ON FRIDAY MORNING, Mrs. Grail arrived, brandishing an envelope. “Ah, the cheek,” she cried, as soon as she got in the door. “The cheek of her! It came this morning. Burn it, my husband says, she’s got no claim on you, she doesn’t pay your wages.”
“But what is it, Mrs. Grail?”
“Read it,” she said, stuffing the envelope into my hand. “Ah, it’s Them. The cheek of them, they’ll do you every time.”
The letter was from Mrs. Stackpole. It began with many expressions of hope for Mrs. Grail’s health and well-being. Then:
I do hope the Family are not proving too much for you. I hear they disagree a lot. I am so anxious to have you with me when I return, dear Mrs. Grail, I hope you will not hold me responsible for them. I shall be in London the last week in July. Please write and tell me whether I shall come to you, or when you can come to me. I am so anxious to talk with you.
“What does she mean, we disagree a lot?” I said indignantly. “Among ourselves or with other people?
“Ah, the wicked thing,” Mrs. Grail said. “I’ll never see her, I’ll never write to her.”
“I suppose Miss Pip said something,” I said. “I suppose she said we’re disagreeable people.”
“Ah, you’re not. I’ll do for you until you leave, until September fourth. But I’ll never work for her, never.”
“My husband has to stay until September because of his business,” I said, looking through the window at the gray street. “I mean actually the children and I don’t have to stay that long really.”
“Well, I’ll do for him then, the dear man,” Mrs. Grail said. She seized the letter which I had vaguely thought of preserving for a lawsuit involving invasion of privacy and libel or something, and tore it to fragments. “That’s for her,” she said, “the horrid, horrid thing!”
I went upstairs and reported Mrs. Stackpole’s latest perfidy to Jordan, who was dressing to go to the office.
“She’s kind of awful,” he said weakly.
“Kind of awful!” I cried. “She’s a big fink. Spying on us. Isn’t there a law against that?”
“Don’t know,” he said.
“Can’t you ask your lawyer?”
He gave me a hopeless glance.
“Well, can’t you?”
“It wouldn’t do any good to ask him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those people in Birmingham are supposed to call this week,” he said, changing the subject. “Maybe they’ll buy into the business.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Oh, I guess they will. But if they don’t, Basil said he would do something.”
“What can Basil do?”
“I don’t know. Something,” he said, with a note of hysteria in his voice. He made an effort to calm himself, and asked, “What are you going to do today?”
“Well, we went to the Comedy Theatre the other day—Eric calls it the Comedy Feeler, isn’t that funny?—but the show only lasts an hour, it’s hardly worth the trip. Except the trip takes up time too, which is good. But it’s right near Madame Tussaud’s, and it makes Eric nervous to be so near Madame Tussaud’s, so I’m not sure we ought to go to the Comedy Theatre again.”
“Well, don’t then.”
“Mark said he would like to go to Madame Tussaud’s, but I don’t see how I can take him there with Eric feeling like this.”
“I’m sure you can work it out,” Jordan said
“I don’t think I can work things out much longer,” I said. “I’m going crazy.”
“Maybe we can go to the country again,” Jordan said. “It’s bound to be better next time.”
“At least I’m glad Mark is going to spend the day with us today. He’s practically an adult; he can share things, you know.”
“I wish he’d be a little more adult around the office,” Jordan said gloomily. “He keeps making copies of Beatle pictures on the copy machine.”
Mark and Bruce were insistent upon going to Madame Tussaud’s; Mark had not yet been there. So we went to Baker Street on the bus. They went to Madame Tussaud’s and Eric and I went to the Comedy Feeler where they were showing a Laurel and Hardy movie which did not amuse him or anyone else in the audience, for that matter. Eric squirmed in his seat; he kept glancing at the entrance.
“Let’s go,” he said after ten minutes.
“We have to stay here until it’s over,” I said. “We’re giving Mark and Bruce an hour at … at … the place where they are, and this movie runs for an hour.”
“Where are they?” Eric asked in a throaty whisper.
“You know where they are,” I said testily. “They’re at Madame Tussaud’s. Watch the movie.”
“Madame Tussaud’s is right down the street,” Eric said.
“I know it.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“They’re made of wax,” I said, for the fifteenth time. “They’re not real. They can’t leave the building. Watch the movie.”
“I want to go.”
“We have to wait.”
“Why?” I threw in the towel and we left and stood outside Madame Tussaud’s, a location that Eric for some reason found preferable to the Feeler, for fifteen or twenty minutes, until Mark and Bruce emerged, full of praise for the slot machines.
“Gosh, is that cool,” Mark said. “There’s nothing like that in Chicago.”
“No,” I said loudly, for Eric’s benefit, “there is no Wax Museum in Chicago.”
“I mean those slot machines,” Mark said. “Boy, are those cool.”
“Did you see Hamlet’s uncle?” Eric asked.
“I love slot machines,” Bruce said. “I love them more than anything in the world. I just lost sixpence. Wow,” he added, reaching for one, “look at the Beatle magazines.”
“’ere,” growled a Cockney voice, “get your filthy ‘ands off them books.”
“Did you hear what he said to me?” Bruce said.
“I’m starving,” Mark said, “let’s get lunch.”
“Lots of luck,” I said crossly.
“Why are you so contrary?” Mark said to me. “You always expect the worst. Look at this, let’s go in here, this chicken place.”
“It looks good,” Bruce said. “Did you hear what that man said to me?”
We went into the chicken restaurant, which was crowded because it was lunchtime, and sat at a large table. There were all sorts of relatively fresh stains on the tablecloth.
“Could we have a clean tablecloth, please?” I said to the waiter.
“What do you want to eat?” he countered.
“I want a clean tablecloth,” I said loudly.
He glared at me for a minute and then two sub-waiters came up with two halves of a clean tablecloth and put them together on the table.
“What do you want?” the waiter said.
“Well, I’ll have the fried fish, and Mark, do you want the fried fish too? Yes, we’ll both have fried fish with fried potatoes.”
Bruce said he wasn’t hungry; all he wanted was some ice cream.
At this point the waiter went away to take someone else’s order.
“What a rude waiter,” I said. After five or ten minutes, the waiter came back. “That will be two fried fish,” I said. “And a fried chicken dinner for the little boy, with mashed potatoes if you have them.”
The waiter went off to seat somebody.
“He’s getting impossible,” I said.
“You shouldn’t have asked for the clean tablecloth,” Mark told me.
“Why not?” I asked. “They wouldn’t want to serve on a dirty tablecloth, would they?”
We both knew they would, so Mark didn’t answer. The waiter returned, looking very hostile.
“We’ll have two fried fish dinners,” I said, “and one fried chicken dinner for the little boy, and cokes all around, and this little boy will just have ice cream, he doesn’t want a dinner.”
The waiter became very agitated and put his pad away.
“You’ll have to leave,” he said. “We’re too busy here to bother with people who want ice cream. All of you will have to have a dinner or else you’ll all have to leave.”
“I’m not very hungry,” Bruce said apologetically.
“Well!” I said to Mark, who was staring at me. “There you go. We’ll leave.”
Mark continued to stare at me. “Things like that never happen to me when I’m by myself,” he said. “It must be your fault. It must have something to do with all of you.”
“But what did we do?’’ I asked, getting up. “We didn’t do anything.”
“I know you didn’t seem to do anything,” Mark said, as we walked out. “But I go around everywhere all day for Dad, and things like that never happen to me, so you must be doing something.”
“But what are we doing that’s wrong?”
“Besides,” he added logically, “that waiter wasn’t even English. He was some kind of Yugoslav or something.”
We went to a hamburger restaurant and ate the gray meat with muddy gravy out of square metal dishes.