by Alison Lurie
“Not a very nice hotel, I should imagine,” says Vinnie.
“Uh, no. It’s not specially nice. It’s called the Majestic, but it’s kinda yucky really. How did you know?”
“Because they always are. And what are you planning to do while you’re here?”
“I d’know. I haven’t thought, really. Look at some tourist attractions, I guess. I’ve never been to England before.”
“I see.” The thought comes to Vinnie that she ought to do something about Barbie; that it’s what Chuck would have wanted. She tries to remember some of the things he’d told her about his daughter, but all she can recall is that Barbie’s keen on animals. There’s the Zoo, of course—But the idea of another visit to the Zoo—where only a few weeks ago she was so happy watching the polar bear that looked like Chuck—upsets and depresses Vinnie so much that she can’t bring herself even to mention it.
“Well, so long, then,” Barbie says awkwardly. “Oh, thanks.” She accepts the ugly umbrella, which Vinnie has closed for her since it is no longer raining. “Thanks for everything, Professor Miner. Have a nice day.”
No, Vinnie thinks, shutting the door behind Barbie. It’s too bad what Chuck would have wanted. There’s nothing she can do for someone who, on an occasion like this, would say “Have a nice day.” And hasn’t doing things for other people caused most of the trouble and disruption and pain in her life? Yes, but it has also caused most of the surprise and interest and even in the end joy. Does she, for instance, really wish that she’d never lent Chuck Mumpson that book on the plane?
She begins mechanically to clear away the tea things, thinking of Chuck—that all the time she knew him he had been ill, and had known he was ill. That’s why he’d told Professor Gilson he wanted her to have the picture of Old Mumpson “if anything happened to him.” He knew something might happen to him; all these months he had been living under a kind of death sentence, but failing to take any of the precautions that might have commuted it. He didn’t put much faith in doctors; he had said that to her more than once, the stupid, unlucky . . . Vinnie has to put down the plate she is rinsing and catch her breath. She is shaken by pity for Chuck, living on the edge of a cliff all this time, and knowing it—and shaken by fury at him for deliberately walking so near the edge, for not taking decent care of himself.
And of her too, she thinks suddenly. Because he could very well have died right here in this flat, with a glass of whisky dropping from one big freckled hand and a smoldering cigarette falling from the other as he pitched heavily, fatally, onto her carpet.
Or worse. Vinnie stares out the window, letting water splash unheeded over the rim of the sink. He could have died in her bed, on top of her. She recalls vividly how red Chuck’s face got—with passion, she had thought; how he gasped at the climax—she had thought, with pleasure. Why did he keep taking that chance? How could he do that to her? Is that why he never told her he was ill, fearing, and perhaps rightly, that if she’d known she might never had let him . . . All those times . . .
Miserable, furious, even frightened—though the danger, of course, is past—without knowing exactly what she is doing, Vinnie turns off the faucet and, holding the colander she has been washing, walks back through the flat into her bedroom. She stands staring at the double bed, now smoothly covered by its brown-and-white flowered comforter, so often before stirred into a whirlpool of sheets. The last time Chuck was here, she suddenly recalls, he hardly smoked at all. He was trying to give it up, he had told her. And he hadn’t drunk anything to speak of either: only one glass of soda with a little white wine. He must have decided to live, he must have wanted to live—
But if Chuck really wanted to live, why did he go on making such passionate love to her? Wasn’t that just plain stupid?
No, Vinnie thinks. Not stupid on his terms, because that was one of the things he had wanted to live for. He loved me, she thinks. It was true all the time. What a horrible bad joke, that after fifty-four years she should have been loved by someone like Chuck, who on top of everything else that’s wrong with him is dead and scattered on the side of a hill somewhere in Wiltshire: If she’d believed him; if she’d known; if she’d said—
A wave of confused memory and feeling churns up inside her; still clutching the wet colander in one hand, she falls onto the bed, weeping.
“Rosemary? Oh, she’s fine now, really.” Edwin Francis says, helping Vinnie to more shrimp salad. It is a warm afternoon a week later, and they are having lunch in his tiny, beautifully tended Kensington courtyard.
“Really?” Vinnie echoes.
“I saw her two days ago, just before she left for Ireland, and she was in top form. But I don’t mind telling you, it was a near thing.”
“Really,” she says, with quite another intonation.
“Now this mustn’t go any further.” He pours them both more Blanc de Blanc, then looks hard at Vinnie. “I wouldn’t say anything even to you, but I want you to understand the situation, so you’ll see how important it is for us to be very very discreet.”
“Yes, of course,” Vinnie says, becoming a little impatient.
“You see, there have been, mm, other episodes in the past . . . Well, nothing quite like this, but Rosemary often gets . . . well, a bit odd when she isn’t working steadily.”
“Oh?”
“It’s no joke, really, you know, always having to be a lady. Or a gentleman, if it comes to that. The best of us—and I do believe, in a way, that Rosemary is one of the best—might find it a strain.”
“Yes,” Vinnie agrees. “It must have been rather difficult for you,” she prompts, since Edwin remains silent.
“Well. Initially. Then . . . Well, as it happens, there’s this extremely gifted doctor—Rosemary’s seen him before, actually. He was tremendously helpful. Luckily, she has a complete amnesia for most of the worst period.”
“Really.”
“Yes. You know, drink does that sometimes. She doesn’t remember Fred’s coming round to the house at all, for instance.”
“I suppose that’s just as well.”
“Oh, I think so. A mercy, the doctor said. But you mustn’t say anything about any of that to anyone. Seriously. Promise.”
“Of course, I promise,” Vinnie says. The British hush-hush attitude towards psychotherapy is something that, in spite of her Anglophilia, she has never quite understood. Eccentricity, even eccentricity of a sort that would be designated “sick” in America, is admired over here. Men who dress up like Indian chieftains and hold pow-wows, women who keep fifty Siamese cats in royal splendor, are written up admiringly in the newspapers. But ordinary neurosis is denied and concealed. If you consult a psychologist, it is something to be hidden from everyone while it is going on and forgotten as soon as possible afterward.
If Rosemary were an American actress, Vinnie thinks, she would already be in therapy, and would refer with easy familiarity to “my analyst” on every possible occasion. She might very well give interviews about her problems with drinking. And her split personality—if in fact it was really split, and not just an act—would be discussed on talk shows and celebrated in People magazine.
“And you mustn’t say anything to Fred, either. Let him think it was all theatrics. Have you heard from Fred, by the way?”
“Yes, I had a letter—well, a note. He wanted to tell me that he and his wife have reconstructed their marriage, as he put it.”
“Really.” Edwin rises and begins to clear the garden table. “And is that a good thing?”
“Who knows? Fred seems to think it is.” Vinnie sighs; she has a deep distrust of marriage, which in her observation has an almost irresistible tendency to turn friends and lovers into relatives, if not into foes.
“It’s just as well really that he couldn’t get in touch with Posy,” Edwin says a little later, returning from the basement kitchen with a plate of fruit and another of macaroons. “She would have coped magnificently, of course, but she’s not as discreet as she might be . . .
Please, help yourself. I especially recommend the apricots.
“I had my suspicions about Mrs. Harris all along, you know,” he continues. “She simply sounded too good to be true.”
“Yes, I thought Rosemary was improving the story sometimes,” Vinnie says. “Or do you mean—do you think there never was any Mrs. Harris?”
“I do, rather. It’s hard to imagine Rosemary doing her own housework, though. I expect she just went on hiring those part-time people—only rather more of them, perhaps, so that Fred would stop complaining of how the place looked.”
“But Fred saw Mrs. Harris at least once. He told me so.”
“Yes, well . . . You know, Rosemary’s always been annoyed that she’s so narrowly typecast. She’s convinced she could play working-class characters, for instance, only no one will ever let her.”
“But she was scrubbing the hall floor, Fred said. I can’t believe—”
“You have to remember her training. She always gets tremendously into her parts. Almost carried away, sometimes. When she’s taping Tallyho Castle, for instance, she starts to have this frightfully gracious lady-of-the-manor manner. I can easily imagine her washing a floor just to get the feel of it.”
“Ye-es.” Vinnie is aware that Edwin is skillfully rationalizing and diminishing what would otherwise seem highly neurotic or even psychotic behavior. “But I think there must have been someone like Mrs. Harris for a while,” she insists. “Even if that wasn’t her real name. I spoke to what I thought was Mrs. Harris on the telephone twice at least. She’d have to be an awfully gifted actress.”
“Oh, she’s gifted,” Edwin agrees, carefully skinning a ripe peach with one of his ivory-handled Victorian fruit knives. “She can imitate just about anyone. You should hear her do your cowboy friend, Chuck what’s-his-name. How is what’s-his-name, by the way?” he adds, changing the subject with his customary deftness. “Is he still digging for ancestors down in Wiltshire?”
“Yes—no,” Vinnie replies uncomfortably. Though she has been at Edwin’s for nearly two hours, and spoken to him earlier on the phone, she hasn’t dared to mention Chuck. She knows it will be nearly impossible for her to tell the story without falling apart as she has been falling apart at intervals for the past ten days. But she plunges in, beginning with Barbie’s telephone call.
“So the wife and the son couldn’t make it to England,” Edwin remarks presently.
“No. Of course, it’s just a convention that when someone dies you have to hurry to the fatal spot. It doesn’t actually do them any good.”
“I suppose not. Still, it does give one a certain opinion of Chuck’s relatives.”
“It does.” Vinnie continues with her story. Several times she hears a tell-tale wobble in her voice, but Edwin seems to notice nothing.
“So there’s some corner of an English field that is forever Tulsa,” he says finally, smiling.
“Yes.” Vinnie strangles the cry that rises in her.
“Poor old Chuck. Rather awful to go out like that, so unprepared and sudden and far from home.”
“I don’t know,” Vinnie says, lowering her head and pretending to be spitting out a grape-seed to conceal her face. “Some people might prefer it. No fuss, you know. 1 think I’d rather have it that way myself.” She imagines herself dead, and her ashes scattered like Chuck’s over a hillside field that’s she’s never seen and never will see. A longing comes over her to look upon that place; to visit the grotto where Old Mumpson lived, the cottage in which Chuck and his ancestors slept; to talk to Professor Gilson and his students about Chuck. And she could do all this . . . Nothing prevents her from doing it except a sense of the hopeless ridiculousness of such an excursion.
“Not me.” Edwin helps himself to the last of the macaroons, of which he has already had more than his fair share. “When I die, I want it to be in my own bed, with flattering interviews in the papers and tearful farewell visits from all my friends and admirers. I want to be prepared for it, not just hit over the head.”
“Well, Chuck should have been prepared,” Vinnie says. “The doctor told him not to drink or smoke; he told him to be careful, his daughter said, but he wouldn’t listen. Climbing three flights of stairs on such a hot day! It really makes me furious. And he probably had a cigarette and a drink in some pub before that. So stupid of him.” Realizing that she has spoken with more feeling than is appropriate, Vinnie gives a false laugh.
“Poor old Chuck,” Edwin says again. “He was quite a character, wasn’t he? Do you remember . . .”
Yes, Vinnie thinks as Edwin relates his anecdote; for her London friends Chuck Mumpson was a character, a comic type—not a real person. And she, who had known him better and should have known better, had put off going to him in Wiltshire not only because she was afraid to trust herself to any man, but because she didn’t want to be associated with him in their minds or even in her own. It was as if, in her blind Anglophilia, she had even taken on what are said to be the characteristic English weaknesses of timidity and snobbishness—neither of them, in fact, particularly characteristic of those English she knows best.
“Still,” Edwin concludes, “I did rather like him, didn’t you?”
“No,” Vinnie is extremely surprised to hear herself say. “I didn’t ‘rather like Chuck,’ if you want to know. I loved him.”
“Really.” Edwin moves his chair back from the table, and incidentally away from the force of Vinnie’s statement and perhaps its content.
It’s true, Vinnie thinks. Chuck had loved her, and—she says this to herself with surprise and difficulty—she had loved him. “Yes.” She meets his stare, his insulting slight smile.
“Well, we did all rather wonder sometimes,” he says at last. “But I never really thought you—” He recollects his manners and breaks off. “I do understand,” he says in another tone, consoling and sympathetic. “These things happen. As I know all too well, you can love someone you don’t admire—love them passionately, even. Of course that’s not very nice for either of you.” A cloudy, fixed look comes over his small neat features; he stares past Vinnie and the orderly little courtyard with its clean white gravel and clipped roses, into the part of his life that she has always preferred to know nothing of.
“But I did admire Chuck,” Vinnie says, realizing the truth of this as she speaks.
“Really. Well, no doubt he was admirable, in his own way. One of nature’s noblemen.”
“I—” Vinnie begins, and chokes herself off. The patronizing phrase enrages her, but she doesn’t trust herself to speak without screaming or crying. And after all, what right has she to scream at Edwin for thinking as she had thought for months?
“Well,” he says, splashing the last of the wine into their balloon glasses. “We mustn’t judge everyone by our own silly standards. I suppose we ought to learn that at our mother’s knee.”
“I suppose so,” says Vinnie, thinking that she did not learn it then, and that if she had, her whole life might have been different. “How is your mother, by the way?” she adds, hoping to divert Edwin.
“Oh, very well, thank you. Her arthritis is much better—one good effect of this frightful heat.”
“That’s nice.” To Vinnie the day is only pleasantly warm, but she is used to the British intolerance of temperatures over seventy-five degrees.
“If she stays well, I’m thinking of giving a little luncheon for her next week; I hope you’ll be able to come.”
“I’m not sure,” Vinnie says. “I may be going down to the country this weekend, and if I do I won’t be back until next month.”
“Oh dear. Really?”
“I’m afraid so,” says Vinnie, who is as surprised by her declaration as Edwin is.
“And when are you leaving for the States?”
“On the twentieth, I think it is.”
“Oh, Vinnie. You can’t possibly. That’s very naughty of you.”
“I know. But you see I’ve got to get ready for my fall term.”
“Come on, now. That’s ages away.”
“Not in America it isn’t.” Vinnie sighs, thinking of her university’s academic calendar, revised recently to save on fuel bills. Classes now start before Labor Day, and by August 24 known and unknown advisees will be fidgeting in her office.
“Besides, you’ve only just come.”
“Silly.” She smiles. “I’ve been here since February.”
“Well, good. Anyhow, I think of you as living here always. Why don’t you?”
“I certainly would if I could.” Vinnie sighs again, well aware that she cannot possibly afford to quit her job and move to London.
“Never mind. I’ll make the most of you now. Let’s have some coffee. And I’ve got a rather shameless strawberry mousse; I hope you have room for it.”
An hour later Vinnie is on her way back to Regent’s Park Road in a taxi, feeling somewhat overfed. Ordinarily she would have taken first one and then another tube train, but an extravagant impulse came over her. If she does go down to Wiltshire—and she realizes that she’s probably going to, ridiculous as that is—she’ll be in London so little longer; why should she waste any of her remaining time here underground? Especially on an afternoon like this one, when everything seems to shimmer with light and warmth: the trees, the shop windows, the people on the pavement. Why does London look so marvelously well today? And why does she feel for the first time that she’s not only seeing it, but is part of it? Something has changed, she thinks. She isn’t the same person she was: she has loved and been loved.
The taxi turns into the Park, and Vinnie gazes out the open window at the smooth green lawns, the nannies with their carriages, the gamboling children and dogs, the strollers, the joggers, the couples sitting together on the grass: all these fortunate people who live in London, who will still be here when she is alone and exiled in Corinth. Even Chuck, in his own way, will be here forever. The cold nauseous ache of past and coming loss squeezes her heart, and she shivers in the heat.
As they swing east into the Bayswater Road she leans back against the seat, feeling tipsy, tired, and low. She thinks again how inconsiderate and wrong it was of Death to come for Chuck just when he had begun to want to live. Then she thinks how inconsiderate and wrong it was of her not to have agreed to visit him in Wiltshire that last weekend. Chuck wouldn’t have gone to look for the De Mompessons then, or climbed those stairs in the Town Hall.
