Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  “You mustn’t do that,” Fred says; but his words are lost. The resolution remains, however. He doesn’t want to waste his time alone with Rosemary sitting in a restaurant with some actor from the play they are about to see. Besides, she’s bought him too many expensive meals lately. When he protests she gives different excuses: the sale of a TV play she’s been in to Australia, a favorable interview in some women’s magazine, whatever.

  “Rosemary, I want to say something,” he begins as soon as they are alone and making their way to their seats.

  “Yes, darling . . .” She stops to wave and smile brilliantly at someone across the theater.

  “I don’t want you to take me to dinner tonight.”

  “Oh, Freddy.” She looks up at him, widening her fringed azure eyes. “You’re cross because I was so late, but I absolutely couldn’t help it, that wretched taxi service—”

  “No, I’m not, I just—” An usher interrupts them; Fred buys two programs at tenpence each. Big spender, he thinks sourly, recalling that Rosemary has been given—or paid for?—their tickets.

  “What it is,” he begins again as soon as they are seated, “is that I just don’t want you to buy me dinner. It’s not right.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly: I already promised.” Rosemary’s eyes are focused past him, sweeping the rows for familiar faces. “Oh look, there’s Mimi, but who can that possibly be with her?”

  “No. It bothers me.” Fred plows ahead. “I mean, what will Erin think? He’ll think I’m some kind of gigolo.”

  “Of course he won’t, darling.” Rosemary focuses on Fred again. “It’s not like that in the theater. When you’re in work you treat. Everyone knows that.”

  “Well, I’m not in the theater. So I’d like to pay for myself from now on.” Fred remembers that he has with him only eight pounds and some change, which according to his budget has to last till the end of this week. Soon he will be sitting, as he has often lately sat, behind a menu whose size is as inflated as its prices, searching for the cheapest item (usually a bowl of coarse raw greens of some kind), declaring falsely that he had a big lunch and isn’t all that hungry. “What I’d really like,” he goes on, leaning toward Rosemary to gain her attention, which is fluttering off again, “is for us to go somewhere tonight that I can afford, and then I can take you. I bet there must be some inexpensive places around here—”

  “Oh yes, there’s lots of nasty cheap restaurants in Hammersmith,” Rosemary says. “And I’ve been to most of them. When Mum broke her ankle, and Daddy stopped my allowance, trying to starve me into leaving the rep and coming home to run the house, because he was too lazy to bother, I found out all about that. I’ve eaten all the fish fingers and macaroni cheese I ever want to eat in my life, darling.”

  “All the same. I don’t think it’s fair that you should pay for me.”

  “But you think it’s fair that I should have to eat in some disgusting caff—”

  “I didn’t say that I wanted to go to a disgusting caff—”

  “—where we’ll probably both be poisoned.” Rosemary’s exquisite mouth sets in a sweet-pea pout. Then, as the house lights soften, her pout softens into a smile. “Besides, you know we can’t do that to Erin, he’d think we were out of our minds, or that we absolutely detested his performance and wanted to punish him for it.” She gives a whispery giggle.

  Fred doesn’t argue further, but for the rest of the evening he continues to feel uncomfortable: during the play and during the dinner that follows, where he orders a chef’s salad and also consumes four rolls, a third of Nadia’s beef bourguignonne, and half of Rosemary’s cherry cheesecake (“Don’t be silly, love, I simply can’t finish it”). What is he doing eating off other people’s plates in this expensive restaurant, in this expensive company?

  “You’re still cross,” Rosemary says plaintively in the taxi afterward. “I can tell. You haven’t forgiven me for being so frightfully late tonight.”

  “No I’m not; yes I have,” he protests.

  “Really?” She leans toward him, resting her spun-gold curls against his shoulder.

  “I always forgive you.” Fred eases his arm around Rosemary; how soft and yielding she is under the folds of wool! “I’m in love with you,” he says, imagining how he will soon demonstrate this.

  “Oh—love,” she murmurs indulgently but rather dismissively, as if reminded of some childhood pastime: skipping rope, say, or hide-and-seek.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Yes.” She raises her head slightly. “I suppose I do.”

  “And? But?”

  “And I love you . . . But it’s not that simple, you know.” Rosemary sighs. “When you’re my age—”

  Fred sighs too, though silently. That he is just twenty-nine and Rosemary thirty-seven—though she hardly looks thirty—is in his opinion unimportant—in the context of their relationship, even meaningless. Of course he knows that women, perhaps especially actresses, worry about their age; but in Rosemary’s case it’s ridiculous. She is beautiful and he loves her; it’s not as if they were planning to get married and raise a family, for Christ’s sake. “What difference does that make?” he asks aloud.

  Fred has been raised in an academic environment; he assumes that even difficult questions must be answered. Rosemary, after years in the theater and long experience of prying and hostile interviewers, assumes the reverse. Instead of replying, she yawns, covering the pink flower of her mouth with one fluttering hand. “Heavens, I’m exhausted! Classical drama does that to me sometimes. Is it dreadfully late?”

  “No; half past eleven.” One possible cause of, or excuse for Rosemary’s constant tardiness is her refusal to wear a watch (“I can’t bear the idea that Time has me by the wrist, like some awful cross old governess”).

  “Oh horrors, darling. I think I’d better go straight to bed.”

  “Don’t do that,” Fred says, grasping her more firmly. “At least, not alone.”

  “I’m afraid I must.” She sighs deeply, as if under some heavy invisible compulsion.

  “But I was hoping—” Fred puts a hand on that part of the angel-wing cape that covers Rosemary’s breast.

  “Now, love, don’t be tiresome. I’ll ring you tomorrow.”

  So, quite casually, Rosemary canceled what was to have been the climax of their evening together. For the next eighteen hours Fred was in a bad state of mind. He called—or, in the British phrase, “rang”—several times, starting at ten A.M., but couldn’t get through her answering service. Either she was out, or she was angry with him. He tried to work, but—as often lately—not with any success; he needed a book that was in the BM, but didn’t want to leave the phone.

  Finally, about six, Rosemary rang back. She was as affectionate as ever, “simply longing” to see him. She denied she’d been cross; wouldn’t even discuss it; welcomed him passionately at her front door an hour later.

  Shadowy spring twilight in the library of an English country house often featured in magazines and color supplements, famous both for its architectural and decorative beauty and for the architectural and decorative beauty of its mistress, Penelope (Posy) Billings, and the financial acumen of her husband Sir James (Jimbo). The crimson velvet brocaded walls, buttery buttoned leather and mahogany sofas, gilt bindings, glass cases of curios, and antique varnished globes of the earth and heavens create a slightly campy late-Victorian effect. This is relieved by an orderly profusion of fresh spring flowers, and a table on which are arranged the latest papers and magazines, prominence being given to those of conservative views and to last month’s Harper’s/Queen, which includes a photograph of Lady Billings in her kitchen and her original recipe for cream-of-watercress-and-avocado soup, as part of a series on “Country-House Cuisine.”

  On the walls are Victorian paintings in thickly flounced gold frames: two portraits of Posy’s distinguished military ancestors and one of a mournful prize sheep who strongly resembles George Eliot. All three pictures have been in her f
amily for over a century. The Leighton above the marble chimneypiece, on the other hand, was bought for Posy by Jimbo as a wedding present just before prices skyrocketed, on a tip from one of her best friends—the fashionable decorator, Nadia Phillips. It shows a smooth-limbed statuesque Victorian blonde, much resembling Posy Billings and with the same tumbling masses of brassy hair. This figure is somewhat anachronistically half clad in pink and lavender draperies and is making eyes at a caged bird on a sun-drenched, petal-strewn marble terrace.

  Now, six years later, Posy is beginning to be tired of the Leighton, the sheep, the curios, and the ancestors. She’d rather like to send them to the attics and put up something more contemporary. Indeed, she has been wondering lately if it wouldn’t be rather amusing to have the library redone, with Nadia Phillips’ help, in the style of the 1930s, with lots of deep sexy white sofas, stainless steel and lacquer tables, engraved mirrors, and funny art-deco cushions and lamps and vases.

  At the moment Posy is not in the library, but having tea in the nursery with her two small daughters and the au pair. The only present occupant of the room is Fred Turner, who would be distressed to learn that its Victorian decor is doomed. As he stands between floor-length curtains of deep-fringed crimson plush, looking out over the lawn—where there is still light enough to see a host of airy daffodils crowding the circular flower bed beyond the gravel drive—he feels both euphoric and slightly unreal. What is he doing here in this perfect Victorian country house, in this misty English spring, instead of a century later in upstate New York where early April is still gray frozen winter? It’s as if, by some supernatural slippage between life and art, he has got into a Henry James novel like the one he watched on television two months ago with Joe and Debby Vogeler. How far away they and their carping complaints about London seem now! How secondhand and incomplete their view of England has turned out to be—as secondhand and incomplete as some TV adaptation of a classic novel.

  In the last few weeks Fred has entered a world he had before only read of: a world of crowded, electric first nights, leisurely highbrow Sunday lunches in Hampstead and Holland Park; elegant international dinner parties in Connaught Square and Chester Row. He has been backstage at the BBC studios in Ealing, and at the offices of the Sunday Times, and has met a score of people who were once only names in magazines or on the syllabi of college courses. What is more amazing, some of these people now seem to consider him a friend, or at least a good acquaintance: they remember that he is writing on John Gay and inquire about the progress of his research; they speak to him in a casually intimate manner about their troubles with reviewers or indigestion. (Others, it’s true, forget his name from one party to the next—which is maybe to be expected.)

  When he first started seeing Rosemary, Fred wondered why she knew so many celebrities. The answer turns out to be that she herself is a sort of celebrity, though he had never heard of her. As one of the stars of Tallyho Castle, a popular comedy-drama series about upper-class country life, she is familiar by sight to millions of British viewers, some of whom occasionally approach her in shops and restaurants or at the theater. (“Excuse me, but aren’t you Lady Emma Tally? Oh, I really do enjoy that program so much, and you’re one of my very favorite characters!”) As a result, she is better known by sight than some of her more famous but nontheatrical friends.

  To Rosemary, Fred realizes now, her popular fame is both welcome and unsatisfying. He has seen how she begins to sparkle and glow when a fan appears, as if some inner lamp had been turned up to 200 watts. He has also heard her say, more than once, that she is tired to death of Lady Emma and of all the other nice ladies she has portrayed on television. What she really wants, she has confided to him, is to act “the great classic parts”—Hedda Gabler, Blanche DuBois, Lady Macbeth—in the theater before she is too old. “I could do them, Freddy, I know I could do them,” she had insisted. “I know what it is to feel murderous, coarse, full of hate.” (If she does, Fred thinks, it’s only by a magnificent leap of intuition.) “All that’s in me, Freddy, it is. You don’t believe me,” she added, turning to look directly at him.

  Holding her close, he smiled, then shook his head.

  “You don’t think I could act those parts.” A frown had appeared between her fair arched brows, as if some invisible evil spirit were cruelly pinching the skin.

  “No, I do. Of course I do,” Fred assured her. “I know you’re good, everyone says so. I’m sure you could do anything you liked.”

  But no director has ever been willing to cast Rosemary in such roles. When she is invited to appear on the stage—less often than she would like—it is always in light comedy: Shaw or Wilde or Sheridan or Ayckbourn.

  The problem is, as Rosemary’s friend Edwin Francis explained to Fred, that she just doesn’t look like a tragedy queen. Her voice is too high and sweet, and she doesn’t project that kind of dark energy. “Can you see Rosemary as Lady Macbeth? Now really: ‘Infirm of purpoth! Give me the daggerth.’” Edwin imitated Rosemary’s voice, with the slight charming lisp that she affects as Lady Emma. “Nobody would believe for a moment that she’d been involved in a murder; they’d think she wanted to cut the cake at a charity fête.”

  Though he doesn’t like the way Edwin sometimes makes fun of Rosemary, Fred has to admit that he can’t imagine her as Lady Macbeth, or as full of coarse murderous hate, even for dramatic purposes. Her wish to play violent and tragic parts is one of the things about her that still puzzles him.

  Something else he would like to understand about Rosemary is why her pretty house in Chelsea is always such a goddamn mess. At first glance the long double sitting room looks very elegant, though a little faded. But soon, especially in the daytime, you notice that the bay windows are smeared and fly-specked, the sills grainy with soot, the gilt moldings of the pictures chipped, the striped gray satin upholstery blotched and worn, the mahogany table-tops branded with rings and burns. Everywhere there are rumpled newspapers, sticky glasses, muddied coffee cups, full ashtrays, empty cigarette packages, and discarded clothing. Below in the kitchen and in the bedroom upstairs it is worse: the closets are jammed with rubbish, and the bathrooms not always clean. How Rosemary can emerge from all that disorder looking so fresh and beautiful is a mystery—and how she can stand to live in it another one.

  Of course Rosemary probably doesn’t know how to do housework, Fred thinks, and he wouldn’t want her to have to learn. But she could certainly hire somebody. Her friends agree with him. What she needs, Posy Billings explained earlier this afternoon when she was showing Fred around her own perfectly kept grounds, is a “daily”—some strong reliable woman who will come in every morning to clean and shop and do the laundry and make lunch, so that Rosemary won’t have to go out to a restaurant. If only Fred could persuade her to hire someone like that—Posy knows of a very reliable agency in London—he would be doing a tremendous good deed.

  “Okay,” Fred said as they stood in front of a long perennial border covered by a mulch of clean shredded bark, from which neat clumps of crocus and grape hyacinths emerged. “Okay, I’ll try.”

  It won’t be easy, though, he thinks now, imagining Rosemary as he had left her a quarter of an hour ago, lying upstairs in what Posy calls the Pink Room. Its oversize bed has a carved and gilded headboard padded in flowered satin, and a matching quilted spread is drawn up in loose folds to Rosemary’s breasts. She is wearing a nightgown of delicate ivory silk with semitransparent lace insets in the shape of butterflies scattered over it; her white-gold hair falls in fine tendrils across pale-pink scalloped sheets. The pink-silk-shaded bedside lamp casts a blush over her creamy skin, and over the rococo furniture painted in pink and silver, the French fashion plates on the walls, and the silver vase of narcissus on the dressing-table. It also illuminates a confusion of spilt powders and creams on this dressing-table and a shipwreck of discarded clothes on the Aubusson carpet.

  No, it won’t be easy to change Rosemary’s ways. She hates talking about “boring practi
cal things” and isn’t capable of concentrating on any subject for long. She is—and for Fred it’s part of her charm—a creature of sudden, random impulse. He sees her as a rare beautiful lacy butterfly like those which decorate her nightgown, fluttering and hovering, dancing near and then away, difficult to catch hold of for more than a moment.

  Her present withdrawal, however, is not idiosyncratic. Going to bed when it isn’t bedtime—or at least saying that you are going to bed—is, Fred has discovered, a habitual and respectable social strategem among the British. To declare fatigue without obvious cause isn’t, as in America, to confess physical and/or emotional weakness. Instead, “having a bit of a rest” or “lying down for a while” provides a polite excuse for social withdrawal—one that is more effective here than it would be at home, since even here married people usually have separate bedrooms. And the English, at least those Fred has met lately, seem to need and want more solitude than Americans do. Now, for instance, at six in the evening, all Lady Billings’ other guests are—as far as he knows—shut up alone in their rooms. After he left Rosemary, Fred tried to stay in his, but restlessness and claustrophobia brought him downstairs again. If it weren’t drizzling and nearly dark, he would have gone out into the gardens.

  There are three weekend guests at Posy’s besides Fred and Rosemary. One is Edwin Francis, the editor and critic, who is almost effusively affectionate to Rosemary and Posy, but speaks to Fred as if he were interviewing him on television, with a pretense of respectful attention that often seems designed to provoke humor at his expense. (“So it was generally known that Mr. Reagan had appeared in a film in which his co-star was a chimpanzee? Yet you say that many members of your college voted for him. How do you explain this?” “Your current project then, I assume it is much influenced by the French school of demolition, excuse me, deconstruction.”)