WE CAME HOME FROM THE PARK in a cheerful mood for a change, ignoring the peeling wall and the soaked carpet. Jordan and I were going out that evening. A woman named Maud Tweak had invited us to dinner. She was in public relations; that was how Jordan had met her: she used his newspaper clipping service. She had phoned me the week before to set up a date between Eric and a little boy named Michael, the son of Margaret, a friend of hers. We were supposed to meet Michael and Margaret on a Saturday afternoon to see a film called Dr. Who and the Daleks, which was all the rage in London. We were to meet in the theater lobby; Margaret would be wearing a white carnation or something, and holding little Michael by the hand. I said “Fine,” and Maud and Margaret said “Jolly good,” and it was arranged.
We had arrived to find a line, or queue, extending from the box office all the way around the side of the theater into a small alley, or mews. We had to wait almost an hour in the alley, but it wasn’t boring. A group of itinerant musicians called The Happy Warriors traveled up and down the queue, playing music. They were all old and shabby and their music was terrible. A very old man with watery eyes moved in front of them, holding out a ragged cap, his ancient overcoat dragging in the gutter. They were a London institution. Bruce took one look at them and turned a pale shade of green.
“They’re beggars,” he whispered, and dumped all his money into the filthy cap.
“Some people think they’re charming,” I said to Bruce.
“Charming!” he said.
“I want to know the difference between a movie and a show,” Eric said suddenly.
“Well, it depends what you mean,” I said. “Some people call a movie a show. When I was little, I called a movie a show.”
“But what’s the difference?” Eric asked.
“Sometimes there isn’t any. But a show can be—”
“A show is on a stage and a movie is a movie,” the woman behind us said impatiently. She turned to her children and said loudly, “This little boy is being silly and asking stupid questions.”
I had noticed and was to notice a free and easy attitude toward other people’s children in London.
We finally got into Dr. Who and the Daleks, which we enjoyed. We were surprised to see people sitting and standing in the aisles, but none of them appeared to be wearing white carnations, and we went home without meeting Margaret and Michael. Now we were going to meet Margaret, because she and her friend Albert were picking us up in a minicab to take us to Maud Tweak’s. We kissed the children goodnight, and went off happily.
“I hope you don’t mind garlic,” Albert said as we climbed into the minicab. “I eat it all the time.” He looked rather like a cartoon: his hair was very curly and stood straight up on his head; he had an enormous thin nose and a pointed chin, and he was wearing long pointed shoes on his long skinny legs. He also had a lisp.
“Where were you Saturday?” Margaret asked me. Next to Albert she seemed surprisingly unexceptional: a large plump dark-haired woman in a black dress.
“My goodness, there was such a crush,” I said girlishly. “No one could find anyone, could they?”
“We waited for you for forty minutes,” Margaret remarked lugubriously.
“We couldn’t even get into the lobby,” I said.
“We waited in the lobby,” Margaret replied.
“The reason I eat garlic,” Albert explained, “is that it purifies the blood. It’s very healthy. It counteracts the poisons.”
He told us what poisons all the way to Bayswater where Maud Tweak lived. I was looking forward to seeing her apartment; somehow I had gotten the impression that it would exhibit sophisticated modern British decor. The minicab stopped in a rather crummy street outside a shop. “What’s this?” I asked, confused.
“It’s Maud’s place,” Margaret said.
“Oh, isn’t she lucky to have it?” Albert cried.
“Oh, dreadfully lucky,” Margaret remarked.
We went up to a little door next to the shop, and they rang the bell. It was a sort of antique shop, filled with queer odds and ends. Through the window I could see a school clock, a pine chest, and a very large doll with long yellow hair and staring china blue eyes, dressed in yellowed ruffles.
“This sort of thing is becoming all the rage in London now,” Margaret said obscurely.
“We have this section called Old Town, in Chicago,” I said.
The door opened suddenly. A small, very thin woman with sharp features stood before us. Her brown hair was bouffant, she was wearing silver slippers and a pretty blue dress with white dots. She radiated friendliness and warmth.
“Oh, my dear,” she cried, seizing my hands, “I’m so happy to meet you. I’m Maud Tweak of course. Oh, do come in.”
We climbed up four or five floors to a small attic apartment. From the hallway I could see the tiny sitting room: an interesting modern painting made a bright splash of color over the low fireplace next to built-in bookshelves and desk.
“Oh, it’s charming!” I said. I had found the rather musty atmosphere of London so oppressive that the least touch of lightness and freshness sent me into an ecstasy. I understood too well Mark’s fascination with the Playboy kitchen. The rest of the furniture was an old settee, painted white and furnished with cushions apparently made of cement, and two armless modern armchairs slipcovered in striped rayon.
We settled down and Maud poured wine for everyone. “I’m so delighted to meet you,” she said to me. “How are the children?”
“Michael got his comeuppance the other day,” Albert said happily.
“Oh, good,” Maud replied. “What happened?”
“He was playing in the area and a man came by, the father of one of the children. Michael hit the boy, and the father spoke to him, and Michael called him a silly twit.”
I was on top of this: Michael was Margaret’s son, the same age as Eric.
“Called the father?” Maud said.
“Yes, and then Michael ran upstairs and the man followed him. He knocked on the door, and Michael hid. But I dragged him out, and the man gave him a tongue-lashing, and I put him to bed without supper.”
Everyone laughed, except Jordan and me.
“Oh, marvelous,” Maud said.
“Yes,” Albert lisped. “I’m so pleased the man followed it through.”
“I am too,” Margaret said. “He could simply have let it go.”
“Yes, he could,” Maud remarked. “Awfully good job he didn’t.”
“Children should be struck regularly, like gongs,” Albert said, and launched into a Swiftian discussion of child behavior. With his hooked nose, tall frizzy hair, long pointed shoes turned out on his thin ankles, to say nothing of his lisp and his habit of delivering pronouncements, he seemed to have stepped from the pages of the early Evelyn Waugh. I had been delighted with these creations during my long period of Anglophilia, now fast waning. I had never expected to meet one. I didn’t know they were real.
“Michael’s going to boarding school in the fall anyway,” Margaret said.
“Oh, wonderful,” Maud said enthusiastically. ‘That’ll straighten him out.”
“Away from Mama,” Albert said joyously, “it’s sink or swim. No one to pat the head….”
From there they moved on to a discussion of a recent act of Margaret’s which they considered monstrous: she had had an operation performed on someone named Tom, who turned out, to my relief, to have been her cat. Albert was exquisitely witty about it, Maud was gleeful, and Margaret castigated herself good-naturedly.
“But they spray the walls,” I said, to help Margaret out. Nobody paid any attention to me except Jordan, who gave me a funny look. They talked about the cat for a while longer and then Maud went to a small table in the corner and began to serve dinner: egg salad, cold cuts and sliced tomatoes.
“Your vegetables here are delicious,” I said sincerely. “I can’t get enough tomatoes.”
“How was Russia?” Albert said to Maud.
“Oh, thrilling,” she replied. They began a swift geographical conversation, travelling rapidly from Russia to Scotland; they talked faster and faster, cutting each other off. I heard something about the Outer Hebrides.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold it. I’m lost. What are you talking about?”
Maud and Albert paused and looked at me.
“We’re talking about the last war,” Maud said. “I was stationed in Scotland, and I was ill there. The people were so kind, so thoughtful. That is the reason,” she said, turning to Albert and sipping her wine, “that I shall never sneer at the people of the Outer Hebrides.” She paused for an effect and went on. “I was in Dublin for my leaves. Of course there was one ball after another. I remember one evening I went to a ball at the German Embassy. I danced with the most divine young man. He said, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Actually, darling, I’m in the British Army.”’ She turned to me. “What do you think of your expatriates?” she asked abruptly.
I couldn’t think of anyone except Henry James and T.S. Eliot.
“Your expatriates,” she repeated. “What do you think of them? Bill, for instance. He’s awfully funny, you know. I asked him how long he plans to live here and he said, ‘For the rest of my life, I hope.’” She laughed.
“Yes, he likes it here,” I said, smiling.
“I asked him what he liked so much,” Maud said. “He said, ‘Your parks. Your theater.”’
She and Margaret and Albert exploded into hearty laughter at this, and we smiled again, to be polite, although we didn’t see anything funny about it. The London parks were beautiful, and there was a lot of good theater at good prices. When Jordan and I had been in London two years before, we had seen five plays in five days and enjoyed them all.
“I never go to the theater,” Maud said. “No real Londoner does, you know.”
“I don’t think it’s a very good season this year,” I said, trying to be tactful.
Maud gave me a swift look. “Is it a good season in New York?” she asked sharply.
I really didn’t know. “Those expatriates,” Maud said to Albert. “You remember that dreadful cow that was here last month? Looked through my books and said some of them were on the Index. Dreadful cow.” She looked at me. “She was travelling on an Irish passport. But she was one of your expatriates.”
“Why was she on an Irish passport?”
“Oh, I suppose she hung round them and pestered them to death so they gave her one.”
“But don’t you have to be a citizen to get a passport?”
“Oh, they’re not all that stuffy about it. She kept after them and they gave her an Irish passport to get rid of her. Stupid creature. And that friend of hers spilled wine all over the carpet.”
“I don’t have any desire to travel,” Margaret said to me. “I’ve been to all the places worth seeing, and if anyone told me they’d give me a trip, I couldn’t think of a place I wanted to see.”
“Have you been to America?” I asked, stepping into it.
“No, I haven’t,” she said, smiling at me.
“We discovered a place to swim practically across the street from us,” I said to Maud. “In the Serpentine.”
“Pronounce it Serpentyne,” she said.
“Serpentyne,” I repeated. “We bought bathing suits at Woolworth’s and it’s been raining ever since.”
“It’s the rain that makes the flowers and vegetables so good,” Jordan remarked.
“Oh, the raw materials are excellent,” Albert said. “But what’s done with them! Do you realize that I have had to give up eating canned peas because they’re filled with green lead dye?”
“But they can’t be,” I said. “The government …”
“Ah, yes,” Albert said. “Your government protects you with the Food and Drug laws. We don’t have that kind of protection here. There are poisons, poisons, everywhere.”
“Green lead dye,” I said.
“Don’t take any notice of him,” Maud said kindly to me. “He’s mad.”
“As a good socialist,” Albert said to Maud, “you ought to concern yourself with legislation against this sort of thing. I’m afraid to eat anything except garlic. It purifies the blood.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at us, his great nose trembling with emotion.
“Of course change is coming,” Maud remarked.
“Oh, change comes, everywhere,” Albert said. “I mean actually the whole world is changing. For instance,” he went on, “we’ve dropped all our nineteenth-century social snobberies in England since the war. And I suppose,” he said graciously to us, “that in about two hundred years America will catch up to us, and drop her nineteenth-century class distinctions.”
“We don’t have nineteenth-century class distinctions in America,” I said.
“No …” Maud poured wine into everybody’s glass. “ … you have distinctions based on money.” She gave us a sympathetic smile. “It’s awful,” she said, wrinkling her nose at me.
“Yes,” I said, “our distinctions are based on money, for the most part.”
“I think rigid class distinctions are worse than money snobberies,” Jordan observed.
Maud and Albert exchanged quick glances; Maud smiled.
“A lot of you Americans come over here,” she said, “and run up bills at Fortnum’s and Harrod’s and all the big shops. Of course they don’t have a bean. We just sit back and watch ‘em till we’re tired of them and then,” she concluded with noticeable ferocity, “we dump ‘em back!”
There was a really long pause after this remark.
“My goodness,” I said, looking at my watch, “nearly eleven! We’ve really got to go.”
We went into the bedroom to collect my coat.
“I just love your apartment,” I said.
“And I did it all myself,” Maud responded proudly.
“And it was so kind of you to have us.”
“Well, it’s meeting people, you know,” she said.