Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  “Well. I’ll try,” says Fred reluctantly.

  “I knew I could count on you.” She stops at the bottom of the stairs and smiles up from under her golden mane, which from this angle looks almost too thick, too perfectly curled—almost like a wig. Maybe it is a wig; maybe underneath all that hair Posy Billings is bald or stubble-headed, as her eighteenth-century ancestors along the corridor probably were under their powdered headpieces.

  “Here you are.” She swings open a door, admitting a gust of cold, dark air. “Now there’s the way down to the lake, where we were this afternoon, you remember?”

  “I think so.”

  “Very good.” As Edwin has remarked, there is an authoritarian, even a military tone to Posy’s manner. “Here’s a torch, but I don’t expect you’ll need it, it’s quite light out. You can almost see the boathouse from here, just past those big pines. And the rain’s cleared off nicely. A lovely night, really. Off you go, now.”

  Fred starts down the path. It doesn’t seem like a lovely night to him. In the circle of light at his feet the gravel is loose and wet; when he points the torch upward he can see the two-hundred-year-old topiary hedges, dark and dripping, on either side. The fanciful shapes of pigeons, peacocks, owls, and urns seem distorted, almost sinister. In the sky above is a lopsided yellowish moon with a pale greasy ring around it, like a badly fried egg It is bright enough, however, for Fred to circumnavigate the pines and make out the boathouse, a crouching structure of pebblestone with a deep overhanging roof and its feet in inky water.

  “Yes?” William opens the door a cautious crack. He is still wearing the baggy knickers and plaid kneesocks in which he portrayed an uncultured schoolboy, and has a rough hairy brown blanket, perhaps the one which earlier was part of the cow, round his shoulders. He looks guilty and disreputable, like some old crazed tramp caught hiding in the outbuildings of an estate. “What did you want?”

  “I brought your things.” Fred decides that if he ever, God forbid, has an affair with a married woman, he won’t set foot in her house, not so much on pragmatic or moral grounds as on aesthetic ones.

  “Oh, thank you very much.” William opens the door just enough to admit his bag. He doesn’t invite Fred to come in, and Fred doesn’t want to come in.

  “Well, see you,” he says, turning away.

  From the lake Posy’s house looks unnaturally tall and somehow misshapen; an effect perhaps of its elevation, the shadows and shrubberies that surround it, and the fried-egg moonlight. As Fred walks slowly back up the path past the giant dark vegetable birds and urns, he becomes conscious of a strong impulse not to reenter this house; to hike instead into the nearest village and find a bed for the night somewhere (at the pub, maybe?) and take an early train or bus into London in the morning.

  But of course he can’t do that, it would be rude and crazy; and besides there’s Rosemary. He can’t leave her alone with two posturing queers and a bossy adulteress whose hair looks like a wig—though only an hour ago he thought it was all beautiful, the real thing.

  James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier; or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James’ prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was just like now . . .

  Because, after all, isn’t Rosemary the classic James heroine: beautiful, fine, delicate, fatally impulsive? She thinks of Posy and Edwin as her best friends; she is too generous to see them as they are, too lighthearted and trusting. She needs other, better friends—better in both senses—friends who will shield her from scenes like tonight’s—

  Well, isn’t that what he’s here for, the sterling young American champion James himself might have provided? For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel, and again it is dizzying, exhilarating. He laughs out loud and plunges into the blackened shrubberies, toward the house.

  5

  * * *

  The Devil flew from north to south

  With (Miss Miner] in his mouth,

  And when he found she was a fool

  He dropped her onto [Camden] school.

  Old rhyme

  VINNIE MINER is sitting on a bench in a primary school playground in Camden Town, watching a group of little girls skipping rope. It is a windy April afternoon; gray and white clouds like jumbled soapy washing slosh across the sky, sending alternate brightness and shadow over her notebook. She already has a thick folder of rhymes recorded in this school and several others; but as a contemporary folklorist she is interested not only in texts but in the cultural settings in which they occur, how they are passed on and by whom, the manner of their delivery, and their social function. So far today she has seen and heard nothing strikingly new, but she isn’t disappointed. She has spoken to one class and collected material from this and from two others, concentrating her efforts on the ten- and eleven-year-olds who are usually her best informants: younger children know fewer rhymes, and older ones are beginning to forget them under the pernicious influence of mass culture and of puberty.

  Overall, Vinnie’s working hypothesis about the differences between British and American game rhymes has been supported. The British texts do tend to be older, in some cases suggesting a medieval or even an Anglo-Saxon origin; they are also more literary. The American rhymes are newer, cruder, less lyrical and poetic.

  More complex analysis will come later; she can see already, however, that violence is common in the verses of both countries, something that wouldn’t surprise any trained observer and doesn’t surprise Vinnie, who has never thought of children as particularly sweet or gentle.

  Polly on the railway

  Picking up stones;

  Along came an engine

  And broke Polly’s bones.

  “Oh,” said Polly,

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Oh,” said the engine-driver,

  “I don’t care.”

  How many bones did Polly break?

  One, two, three, four . . .

  The chant continues, repeats itself; the rope revolves, a vibrating blur in the air, enclosing an ellipsoid of charmed space. Within it a child jumps, her long hair blown out, the gray pleated skirt of her school uniform fanning wide above thin knobby legs in gray wool stockings. Her expression of unselfconscious concentration, skill, and joy is repeated on the face of the girl next in line, who is already bobbing to the scuffed beat of oxfords on damp tarmac. As Vinnie watches, her strongest sensation—far stronger than professional interest or a shiver whenever the sun skids under a cloud—is envy.

  Since she is an authority on children’s literature, people assume that Vinnie must love children, and that her own lack of them must be a tragedy. For the sake of public relations, she seldom denies these assumptions outright. But the truth is otherwise. In her private opinion most contemporary children—especially American ones—are competitive, callous, noisy, and shallow, at once jaded and ignorant as a result of overexposure to television, baby-sitters, advertising, and video games. Vinnie wants to be a child, not to have one; she isn’t interested in the parental role, but in an extension or recovery of what for her is the best part of life.

  Indifference to actual children is fairly common among experts in Vinnie’s field, and not unknown among authors of juvenile literature. As she has often noted in her lectures, many of the great classic writers had an idyllic boyhood or girlhood that ended far too soon, often traumatically. Carroll, Macdonald, Kipling, Burnett, Nesbit, Grahame, Tolkien—and the list could be extended. The result of such an early history often seems to be a passionate longing, not for children, but for one’s own lost childhood.

  As a little girl Vinnie too was unusually happy. Her parents were good-tempered, fond of her, and comfortably circumstanced; her first eleven years were passed in agreeable and varied semirural surroundings. It was no handicap not to be be
autiful then, and all children are small. Vinnie was clever, energetic, popular. Though her size prevented her from excelling at most sports, she gained authority through her self-confidence and her good memory for games, rhymes, riddles, stories, and jokes. She loved everything about those years: the hours in the classroom and on the playground; the thrilling exploration of overgrown vacant lots, alleys, woods, and fields; the visits to stores and museums; the picnics and summer trips to the mountains or seaside with her parents. She loved the books—indeed, she still prefers children’s literature to most contemporary adult fiction. She loved the toys, the songs, the games, the Saturday matinees at the neighborhood movie house, the radio programs (especially “Little Orphan Annie” and “The Shadow”). She loved the round of holidays, from January first—when she helped her parents toast the baby New Year in nonalcoholic foamy eggnog—to Christmas with its elaborate family ceremonial and gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins.

  Then suddenly, when Vinnie was twelve, her parents moved to the city. In her new school she was skipped a grade, and found that she had lost everything important to her in life and become a disadvantaged adolescent—an undersized, pimply, flat-chested, embarrassingly plain “grind.” The pain of this transformation is something she has never quite got over.

  As it turned out, though, Vinnie didn’t have to relinquish childhood forever. No one really has to, she believes, and often declares. The message of all her lectures and books and articles—sometimes explicit, more often implied—is that we must, as she puts it, value and preserve childhood: we must “cherish the child within us.” This isn’t of course an original theme, but one of the basic doctrines of her profession.

  The cloudy laundry overhead has thickened; the school building, a castellated structure of sooty Victorian brick, intercepts the declining sun. The skipping rope ceases to define its magical space, falls limp, becomes only a length of old clothesline. As the little girls prepare to leave, Vinnie consults with them to check on some of the textual variations she had heard; she thanks them, and writes down their names and ages. Then she puts away her notebook and follows the children’s route across the chilly, darkening playground, wrapping her coat closer, looking forward to her tea.

  “Hey! Hey, missis.” The girl who has accosted her is standing against the smoke-stained, graffiti-scrawled brick wall of the narrow passage that runs past the school to the street. She is older than the children who were jumping rope—perhaps twelve or thirteen—skinny, and poorly dressed in a semi-punk style. A soiled once-pink Orion cardigan is pinned together over her school uniform skirt and a red-and-black T-shirt advertising some rock group. Her complexion is bad; her cropped hair has been dyed a nasty shade of pale magenta, and resembles the synthetic fur of those stuffed toys that are won—or more often not won—at Bank Holiday fairs.

  “Yes?” Vinnie says.

  “I got somethin’ to tell you.” The girl grabs a fold of Vinnie’s coat sleeve. “My sister says you’re wantin’ rhymes. Rhymes you wouldn’t tell the teachers.” She grins unattractively; her teeth are chipped and irregular.

  “I’m collecting all sorts of rhymes,” Vinnie says, with a professionally friendly smile. “What I told your sister’s class was that there might be some they wouldn’t want to recite in public, because they weren’t very polite.”

  “Yeh, that’s what I mean. I know a lotta those.”

  “That’s nice,” Vinnie says, repressing her desire for tea. “I’d like to hear them.” The girl is silent. “Would you like to say some for me?”

  “Maybe.” A precocious shrewdness twists the spotty unformed features. “How much you paying?”

  Vinnie’s first impulse is to break off the conversation. No child or adult has ever before proposed to sell material to her; the very idea is unseemly. Folklore by nature is free, uncopyrighted—as a Marxist colleague says, it’s not part of the capitalist commodity system—and this for Vinnie is part of its glory. But it’s possible that this unpleasant little girl knows some interesting, even unique rhymes; and Vinnie has learnt in over thirty years never to turn down material, or judge the value of the text by an informant’s appearance. Besides, God knows the child looks as if she could use the money.

  “I don’t know.” She laughs awkwardly. “How about fifty pence?”

  “Okay.” The reply is animated, almost avid. Vinnie realizes she’s offered much more than was expected. She gets out her notebook and pen; then, noticing the child’s suspicious stare, she rummages in her purse. When she first came to England, the old silver coinage was still in use; the new octagonal fifty-pence piece, once she finds it, looks more than ever like some sort of cheap medal. Britannia, sitting between her lion and her shield, seems shrunken, defensive.

  And where is Vinnie to sit? Reluctantly she lowers herself onto the only available horizontal surface, a ledge of dirty-looking cement alongside the school building.

  Clutching the coin, the mauve-haired girl darts down the alley to scan the now-empty playground, then back in the other direction toward the street. Perhaps it was all a begging trick, Vinnie thinks. But after surveying the scene the child sidles back up the passage.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Just a moment, please.” Vinnie opens her notebook. “Could you tell me your name?”

  “Wha’ for?” The child takes a step back.

  “It’s just for my records,” Vinnie says in a reassuring tone. “I’m not going to tell anyone.” This isn’t strictly true: in her published work she always identifies and thanks her informants, and over the years more than one child, coming across Vinnie’s books or articles later, has written to thank her in turn.

  “Uh. Mary, uh, Maloney.”

  The manner of delivery makes Vinnie certain that this is not the child’s name; but she writes it down. “Yes. Go ahead.” “Mary Maloney” bends toward her and says in a hoarse whisper:

  “Mother, mother, mother pin a rose on me,

  Two little nigger-boys are after me,

  One is blind and the other can’t see,

  So mother, mother, mother pin a rose on me.”

  It would be idle to pretend that Vinnie likes this rhyme. But since she has never heard it before she records the lines and then, as is her custom, reads them back for confirmation.

  “Yeh. You got it.”

  “Thank you. Would you like to say another one?”

  Mary Maloney slouches against the sooty bricks above Vinnie, mute. The ripped hem of her skirt hangs down on one side; she wears sagging pink bobby socks and scratched red plastic clogs, and her thin white legs are prickled with gooseflesh. “You want more, you gotta pay for more,” she whines.

  Now it is Vinnie’s turn to be silent; the sordidness of the transaction has overcome her.

  “I betcha you’ll get more brass ‘n that when you sell my stuff.”

  “I don’t sell these rhymes.” Vinnie tries to say this pleasantly, to keep both distaste and rebuke out of her voice.

  “Yeh? What d’you do with them, then?”

  “I collect them, for, uh”—How can her life’s work be explained to a mind like this?—“for the college where I teach.”

  “Oh yeh?” The girl gives her the look one gives a liar whose bluff one has decided not to call. It is clear that she believes Vinnie to be collecting dirty rhymes for some dubious, even perverse purpose. It also seems likely that for enough money she would sell Vinnie, or anyone else, anything they wanted—that she would say and do horrors. “Okay.” A peeved sigh. “Tenpence.”

  Now that she is in so far Vinnie feels somehow constrained to go on. She reopens her purse and extracts another tinny, debased coin. Mary Maloney leans closer, so close that Vinnie can see the dark, dandruff-clogged roots of her synthetic mauve hair, and smell her sour breath.

  “I wish I wuz a seagull,

  I wish I wuz a duck,

  So I could fly along the beach

  And watch the people fuck.”

  Vinnie’s pen pauses in
its transcription. She likes this verse even less than the preceding one: not only is it vulgar, it contradicts her thesis. A few more of these and her theory about the difference between British and American playground rhymes will be down the tube, as they say here.

  “Thanks, that’s enough,” she says, shutting her notebook on the unfinished rhyme and rising to her feet. “Thank you for your help.” She gives a tight smile. A cold wind has begun to scour the darkening playground and funnel through the passageway, blowing shreds of paper rubbish with it.

  “Hey, I ain’t finished.” Mary Maloney follows her out into the street.

  “That’s all right; I have enough now, thank you.” Vinnie begins to walk down Princess Road; but the girl follows closely, clutching at her coat.

  “Hey, wait! I know lots more rhymes. I know some really dirty ones.” Mary Maloney presses nearer; in her clogs, she is taller than Vinnie, who always wears sensible low heels on field trips.

  “Would you let go of me, please,” Vinnie exclaims, her voice tight with revulsion and, it must be admitted, fear. The street is almost empty, the clouds low and unpleasant.

  “Mary had a little lamb—”

  A dread of hearing what will come next gives Vinnie the strength to pull her coat away. Breathing hard, not looking back, she walks off as fast as she can go without actually running.