I Conquer Britain (4 page)

“Well that’s all right, then,” said Robert. “We wouldn’t want Sophie to get too homesick over there across the pond.”

It was kind of exciting speaking the same language and not understanding what they were saying. “The pond?”

“You know. That body of water you flew over.”

“You mean the Atlantic Ocean?”

Robert didn’t laugh, he chuckled, which is not a sound you hear very often in Brooklyn. “You Americans. Whoppers instead of burgers… Latte Grandes instead of a large coffee with milk… You do love to exaggerate.”

Caroline patted my arm really lightly, like it might be hot. “Let’s get you home and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

Now that was more like it. Right then I figured that a nice cup of tea was probably what had been missing in my life for the past sixteen years. “Cool. Tea we don’t really have in Brooklyn.”

“That’s what you get for dumping the last lot we sent you in the harbour,” said Robert.

He grabbed hold of the cart. “I’ve got to pay for the parking. I’ll take the lift and meet you at the car.”

I thought he meant he had to get a ride to the car, which is something that Jake’s always having to do. “You’re just like my mother. She always parks so far away that we might as well’ve walked in the first place.”

Robert gave Caroline a look. “What did I say? Separated by a common language.”

“He means he’s taking the elevator,” Caroline explained.

Lift not elevator… Lift… lift… lift…

“Boy,” I said, “I’m going to have to start taking notes with all these new words. All I knew before I left Brooklyn was that you call erasers rubbers.”

Caroline’s smile flickered. “And what do you call them?”

“Erasers.”

“No, I meant what do you call rubbers?”

“Condoms.”

I
probably don’t need to say that the Pitt-Turnbulls’ car wasn’t nearly forty years old and four different colours, including rust. It was a late model, black BMW, and it was so clean it looked like it’d just rolled out of the showroom.

“Wow!” I said. “A real car.”

There was nothing on the floor, no junk piled up in the back, no duct tape holding parts of it together. I was almost afraid to sit down in it, in case I got it dirty or accidentally scratched the upholstery or something. Caroline gave me a thin smile as I climbed into the back. She was afraid for me to sit down, too.

We weren’t there more than a couple of minutes when Caroline started worrying that something had happened to Robert.

“I wonder what’s keeping Robert.” She gazed across the parking lot like we’d already been on the road for hours and she was looking for a rest room. “I hope he hasn’t forgotten what level we’re on.”

I said he didn’t seem to me like a person who’d forget where he put the car – that’s the kind of thing my mom does.

Caroline smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “That’s what worries me. Perhaps something’s happened to him.”

I really didn’t think there was that much to get worked up about. I mean, what could have happened to him? It wasn’t like he had to cross the Amazon on a raft (or Flatbush Avenue on foot) – you know, anything you might consider dangerous – to get back to the car.

Caroline said he might have been mugged.

I pointed out that there were about a million people coming and going.

Caroline said that he might not have the right change for the machine.

I said, “You mean it doesn’t take bills?”

Caroline sighed.

I started looking around for signs of England while Caroline went through every possible disaster that could have happened to Robert, but parking lots aren’t one of the things that change from place to place. You know, they all look like a set in a cop movie (like someone’s going to start shooting at you in about three seconds). So except that the cars all had their steering wheels on the wrong side there weren’t any signs of England. I could still have been in New York.

Caroline had just decided that Robert might have had a heart attack while waiting for his turn at the machine when he finally turned up. He’d gone back to get a paper.

If it was Jake she’d have made him really sorry he kept her waiting like that, but Caroline just smiled. “We were starting to get worried that something had happened.” She turned her smile on the paper. “You know, you could have bought that at home.”

“What? And go back out again?” Robert got into the driver’s seat. “I’ve been up since the bloody crack of dawn, Caroline. Once I get into the house, that’s where I’m staying.”

Now that I was actually in the bosom of the Pitt-Turnbulls (well, in their car) I started feeling a little weird. Like a dolphin who suddenly finds herself on the back seat of a BMW.

And I was also starting to feel really bad for Caroline and Robert. I figured that if I was feeling weird, they must be feeling even weirder. They were the ones who were taking the dolphin home for tea.

Not that they let it show or anything. Angelina’s mother was right about the English being so polite. Robert was all fasten your seatbelt and no one minds if I put on the radio, do they? And Caroline kept apologizing for the weather and how long it took us to actually get out of the parking lot.

We drove to Putney with the window open because Robert said he liked a bit of fresh air when he drove. (I was pretty sure that wasn’t true. I mean, if he wanted fresh air he’d pretty much have to drive on a different planet, but I didn’t say anything. This was obviously just more politeness. I didn’t think he really wanted a good whiff of pollution and a lap full of rain, I thought he just didn’t want to choke to death on the smell of vomit coming from my skirt.) Robert concentrated on driving and Caroline concentrated on smiling at me in the rearview mirror. It made me really nervous. I was starting to think that maybe she had some horrible genetic defect that made it impossible for her not to smile. Like if you told Caroline some really, really bad news – that the world was about to be hit by an asteroid the size of Saturn, for instance – she’d keep right on smiling, even if there were tears in her eyes. I bet she had to stay away from funerals.

That’s why I started talking. Jake always says that one of the biggest mistakes she ever made was teaching me to speak. She says that when I was little I fell asleep talking and woke up in the middle of a sentence. But even by my standards I talked a lot all the way from the airport. I couldn’t shut up. It was because I was all off centre. As soon as Caroline (politely) asked me how my flight was I was off. Blahblahblahblah… I couldn’t find a suitcase…. Blahblahblahblah… Bart ate my satchel… blahblahblahblah… Bruce Lee threw up on me in the van… Blahblahblahblah… Jake got lost and went to the wrong airport… Blahblahblahblah… Mrs Beeker thought we were all going to die… Blahblahblahblah…

“So then, Mrs Beeker threw up all over me too.” I laughed so Caroline would know I thought it was funny and she didn’t have to apologize. The apologizing wasn’t doing anything to relax me either. “It’s like I’m being stalked by vomit.”

It didn’t work.

“Oh, you poor thing. I am sorry,” said Caroline.

“So there was a big commotion about that, but Joe – the steward? – Joe was a total angel. Mrs Beeker was really embarrassed, but I told her that you could tell from how fast Joe mopped everything up that he’d done it before. I said she wasn’t the first person to lose her lunch on a plane and there was no way she was going to be the last, and that made her feel a lot better.”

“Oh, dear…” murmured Caroline.

“But that wasn’t the end of it.” I could see Caroline’s smile kind of flinch in the mirror, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Then this dude fell down drunk right next to my seat.”

Caroline said she was sorry.

“No, it was cool. It was better than watching the dumb movie,” I went on. “And anyway after all that drama I didn’t even mind about my meal.”

I could see Caroline straighten up in her seat. “Your meal?”

“Did I forget about that part? They ran out of vegetarian.”

Caroline looked around. “Pardon?”

“Vegetarian,” I repeated. “Probably Jake forgot to order it – you know what she’s like – but I didn’t tell them that. I pretended they’d made a mega-mistake.” I shrugged. “Not that it did any good, but you’ve got to try, don’t you?”

Caroline was still looking at me as if I’d suddenly started talking in Spanish.

“Vegetarian? Are you saying you’re a vegetarian?”

Well, what did I expect? Trust Jake to forget to mention anything that might be important. “Don’t tell me she didn’t tell
you
, either!”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Caroline’s smile was getting a little grim. “But I’m sure she had a lot on her mind.” She blinked a few times, probably wondering what she was going to do with the half a cow she’d planned for supper. “What about fish? Do you eat fish? Or chicken?”

I’d always thought the word “vegetarian” was pretty self-explanatory, but it looked like it was open to interpretation in England.

“No,” I said, “just vegetables.”

“Perhaps we’d better stop at the supermarket.” Caroline touched Robert’s arm. “Darling, do you think we could go by way of Waitrose?”

Robert glanced over like he’d forgotten we were in the car with him. “What?”

Caroline asked him again if we could go by way of Waitrose.

“Oh, Caroline … now? I’m expecting an important call from my agent. I’d really like to go straight home. Besides, I thought you did the shopping yesterday.”

“I did, darling, but that was before I knew that Cherry doesn’t eat meat.”

“Doesn’t she?” He passed the turn-off Caroline was pointing to. “I don’t see the problem,” said Robert. “Let her eat cheese.”

B
y the time we got off the highway (otherwise known as the motorway, which if you ask me makes it sound like a conveyor belt) I was not just exhausted from talking so much, I was desperate to see something that I wouldn’t have seen on the New Jersey Turnpike besides the occasional black cab.

“There’s a mailbox!” I yelled as we finally turned into an ordinary street and came to a sudden stop. “Oh my God! Look! A double-decker bus!”

“Why, so it is,” said Caroline.

The bus moved and we inched forward.

Robert muttered, “Bloody traffic.”

I leaned my head against the window so I wouldn’t miss anything (though the speed we were going I’d pretty much have had to shut my eyes to miss anything bigger than a gnat). I guess I had this picture in my mind of narrow, cobbled streets lined with quaint little stores from seeing
A Christmas Carol
about five hundred times. But the streets we went through weren’t anything like that. They looked just like regular streets, and the stores were all regular stores, too:
McDonald’s
…
Burger King
…
Subway
…
KFC
…
Starbuck’s
…
The Gap
…
French Connection
…
Footlocker
…
Tower Records
. There wasn’t a
Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe
to be seen. I wouldn’t even have known I was in London if we weren’t driving on the wrong side of the road.

I turned my attention to the people trudging through the rain. It was all hoodies and baseball caps and sneakers with the Nike tick on the side. There wasn’t a good suit or bowler hat in sight.

What did they do with London? It’s as if they’ve moved part of America and stuck it here. I could only hope that they’d put London in Putney.

Robert finally turned into a wide road lined with houses on either side.

I had two images of London houses. The first was those big, fancy white houses with wrought iron fences and tiled stoops like where Oliver Twist’s grandfather lived in the movie. The other was those narrow, grey houses like where the Crachits lived. But the houses on this road didn’t fit into either of those images. They were all two storeys high, with a tiny porch over the front door, a bay window beside it and a tiny garden crammed with shrubs and flowers between it and the sidewalk. It was more like something you’d find in the suburbs – except that these houses were all attached and there weren’t any statues of the Virgin Mary out front. If this was Putney, it wasn’t where they’d put London. And it wasn’t anything like the dead cool city Kev told me about with the markets and the street life and all that stuff either. It looked like the most exciting thing that happened around here was when the hedges got trimmed (probably every week). I started hoping that we were just taking a detour to avoid another traffic jam.

Halfway down the block, Robert stopped the car.

“Here we are at last!” cried Caroline. She sounded so relieved you’d think she’d been away from home for months. “That’s our house, Number 22.”

Number 22 looked exactly like Number 20 and Number 24 except for the colour of its front door (which was grey and not black or dark blue).

“It’s really nice,” I said. Which it was. It didn’t exactly make you think that Charles Dickens was going to come strolling along (or even Orlando Bloom, unless he was lost), but there wasn’t any peeling paint, or weeds in the garden, or broken steps or any of the other things that I pretty much associate with home. I figured that if it wasn’t raining the windows would be sparkling in the sunshine. “Our house is practically falling down.”

“Oh, dear,” said Caroline. “That can’t be very pleasant.”

I’d never thought of it as being pleasant or unpleasant, it’s just the way it is.

Robert opened his door. “Why don’t you show Cherry her room, Caroline? I’ll bring her bags up after I’ve checked my machine.” He looked back as he got out to give her a big smile. “And then we can all have a nice cup of tea.”

At last – a nice cup of tea! Eat your hearts out all you poor saps back in Brooklyn with your cans of Coke and your cappuccinos. I was going to have a nice cup of real English tea.

Robert had already disappeared up the stairs by the time Caroline and I got to the front door.

Caroline stepped inside first. “I’m afraid it’s in a bit of a state. But things have been rather frantic lately…”