Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  Annoyed, she tries to calm her, speaking slowly and firmly as she would to an anxious class. “Of course you’re not alone. You have so many friends, so many beaux, I’m quite sure—”

  “That’s what you think, my dear. You think a lot of men want to sleep with me. I used to think that myself.” Her voice alters. “Bloody little fool that I was. Men don’t want to sleep with me, they want to have slept with me. They want to be able to tell their mates, ‘Oh, Lady Rosemary Radley, the television star? Yes, I do know her. In fact, I knew her very well, at one time.’ “Rosemary has slipped into a third voice: tenor, smarmily insinuating.

  “That’s how they all are, the bastards,” she continues, her accent shifting again. “Except for Freddy. Freddy knew I was an actress, but it didn’t mean fuck-all to him. He’d never even heard of Tallyho Castle before he met me. I thought all you Americans were mad about British TV, but he didn’t even own a set, for Christ’s sake. He never even saw the show, he loved me anyhow.” Rosemary is sobbing now, her face distorted in a way it never becomes when she weeps on camera. “But he’s a bastard like the rest of them.”

  The taxi is in Oxford Street now, snarled in a skein of other vehicles. From either side their drivers and passengers, with the covert but avid interest of the British in personal disaster, regard the drunken and weeping woman from whom they are separated by only a sheet of glass.

  “He keeps on phoning my service, but I don’t dare see him or talk to him. I bloody couldn’t take it, Vinnie, unless I knew he was coming back for good, I—” Rosemary breaks off, perceiving that she has an audience.

  “Yah!” she screams suddenly, turning with an ugly face and a coarse gesture to the nearest spectator, a portly well-dressed man in an adjoining taxi. He flinches visibly, then turns away with an unconvincing attempt at casualness.

  Rosemary laughs wickedly, almost hysterically. Then she flings herself across the cab and repeats the performance at Vinnie’s open window, horrifying a young woman at the wheel of a Mini. “Yah, you nosy bitch! Why don’t you mind your own business!” She flops back into her seat, grinning. The pale silk cocoon of her cape has been sloughed off by all this activity, and lies crumpled on the seat beneath her; and what has emerged from it, Vinnie thinks, is not a butterfly.

  The light changes, the taxi jolts ahead. Rosemary turns to her and says in a light sweet voice, “Next time you happen to see Mr. Frederick Turner—”

  “Er-yes?”

  “You might be kind enough to give him a message from me. Would you do that?” Her manner has become exaggeratedly gracious, almost caressing.

  “Yes, of course,” Vinnie agrees, bewildered and even a little frightened by these rapid histrionic changes.

  “I’d like for you to tell him, mm—Please tell him, would he be kind enough to stop telephoning me, and writing to me”—her voice alters again—”and just bloody well go screw himself.”

  “Now really, Rosemary. You don’t mean—”

  “Now really, Vinnie. That’s exactly what I do mean,” Rosemary interrupts, caricaturing Vinnie’s intonation and accent. “I’ve had it with all you fuckin’ Americans,” she goes on in the other voice, the coarse cockney Vinnie has heard somewhere. “Why don’t you stay home where you belong? Nobody wants you comin’ over here, messin’ up our country.” She waves at the souvenir shops and hamburger bars with which this portion of Oxford Street is disfigured. The loose, excessive gesture and grimace are those of a low-comedy stage character—of a music-hall charlady, say—of Mrs. Harris. Yes. That’s where Vinnie has heard this voice before: once or twice on the phone when she called Rosemary, and often at parties when Rosemary, telling some story, had imitated Mrs. Harris.

  “It wasn’t me,” she starts to protest, with a strained laugh, trying to treat Rosemary’s performance as a joke—which after all it must be. “I certainly never wanted—”

  “Of course not,” Rosemary interrupts smoothly. “Tell me something, Vinnie. How old are you?”

  “Uh, I’m fifty-four,” replies Vinnie, who makes a point of answering this question accurately.

  “Imagine that.” Rosemary smiles sweetly. “I would never have guessed it.”

  “Thank you.” She is pleased in spite of herself, and somewhat mollified, “It’s just because I’m small, really.”

  “You know what’s so wonderful about you, Vinnie?”

  “Er—no.” Vinnie smiles expectantly.

  “I’ll tell you what’s so wonderful about you.” It is Mrs. Harris’ voice again, speaking through the pink sweet-pea lips of Rosemary Radley. “You’re fifty-four years old, and you look sixty, and you don’t know fuck-all about life.”

  The taxi has, with many stops and starts, negotiated the turn into Portman Square, and is halted next to a bed of yellow parrot tulips. Seizing the opportunity, Vinnie mumbles something about having to be home by seven-thirty, shoves the door open, and flees.

  Not looking back, she makes her way hazardously through the traffic toward the 74 bus stop, walking too fast and breathing painfully hard, but congratulating herself on having had the nerve to get out of Rosemary’s taxi and escape from her drunken insults. Messing up our country. Fifty-four, and you look sixty. Standing on the curb, she shivers with rage and pain. She shouldn’t have sat there and taken it, she should have said—But Vinnie can’t think what she should have said. And after all, what’s the point of arguing with a drunk?

  Of course Vinnie has never liked Rosemary, and probably Rosemary doesn’t like her. It’s not as if they’d ever been friends. Vinnie’s real friends don’t like Rosemary very much either, except for Edwin, and even he admits that she is self-indulgent and erratic, though he excuses it because she’s an artist, an actress—as if that were any excuse, Vinnie thinks, with another spasm of fury.

  She’s always thought there was something unpleasant about the art of acting, Vinnie remembers as she reaches the bus stop; something unnatural, really, in the ability of certain persons to assume at will a completely alien voice and manner. She has felt this often at the theater, where she is never really comfortable, however entertained or moved she may be. The mimicry of other living beings is a nasty business; the more successful the imitation, the more there is essentially something horrible and uncanny in it.

  Uncanny; literally so, because it overturns our belief in the uniqueness of the individual, Vinnie decides as she stands waiting for the bus in a queue of half-a-dozen women of varied ages and walks of life, any one of whom Rosemary might presumably if she chose become, as she had a few minutes ago become Vinnie Miner. Again she hears what was supposed to be her own voice coming out of Rosemary’s mouth: “Now really, Vinnie—” Does she always sound like that, so pert, nasal, and schoolmistressy? Of course no one likes his own voice; she remembers embarrassing moments with her tape recorder. Then she wonders whether Mrs. Harris has ever heard Rosemary’s impersonation of Mrs. Harris. Somehow she doubts it—a woman of her sort wouldn’t stand for that; she would fly into a rage, she would curse out Rosemary or maybe even smack her, the way Vinnie would have liked to.

  Histrionic talent such as Rosemary’s has other dangers besides the hostility of those who are mimicked, Vinnie thinks, breathing more normally now. It’s possible to play a part once too often; actors can be typecast, so that they have to go on being silly ingenues or strong-silent detectives for years. Sometimes they become so identified with a role that it gradually usurps their own shallower and less defined personalities—in private as well as in the public eye.

  Edwin was right, she tells herself as the tall red bus approaches. He saw what was happening before he left for Japan: he said that Mrs. Harris was a bad influence. And now, from imitating her as a parlor trick, Rosemary has progressed to the point where, when her own rather weak ego is blurred by alcohol, the strong but disagreeable personality of her charlady takes over and says things Rosemary herself would never say, or probably even think. Because surely she doesn’t think that Vinnie is personally messin
g up London and knows fuck-all about life.

  Yes, that’s an interesting theory, and a nice, reassuring one, Vinnie says to herself as the 74 bus grinds north toward Regent’s Park. But isn’t it more likely that Rosemary, however drunk, meant what she said? That her jealous rage at Fred spilled over onto Vinnie, and the real truth came out? But what she really thinks of Vinnie—what all her friends—maybe everyone in London—think of Vinnie couldn’t be properly expressed by anyone as sweet and charming and refined as Lady Rosemary Radley. To say it she had to become, and because she is an actress could become, a coarse, ill-tempered, vindictive person like Mrs. Harris.

  When she reaches her flat, Vinnie’s impulse is to go to bed and hide. But she resists it; she isn’t really tired or ill, just angry and miserable and headachy. She doesn’t feel up to going out again, even just up the road to Limonia to have supper with her cousins. She distrusts the world: people she has never done any harm to—or (as in the case of L. D. Zimmern) even met—are walking around in it wishing her ill. She decides to telephone her cousins and excuse herself. But before she can find the number of their hotel, her phone rings.

  “Hi, honey, this is Chuck.”

  “Oh, hello. How is everything in Wiltshire?”

  “Great. I’ve got a heap to tell you. You remember that picture of the grotto with the Hermit of South Leigh that Colonel and Lady Jenkins showed me when I first came down here?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Wal, I’ve been trying to get ahold of a copy, and this guy in Bath just came up with one. Not the whole book, just that etching, but it’s hand-colored and in great condition.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  “And yesterday we found a stone on the dig with real interesting carvings; Mike thinks—” Chuck expounds; Vinnie, holding the phone with one hand and her headache with the other, listens, making appropriate noises. “So it looks like—Hey, Vinnie. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Oh yes, thanks,” she lies.

  “You sound kinda low.”

  “Well. Perhaps a little. A rather upsetting thing happened this afternoon.” Though she hasn’t meant to, Vinnie finds herself relating her encounter with Rosemary, omitting only the characterization of her own appearance.

  “Weird,” is Chuck’s comment. “Sounds to me like she’s having some kinda crackup.”

  “I don’t know. It could easily have been deliberate. After all, Rosemary’s an actress. Probably she just doesn’t like Americans. And I expect she never did like me very much.” In spite of herself, Vinnie’s voice wavers.

  “Aw, baby. It’s rough to be cursed out like that. I wish I was there; I’d make you feel better.”

  “I’m all right, really. It’s just that it upset me, the way she kept changing voices.”

  “Yeh, I get what you mean. Myrna used to do something like that. She’d be screaming at me or the kids, or maybe the help, practically out of control. Then the phone would ring, and she’d answer it sweet and smooth as soft ice cream, talking to some client or one of her lady-friends. Just as easy as switching channels. It used to spook me.”

  “I can understand that. You wonder which one is real.”

  “Yeh. Wal, no. I never wondered that.” Chuck laughs harshly. “Listen, honey. Maybe what you need is to get out of London for awhile. I mean, you don’t hafta be back home till late August, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Wal, I was thinking. There’s a lotta folklore down here in Wiltshire. All these books and manuscripts and stuff in the historical society, I was looking at some of them the other day. And there’s schools here of course, and kids. There oughta be lots of rhymes you could collect. I was thinking, maybe you could come down and stay with me for the summer. There’s plenty of room for you to work here. I’d really like that.”

  “Oh, Chuck,” Vinnie says. “That’s kind of you, but—”

  “Don’t decide now. Think about it awhile. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Vinnie repeats.

  Of course she can’t spend the whole summer in Wiltshire, she tells herself after she has hung up; she doesn’t want to leave the London Library and all her friends. But a short visit—several visits, even—that might be possible. And that way she could see Chuck every day, and every night, without anyone in London knowing about it. Yes, why not?

  While she wasn’t watching it, Vinnie’s headache has dissolved. She feels able to go out to dinner after all.

  10

  * * *

  “Why dost thou turn away from me? ’Tis thy Polly—”

  John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera

  IN Notting Hill Gate, Fred Turner is packing to return home. It is midsummer, and London is in full bloom. Tall horse chestnuts press their green hands and creamy candles of blossom against his windows, and through them a hazy vanilla light seeps into the room, transfiguring its scratched wooden furniture, turning its paint-clogged Victorian woodwork and flowery plaster ceiling decorations into confections of whipped cream. The air is warm and windy, the sky beyond the trees a deep, still blue.

  Fred, however, sees little of this. His mood is gray, flat, icy, and bitter as a brackish winter pond. In less than two days he will be gone from London, without having finished his research, seen Rosemary again, or heard from Roo. More than two weeks have passed since he cabled an answer to his wife’s letter: but though his message included the words LOVE and CALL COLLECT, there has been no answer. He had waited too damn long, or Roo never wanted him back in the first place.

  As for his work, it is in a dead funk. He goes through the motions of scholarship, reading primary and secondary sources, copying down quotations from Gay’s work and from eighteenth-century critical essays, contemporary records, and true-crime narratives, patching them together somehow into a kind of whole, but it is all false and forced. Everything Fred puts into his two battered canvas suitcases reminds him of failure, of waste. Stacks of notes—skimpy and disordered compared to what they should have been—half-empty notebooks, blank three-by-five-inch index cards. Unanswered letters, including one from his mother and two from students asking for recommendations which should have been dealt with weeks ago. A favorite snapshot of Roo at fourteen with a pet rabbit, taken by her with her first time-release camera; the innocent warmth of her smile, the openness, the trust, wrenches his heart: this Roo has never loved him or any man, never been hurt by him—A great lump rises in Fred’s chest; he turns the photograph face down, sets his jaw, goes on with his packing.

  Paper, envelopes, manila folders, all unused, mutely accusing. Programs for plays, operas, and concerts he’d attended with Rosemary—why the hell is he still saving these? Fred shoves them in the overloaded wastebasket. The long handwoven tan cashmere scarf that Rosemary gave him for his birthday, winding it round and round his neck with her own hands. A square of pocket mirror with the mauve-pink imprint of her mouth on it, commemorating their first kiss. They had just finished lunch at La Girondelle in the Fulham Road, and Rosemary was renewing her lipstick. Fred, suddenly realizing that they were about to part, leaned over the table toward her, saying something impulsive, passionate. She glanced up, smiling slowly and wonderfully, then blotted her open mouth on the glass to avoid smudging his. How charming, how thoughtful, he had marveled. Later he had put his hand on her wrist to stop her from returning the bit of mirror to her handbag, claiming it as a souvenir. Now it has another meaning: before she kissed him, Rosemary had kissed herself.

  Stop thinking about it, Fred tells himself. It’s over, for Christ’s sake; he’s leaving London the day after tomorrow and he will probably never see Rosemary Radley again. Also, as he realized this morning when he emptied his closet, he will never see again his Ragg sweater from L. L. Bean, his blue chambray workshirt, his Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, and his spare toothbrush and razor, all of which he left at Rosemary’s before the day of her party.

  But he can’t stop thinking about it. Angry as he is at Rosemary, he hasn’t been able to
forget her. Several times in the last two weeks, against his better judgment, and giving himself the lame excuse that he just wants to pick up his sweater, shirt, etc., he has dialed her number. Most of the time it rings on and on, unanswered, though once Mrs. Harris picked it up, growled out, “Nobody home,” and slammed down the receiver. He also tried the answering service, where a falsely refined female voice always informed him that Lady Rosemary was “out of town.” A warble of amused condescension the last time he called suggested to Fred that the female voice knew all about him; that as soon as he hung up she would turn to other females and say: “Guess who just phoned Lady R again, the moron; when will he smarten up?” Though he left his name, Rosemary never called back.

  Suppose he were to leave the message that he wasn’t going back to America, would Rosemary call him then? Yes, maybe, Fred thought. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for. Or maybe not. It has occurred to him that in a way their love affair has reenacted Anglo-American history. Rosemary may have loved him, but she has the colonial mentality; she would do anything for him but grant him independence. When he demanded that, it was war.

  Partly in order to stop himself from telephoning Rosemary again and leaving this self-destructive message, Fred has just had his phone cut off. His other, more rational motive was to save money. As it is, he’s going home dead broke, and in debt on both sides of the Atlantic.

  He shuffles through a pile of letters from relatives and friends, consigning most to the wastebasket. Among them is a postcard from Roberto Frank in Buffalo. The reverse of the card is a painting from the Albright-Knox Gallery by Sir Joshua Reynolds: Cupid as Link Boy, 1774—selected because of Fred’s interest in the period, he had assumed. Now he looks at the picture more closely.