The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York. Peter Godwin

pride of Ted’s executive toy chest is his wave machine. This is a glass box, a yard long by a foot high, filled with a viscous aquamarine oil. When switched on it simulates the ocean, only in slow motion. ‘Very soothing,’ nods Ted. One day, he says, he is planning to surprise me by changing the colour of the oil.

      ‘I’ll do it,’ he threatens. ‘Just see if I don’t, I promise you, one day you’ll walk in and I’ll have changed it to purple!’

      Under his desk he also keeps a wooden rod with an iron hoop, which looks like a metal detector.

      ‘This is my “Bullshit Detector”,’ he announced within an hour of his arrival, waving it at me and making a high-pitched beeping noise. Whenever a client says something he doesn’t agree with, he reaches for it, sweeps it towards them and starts up his high-pitched beeping.

      Monday, 25 May Peter

      After consulting our battalion of liveried doormen, we have finally hired a cleaner. She is a short, hefty, middle-aged woman with brightly hennaed hair, called Margarita. Her work uniform is an appliqué T-shirt, black leggings, Nikes and dayglo pink rubber gloves. She arrives with another maid to negotiate her fee.

      ‘Eighty dollars,’ states her colleague baldly. ‘That is the rate.’

      This seems a little steep to me. In London we paid our cleaner £30. Given that Margarita says it will take three hours to clean our apartment here, $80 works out at nearly $27 an hour. The minimum wage in this country is $5.45 an hour, so we will be paying her almost five times that.

      ‘Sixty dollars?’ I suggest. ‘That’s twenty dollars an hour – a good wage,’ I say hopefully. I am a terrible negotiator, the thrills of shopping at the souk are not for me.

      But Margarita will not budge. There is to be no negotiation. The two women stand there arms folded over their bosoms regarding me sternly and I cave in. It’s a deal. As they leave, Margarita’s colleague informs me that laundry will be extra.

      Margarita comes from Ecuador and though she has been in the United States for twelve years, she speaks no English. Well, that’s not entirely fair. She speaks three words of English: ‘No thank you.’ She deploys this phrase in differing intonations, depending on the situation.

      ‘Margarita, can you clean the windows?’ I ask her, miming cleaning the grimy windows. ‘No thank you! No thank you, Mr Peter!’ she bellows back, nodding vigorously and smiling broadly so that her gold tooth winks in what little light has made it through the panes.

      When I introduce Margarita to our stock of household cleaning materials and equipment – all the usual fluids and unguents and sprays, and my newly purchased vacuum cleaner – her brow knits in disapproval and she scowls. ‘No thank you, Mr Peter!’ she says firmly, and this time she means just that. I am mildly offended. I went to some trouble choosing the vacuum and it seems perfectly adequate.

      ‘Look,’ I appeal to her, ‘it is the latest Panasonic, the Jet Flo 170. It’s got 170, um 170 suck power, or something.’ But she is not impressed.

      Today Margarita arrives with her own preferred condiments of cleaning, evidently chosen with the loving care of a commando’s specialized weaponry, and her own vacuum, all loaded on to a shopping trolley pushed by her taciturn teenage son.

      ‘This,’ he says, translating his mother’s Spanish, ‘this, my mother says, is a real vacuum.’

      It doesn’t look like much, an ancient beige drum vacuum, its grubby plastic casing bound with masking tape. Margarita fires it up and sweeps the nozzle along the floor, where it immediately sucks most of a small kilim into its mighty vortex, and its tone changes to a strangled high-pitched scream. She rattles off another Spanish command and her son says to me, ‘Go on, pull it. Pull the rug.’ I grab hold of the kilim and tug it. Margarita takes up a wrestling stance and holds the vacuum pipe in both hands. We tussle this way and that for a while, but I am quite unable to dislodge the kilim until she switches off the power and I finally stagger backwards, kilim in hand.

      ‘That’s a hell of a vacuum,’ I am forced to concede.

      ‘No thank you, Mr Peter,’ says Margarita graciously and smiles a victory smile garnished with another flash of gold tooth.

      Tuesday, 26 May Joanna

      Tonight we attend the inaugural dinner of the American Friends of the Royal Court held at a grand townhouse just off Fifth Avenue.

      It is run by a rather terrifying band of supremely confident English women who, among their other triumphs, are also accomplished fund-raisers. It’s the first time either of us has been involved in anything like this, and it soon becomes apparent we are in way over our heads.

      There are twenty of us altogether at the dinner and Stephen Daldry, the Court’s artistic director who has flown in from London this afternoon specially to address us, explains what the theatre needs. Except that he is far too abashed to ask for money directly and, instead, keeps talking about ‘raising the Royal Court’s profile’, so that it isn’t entirely clear what he’s actually after. Looking suitably perplexed, an American woman sitting opposite me suddenly pipes up, ‘Well, what do you need? Would it help, for example, if each one of us sitting here were to write you a cheque for twenty thousand dollars?’

      To my horror, several other people nod supportively. ‘Good idea,’ murmurs my neighbour, and one woman even makes as if to retrieve her chequebook from a small beaded handbag. Unable to catch Peter’s eye, I sit frozen in fear of us being publicly humiliated as the only people round the grand candle-lit table unable to afford such a gesture. Fortunately, Daldry is so embarrassed at the idea that it is somehow lost over the dessert wine. Overwhelmed with relief, as we are leaving, I cheerfully sign up both Peter and I to attend a volunteers’ meeting to explore ways of expanding the Royal Court’s reputation in New York.

      Tuesday, 26 May Peter

      Today I notice for the first time a disturbing tribe of women on the street – mothers with newborn babies. This tribe has apparently lost all dress sense and dispensed with sartorial vanity entirely, strolling along in lumpy sweaters, mismatched socks and untended hair. They converse in goo-goo talk with their little grubs, and wear beatific, gormless smiles. The only other place I’ve seen this foolish beam is on the faces of cult members. Will Joanna’s brain also turn to mush? Will she too promenade in jumble-sale attire, with bad hair, chat entirely in infant gibberish, cease to call me by my name and address me as daddy instead?

      Oh God, what have we done?

      Wednesday, 27 May Joanna

      Someone has stuffed a flyer under our door advertising a playreading this evening at the local West Beth Community Centre. The reading has been arranged hurriedly by local actors and writers as ‘the community’s reply’ to a rape in Horatio Street, which ended with a desperate girl flinging herself out of the bedroom window of her fourth-storey apartment. After the reading local police have agreed to address us about neighbourhood safety and how to protect ourselves.

      By the time I arrive there are sixty or so women gathered in the hall and about a dozen rather reluctant-looking men. (Peter has refused to accompany me on the grounds that he is on deadline for a Newsweek column on Winnie Mandela, though I suspect the real reason is to do with ‘Must See TV’ night on NBC: Seinfeld followed by ER).

      I take my seat towards the back of the audience and a large gentleman, apparently in charge of proceedings, steps up to the dais.

      ‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘We’re just waiting for our leader, who is upstairs chanting.’

      ‘How very Greenwich Village,’ mutters my neighbour, a blonde, bobbed woman with a complicated briefcase and tan legs which disappear into