THE NEXT DAY Jordan left for Birmingham. He wasn’t coming back until the following evening. “What fun we’ll have on our own,” I said brightly. “We’ll go to Wimpy’s for dinner.”
“It’s spooky without Daddy,” Eric said, looking around.
“It’s not spooky yet,” Bruce said. “It’s still daylight.”
The telephone rang, a fairly unusual occurrence. It was Cynthia.
“Oh, Cynthia,” I said, pleased. “How good to hear from you. Jordan has just left for Birmingham and we feel sort of lonesome. Could you and Sydney come here for lunch? We could spend the afternoon together.”
“I actually called to ask if you were free tomorrow night,” Cynthia said.
“Well, Jordan is coming back from Birmingham fairly early …”
“Oh, good,” Cynthia said. “My friend Althea wants to meet you. You’ll love her. We’ll drop by about seven-thirty.”
“But what about today? I mean, the children would love to see Sydney and I haven’t seen you for a while—”
“Oh,” Cynthia said, in a feeble voice, “I have such a headache. My legs feel queer. I’m sort of sick.”
“Maybe it would cheer you up to get out? Change of pace.”
“I went out yesterday to a seaside restaurant,” Cynthia said. “The day before that I shopped in the West End with friends. The day before that I went to a lovely tea and fashion show with other friends.”
“The children would love to see Sydney,” I said. “They’re awfully lonely.”
“Sydney has a headache,” she responded promptly. “Her eyes look funny. I think she’s sort of sick.”
“How about tomorrow? We haven’t got much to do.”
“We really have to stay with my parents. You know they’re getting old and I can’t be here to take care of them. I have to go home soon. It’s very depressing.” I wondered whether the peanut eating had gotten to Cynthia. She certainly seemed changed. She had always been eager to go to lunch with me at home; of course here I didn’t have a car. At any rate we arranged that she and her friend Althea would come to visit the following night.
Now we had not only an empty day ahead of us, but an empty evening as well. We decided to go to the Science Museum, which was within walking distance, across the street from the Victoria and Albert.
We had some difficulty finding the Children’s Exhibits because two guides told us there weren’t any, but we finally located them in the basement, in a section that was very dark, grimy and Victorian. But there were things you could work by pressing buttons and pulling levers. Bruce and Eric, happy and excited, lined up as they had always done at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and awaited their turns. There were a lot of schoolboys there, in very dirty woolen uniforms, who apparently never took turns, because they stayed endlessly at the machines. A few times Bruce and Eric got through: while they were turning knobs and looking through holes, boys came up and casually knocked them out of the way. “Hey!” I kept saying indignantly. “Stop that!” They didn’t pay any attention to me. Some of the scuffling among the schoolboys themselves got very rough indeed. There didn’t seem to be any supervision.
We went upstairs for tea. The top floors of the Museum were new, beautiful and airy, and devoted to ships and airplanes. The cafeteria offered a good view of the city. The tables were sticky and so were the trays; I noticed that the attendants took the trays off the tables and put them back on the racks to be used again without washing them. But the sandwiches, which were wrapped in waxed paper, were tasty and the Coca Cola was cold. We liked the cafeteria.
After tea, we admired the airplane exhibits: you could go up a sort of catwalk and look closely at the early planes, which hung from the ceiling. Then we descended to the Children’s Exhibits again; a good many of the kiddies had been collected and taken away, so it was possible to walk about without being knocked down. We stayed there a long time, and then went out and wandered about Knightsbridge, looking at the shops.
It was finally dinnertime, and Mark met us at Wimpy’s, as we had arranged. He looked morose.
“I don’t like the office so much anymore,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked, surprised. “You loved it.”
“I’ll go,” Bruce said.
“I’ll go,” Eric said.
“They keep laughing at my shoes,” Mark said.
“What’s wrong with your shoes?” I said. “I like your shoes.”
“They’ve got laces. The toes aren’t pointed.”
“You’ve got flat feet.”
“They don’t like my jacket either,” he said.
“My God, is it an office or Christian Dior?”
“Jane keeps calling me a twit,” Mark said.
“She called me an old cow,” I said. “Your father says it’s just her way.” She had recently handed me some kind of liquid medicine for a headache, and when I said I would prefer aspirin, she had given me a friendly shove and said, “Go on, you old cow, drink it.” “She’s very informal,” I added, through gritted teeth.
“Today she called me a fathead,” Mark said.
“She expects everyone to love her,” I remarked.
“I love her,” Eric said.
“The others laugh at me too,” Mark said. “They say awful things about America.”
I tried to think of something positive to say. In the newspapers and on television, in book reviews, television reviews, film reviews, editorials; on panel shows, in musical reviews, in dramas, one encountered an unmistakable hostility toward Americans. To be fair, foreigners in general were derided. But one sensed an obsession with America.
“They say our shoes are ugly and our clothes are ugly,” Mark said mournfully.
“They should talk,” I said, deteriorating into a rage that surprised me, “with those crazy clodhoppers of theirs.”
“I feel sorry for them,” Mark said, suddenly switching attitudes and leaving me with my hostilities hanging out, as usual. “Today Jane was wearing this terrible dress, like cardboard, with holes in the sleeves. I mean it had holey sleeves. She just bought it, and she was so proud of it. It made me feel sad.”
“I suppose she could be pretty,” I said.
“She’s beautiful,” Eric said.
“I feel sorry for all of them,” Mark said. “They’re so poor and miserable.”
“Then don’t complain,” I snapped.
“I like it here,” Mark said. “You’re ruining it for me. You hate it. I can tell.”
“I don’t hate it,” I said. “All my life I’ve loved England. I’m an English major, aren’t I?”
Eric began to cry. “I’m afraid of Hamlet’s uncle,” he said. “I’m afraid of King Claudius. I want to go home.”