by Alison Lurie
The whole situation was beginning to make Vinnie cross and uncomfortable, and she was therefore positively glad to see Chuck leave London. She quite enjoyed imagining him traveling down on the train to Bristol, where he would pick up his rental car: a large red-faced American in a cowboy hat and a fringed leather jacket, eating her excellent ham sandwiches and, to the surprise of the other first-class passengers, reading Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales. But now that he’s gone, though Vinnie doesn’t much like to admit it, she misses him. She almost looks forward to the frequent phone calls in which he reports on his research and thanks her for sending on his mail. Most of this seems to be concerned with business: as far as she can tell there has been almost nothing from his wife or his children. Nevertheless, on the phone Chuck sounds in reasonable spirits, sometimes almost cheerful.
Since Chuck is no longer a useful object of pity, Vinnie, lying in bed with her nasty cold, considers pitying Fred Turner. Certainly he seemed miserable enough the last time she saw him.
Lately, Fred hasn’t been at any of the parties Vinnie has attended. She met him instead at the British Museum, just before the descent of her cold. It was the first time in weeks that she had gone there, for most of her research is complete and she dislikes the Reading Room—especially in the spring and summer when all the tourists and lunatics come out and it becomes intolerably stuffy, and the staff (perhaps understandably) is harassed and grumpy.
She was crossing the wet cobbled forecourt after a sudden spatter of rain when she saw Fred sitting under the portico eating a sandwich. Her first thought was that as a single man on a fairly generous study leave he should have no need for such economies. Either he didn’t want to wrench himself away from his research for more than a few minutes, or—more likely—the purchase of theater tickets, flowers, and expensive meals for Rosemary Radley had greatly depleted his bank account.
Fred’s handsome countenance wore a melancholy, ill-fed expression which brightened only slightly when he saw Vinnie. He invited her to join him on the slatted bench, but agreed only dully with her praise of the day, though the scene before them resembled a British Air travel poster: whipped-cream clouds sailed overhead, the trees were sprinkled with a shiny confetti of new leaves, and the courtyard steamed and glinted with rainbow fragments of light.
“Oh, I’m okay,” he replied to her query, in tones that suggested the reverse. “Maybe you know, Rosemary and I aren’t seeing each other any more.”
“Yes, I heard that.” Vinnie refrained from adding that so had all her London friends, not to mention Private Eye. “I understand she was upset because you have to go back and teach so soon.”
“That’s about it. But she thinks—she acts like I’ve betrayed her or something.” Fred crumpled and uncrumpled his damp paper bag, banging his fist into it in an angry way. “She thinks it’d be easy for me to stay here if I wanted. Damn it, you know that’s not true.”
Vinnie assented emphatically. In case he might be thinking of some such move, she pointed out that his sudden and unexcused withdrawal from the Summer School faculty would annoy and inconvenience a great many people at Corinth University; she began to list these people by name and title.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Fred interrupted. “I explained all that to her. Rosemary’s a wonderful woman, but she just doesn’t listen. When she doesn’t like what you’re saying she just fucking doesn’t listen, excuse me.”
“That’s all right.”
“Christ, I’d stay here if I could. I love her, and I love London,” he exclaimed, shedding crumbs of peanut-butter sandwich. “I don’t know what more I can say.”
“No,” Vinnie agreed, sympathizing with one of Fred’s passions. “It’s always so hard to leave. I know.”
“But why is she being so goddamned unreasonable? We were going to have such a great time together this month, we had tickets to Glyndebourne . . . I never said I was going to be in England forever, or anything like that. I didn’t lie to her. I told her a long time ago I had to go back in June—hell, I know I did.” Fred shook his head while running one hand through his wavy dark hair, a gesture both of puzzlement and of self-reassurance For the first time, Vinnie saw in him what she had often seen in Rosemary Radley: the assumption of very good-looking persons that as they pass through life they are entitled to take—and to leave—whatever they choose when they choose. In both of them it was the stronger for being largely—in Fred’s case perhaps wholly—unconscious.
“Maybe she’ll get over it.”
“Yeh. Maybe,” he replied in a dead, unconvinced voice, frowning at the pigeons that had begun to gather. “Right now she won’t see me, or talk to me on the phone, or anything. Oh, okay.” He dropped a crust from the bag onto the pavement; the fat gray birds jostled and pecked. “She’d better get over it fast; I’ll only be around another three weeks.”
“I certainly hope she does,” Vinnie said, though in fact it mattered nothing to her.
“Me, too.” A kind of geological tremor passed over the stormy, handsome landscape of Fred’s face. “Listen, Vinnie,” he added, controlling the threatened volcanic erruption. “You know Rosemary pretty well.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, anyhow. You see her all the time. I was wondering . . . Maybe if you were to talk to her.”
“Oh, I don’t think—”
“You could explain about summer school; how I can’t just walk out on it.” Fred scattered the rest of his half-eaten sandwich, causing a further invasion of pigeons, dozens of them it seemed, flapping and swooping from all directions.
“I really don’t think I could do that.” To protect her stockings, Vinnie kicked a particularly intrusive lavender-gray bird away with the side of her shoe.
“She’d listen to you, I bet. All right, get lost! There isn’t any more, for Christ’s sake.” He stood up, lifting a loaded briefcase. “Please, Vinnie.”
Vinnie rose too, and retreated several steps from the crowd of pigeons. She looked at Fred Turner standing on the porch of the British Museum, waiting for her answer in a clutter of equally demanding and unreasonable iridescent birds, with his tall athletic figure thrown off-balance by overloaded feelings and an overloaded briefcase. At that moment she realized that he had enrolled himself in the class of persons (usually but not always ex-students) who take it for granted that Vinnie will write them recommendations, give them letters of introduction to colleagues abroad, read their books and articles, and take an interest in their personal and professional happiness. Typically, the fulfillment of any such request does not discharge the obligation, but rather recharges it, just as the use of an automobile recharges its battery. The academic relation of protéger to protégé is a closed electrical circuit not subject to the law of entropy; often it sends out sparks until death.
For Vinnie, one of the advantages of being in England is that she can escape most of these parasites (though a few, of course, have pursued her by mail). Now here is Fred, who has elected himself her protégé simply because they are in the same department, and in the same foreign city, and she is a quarter-century older. And also probably because, quite without having intended it, she is in a sense responsible for his present situation. She was on the department committee that granted him a study leave, and she had invited him to the party at which he met Rosemary Radley.
Sighing, Vinnie told Fred that if the opportunity arose she would try to talk to Rosemary. She had little expectation of succeeding in this assignment, and privately wished that she might have no chance to carry it out. Since she became ill the next day, that wish was granted, though not in a very pleasant manner. But as Vinnie has often noted, both in folklore and in real life, that is the way with most wishes.
Perhaps Fred is somewhat pitiable at the moment, Vinnie thinks as she lies in bed with her lukewarm hot-water bottle, but he is not really the right sort of person for her to contemplate. In the long run, there is no reason to feel sorry for him. He is young, healthy, handsome,
smart, well-educated, and—though Vinnie has no intention of ever telling him this—regarded in the English Department as a corner. Right now he feels sore and disoriented because Rosemary has thrown him over, but he will recover. Many other women will love him; his career will steadily advance; and unless he is struck by a car or a deadly disease or some other form of lightning his whole life will be irritatingly fortunate
Whereas Vinnie is alone, and will probably always be alone. When she is ill, as now, there will never be anyone to listen sympathetically to her symptoms and bring her fresh-squeezed orange juice without being repelled by her appearance or smearing her with condescending pity like glaucous gooseberry jam. She is fifty-four years old; she is going to get older. And as she gets older she will be ill more often and for longer periods of time, and no one will really care very much.
Fido, or Self-Pity, who has been half dozing beside Vinnie for nearly three days, thumps his feathery tail on the comforter, but she shoves him away. Though she has a perfect right to be sorry for herself now, she knows how perilous it is to overindulge it. To go on feeding and petting Fido, even to acknowledge his existence too often, will fatally encourage him. He will begin to grow larger, swelling from the breadth and height of a beagle to that of a retriever—a sheepdog—a Saint Bernard. If she doesn’t watch out, one day Vinnie will be followed everywhere by an invisible dirty-white dog the size of a cow. Though other people won’t be able to visualize him as she does, they will be subliminally aware of his presence. Next to him she will look shrunken and pathetic, like someone who has accepted for all time the role of Pitiable Person.
“Go away,” Vinnie says to Fido in a half whisper. “This is just a bad cold, it’ll be gone soon. Get off my bed. Get out of my flat. Go find Mr. Mumpson, why don’t you?” she adds suddenly aloud, visualizing Chuck alone in the depths of the country, without friends, searching among faded dusty records for his illiterate ancestors.
In her mind, Fido considers the suggestion. He raises his head, then his chest, from the comforter, and sniffs the air. Then he slides off the bed and makes for the door, without even looking back.
Encouraged, Vinnie pushes away the covers and stands up dizzily. She stumbles into the kitchen, pours a glass of orange juice, and drops a black-cherry-flavored Redoxon tablet into it. Though an agnostic, she has faith in the power of Vitamin C; like most believers, she worships her god more devoutly when things go ill. Now she downs the fizzy, acid-magenta beverage and returns to bed, blows her nose again, pulls her sleep-mask down and the comforter up, and sinks into a snuffly, headachy slumber.
About an hour later she is roused by the telephone.
“Vinnie? This is Chuck, in Wiltshire. How’re you doing?”
“Oh, all right.”
“Sounds like you have a cold.”
“Well, I do, actually.”
“Aw, that’s tough. How bad is it? I’m coming up to London this afternoon, I was hoping we could have supper.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been in bed since day before yesterday. I’m feeling fairly awful, and I look a wreck.” Vinnie feels no hesitation in telling Chuck this. He isn’t important in London or in her life, so it doesn’t matter what he thinks. “God knows how I’ll be tonight.”
“I’m real sorry to hear that. Tell you what. You stay in bed now and keep good and warm, okay?”
“Okay.” It is years since anyone has told Vinnie to stay in bed and keep good and warm.
“I’ll phone you when I get in, about seven-thirty. Then, if you’re up to it, I can bring something over for us both to eat.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Vinnie has a mental picture of her cupboard and refrigerator, now more or less bare except for three quarts of cold soup. “But you certainly don’t have to. This flat is probably teeming with germs.”
“Aw, I’m not scared. I’m tough.” Chuck guffaws.
“Well . . . All right.”
Vinnie hangs up, flops back into bed, and returns to oblivion.
By eight that evening, when Chuck arrives with beer and a complete Indian takeout supper, enough for at least four people, she feels considerably better. It is only the second time that he has been to her flat, and she is struck again by how out of place he looks there, how large and clumsy and Middle American.
Chuck himself, naturally, is not aware of any incongruity. “Nice place you have here,” he says, looking toward the bow window, which frames a sweep of London back garden, brilliantly and variously gold and green in the declining sun. “Nice view. Real pretty flowers.” He gestures at a teapot overflowing with overblown yellow roses.
“Thank you.” Vinnie smiles uneasily, aware that her roses were not bought at a shop, but instead removed at dusk two days ago from various nearby front gardens. This petty theft, her first in nearly three months, occurred the day after she heard the story of L. D. Zimmern and her grant renewal, and—like her cold—may be related to it. “Let me take that shopping bag,” she says, changing the subject.
“Naw. You sit right there and rest. I’ll manage.”
In spite of her doubts, Chuck does manage, warming and serving the supper with skill and dispatch. In her present low mood Vinnie finds his clumsy concern soothing, his plodding conversation almost restful. He had a real productive trip to South Leigh this time, Chuck tells her, putting away two-thirds of the Indian dinner and most of the beer as he talks. “Y’know, this research, it’s not like business. Sometimes you do a hell of a sight better if you don’t try to zero in on a problem. You start looking for one thing, you come across something else important by accident.”
“Serendipity,” Vinnie says.
“What?”
She explains.
“Yeh, that’s what I said. I didn’t know there was a word for it.” Clearly, he feels not much is gained by this knowledge. “Anyways, I was kind of browsing around in the library down there, y’know?”
“Mm.” Vinnie imagines Chuck as a large cow—no, a bull—roaming the stacks of a provincial library, munching on a page here and there.
“Y’know they have these parish records, who lived in a place, who was christened, and married, and buried there. If you go into the churchyard, you can see some of the names on stones. All those names, and every goddamn one of them was a person. They got born, and were babies; and then they were kids, they learned their lessons and played games. Then they grew up and plowed and milked and cut the hay and ate dinner and drank the local beer at the Cock and Hen; and they fell in love and got married and had children and were sick and well and lived and died. And while all that stuff was going on, Tulsa was just a piece of prairie with buffalo ranging over it, and maybe a few Indians. All these people living down there in South Leigh, and everywhere else in this country, for hundreds and hundreds of years, way back to prehistoric times, and now nobody remembers them any more. They’re as extinct as the buffalo. It kinda bowls me over.”
“Yes.” In Vinnie’s mind, too, shadowy generations rise up; it is what she often feels about England, that every acre of it, every street and building, is thronged with ghosts.
“Wal, so I got to thinking about my ancestor, that I was so ashamed of. I found out some more about him, not much. He was in the parish register for South Leigh, born 1731, died 1801 aged seventy: ‘Charles Mumpson, known as Old Mumpson.’ Kind of a honorary title. Seventy doesn’t sound real old to us, but back in those days most folks didn’t live so long. The doctors didn’t really know anything—Wal, they don’t know all that much now either, if you ask me.”
“No,” Vinnie agrees.
“Reaching three score and ten, it was a kind of achievement then, ‘specially for a working man.” Chuck takes another swig of beer. “He must of had a strong constitution.”
“That’s true,” Vinnie says, considering the muscular breadth and bulk of Old Mumpson’s descendant.
“Anyhow, what I figure, when Old Mumpson was about my age he probably got past farm work, nobody would hire him any more. His wi
fe had died years back, and his two sons had moved away, maybe gone to America—anyways there isn’t any record of them marrying or dying in the county. Wal, there probably wasn’t much old Mumpson knew how to do besides farming. So he took this hermit job, instead of going on public assistance. The way I figure it, I oughta be proud of him, ‘stead of ashamed, y’know?”
“I see what you mean,” Vinnie says, unconvinced, but reluctant to damage Chuch’s reconstruction.
“And then this Oxford University professor I told you about, this guy that’s in charge of the dig—Mike Gilson his name is. Mike said to me, ‘Y’know, you don’t have to conclude that Old Mumpson was stupid just because he couldn’t read and write. It could be that he never had any education; a lot of country folk were illiterate back then.’ It could be he really was a kind of local wise man, Mike said, and that’s why they hired him. Maybe people did come from everywhere round to ask his advice.”
“Yes, of course that’s possible,” Vinnie says, wishing she had thought of this comforting argument herself weeks ago.
“There’s a hell of a lot of learning that isn’t in books.”
“You may be right.” In Vinnie’s opinion, the extent of this unpublished learning is less than is generally claimed.
“Anyways, what I wanted to tell you, it’s about Mike partly. I’ve been spending a lot of time out on the dig, like I told you, taking pictures for him. Then Mike has these aerial photos of the area, from the government. You can find out a lot from those things if you know what to look for: ground water and drainage channels, and old foundations and boundary lines and roads—stuff he hadn’t noticed, some of it. It helps if you know some geology. Wal, a couple of days ago Mike said, why didn’t I stay on for the summer, join his crew. He can’t pay me anything, account of I’m not a British citizen, but he’s got this big house not too far from the dig rented for the summer, and there’s a real nice furnished apartment empty in what used to be one of the tenant cottages. Mike said I could have that for free, and I could eat with them in the main house whenever I wanted.”