“For instance, the way they are in the stores. That man at the grocery was really disagreeable, as if I’d insulted him or something by saying he ought to carry unsweetened baking chocolate, and he was glad he’d never heard of it.”

“They’re in collusion. That’s what we decided,” Joe says. “They meet once a week in some local pub. ‘Okay, let’s get those dumb young American professors,’ they say, ‘the ones who were so bloody pleased with themselves for being in London.’” He laughs, then blows his nose.

“That’s why the plumber didn’t come when our kitchen sink clogged up. He refused to say when he could get here, or if he would ever even come at all.”

“Or like today, that woman at the dry cleaners. She looked at my pants as if they had a smell. ‘No, sir, we couldn’t do anything with those oily spots, one pound ten please.’” Joe’s imitation of a phony-refined British accent is marred by a natural tin ear and a bad cold.

“It’s so ugly, that’s what I think I mind the most,” Debby says. “Everything’s so gray and damp, and of course all the modern buildings are absolutely hideous. And they put up public housing and hamburger restaurants and billboards right in the middle of the most beautiful old streets. What’s happened to their aesthetic sense?”

“Frozen out of them,” her husband says. Joe, a native of California, is thin, narrow-chested, and easily chilled; he has been ill ever since he arrived in London and sometimes sick as well. At first he tried to ignore the whole thing, he tells Fred while Debby is below in the dark, damp kitchen making coffee. Then he went to bed and waited for four days to feel better; finally, despairing of recovery, he got up again. At present he has a fever, a headache, a sore throat, a cough, and blocked sinuses. What he wants most is to go upstairs, lie down, and pass out; but he is a student and professor of philosophy and a natural stoic. Debby and their baby Jakie also have colds.