SEVERAL DAYS HAD ELAPSED, and the water was still streaming down the lavatory wall. Mrs. Grail alternated between telling me to leave it for Mrs. Stackpole, whom she kept seeing slinking around Knightsbridge, and urging me to do something so that Mrs. Stackpole would not fly into a vindictive rage and do something terrible to us. I had heard neither from the plumber nor from Mr. MacAllister. I decided to try the plumber again.
“He’s away on holiday,” the woman said.
“But this is an emergency. Isn’t there someone else I could call?”
“When he returns, I’ll send him round.”
“But water has been coming down the wall for days! Can’t you give me another name to call? Isn’t there anyone else there?”
“I’ve already told you, Madam. When … he … returns….”
I hung up and told Mrs. Grail about it.
“At home,” I said, close to tears, “at home plumbers are listed in the phone book. They have emergency numbers. Here, they’re all on vacation at the same time….”
“Ah, the cheeky things,” Mrs. Grail said.
I tried to call Mr. MacAllister.
“He’s away on holiday,” the girl said.
The doorbell rang. It was the laundry man.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s two o’clock and the last time Mrs. Grail said you came after two. You see, she leaves at two, and the girl in the office said you would be here before two.”
“They don’t know nuffink in the office,” he said, growling.
“Well. Still. If you could manage to be here before two …”
“I can’t know what time I can be here.” He was becoming upset. “‘Be here then, be here now.’ It’s all I can do to get all them calls. What do you think I am? I can’t make promises, I can’t say this or that. I’m not going to be picked at, they don’t know nuffink in the office.”
“Oh, forget it,” I said. “Calm down.”
“‘Be here now, then go there.’” He thrust a pamphlet into my hand. “I already said I didn’t know what time. I can’t kill myself, I won’t.”
“I said forget it,” I said, looking at the pamphlet. “What’s this?”
“That’s your book,” he said, scowling horribly. “Don’t lose it.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s your book.” He went out, slamming the door hard behind him.
“What a rude man,” I said to Mrs. Grail, who was in the basement putting her coat on.
“Ah, it’s the English. They’re all like that.”
“What is this thing he gave me?”
Mrs. Grail looked at it. “Ah, that’s your book, dear. Don’t lose it.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s your book,” Mrs. Grail said.
I went upstairs and phoned Jordan. “And Mr. MacAllister is out,” I said. “Everyone is away on holiday. What on earth are we going to do about the water? Call the fire department?”
“Maybe I should look up a plumber in the directory,” he said.
“You mean you have one?”
“They’re given to businesses.”
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me this before? The carpet is soaked, the paint is blistered….”
“Please,” he said, “don’t bug me. I’m going crazy. If Basil Goldbrick doesn’t buy into this goddamn thing, we’ll sneak out of the country under cover of darkness.”
“Well, if we have to leave, we have to leave.” I thought of what it would be like to be at home: the sun would be shining brightly, I could wear a cotton dress and no coat, the children could play outside. I could buy real meat and cook it on a real stove. “We’ll just have to make the best of it,” I said gamely.
While I was putting the book in a safe place, Jordan phoned to say a plumber was coming the next day. “I called a place in Chelsea. It says Plumbers and Decorators. I guess it’s all right.”
“Thank God,” I said. There was moss growing on the downstairs bathroom floor.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with these people here,” Jordan said, referring to the office. “One of the ladies has an upper-class accent and she keeps ordering the others around. She sits and tells them to get things for her.”
“I suppose they do it.”
“Yes, how do you know that?”
“Oh, I just sort of know.” A month in the British Isles was giving me all sorts of knowledge. I kept thinking about all those English novels I had read, and all the English movies I had seen. I remembered how we had thought that opening a business in England was a splendid idea; we might want to move there someday….
The next day was the last day of camp. I went with the boys to West Ruyslip on the underground. That took an hour. I left them there and set off for North Lambeth to retrieve Eric’s sweater and raincoat. This trip took more than an hour. I sat next to a young man in sneakers. He had a large duffel bag with him, with a Canadian flag on it.
“I’m just going back,” he said, sniffling. “I was on my way to France and I forgot my passport. Now I have to go all the way back and get it. I’m a Canadian,” he said unnecessarily. “I live in Montreal. I’m going to spend the summer in Europe. What do you think of London?”
“Well…”
“They don’t like you because you’re an American. Americans are hated everywhere. That’s why I have that flag on my bag. I don’t want to be mistaken for an American. It’s so damp here,” he said, sneezing. “I caught a cold. I’ve been here a week and I caught a cold, and now I have to go to France. After that I’m going to Germany and Austria, and then I’m going to Italy, to Rome. I have an audience with the Pope.” He sneezed again.
“It sounds interesting,” I said. “You’re lucky.”
He nodded without enthusiasm. “I wish it was over,” he said.
He leaped up, seized his bag, waved at me and charged out. I travelled the rest of the way to North Lambeth in silence. When I finally got there, I found the police station after several errors and climbed the stairs to confront a man in a glass cage, like a movie theater cashier. Since I knew the day and even the hour of the loss, the man went straight to a cubby hole and redeemed the items, wrapped in brown paper and tied with heavy string.
“Oh, good,” I said, reaching for the parcel.
The policeman held onto it. “We charge two shillings a pound of the worth of the item,” he said. “It’s a reward to the driver for turning it in.”
It became clear to me why the driver had not stopped when Bruce called to him, and why he had not checked the seat after his juvenile passengers.
“Would you say the items are worth ten pounds?” the man asked.
“No,” I said churlishly. “I got them at Marks and Spencer.”
“All right, five pounds?”
They weren’t worth five pounds, or roughly twelve dollars, but I couldn’t remember what I had paid for them. I ended up paying nine shillings in a state of total confusion and feeling like a liar.
“It’s to reward the driver,” the policeman called after me, “for his honesty.”
I walked back about five blocks to the underground and travelled hastily to Baldridge Place to see what the plumbers were doing. They said that the trouble stemmed from the Children’s Bathroom, unheated, but with darling decals of Little Bo-Peep and Little Mary Quite Contrary all over the wall, which was peeling. The tub had a telephone shower, an awkward contrivance that you hold in your hand. Since it was the only shower in the house, Mark and I had used it to wash our hair.
The plumber said that the bathtub drain was defective and the tub was not properly caulked. We had never filled the tub, but of course the telephone shower emptied into the drain, so we decided that that was what was causing the leak. We were rather suspicious of the toilet, too, so we called the entire Children’s Bathroom out of bounds. It did have an airing cupboard (“There’s your airing cupboard,” Mrs. Stackpole had said proudly), an entity I remembered from my days of reading Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. Apparently some hot water pipes travelled through it, and you were supposed to put things in there to dry them out. It was fully as damp as the rest of the house; maybe a little damper.
We were now reduced to one bathroom: ours. Since it was on the second floor or two flights up from the basement kitchen by American count, we were all rather put out, especially since Eric always had to go to the bathroom during meals and television programs and he refused to go up alone because of Hamlet’s father, and also because of the wax Queen Mother, whose beady little eyes seemed to follow him still.