Sisterchicks Go Brit! (8 page)

So what if we hadn’t gone to London last night as planned? Why should that ruin my attitude or make me cynical? I took a deep breath of the chilly, damp air and felt my heart mellow.

We watched as a dozen or so racers lined up at the starting point. I hadn’t expected such a mix of sizes, shapes, and ages. All the women wore skirts covered by aprons in a wide variety of colors and styles. All of them wore some sort of kerchief or scarf on their heads. And all of them wore modern-style running shoes. It was quite an eclectic array, as each held out her frying pan and listened to the instructions being given by an official-looking gentleman in a red blazer.

“It appears that the outfits haven’t changed much since the two of you raced in the fifties,” Kellie said.

“Except for the shoes,” I added.

Rose gave an uncomplimentary snort.

On the mark of some sort of signal we couldn’t hear, the line of women flipped their pancakes in the air just once. It seemed they had to prove their pancakes weren’t glued to the pans. The test run of the flying flapjacks brought an eager round of approval from the hundreds of spectators.

“Just about ready,” the man behind us said.

The ancient Shrove bell rang out from the church steeple, and off they went! The herd of seriously competitive women with their aprons and scarves hit the asphalt. Images of the past and present raced past us as flapjacks flipped, head scarves flapped, and the women pounded their way toward the parish church of St. Peter and St. Paul.

That quickly, they rounded the corner and were out of view. All except for one lone trotter: Opal.

While we were watching the official race zoom past us, Opal had sprung from her seat and now was trotting along, playfully flipping her pancake. No one was going to tell her she couldn’t participate in the race fifty-some years after her last competition.

She flipped her pancake again with an exaggerated grin or grimace. It was difficult to tell which. Both her hands then grasped the frying pan and clasped it right under her bosom. I assumed the wrists-under-the-bustline position was for added athletic support. She wasn’t exactly an athlete, but she definitely could use the support.

A spectator behind us said, “The poor dear looks as if she’s been harpooned with a long-handled frying pan and is trying to pull it out!”

Rose seemed to share the woman’s opinion. She watched her frivolous twin with her arms crossed, shaking her head in disapproval.

Regardless of how Rose or the other woman viewed the unofficial straggler, Opal was the darling of the crowd. As she scuttled around the bend at her one-foot-in-front-of-the-other trotting speed, Kellie and I joined the rest of the crowd to cheer her on. Many of the viewers waved. Some of them, including Kellie and me, laughed joyously at the determination Opal demonstrated.

Then it was over. Opal was out of view. Rose stood, and Kellie and I folded up the chairs. As Rose muttered, we followed the dispersing crowd that was making its way to the church. The disadvantage of being positioned in the middle of the raceway was that we didn’t see any of the women cross the finish line, nor did we see the final pancake flip or the scandalous “kiss of peace” from the vicar.

But we did see Virgil when we arrived in the churchyard.

And we saw Opal.

He was beaming. She was glowing. People were taking her picture as she stood beside Virgil in his floppy chef’s hat.

“What has happened to my sister?” Rose wasn’t looking at either Kellie or me, but the tone in her voice made it sound as if
she was charging us personally for the untaming of her twin. “She has not behaved like this since …”

The end of her sentence went unfinished. I wanted to finish it. The ending was right on the tip of my tongue, but I held back from saying it.

Since the last time she was in love, right?

Kellie pulled me aside. “What do you think? Should we leave now?”

“Now?” I surprised myself with my sudden resistance to leaving Olney.

“I’m thinking if we stay for the church service and the pancake feed afterward, we’ll be here all day.”

“You’re right. Yes, we should slip out now. Let’s tell the twins.”

Kellie and I ushered Rose over to where Opal was posing for the last of her publicity shots. She still was flushed from her admirable trot to the churchyard. We drew her aside and explained to both of them that we needed to be on our way. Their disappointment was blatant.

“We did hope you would stay for the pancakes at least.”

“And the church service,” Rose said.

I’m sure she was convinced Kellie and I were the undoing of her sister and all three of us incorrigible women from the U.S. were in dire need of a good sermon.

“We’ll take the chairs back to the house,” I said.

“No need,” Opal said. “Virgil can take them for us. He’s taking the frying pan back for me.”

“The house is open,” Rose said. “I don’t lock my door during the daytime.”

“Well, thank you both so much for everything. We really appreciate your hospitality. Kellie and I will come back here next week as planned.”

“We will be here,” Opal said. “And do remember that in case you tire of London sooner than you expect and would like to come back early—”

“The guest room will be waiting.” Rose stood next to her sister as the two of them fell into their overlapping pattern of talking.

“We have your phone number with us, and we’ll contact you if our plans change,” I said.

“Have a lovely time in London.”

“Thank you,” Kellie and I said in unison.

The two sisters stood to the side of the pancake tent and waved at us as we turned to go. I glanced over my shoulder with one last smile. With the sunlight coming through the churchyard, the sisters reminded me of two fuzzy-haired characters in my younger daughter’s favorite movie,
The Princess Bride
. Without knowing it, Rose and Opal were mimicking the scene in which the elderly couple stand at the front door of their woodland cottage waving and calling out, “Have fun storming the castle!”

“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Kellie asked when we were out of the crush of people.

“Definitely. If we stay …”

“I know. We’ll never—”

“Get out of here. You’re right.”

There was a short pause, and then I said, “Did you just finish my sentence?”

Kellie looked at me. “Did I? I thought you finished my sentence.”

“I think I did.”

“I probably did too.”

“Then it’s definitely time for us to take our leave of the twins.”

We linked arms and tried Opal’s trot-walk on the now-deserted streets of Olney, all the way to Rose’s cottage.

W
e had no trouble
arranging for a cab to pick us up at Rose’s cottage and to take us to the bus station in Milton Keynes. We did have difficulty once we arrived.

I asked which bus we should take to Oxford Street in London, and the driver as well as the attendant on duty kept asking which coach we wanted. Asking for a coach gave me a mental picture of a Cinderella-style, horse-drawn carriage.

The station attendant said he couldn’t understand our accents. We were having a difficult time understanding his accent as well. He seemed amused to see two American women with luggage trying to make themselves understood at a coach station that was primarily used by those who lived in the area.

“We need to go to this hotel.” I pulled out my super-overachiever notebook and pointed to a brochure of the hotel where we had reservations. “It’s on Oxford Street.”

“Oxford.” The attendant nodded, understanding at last. He walked us over to a bus that had its engine running and was about to leave. We bought our tickets directly from the coach’s driver. He stowed our luggage in the bus’s underbelly while Kellie and I joined a small number of travelers who were leaving Milton Keynes at two thirty Tuesday afternoon.

The comfortable seats and steady rumble of the bus jogged Kellie and me into a jet-lag snooze for the next hour. With the steaming sound of the air compression brakes on the coach, we pulled into a narrow lane at a bus station where several other buses were lined up. Kellie and I were both yawning as we stepped down from the bus and waited for our luggage. We then walked away as if we knew what we were doing.

“So.” I looked around the moderately small station. “Should we ask someone how to get a taxi to take us to our hotel?”

“Good idea. Although if we go to the other side of this building, we might be able to hail a cab. You would think plenty of them would be hanging out at a bus station.”

I followed Kellie and thought how quiet the surroundings seemed for such a large city. Not that I had any idea what part of London we had landed in or how far we had to go to our hotel. I guess I expected more traffic noise. The age of the surrounding buildings and the relative lack of commotion and congestion almost made it seem as if we were back in Olney. I had expected London to be industrial and noisy like it was when we left Heathrow Airport.

“There’s a cab.” Kellie picked up her pace and raised a hand to flag the taxi driver. He was parked along the side of a cobblestone road.

“Are you free?” Kellie asked.

With a wry grin the driver said, “No, mum, I charge full price like the rest of ’em.”

“I meant, is your taxi available?”

“Of course.”

We climbed into the back with our luggage, and he started the digital meter. “Where to?”

Kellie said the name of the hotel, and he looked stumped.

“I have it written down,” she said. Unfortunately, the reservation papers were folded up in the pouch around her neck along with her passport. She had to do some tugging and wiggling to retrieve the papers. While she did her backseat cha-cha, the meter was running.

Kellie handed the reservation to the driver through the open window between the front and back seats. “The address is there at the top. Oxford Street.”

The driver let out a low whistle. “This is going to cost you, mum.”

“All right,” Kellie said cautiously.

“Are you sure this is where you want to go?”

“Yes. Why is it going to cost so much?”

“This address is in London, mum.”

“Yes,” Kellie said plainly.

“We’re in Oxford, mum.”

Kellie leaned back slowly. She didn’t look at me.

I asked the most illogical question ever. “Are you sure this is Oxford?”

“Pretty sure, mum. I was born and raised here. But I have been known to make a mistake or two along the way. At least that’s what the wife tells me.”

Kellie covered her face with both her hands. “I can’t believe this.”

“We must have gotten on the wrong bus,” I said. “We were trying to tell that guy at the station that we wanted Oxford Street, London, and he put us on the bus to Oxford.”

“Obviously,” Kellie muttered. Her happy-camper attitude had flown south.

“Where did you get on?” the cabby asked.

“Milton-something,” I said.

“Right. Well, you have several choices, then. You can go back to the station behind us and ask a stationmaster to make sure to get you on the right coach back to London. The express coach will take you to Heathrow. From there you can take the tube into the city. Straightforward enough. Unless your tube stop is off the Piccadilly Line. You’ll be jostling your luggage down a lot of stairs if you’re on the Piccadilly. In that case you would be better off taking the train into Paddington. From there you can take the tube or a cab to your hotel.”

He was speaking understandable English, but he might as
well have been speaking Martian to us. At that moment his directions were too overwhelming to process.

“Any other options?” I asked.

“You can always stay in Oxford for a day or two.” He grinned. “It’s not a bad place. Or, if you really like, I can drive you to your London hotel, but I’ll have to tell my wife I won’t be home for supper.”

“What do you think we should we do now?” I asked Kellie.

“I don’t know.”

It seemed Kellie and I were taking turns having bad attitudes. Mine had dissipated during the pancake race. Kellie’s was in full bloom. I had made decisions for both of us many times in the past, just as she had made decisions for us as well. But I preferred not to do so at the moment. Staying last night at Rose’s was a mutual choice and had worked out fine. Staying in Oxford would work out better if Kellie and I agreed to do so.

“Have you made up your minds, then?” the driver asked.

“We could stay here,” I suggested.

“That means I’ll have to call the hotel in London again and cancel before six o’clock. I hate doing that.”

“Well, we can go back into the station and take the express coach. I’m fine with whatever.”

The driver stretched his hand through the separating window. He held out his cell phone. “Would you like to use my mobile?”

“No, thanks. That’s okay.” Kellie reached for the door handle. “We can find a phone booth.”

The driver kept his hand extended with the phone. His cocky grin didn’t leave his face. “I’m sure it’s not my place to mention this, but if the two of you weren’t able to find the right coach to London, what might your odds be of finding a phone booth this evening?”