one to sniff a milk jug in public. It has definitely turned. Mother would be appalled by the very fact that I take milk in Earl Grey at all. I look around for a waiter but think better of it. I donât like to make a fuss. Not at Claridgeâs. Iâm awfully fond of Claridgeâs, and besides I canât summon the enthusiasm to make a proper fuss about anything recently. I decide to forgive this small oversight, assign the bad taste to too many gin cocktails last night, and reserve my annoyance for my wretched brother.
Iâm quite aware that Peregrine tolerates our ritual of afternoon tea simply to humor me. He has complained about it since we first started meeting here when he was a jaded young lawyer and I was a bored society debutante. He thinks it unfair that I only invite him to tea and not our older brother, Aubrey, but as I remind him frequently Aubrey is too busy and too married and too full of his own self-importance to contemplate tea with his little sister and brother. We are better off without him.
âBut must we take afternoon tea every Wednesday, Etta?â
âYes, Perry. We must.â
âMight I ask why?â
âBecause afternoon tea is predictable and charmingâqualities that should be preserved wherever possible. Because it is one of the few things in my life that I can do without a chaperone, and because if we stop meeting for afternoon tea, who knows what we will stop doing next. Eventually weâll stop seeing each other altogether. Weâll become distant strangers, like Aubrey, communicating only through a few thoughtless lines scribbled on tasteless Christmas cards. One day weâll realize that we miss afternoon tea on a Wednesday terribly, but it will be too late, because oneâor both of usâwill be dead.â
Perry laughed and called me melodramatic, but he kept showing up nevertheless. In the end it wasnât his lack of enthusiasm that brought an end to our little arrangement, it was war.
Overnight, the carefree privileged life we knew came crashing to a halt as a new and terrifying existence settled upon us all like a suffocating fog. My brothers went to France to serve as officers on the Western Front. I enrolled as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. Simple pleasures such as afternoon tea became a distant memory until the war ended and my brothers returned. We were all changed irrevocably by the long years between. Now I cling to Perry and afternoon tea at Claridgeâs like a life raft, holding on with grim determination, even if his habitual tardiness irritates me immensely and gives me a daylong headache.
âWould you care for another pot of Earl Grey while you wait, Miss May?â
I glance up at the waiter. A handsome young chap. All taut-skinned and vibrant-eyed. The treasures of youth. âI suppose another canât do any harm.â
âNo, miss. Not on such a dreadful day. And another slice of Battenberg, perhaps?â
I nod. Even the waiters at Claridgeâs know my preferences and tastes. It makes life extraordinarily dull at times. âAnd a fresh jug of milk,â I add.
âVery well, Miss May.â
He moves with the precision of a principal ballet dancer, pirouetting behind the great ferns and Oriental screens that segment the room into private nooks and crannies. I almost call after him, tellhim Iâve changed my mind and to bring Darjeeling and Madeira cake instead, but I donât. Sometimes it is simpler to keep things as they are.
The pianist plays ragtime as the rain thrums in time against the window. All is a colorless gray smudge outside, weather for reading a racy novel, or for playing backgammon by the fire if one isnât easily enthralled by the notion of illicit love affairs. Bored and restless, I drape my arm casually over the back of the chair beside me, the creamy white of my skin visible where my sleeve rides up over my wrist. A gentleman at the table to my right canât