THE NEXT DAY two telephone men came, hollering to each other as they dragged rubbery coils around. Mrs. Grail complained to me bitterly. I responded that I really couldn’t see why all this should go on. “It was only supposed to take an afternoon for her to move in.”
“Ah, that’s the way of them,” Mrs. Grail said. “That’s the British for you. She’ll have it nice and easy when she comes in September and you’ve had all the mess and all the aggravation. And I’ve swept down them stairs three times already and they’ve tracked in all the mud. And now you can’t get the sheets, and them twisty rags on the boys’ beds. I wouldn’t put them in a kennel. And you paying all that rent.”
“A woman yelled at me in Harrods yesterday,” I said moodily. “At the meat counter.”
“Oh, I’ve been here twenty-five years,” Mrs. Grail said. “And I’ll never get used to it. Never.”
“The children are holding up very well, though,” I said. “My husband and I were discussing it yesterday. Well, Bruce’s stomach is upset—maybe the milk is too rich—but Eric is doing well. He’s such a good traveler. We’ve taken him to Wisconsin and Boston and Maine and never a bit of trouble with him. He loves to travel.”
“Ah, the dear little tyke,” Mrs. Grail said.
“He’s kind of fresh, though,” I said.
“Ah, they’re all awful,” Mrs. Grail said. “I had four of them and I love them dearly, but if l had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have any. I’m a Catholic but you’ve got to use common sense. They’re all a great trial.”
“Well,” I said. “Anyway, Eric seems to take it all in his stride.”
“The dear little thing,” Mrs. Grail said. “But why do they like the Beatles so much? I can’t stand them, but Elvis Presley is lovely, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is,” I said, measuring out drops for Bruce’s stomach. “I think I’ll take them to Madame Tussaud’s today. The Victoria and Albert wasn’t good.”
“Oh, they’ll love Madame Tussaud’s. You go out here to Knightsbridge and take a Number Nine bus…” We gathered ourselves together and straggled off in the rain, leaving Mrs. Grail wrapped around the doorpost, her eyes begging us not to leave her alone in the house.
Madame Tussaud’s seemed to be a success; the children waited quietly in the long lines before every exhibit. Eric looked nervously at the image of the Queen Mother; its eyes were glittering strangely under the lights.
“Who’s that?” he cried, pointing.
“It’s the Queen Mother, dear,” I said loudly. “She’s an awfully nice lady.”
They wanted to go to the Chamber of Horrors, and on the way we stopped in the Diorama Room before the diorama of Hamlet. Hamlet was standing on a stony platform, and the Ghost loomed in the background. “Do you see that?” I said, showing off. “That’s Hamlet, and that’s the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and he’s telling Hamlet that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius murdered him by dropping poison in his ear and…”
After I finished giving a summary of the play, we went on down to the Chamber of Horrors which the boys seemed to like. When we got home, I cooked hamburgers in an electric frying pan that I had found hidden in a cupboard in the laundry room. It was rather greasy, but I washed it thoroughly, plugged it in, and it worked.
The next morning we received a letter from Mrs. Stackpole. She seemed angry because of the Great Sheet Controversy and repeated the point of view delivered to us by Mr. MacAllister. “As for the frying pan,” she wrote, “I am terribly sorry not to have provided one, but I am afraid that is an object I never use!” There was a good deal more in the same vein. Shortly after we finished reading the letter, the telephone rang. Jordan spoke genially for a few minutes, and then hung up. “It’s Miss Pip,” he said. “The lodger. She wants to bring a few things in. I told her someone would be here until two o’clock, so don’t forget to tell Mrs. Grail.”
“They’ve already driven us crazy with the telephone,” I said, “dragging dust and fluff all over the stairs, and them twisty bits of rag …”
“Well, we said she could move a few things in,” Jordan said reasonably.
I took the children to see a Jerry Lewis movie in Piccadilly. It was in color: we watched the California sun beat down on everyone, and it was an adjustment emerging into the gray London streets.
“Let’s go and have a nice lunch,” I said enthusiastically. “We’ll go to Fortnum’s Fountain Bar.” This had been recommended to me as one of the best places in the city for lunch.
We established ourselves at the bar and tried to attract the attention of the waitress, who was lounging against the counter, chatting with a blond chinless youth. “I really hate it here,” she was saying. “The kitchen is filthy.”
I cleared my throat.
“Are you going to Boopsie’s on Saturday?” the waitress asked wistfully. The youth said he was thinking of it. “I wish I could go,” she said. “I’m so exhausted all the time. It’s so difficult here, and the other girls …”
“How about some scrambled eggs?” I asked Eric, who sat droopily beside me, his chin resting on the counter.
“I’m not hungry,” he said faintly.
“You haven’t had anything to eat all day,” I said, puzzled. “See? It says here, ‘Scrambled Eggs, Prawns, on Toast with Green Salad’… You don’t like prawns or salad, so we’ll just have the eggs and toast. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“All right,” he said.
“I want the stuffed Canadian bacon with cheese sauce,” Bruce said. He fell off his stool, which collapsed on top of him. Eric continued staring moodily into space. I climbed down and helped Bruce up, righting his chair.
“I want to go home,” Bruce said.
“If I am able to go to Boopsie’s on Saturday…” the waitress was saying.
“Miss,” the woman sitting next to Eric said apologetically, “I’m afraid my lobster’s full of sand.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” the waitress said reluctantly to her friend. She turned to the woman next to me, inspected her lobster, and agreed that it was full of sand.
“Could you take our order?” I asked.
“One moment,” she replied frostily, and went off with the sandy lobster.
“I never had sandy lobster before,” the woman said to me. She was a compatriot of ours, and very embarrassed about making a fuss. Another waitress came up to us. “Yes?” she asked.
“He wants the Canadian bacon with cheese sauce,” I said. “And he wants the scrambled eggs. Can he have it without prawns, please?”
“We don’t have scrambled eggs,” the waitress said.
“Yes, you do,” I replied. Eric sat drearily next to me, his chin still on the counter. “Here,” I said, pointing to the menu. “Scrambled eggs and Prawns on Toast, with Green Salad.”
“Oh, scrambled eggs with prawns,” the waitress said. “Yes, we have that.”
“Can he have it without prawns, please?”
There was a pause.
“All you have to do is take the prawns off,” I said encouragingly.
She hesitated. Finally she made a decision.
“I can take the prawns off,” she said firmly, “but you’ll have to have the green salad.” “All right,” I said. “We can push it aside,” I whispered to Eric, who was still staring moodily into space.
When the eggs came, on toast, with the green salad, I was relieved to see him tuck it in with good appetite. Bruce was enjoying the Canadian bacon. Eric dug the toast out from under the eggs, ate it, and asked for another piece.
The waitress hesitated again.
“We do do toast,” she said. “But I don’t know if you can have toast. With that,” she added. “I’ll go and check.” Eric sighed. In less than twenty minutes, she was back, triumphant, bearing a plate of sliced, buttered tea toast. Eric consumed it, still moodily.
But that night, he didn’t touch his dinner. “What’s wrong?” Mark asked him.
“I want to go home!” Eric said, and before our horrified eyes, he dropped his head on the table and began to sob. “I’m afraid of King Claudius! I want to go home!”
A dull cloud of gloom descended over the kitchen.
“Let’s all go upstairs and watch television,” Jordan said heartily. “We’ll see what’s on.”
Puppets appeared on the screen. One was lying on a stretcher, moaning and sobbing as he was being pushed through swinging doors. “Oh, oh, oh!” he shrieked. “Don’t take me to the hospital, don’t, don’t! I’m afraid, I’m afraid of the hospital!” Another door opened and another puppet, decidedly African in appearance, swathed in a long white medical gown, approached the screaming sufferer. He was holding a huge hypodermic needle, nearly as long as his leg. The camera shot him from below, so that he appeared to be very tall. “Ho ho ho!” he said. “I am the doctor. I am going to stick you with this needle.”
“Oh no!” howled the sufferer, who had great goggly eyes and resembled a frog. “Oh don’t! Oh, I’m frightened of the hospital! I’m frightened of the doctor! Oh, please, please don’t! Oh—!”
The enormous puppet approached, raising the needle. The toad on the stretcher went into a frenzy of screams. Mark broke the frozen spell in which we sat, crawled over to the set and turned it off. “My God!” he said. Eric turned to me with a weak smile. “That was Sammy Snake,” he said. My flat American voice rose in the cold, chintzy, mildewed air of 16 Baldrige Place. “Doctors are our friends,” I said. Jordan did not meet my eyes.