Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  “Heavens, no,” Edwin replies soothingly, with the complacent tolerance of the well fed. “We all of us know how little use warnings are with Rosemary; they only incite her. When she rushed off to Tuscany with that painter, Daniel what’s-it, everyone warned her, but it simply made her more determined.”

  “Well then. What could I possibly do?” She laughs.

  “I think you just might speak to Fred.” Though Edwin continues to smile, it is clear from the way he pushes his coffee aside and leans over the blue-and-white checked tablecloth that he is not entirely jesting. “I’m sure he’d listen to you. Considering your position at his college. You could try to persuade him to—what would be his phrase?—cool it, before there’s too much damage done.”

  The idea that she might use her academic seniority to persuade persuade—blackmail would be a more accurate word—Fred into breaking off his love affair is disagreeable. Vinnie enjoys wielding her hard-won professional authority, but only in professional matters. Unlike Edwin, she feels a strong dislike, almost a revulsion, from the idea of meddling in anyone’s private life.

  “I could, I suppose,” she says, sitting back away from him. “But I certainly am not going to.”

  A March afternoon in St. James’s Square. In what she has determined by experiment to be the most comfortable and best lit of the chairs in the London Library Reading Room, Vinnie Miner sits working. Unless she needs some volume available only in the British Museum, she prefers to study in these quiet, elegantly shabby surroundings, which for her are agreeably haunted by the shades of writers past and the shapes of writers present. It is easy for her to imagine the portly, well-dressed spirit of Henry James climbing the stairs in a dignified manner, or that of Virginia Woolf trailing limp crushed twenties silks between two shadowy bookstacks. And almost any day she might see Kingsley Amis, John Gross, or Margaret Drabble in their still incarnate state. Many of her friends, too, use the library; there is almost always someone around to lunch with.

  Vinnie’s scholarly research is nearly complete. As soon as it stops raining and warms up a bit she can begin the more exciting part of her project: collecting playground rhymes in city and suburban schools. Already she has spoken to a number of principals and teachers, some of whom have not only given her permission to visit, but volunteered their help in recording rhymes, or even made this part of a classroom project. Here in Britain, she doesn’t have to educate the educators; her interest in folklore is seen as natural and respectable. All that remains is to wait for the weather to improve.

  By now Vinnie has more or less forgotten her unpleasant flight to Britain and—most of the time—that hateful article in the Atlantic. So far, no one she knows here has mentioned it; probably no one has even seen it. To help ensure this, since many of her friends regularly use the London Library, on her first visit she took the precaution of removing the March issue of the Atlantic from the top of its pile in the reading room and sliding it under a stack of Archaeology nearby. From time to time the magazine reappears; then she hides it again. One sign of the moderation of her distress is that this morning she merely moved the March issue to the bottom of the heap of Atlantics. As she did so, she imagined L. D. Zimmem as shrunken to about six inches high and crushed flat between the pages of his own article, a kind of unattractive paper doll, staining the paper with a thin sepia smear. It also occurred to her, as it has before, that she might slip the magazine into her canvas shopping bag, sneak it out of the library, and destroy it at her leisure. But all her training is against this final solution. Magazine-burning, in Vinnie’s mind, is nearly as bad as book-burning; besides, in the same issue there is a really excellent article on vanishing wildlife, which many people might enjoy.

  The only thing that disturbs her at the moment is her conversation with Edwin Francis at lunch yesterday. Mentally reviewing it, she is not quite comfortable in the most comfortable chair in the reading room. She is annoyed at Fred Turner, and feels—quite illogically, she realizes—that he is somehow responsible for a slight but definite coolness between her and her oldest London friend and for the fact that Edwin and she had parted yesterday without making plans to meet again. Fred has also somehow deprived her of an apricot tart with whipped cream—a treat that seems even more desirable today after a pub lunch of wafer-thin salmon-paste sandwiches and a rubbery Scotch egg. Why should she be involved in the affairs of some junior colleague whom she hardly knows? If Fred needs to be recommended for a grant, very well; if he wants to have a frolic with a mutual acquaintance, it is no concern of hers. At the same time, Vinnie is uncomfortably aware that if Fred did ask for a recommendation now, it would take some effort to respond with disinterested good will.

  Her mistake had been asking him to her party in the first place. In the past, instinct has always warned Vinnie to keep her American colleagues and her English friends apart. She has suspected that if they did meet, they would probably fail to appreciate or would even dislike one another, and that this dislike might rub off on her, staining both existing relationships (“I just don’t understand Vinnie. How could she possibly care for someone like that?”). In one or two cases she had almost disregarded her intuition, but after consideration decided not to risk it. As Edwin once said, social life is like alchemy: mixing foreign elements is dangerous. Last month she had broken her rule for a mere junior colleague; and instead of disliking each other Fred and Rosemary Radley apparently liked each other too well. Trouble either way.

  Originally Vinnie had never meant to invite Fred to anything. She knew he was in London, of course—she had seen him several times in the British Museum. She knew he was alone here, having somehow misplaced his wife, though she had no idea how he had done this; one seldom does know personal details about the junior members of one’s department, though there is, in Vinnie’s opinion, more than enough gossip about one’s contemporaries. It had never occurred to her to feel sorry for Fred because he had no spouse with him: after years of detached observation, she doesn’t think that much of marriage.

  The whole thing was an accident, really. One gusty wet afternoon, on her way home from a luncheon party, Vinnie had stopped in a grocery store in Notting Hill Gate and run into Fred, who lives nearby. He was looking windblown and damp, and buying two sickly greenish oranges and a can of the wrong kind of vegetable soup for his supper. Vinnie felt an irritated, uncharacteristic concern. At home, except for her students and very close friends, she seldom does anything for anyone else if she can help it; she simply hasn’t the energy. But here was a junior member of her own department, hungry and lost in a foreign city. In Corinth she would have passed him by with hardly a nod; but in London, where she is a different, nicer person, the unfamiliar conviction came to her that she ought to do something about him. Well, I suppose I could ask him to my party next week, she thought. He’s presentable enough.

  Too presentable, almost. There is something overfinished about Fred’s looks that reminds Vinnie of the Arrow Collar Man in the advertisements of her childhood—though that isn’t his fault, heaven knows. He doesn’t dress up or act up to his appearance: he wears ordinary, even colorless preppie-professor clothes and has unremarkable good manners. All the same, his appearance sometimes annoys people, especially men: Vinnie remembers the hostile, jocular remarks that were made after his MLA interview. It was lucky for Fred that he had already published two solid articles and was in the eighteenth century, where good candidates are scarce.

  Fred’s handsomeness hadn’t saved his marriage either, Vinnie thinks. That wasn’t so hard to understand, perhaps. Such looks arouse false expectations: the noble exterior is assumed to clothe a mind and soul equally great—the Platonic fallacy. Whereas inside Fred, as far as Vinnie can tell, is simply an ordinary, reasonably intelligent young man who knows something about the eighteenth century. Besides, one might get tired of striking, continual beauty after a while, just as one might get tired of being struck continually.

  Even as she issued the invitation, Vinnie had re
grets. But at the party Fred caused her no anxiety. She noticed that he didn’t spend much time talking to Mariana’s punk daughter and her angry-looking boyfriend—well, who could blame him for that? He ate a good deal, which was understandable considering the financial difficulties suggested by the vegetable soup and his rather desperate inquiries about how one could get Corinth paychecks cashed without a four-week delay. (No way, is the answer.)

  Later on at her party Vinnie had noticed that Fred was part of the circle around Rosemary Radley; but then there is always a circle around Rosemary. She has the knack of becoming the center of a group without seeming to dominate it that, Vinnie supposes, any successful actor must possess. Her sphere of influence is rather small—only a few feet in diameter—as you might expect of someone who works mainly in television and films. She cannot, like some stage performers Vinnie has met, effortlessly focus all attention in a large room; but within her range she is invincible. And this somehow without holding forth on any topic, retailing gossip, wholesaling personal confessions, or saying anything especially clever or shocking—anything, really, that would have been out of character for the roles she plays on camera.

  Professionally, Rosemary’s specialty is ladies: highborn women of every historical period from classical Greece to modern Britain. She doesn’t portray queens or empresses: she isn’t sufficiently regal or monumental for that. She is extraordinarily pretty rather than in any sense beautiful: pink-and-white-and-gold like a refined Boucher; her features are agreeable but small and unemphatic. What she mainly projects is elegance and breeding—comic, pathetic, or tragic according to the demands of the script—and a sweet, airy graciousness. She is frequently in work, since ladies are overrepresented in British television drama, and is often praised in reviews as one of the few actresses who is totally convincing as an aristocrat. It is sometimes mentioned that this is not suprising, since she is really Lady Rosemary Radley, her father having been an earl.

  Rosemary’s private life is generally believed to be unsatisfactory. She has been married twice, both times briefly and unhappily and without issue; now she lives alone in a large beautiful untidy house in Chelsea. Of course some people say it is her own fault that she’s alone: that she is impossibly romantic, asks too much (or too little) of men, is unreasonably jealous, egotistical/a doormat; sexually insatiable/frigid; and so on—the usual things people say of any unmarried woman, as Vinnie well knows. In all this, Rosemary has Vinnie’s sympathy. But, somehow, not her trust.

  It is Rosemary’s charm that Vinnie doesn’t trust: the silken flutter and flurry of her social manner; her assumption of a teasing, impulsive intimacy which yet holds its victim at arm’s length. For instance, when someone new comes within her range, Rosemary will often compliment that person extravagantly on some quality or attribute nobody else would have fixed on, or perhaps even noticed. She will declare that she adores some acquaintance, or a cousin, or her greengrocer or dentist, because they are so marvelous at arranging roses, or speak so slowly, or have such curly hair. She always makes this announcement with an air of wondering discovery to everyone who is within listening range, and without regard to whether its subject is sitting next to her or is miles away.

  At a luncheon of Edwin’s once, for instance, she sang out during a pause in the hubbub that she really loved the way Vinnie’s friend Jane ate salad. It was no use asking what she meant by that, as Jane discovered. Even if you could get her attention again, which was never easy, Rosemary would only toss back the pale-gold waves of her hair and give her famous laugh—like sunlight sparkling on crystal, a besotted television reviewer had once written—and cry, “Oh, I can’t explain! It’s just—so—wonderful.” And if, as occasionally happened, someone else offered an interpretation, Rosemary would either ignore them or protest that it wasn’t that at all. She couldn’t bear to have her butterfly enthusiasms—or, possibly, her antipathies—analyzed, pinned down.

  When they heard—or heard of—Rosemary’s paean to their unique qualities, most people were pleased, because it’s agreeable to be loved and adored, even casually; and because Rosemary was pretty and well known. Even if they didn’t have the least idea what she meant, there was something awfully attractive in the manner of its delivery. Indeed, some of those who hadn’t ever thus been complimented, like Vinnie, began to feel a little left out.

  Others, however, were made uneasy. One can for instance picture Rosemary’s dentist alone in his surgery after his famous patient has left. He twists the magnifying mirror attached to his dental unit toward him and frowns into it. Is there really something unusually lovable about the way his hair curls behind his ears? Or is there, on the other hand, something odd about it, something ugly and bizarre? Had Lady Rosemary been laughing at him?

  For days after Edwin’s party, Jane said, Rosemary’s encomium kept sliding into her mind and nagging at her. Finally one day she took a container of leftover salad out of her fridge and went and stood in front of the dining-room mirror, peeled back the plastic wrap, and watched herself eating the spicy oil-soaked lettuce leaves and soggy slices of tomato, trying to discover what was so damned adorable about it, or so different from the way most people ate salad. What on earth had Rosemary meant?

  The truth was, Vinnie told her, Rosemary probably hadn’t meant anything. It was just nonsense off the top of her head, a way of focusing attention on herself or changing the topic of conversation, perhaps—a musical noise, that was all. Words don’t matter to actors as they do to a literary person. For them meaning is mainly in expression and gesture; the text is just the libretto, a line of empty glasses that the performer can fill with the golden or silver or bronze liquid of his or her voice. At drama schools, Vinnie has heard, they teach you to say “Please close the door” twenty different ways.

  In any social network there are always some people who are as it were “friends” by social compulsion, though if the net fell apart they would seldom or never see each other. It is thus with Vinnie and Rosemary. Because of Edwin they meet fairly often, and always behave on these occasions as if they were perfectly delighted, but they don’t like each other very much. At least, Vinnie does not like Rosemary; and she senses that the feeling is mutual. But nothing can be done about it. Vinnie imagines their social network, or perhaps “web” is more like it—fine-spun, elaborately joined, strung across the rainy city from Fulham to Islington, anchored by isolated threads in Highgate and Wimbledon. She and Rosemary are points of intersection in the web, held there now by many silken twisted strands. If they were to break off cordial relations it would leave gaping sticky holes, distressing to everyone. And they are probably not the only two thus unwillingly joined, Vinnie thinks. Still, the web holds, and spreads its elastic, dew-spangled pattern over London: that is the important thing.

  The fading light on the pages of her book tells Vinnie that it is time to leave if she wants to avoid the homebound crowds. Outside the London Library the air is cold, damp, with rain suspended in it rather than falling. Realizing that she is still hungry, and the cupboard in her flat bare of delicacies, she turns up Duke Street and into Fortnum and Mason’s. A clerk in formal morning dress, resembling an Edwardian banker, approaches her with discreet whispered offers of assistance, which she politely declines. No; really it would be foolish to buy anything here; the prices are ridiculous. As she stands debating before a Tower of Babel of international jams and jellies, a much louder voice, much less refined—in fact, blaringly mid-American—hails her.

  “Wal, hey! Aren’t you, uh, Professor Miner?’

  Vinnie turns. A very large man is grinning at her; he wears a semitransparent greenish plastic raincoat of the most repellent American sort, and locks of graying reddish-brown hair are plastered to his broad, damp red forehead.

  “Metchoo on the plane last month. Chuck Mumpson.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agrees without enthusiasm.

  “How’s it going?” He blinks at her in the slow way she recalls from the flight.

  It
? Presumably, her work. Or life in general, perhaps? “Very well, thank you. How about you?”

  “Oh, doing okay.” There is no enthusiasm in his voice. “Been shopping.” He holds up a damp-stained paper shopping bag. “Stuff for the folks at home, wouldn’t dare go back without it.” He laughs in a way that strikes Vinnie as nervous and unreal. Either it is in fact the case that Mr. Mumpson would be afraid to return to his “folks” without gifts, or, more likely, the remark is just an example of the debased and meaningless jesting common among half-literate middle Americans.

  “Hey, glad I ran into you,” Mumpson continues. “Wanted to ask you something; you know this country lots better than I do. How about a cup of coffee?”

  Though she isn’t especially glad that Chuck Mumpson has run into her, Vinnie is moved by the appeal to her expertise and the prospect of immediate refreshment. “Yes; why not.”

  “Great. A drink’d be more like it, but I guess everything’s shut now, crazy regulations they have here.”

  “Until five-thirty,” Vinnie confirms, glad for once of the licensing laws. She doesn’t care for city pubs, and would especially not care to be seen drinking in one with someone dressed like Mumpson. “There’s a tearoom here in the store, but it’s awfully expensive.”

  “No sweat. I’m taking you.”

  “Well. All right.” Vinnie leads the way past elaborate ziggurats of biscuits and candied fruits and up the steps to the mezzanine.

  “Hey, did you see those guys?” Mumpson says in a loud whisper, jerking his head back at the small table at the head of the stairs where two Fortnum’s employees in Regency dress are having tea and playing chess. “Weird.”

  “What? Oh, yes.” She moves on to a more polite distance. “They’re often here. They represent Mr. Fortnum and Mr. Mason; the founders of the store, you know.”