As Sweet as Honey

29




Those first weeks were filled with a kind of wonderment, as Meterling and Simon settled down together. They did not have much to unpack beyond clothes and books. Simon left for work around eight, and on her first solo trip outside, Meterling with Oscar in a Snugli walked to a flower market to purchase some blooms for the flat. A day at her disposal. The air was fresh with autumn, as people hurried by. She listened to the noise of the traffic, looked at the red buses go past, and bought a newspaper. She compulsively consulted the map Simon had drawn for her, but she got lost anyway. She had wandered off the perimeter, toward the arrow on the paper marked Chelsea, or was it Millbank? There was a pub on the opposite side of the road she was on, with doors spilling open onto the sidewalk. Looking both ways, crossing carefully, she walked toward it. A man sitting just inside the door looked asleep as she went toward the bar to ask for directions.

“C’mon, let’s go,” said the man at the door. Heaving himself off the chair, he walked outside. The bartender indicated she should follow him, so Meterling did. He looked like an old sailor with his grizzled chin and cropped gray hair, and he was silent. After depositing her on her street, he lumbered back for his pint. Krishna, Meterling thought, watching him go back—she had been rescued by Krishna.

Mrs. Vickers, a woman of few words, came on Wednesdays. Simon hired her to clean, because, he said, “we can afford it, and you’re not used to this,” which was true enough; when had she had to do anything out of need in terms of housework? In Madhupur, she cooked only because she wanted to, mended only when she felt the inclination. At home, there was a servant for each task; Grandmother looked harried only because she needed to organize, or maybe because there were so many underfoot. Plus there was Oscar to look after, also on her own; but Meterling felt a twinge of guilt. Still, it seemed to make Simon happier, and she would be kidding herself if she protested too much.

“I’ve lots of Indian and Pakistani clients I do business with,” Mrs. Vickers said curtly that first day, hanging up her coat and bag. Immediately, Meterling felt rebuked. Mrs. Vickers had a fat zippered Filofax full of clients. Although used to women cleaning around her, to lifting her feet for the broom, Meterling found that in London, she needed to leave the flat on Mrs. Vickers’s days. She found herself feeling embarrassed, wondering if Mrs. Vickers in her white skin resented working for “the Indians and Pakistanis,” whereas, she reflected, outside with Oscar, they had far more to resent. She tried to tidy up before Mrs. Vickers came: piling the laundry into baskets she had bought from an open-air market, tidying up the toys, washing the dishes. It was not enough, but Mrs. Vickers never said a word, and was brisk, nearly scientific in her cleaning, and what Meterling came to appreciate most was how the flat looked and smelled after Mrs. Vickers left: clean, smoothed out, renewed.


Simon gave her a Barclay card, but Meterling insisted that she get her own to draw from the interest on Archer’s estate. This was easier than both had anticipated, since the transfer of money had occurred months before, and what was required was a new account created under her own name. The bank issued her a credit card, a set of checks, and a safe-deposit box. Together, she and Simon stored her wedding jewelry in the bank’s vault, under the kind of quiet courtesy exhibited by the bank employees for the wealthy. For she was wealthy, my aunt Meterling, an heiress who had married money, twice.


Simon had introduced her to the neighborhood, taking straight routes she could memorize. They walked to Waitrose, which was larger than any shop she’d ever imagined. How did the British make choices: single cream; double cream; full fat; less fat; goat milk; soybean milk; kefir? In Madhupur, the milkman brought fresh milk on his bicycle, warm from the cow, and she received it in a vessel from his jug to take inside to boil. There were so many lights in the store too, so that everything gleamed. It was such a white country.

But pockets of green were scattered everywhere. No matter what part of town they were in, it seemed, there were neat squares of garden full of fall growth. When the pace got to be too much, or she became overwhelmed by all the buildings and street signs and roads, she studied the tulips, which were putting on their final show before winter. Purplish-red shocks of leaves as well as dark-orange berries clung to the tree branches, which held a certain enchantment; Meterling had never witnessed an autumn before. She snapped pictures, which she sent to us. (“All she does is send pictures of trees and flowers,” complained Sanjay.)

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Simon took her on the Underground, which thrilled her, because she had studied the station map back in Madhupur. So now she actually stopped at Oxford Circus and Paddington, Tottenham Court Road, minded the gap, held tight to husband and child. They sampled chum chums and other milk sweets somewhere near Fitzroy Street. She bought jars of mango pickle to accompany the ones Grandmother had made and packed for her. Meterling’s excitement was tremendous those first weeks—to see what she had read about, to experience what was in Dickens, in the Spectator, all the readings at school. Simon took them to his work, where he introduced his colleagues. They smiled, shook hands, fussed over the baby, and went back to work. She had not expected an editorial office to be messy, but it was, with lots of people moving in and out of cubicles and doors, holding bits of paper, while bookshelves bulged with manuscripts and books. Simon’s own office held a half-dozen coffee cups, stained and forgotten, breeding mold, as well as a neglected plant of some species—a palm? A jasmine? Giving the baby to Simon to hold, she cleaned up his office, threw out the plant, tidied his desk somewhat.

Had he wanted to talk of Archer, or did he hope that she would bring the topic up? To think they had made it to England so easily, so conveniently. Archer was buried in the countryside, but Meterling hadn’t asked to see his grave. Perhaps she still smarted from being so cruelly left out of the funeral plans. Simon winced, thinking back to how quickly he and Susan had acted, how thoughtlessly, how selfishly.

He showed her the food court at Harrods, the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the Tower of London, and the Sword of Mercy, with its tip cut off. They toured the British Museum, walked through Bloomsbury, and looked at Dickens’s house and the Old Curiosity Shop on Portsmouth Street. One day they took the ferry to Greenwich, and the tour guide on the trip pointed out the places around the docks where the pirates, the rogues, the rebels were hanged. Snippets she remembered that she hardly knew were stuck in her mind kept coming to her: “Shakespeare answered very badly because he hadn’t read his Bradley”; “Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”; “Once more into the fray”—so much history, too much history.

“How will I learn it all?” she said later, on their return home.

“Learn what, Meti?”

“All this English.”