same blue skirt and that sweater. I’d know her anywhere.” She gave a rather creepy glance at the windows. “She’s staying somewhere here, close by.”
The phone rang and Jordan answered it upstairs. I excused myself and joined him; I could hear Mr. MacAllister’s boiled voice shrieking through the receiver. It didn’t sound good.
“No sheets,” I said, when he hung up.
“He says he’s been on to her. And she was very upset, about the sheets and the frying pan and all that. She said no linens and I said what about human decency, but he didn’t seem to know what I meant. He said we could leave if we didn’t like it.”
“Well, what did she say about sheets when you rented the place?”
“I can’t remember,” Jordan said sheepishly. “I remember thinking it was all right.”
I looked moodily out the window. “Mrs. Grail said she saw her today, in the Knightsbridge Road. She says she’s staying here somewhere, spying on us.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said briskly. “What would she want to do that for?”
I shrugged.
“Well, have a good day,” he said hastily, and set off with Mark for the bus. We had decided to spend the afternoon enjoying the local sights. Jordan had suggested we walk through Knightsbridge to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“You’re going out?” Mrs. Grail asked. She looked around nervously. “It’s so quiet here without the boys,” she said. “And that damn clock ticking.”
“Well, we want to see a few things,” I said brightly. It was a relatively mild day; we were comfortable with sweaters under our raincoats. The sky was gray and threatening, but it was not raining. We walked along for several blocks. Bruce kept saying that we were lost. “It’s too far,” he said. “There isn’t any museum. It’s the wrong way. My feet hurt.”
Finally we found it, huge and gray, dark gray. I went boldly up to the desk. The lady sitting there looked alarmed. “You ought to go to the Children’s Museum at Bethnal Green,” she said. “We haven’t anything for children here.”
I had no idea how to get to Bethnal Green. “Haven’t you anything?” I asked.
“Oh, armor!” I cried, beaming at my charges, “Oh, good! You’ll love the armor. Where is it?”
“Well, you walk through the Church Plate …”
We walked through the Church Plate, cheerfully discussing it, and eventually found the armor.
“Oh, look!” I called gaily. “Oh, my goodness, Bruce, look at this big shield!”
“Oh!” Bruce cried. “Isn’t it big? My goodness, you mean they really carried that?”
“Indeed they did,” I said. “Doesn’t it look heavy? My goodness…”
“Oh, look!” Eric cried. “Look at this big sword!”
“Oh, goodness!” I cried back. “Look, Bruce!”
After about ten minutes of this, I was going on about a large iron gauntlet, when Eric spoke in a low, despairing voice.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Silently, we slunk past the Church Plate and out into the street. A light rain was falling, and it was cold. We went to a little restaurant and ordered hamburgers. They came, gray slabs of meat in a square metal dish, covered with greasy gravy. No bread. And the milk was warm.
“We’ll go to Harrods,” I said cheerfully, “and I’ll buy something delicious for dinner. And we’ll look around Harrods.”
So we trudged to Harrods, and we looked around. Everything seemed very expensive; prices seemed to have doubled since Jordan and I had come to London as tourists, two years before. Finally we went down into the food halls. I gathered up my courage and approached the meat counter. A woman in a white coat was sitting on a high stool behind the roasts, chewing on something.
Using my tentative polite approach, I edged in a few feet to the left of her, eyeing her with my right eye, and clearing my throat hopefully. She chewed on, staring straight before her. I edged a few inches closer to her line of vision and said, “Uh …”
She glanced at me irritably and said, “Oh, move along, madam, move along. Get down to the end of the counter. Get away!”
“Well!” I said, gasping.
“Oh, get away,” she responded.
I moved down to the end of the counter, still gasping, and a meek butcher cut a roast for me. The woman in the white coat sat glaring at me during the entire transaction. “What a rude woman!” I said to the butcher. He smiled at me meekly. Apparently, I had blundered into her tea break.
Gathering up my roast, I sailed with my little tykes toward the exit in the drug department. Near Drugs was Hairbrushes. Bruce and I each needed a hairbrush. Surprised to discover that English hairbrushes cost more in London than in Chicago, I weighed two in my hand while I thought about it. “If you can’t decide, it’s better to leave it,” the saleswoman said coldly. “We close in ten minutes.”
I put the hairbrushes down and we exited through Drugs.