Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [20]
It is that, tragically, they have been phonied up farther down the street. Somehow, between numbers 237 and 241, in a gerrymander worthy of an old Chicago politician, a 221b has sprung up, complete with a young man in an ill-fitting bobby’s uniform outside. (No Lestrade, this, even on his worst days!) The Sherlock Holmes food and beverage and a Sherlock Holmes memorabilia shop stand between the Beatles Store and Elvisly Yours. Across the street is another Holmes store, this one with a variety of mugs, pitchers, and a chess set with, among its pieces, a black dog that is clearly meant to be the menacing Hound of the Baskervilles but looks more like a fat lab, begging.
It’s not simply that I find all of this dispiriting, but that Holmes himself, who is as vivid a character as we will find in fiction and who loathed sentiment, much less pretense, would have found it an outrage.
Luckily there are also times and places in which London is vividly, completely that place that you’ve encountered dozens of times in books. And it’s not at the palaces, or staring at diadems in the Tower jewelry exhibition, or even listening to some cabbie do a little mock cockney act because he’s come to believe that’s the sure way to get stupid Americans to ante up a big tip.
But when you’ve cut through one of the narrow alleys that leads from Green Park to Pall Mall, skirting the majestically restored Spencer House, wandering out onto St. James’s Street, it’s rather clear that you’re not in Kansas, or even Manhattan, anymore. The shopwindow of Williams Evans, “gun and rifle makers,” is filled with hunting paraphernalia of the most tasteful and arcane sort, shooting coats and moleskin plus 2s and the House Tweed laird’s jacket. Just up the street, a store with a beautiful assortment of top hats and bonnets trimmed with feathers and ribbons has a sign displayed near the front door: “Now Taking Orders For Ascot.”
Up on Piccadilly, the shopping arcades are as Victorian as anyone could want, with their ivory-handled shaving brushes and handmade boots. The one between Albemarle and Bond Streets is particularly atmospheric, with its enormous bay windows and gilded signs. Queen Victoria bought her riding habits in one of the shops, and it looks and feels as if the servant sent on the task had only lately left.
But perhaps it is in Simpson’s-in-the-Strand that I felt most definitely ensconced in the London I’d learned to love through books, a stage-set London that is only a highly colored, largely antiquated facsimile of the real thing. That feeling may have been inevitable, since English food plays such a central part in how Americans see England, and also how they see it in a way that is painfully out-of-date. It exists, as does so much else in English novels, in a completely foreign argot: even such a thing as tea, which we assume to be a simple beverage, turns out upon further reading to be something more, and more mysterious, perhaps with cakes, perhaps with cucumber sandwiches, perhaps with some mysterious element called clotted cream or mysterious side dish called digestive biscuits. And that is quite apart from completely foreign dishes like toad-in-the-hole or bangers and mash.
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a cookbook entitled Great English Food, and she said that not a single person to whom she had given it or spoken of it in the United States could keep a straight face,