by Alison Lurie
The trouble is, she does know where Fred is, or at least where he soon will be: on the highest part of Hampstead Heath with the Druids. But she certainly can’t go out at this time of night and look for him there. Nobody would expect her to do that. Let events take their course. Vinnie turns off the sitting-room lights and begins to prepare for bed.
No, most people Vinnie knows certainly wouldn’t expect her to go to Hampstead Heath. But one person would, she thinks as she sits on the side of her bed with one shoe off and one on. Chuck Mumpson would take it for granted that she’d go, without even stopping to consider the great inconvenience and even possible peril of such an excursion. And when he hears that she hadn’t delivered Ruth March’s message, he will stare at her in a surprised unhappy way, as he did once when she said she’d never met a dog she liked. She can see exactly how his face will look, and hear his voice. “You mean you didn’t even try?” it says. “Aw hell, Vinnie.”
Vinnie returns to the sitting room and turns on the lights. She unfolds her bus and Underground maps and opens her A to Z. Getting to Parliament Hill, as she suspected, would be a real chore. The London Transport Authority has made it easy for her to shop at Selfridges, consult a doctor in Harley Street, or see friends in Kensington; but it hadn’t conceived that she or any well-bred resident of Regent’s Park would ever wish to visit Gospel Oak, and little provision has been made for such a journey. She’ll have to walk all the way to Camden Town Station, take a bus or the Underground to Hampstead, and then tramp another mile or more across the Heath. And after she finds Fred—if she finds him, which is unlikely—it will be too late to return by the same route; she’ll have to pay for a taxi home.
She refolds her maps, thinking how expensive and tiring and difficult, if not dangerous and impossible, it would be to find Fred Turner on Parliament Hill at midnight; how easy and satisfying it will be to stay home and cause lasting pain and grief to a close relative of L. D. Zimmern. As for Chuck, he needn’t ever know. But at the same time she finds herself putting her shoes back on; taking her passport, bank card, and all but five pounds and some change out of her wallet as a precaution against pickpockets and muggers; and getting her new raincoat out of the closet—for though it is a warm summer night it may be cool and windy up on the Heath.
Even at past eleven Regent’s Park Road is familiar and reassuring, with only a few respectable-looking people walking dogs, or on their respectable way home. But as Vinnie crosses the intersection and starts down the Parkway toward the center of Camden Town her breath comes tighter. It is the worst time of night now, just after the pubs close; and numbers of the homeless unemployed men who hang about Camden Town have been released onto the street in a drunken and confused and possibly violent condition. She sets her mouth and walks faster, turning her head away as she passes each moldy figure or group of figures, ignoring remarks that may or may not be directed to her; once crossing the street to avoid two especially dubious-looking individuals lounging in a dark doorway, thinking that each step she hammers onto the pavement with her size 5 heels is another step further away from comfort and safety.
When Vinnie reaches the town center, rather out of breath, there are no buses at the stop, and no one waiting for them. She scurries into the station, though it hardly seems much of a refuge. It is a disagreeable place at any time of day, with a cold blast of air always rising from below and the loud, loose, continuous death rattle of the antique wooden escalator. Three scruffy young men shove their way onto the moving stairs ahead of Vinnie, glancing at her in an unfriendly, possibly threatening way. Utterly against her better judgment, she steps on behind them. At the bottom, however, without a backward glance, they disappear down a corridor.
Vinnie takes the opposite tunnel, descends the stairs, and waits for the train to Hampstead. How horrid the dark holes at each end of the platform are: they suggest that something huge and nasty is about to come rushing out of them, heading for her. A stupid thing to think, almost mad. Is it perhaps some vestigial folk-memory trace, some lingering Jungian subconscious dread of caverns and giant slimy serpents?
What does finally come out of the cavern, of course, is a train: ordinarily no danger but a kind of sanctuary. The London Underground is usually in all respects the opposite of the New York subway: well lit, warm, relatively clean, and full of harmless passengers. The car Vinnie enters, however, is less reassuring. It is almost empty, littered with old newspapers, and dimmed by some fault in its electrical system. Well, she has only three stops to go; fifteen minutes at the most.
But after Belsize Park, as sometimes happens on the Northern Line, the train slows, shudders convulsively, and grinds to a halt. The engine dies; the lights blink and dim further. There are only two other passengers in the car, both male, sitting alone at the other end across from each other. One, younger, stares angrily at the floor; the other, older, seems half drunk or half asleep or both.
In the sudden silence another Jungian monster can be heard far off, roaring through distant tunnels. Vinnie stares at her own smudged reflection in the opposite window, and then at the notice above it, which recommends a poison for blackbeetles. As the minutes pass, she begins to feel that time has stopped; that she will never reach Hampstead or anywhere else, that she will sit on this seat forever.
If it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, she wouldn’t be here. If he had never existed, he wouldn’t have had a quarreling inconsiderate daughter for Fred Turner to marry. Fred would have married some other much nicer girl, who would not have quarreled with him, who would have come with him to London. He would never have had an affair with Rosemary Radley, and Rosemary would never have insulted Vinnie in a taxi.
It is Zimmern who should be here now, imprisoned in time on an almost empty half-lit train. Vinnie imagines him sitting across from her under the advertisement for blackbeetles, looking rather like a blackbeetle himself. She imagines how as the minutes lengthen toward hours the insects so graphically depicted above Zimmern’s head will begin to crawl out of the poster and down the window frame toward him, how they will crawl in procession onto his shoulders and arms and neck and head; how he will try to brush them off, but it will do no good, for more of them will come out of the picture, and more and more. Zimmern cries out for help, but Vinnie only sits looking steadily at him, watching what happens to him, willing it to happen . . .
The lights blink brighter; the image of L. D. Zimmem fades and vanishes. The engine gives a drunken hiccup and begins to hum. Finally, with a jolt, the train starts off.
Hampstead, when Vinnie reaches it, is at first unthreatening. A blurred haze of interlocking street lights hangs over the High Street, which is well populated with harmless-looking pedestrians, and here and there an illuminated shop window. But the side streets are empty and silent. Now and then she hears the echo on the pavement of some other late walker’s tread, and occasionally a car rushes past her. At East Heath Road she halts, gazing at the path opposite, which disappears between overhanging heavy trees into acres of windy darkness. Really, to venture onto the Heath at this hour would be plain stupidity, just asking for it. The only sensible thing is to turn around and go home now, while the Underground is still running.
Impelled by this idea, Vinnie starts back down Well Walk. “I tried,” she says in her mind to Chuck Mumpson, “But the Heath was pitch-black, and I really didn’t want to get myself mugged.” “Aw, come on, Vinnie,” his voice replies. “You got this far, you can do it. You just gotta have a little gumption.”
All right, damn it, she says to him, turning round again. But as she crosses the road and starts onto the Heath her heart begins to pound warningly. A hazy, pale, nearly full moon is just clearing the trees, and the sky is a strange fluorescent smoke-red. In the fitful night breeze every stooping bush, every overhanging tree is a moving presence; and there are other, worse presences: voices and figures. Vinnie keeps stupidly walking on, feeling more and more frightened and angry at herself for having come, swerving away from every blowing
leaf or strolling couple, thinking how insane it is for her to be wandering across Hampstead Heath in the middle of the night on this wild-goose chase. Who knows if she can find the goose Fred Turner on Parliament Hill, among the drifters and tramps and thieves that may be—probably certainly are—prowling about there in the dark? Who knows if she can even find Parliament Hill?
And whether or not she is robbed and injured on this foolish excursion, Vinnie realizes, there is a more certain, though more intellectual danger: the danger that her vision of London will be injured, even destroyed. So often she has boasted to her American friends that this is a benign and nonviolent city, in which her flat may be burgled when she is away, perhaps (not that this has ever happened), but she herself will never be attacked or threatened; a city where even a small woman in her fifties can go out alone at night in perfect safety. If she really believes this, why is her pulse so fast, her breathing so tight? What if it isn’t true, never has been true? How long is it since she was last alone in an unfamiliar part of London at midnight?
It is not only L. D. Zimmern’s fault that she is here, but Chuck Mumpson’s. If it weren’t for Chuck, she would be safe at home now, probably already asleep. And if she is attacked and murdered tonight on Hampstead Heath, he won’t even know what she was doing there; no one will. Vinnie almost wishes she hadn’t ever met Chuck Mumpson, or even heard of him. But it is too late for that now, So she walks on, as fast as possible, across the shadowy grassy common, under the watery moon.
At the summit of Parliament Hill, near a thicket of bushes and trees, a small and rather scattered crowd has gathered to watch for the Druids. Among them are Joe and Debby Vogeler and Fred Turner. None of them feels the least anxiety about being out on the Heath at midnight, but their minds are not at ease. The Vogelers are a bit worried about Jakie, whom they have left with a sleepy-looking teenage babysitter. Fred, though he is actively trying not to think of it any more, is silently haunted by the overlapping images of Rosemary Radley and Mrs. Harris. What has happened to her/them since yesterday afternoon? Where/how is/are she/them now?
Awful scenarios flicker before him of Rosemary/Mrs. Harris staggering round her house in a drunken, schizophrenic state, or dead of a broken neck at the foot of her graceful curving (but slippery) staircase. Also of her quite happy and well, laughing with friends at a dinner party, relating what a clever trick she’d played on boring old Fred: pretending to be her own charlady, pretending to be drunk. It had been so easy to fool him, she says: he was like that silly rude clerk who wouldn’t charge her groceries, and then complained about not being able to recognize Lady Emma Tally in jeans and a sweater. Maybe he’ll never know which scenario is right, or what really happened to him yesterday. He still hasn’t been able to reach Rosemary or any of her friends, and in twelve hours he’ll be on a plane to New York.
Fred is also brooding about his uncompleted book on John Gay. The directness and brilliant energy of Gay’s work, to which he had been so strongly attracted, now seem to him a façade. The more he studies the texts, the more ambiguity and darkness they reveal. It strikes him now with greater force than before that everyone in The Beggar’s Opera is dishonest; even Lucy, its heroine. Its hero, the highwayman Macheath, named after the common on which Fred now stands, is nothing more than an urban mugger on horseback, and cheerfully false to all his women. London in Gay’s time was filthy, violent, corrupt—and it hasn’t changed all that much. The streets are still dirty, the newspapers are full of crime and deception—in low-rent districts, mostly, but is it basically any better elsewhere? Who in this town gives a shit about anything except using one another and getting ahead?
Fred also compares himself, unfavorably, with Captain Macheath. The women in his life hate rather than love him; and if he is presently to perish it will not be like Macheath for what he has done, but for what he has failed to do: specifically, for his failure to write and publish a scholarly work.
Apart from their anxiety about Jakie, the Vogelers’ mood is cheerful. In the last few weeks—ever since the weather became really warm—their view of England has altered. They still don’t care much for London; but a trip to East Anglia, where their Canadian friends have been lent a cottage, has given them a passion for the English countryside. “It’s like being back in the nineteenth century, really,” Debby enthuses. “Everybody in the village is so friendly, not like here in London, and they’re all such perfect characters.”
Next month, Joe tells Fred, they and the Canadians are planning to rent a boat and cruise on the canals. “It’s too damn bad you have to leave tomorrow, otherwise you could come along. It’s going to be great.”
“Yeh, it sounds like fun,” Fred says, thinking to himself that being confined for a week on a canal boat with the Vogelers and their friends, not to mention Jakie, isn’t his idea of great. While their opinion of contemporary England has improved, his has worsened. Everywhere about him now he sees all that they used to complain of: the meaningless imitation and preservation of the past, the smug hypocrisy, the petty regulations, the self-conscious pretense of refinement and virtue. London especially—like Rosemary—seems to him alternately false and mad. He wishes it were already tomorrow evening and he were back home where he belongs, though Christ knows nothing much awaits him there. Roo never answered his telegram; she’s probably off him for good.
Because of his height Fred is one of the first to see the Druids approaching up the path from the east: a procession of maybe two dozen persons hooded and robed in white, many of them carrying lanterns of antique design. At a distance, climbing the dark hill in the hazy moonlight, they are mysterious, even moving: numinous ghostly figures from the prehistoric past come back to life.
Joe and Debby suck in their breath, and Fred, awed in spite of himself, thinks a kind of prayer at the Druids and whatever supernatural powers they may be in touch with—in much the same spirit in which, as a child, he used to wish on a white horse and a load of hay. Make everything come out right, he whispers silently.
But as the Druids draw nearer, the illusion, like so many of Fred’s illusions about England, wavers and is shattered. At close hand these figures are undeniably modern, middle-class, and middle-aged or worse. Under their loose monkish hoods are long smooth pink-and-white English faces of the kind Fred used to see every day at the British Museum; they wear solemn self-conscious expressions and, in many cases, glintingly anachronistic spectacles. And beneath their long robes is an assortment of leather and plastic sandals, only a few pairs of which could pass even on stage as Early British.
The Vogelers don’t seem to be disturbed by these incongruities, or even to notice them. “Hey, this is great,” Joe says as the procession continues past them and forms into a straggly circle before the clump of trees that crowns Parliament Hill.
“Really pretty impressive,” Debby agrees; and in an almost reverent whisper she points out that many—in fact more than half—of the celebrants are female. Druidism is a gender-neutral faith; she read that in the Guardian.
Joe isn’t so sure. Maybe that’s the way it is now, he whispers back, but weren’t all the original Druids men?
Whatever the truth of the matter, Fred thinks as the Vogelers continue to debate the point sotto voce, these modern London Druids are patently phony and amateurish. The elbowy gestures with which their leader flourishes his ceremonial sword are awkward and unconvincing, and so are those of the two bespectacled women waving leafy branches toward the four points of the compass. The fragments of liturgy blown toward Fred on the night wind suggest an Edwardian rather than an Anglo-Saxon religious service; the manner of delivery reminds him of college productions of Greek drama. There’s something almost mad about them too, he thinks, as the Druids raise their lanterns aloft in semi-unison, chanting a hymn to what sounds like The Great Circle of Being in thin well-educated voices, and incidentally revealing a large number of anachronistic wristwatches and trouser legs.
Fred turns away, disgusted with this mummery, and
with all the phoniness that surrounds him as far as his eye can see, from Bloomsbury to Notting Hill, from the lights of Highgate in the north to Chelsea in the south, and further.
As he stares toward Hampstead Village he sees another, even stupider-looking Druid climbing the path, coming from the wrong direction and obviously late for the show. At the crest of the hill she halts, peering anxiously about at the crowd of spectators; then she trudges on, wavering this way and that as if uncertain whether or not to approach her fellow-worshipers. Her welcome seems doubtful to Fred, for she is not only late but ill-equipped. She has forgotten her lantern; and small as she is her hooded robe is far too short; it doesn’t reach the ground by almost a foot, and exposes a pair of modern pumps.
Yes, Fred thinks as the foolish figure drifts nearer, this is what England, with her great history and traditions—political, social, cultural—has become; this is what Britannia, that vigorous, ancient, and noble goddess, has shrunk to: a nervous elderly little imitation Druid—
No. Wait a second. That isn’t a Druid, or even an Englishwoman. It is Vinnie Miner.
Eight hours later Fred is sitting on the front steps of Rosemary’s house in Chelsea, surrounded by all his luggage. Or maybe not all; when he jammed stuff into his canvas backpack early this morning he was still groggy from a second night of interrupted sleep. But if he’s forgotten anything, it’s too late now; his plane leaves from Heathrow at noon.
Though tired, Fred is in a far better frame of mind than he was last night. He knows now that Roo is waiting for him in New York; and he has managed to pass on his anxiety about Rosemary first to Vinnie Miner and then, with her help, to Edwin Francis, who is back from Japan and staying in Sussex with his mother.
