The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff Read Free Book Online

week’s hotel bill this morning, much steeper than I’d anticipated, what with assorted lunches and dinners and a 12 per cent surcharge added for tips. I just took it up the street to Deutsch’s, to Mr. Tammer, their accountant. He’s a solemn, bespectacled gentleman who gives you a sudden warm smile when you say hello to him. He’s got all my “advance” money in cash in the office safe and he’s doling it out to me weekly. He gave me cash to pay the hotel bill and ten pounds, which is my Allowance for the week; when I run short I dip into my brother’s hundred. I had ten of the hundred with me for him to change into pounds, and he got out all his charts and machines and figured the latest exchange rate very tensely and meticulously, God forbid he should cheat me out of fifteen cents.
    There was a letter for me at Deutsch’s which intrigues me, it’s from a man I never knew existed. Nobody I corresponded with at Marks & Co. ever mentioned him.

    Dear Miss Hanff,

    I am the son of the late Ben Marks of Marks & Co. and want you to know how delighted I am that you are here, and how very much my wife and I would like you to dine with us.
    I do not know where you are staying so could you please ring me at the above telephone numbers? Thesecond one is an answering service and any message left there will reach me.
    We’re both looking forward to meeting you.
    Sincerely,
    Leo Marks
    The secretary who gave me the letter told me he called and asked where he could reach me.
    â€œBut we never tell anyone where you’re staying,” she said. “We just ask them to get in touch with you through us.”
    I took a very dim view of this and went into Carmen’s office to straighten it out.
    â€œCarmen, dear,” I said, “I am not the kind of author who wants to be protected from her public. Any fan who phones might want to feed me, and I am totally available as a dinner guest. Just give out my address all over.”
    She said there are at least two interviews to come and she’ll make them both over lunch. Some interviewer asked me if I planned “to buy silver and cashmere here—or just books?” I said I planned to buy nothing over here, everything I see in a shop window has a price tag reading “One Day Less in London.”
    Off to Parliament.
    Midnight
    I’VE BEEN TO THE OLD VIC, shades of my stage-struck youth, walking into that theater was a thrill. Nora andSheila and I saw Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The theater has the atmosphere of the old Met in New York and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia; the audience files in with a kind of festive reverence, like people going to church on Christmas Eve.
    Sheila had trouble parking the car, she got to the theater three minutes after the curtain was up and was promptly shunted off downstairs to the lounge to watch the first act on closed-circuit TV, you do not trail down the aisle after Mass has started.
    I’ll never understand why they did Mrs. Warren’s Profession in turn-of-the-century costumes. Politicians and businessmen don’t own whorehouses any more? Poor girls are not expected to starve virtuously rather than eat unvirtuously any more? Moral pillars of society don’t keep mistresses in country cottages any more? Who does such a play as a costume piece belonging to some other era? Bernie Shaw would have a fit.
    I asked Nora about Leo Marks, she said she only met him and his wife a few times but “they seemed a nice young couple.” She said he’s a writer.
    I’m sitting here eating vitamin C, think I’m getting a cold. Tried reading Mary Baker Eddy once, should’ve stuck with it.

Saturday, June 26
    It finally turned sunny and warm, thank God, so I could wear a skirt for PB. (Headline in the newspaper read ENGLAND SWELTERS IN 75-DEGREE HEAT.) Wore my brown linen skirt and the new white blazer, and he beamed and said, “You look charming,”