Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  Today Fred is in a part of London where he has little hope of coming upon Rosemary. He is walking along the Regent’s Canal above Camden Lock on a glowing June day with Joe and Debby Vogeler. Their progress is slow, since Joe is pushing the baby, and the old towpath is thronged with Sunday strollers. By the time Fred gets back to his flat and his typewriter most of the working day will be gone. On the other hand, if he’d stayed home he probably wouldn’t have accomplished damn-all either. His mind cannot focus on the eighteenth century; it is focused too hard on the late twentieth, and specifically on the moment less than twenty-four hours from now when he will be face to face with Rosemary for the first time in a fortnight, and she will have to listen to him.

  Joe and Debby are also preoccupied, though in their case more vocally. What obsesses them is their baby’s intellectual development, or rather his lack of it. Jakie is already sixteen months old, for God’s sake, and he hasn’t started to talk—hasn’t said a single damn word, though many kids his age or even younger (examples are cited) are already dauntingly verbal. Their anxiety, it occurs to Fred, is clearly a function of what some modern critics would call an over-valorization of language; it hardly matters to them that Jakie is, as he points out now, a healthy, strong, active child.

  “If he’d just start to speak, he’d be so much more like a real person,” Debby explains. “I mean, sure, I know he’s healthy, and he’s kind of sweet sometimes, but he’s not exactly human, you know what I mean?”

  “It’s so damn frustrating not being able to communicate with him,” says Joe. “Not to know all the things he must be thinking and experiencing. Our own kid. You can’t help wondering, when he starts speaking, what is he going to say to us?”

  “You could be disappointed,” Fred remarks. “My father told me once that when I was a baby he used to look at me, having deep Wordsworthian thoughts about childhood, and wondering what message from the realms of glory I would bring down to him. Then finally I learnt to talk, and I said my first sentence, and it was, ‘Freddy want cookie.’”

  “How old were you when you said that?” asks Debby, failing to get the point.

  “I haven’t any idea.” Fred sighs.

  “Most children don’t start putting sentences together until they’re about two,” Joe says. “But they can usually produce single words a lot sooner. Ordinarily. Jakie babbles a lot, but nothing comes of it. I mean, what do you think?”

  “He looks okay to me,” says Fred, who has no experience of babies. Maybe there is something wrong with Jakie; how the hell should he know? He has a hard time considering the subject, or any subject; he scarcely sees the picturesque scene through which he is walking: on the one hand a bank of long grass and wild flowering weeds, on the other the brightly painted barges and the tall horse chestnuts in the gardens on the opposite shore, which have begun to scatter their clusters of bloom onto the canal, transforming it into a floating carpet of cream and pink stars. London is visible to him now only in painful flashes of memory; most of the time he moves in a city of clouded gloomy shapes and noises.

  Almost the only people Fred has seen anything of since Rosemary’s party are the Vogelers, and he has seen more of them than he wants to, mostly because he hasn’t the energy to invent excuses. Joe and Debby’s opinion of London has improved with the good weather, but not much. Sure, the place looks better, Joe admits, but Jesus Christ, it ought to be warmer than this by June. Back home they’d have been swimming for months, Debby says. And you might as well forget about trying to get a decent tan.

  The Vogelers’ views are shared by several friends they have made here—two Canadian historians, met in the British Museum lunchroom, and another couple, relatives of the first, from Australia. All four of them agree with Joe and Debby about the inadequacy of British food, the lukewarmness of British beer, the chilliness of the natives, and the disappointing smallness of every national monument and tourist attraction.

  They also have an explanation. Andy (the Australian) outlined it to Fred last week in a pub in Hampstead. The trouble with Britain today, he claimed, is that for three hundred years its boldest and most energetic, independent, and hardy citizens left the fucking place and went to the colonies—under which term he includes the U.S., right? The ones who stayed behind, by a process of natural selection, became progressively more timid, inert, slavish, and sickly. Hell, just look around you, Andy said. The British are poor pale sad bastards now, the dregs of a once noble stock.

  Sure, Andy admitted, Australia was settled by convicts—but wait a moment, mate, just ask yourself how they got to be convicts in the first place. What they really were was working-class blokes who wouldn’t accept the class system shit, who weren’t going to rot their fucking asses off slaving for pennies and live on charity porridge when they got too old to work. They had imagination and guts; they took risks, they made a grab for a fair share of what was going. Moll Flanders, not Oliver Twist.

  Essentially the attitude of all these colonials—now including the Vogelers—toward Britain is that of successful people toward parents they have outgrown. They admire England’s history and traditions; they feel a sentimental fondness for its landscape and architecture; but, Christ, they’d never want to come back and live here.

  The experience of what Fred considers the real, inner London that Joe and Debby had at Rosemary’s party hasn’t affected their views. Most of the people they met there seemed to them “kind of phony-baloney,” and they are still smarting from the reaction of certain guests to their baby’s presence and behavior. Debby, in particular, seems to Fred to be nursing her grudge as if it were some ugly, fretful child—Jakie himself, maybe, on a bad afternoon. Fred’s admission now that he and Rosemary have quarreled, and his account of his last meeting with her, only confirm their prejudice.

  “That’s how the English are, especially the middle-class types,” Joe informs Fred as they turn back down the towpath toward Camden Lock. “You never really know where you are with them.”

  “Perfidious Albion,” suggests Fred, who half agrees with Joe and half pities his ignorance.

  “Yeh, okay.” Joe declines to register the irony. “I don’t deny that they can be damn pleasant if they want. I can understand how you felt about Rosemary Radley; I was kind of bowled over by her myself at first. But your mind-set and hers are light-years apart.”

  “Mf.” Fred makes a noise of discomfort. Not for the first time, he wonders why it is that married couples feel perfectly free to analyze the affairs of their unmarried friends; whereas if he were to make some comment on Joe and Debby’s relationship they would be righteously pissed-off.

  “I absolutely agree,” his wife says. “Oh, what is it now?” She squats to confront Jakie, who has begun fretting and squirming in the stroller; it is one of his bad afternoons.

  “It looks like he wants to get out,” Fred suggests.

  “He always wants to get out. Well, all right, silly.” Debby disentangles the baby and sets him on uncertain feet—he has only been walking for a few months. “Okay, wait a second. Jesus.” She straightens out the striped ticking overalls and cap that make Jakie look like a dwarf railway engineer, and takes a firm grip on his small puffy hand.

  “You’ve got to reexamine your priorities,” Joe instructs Fred, as they continue, now at a toddler’s pace, along the towpath, pushing the empty stroller.

  Silently, Fred declines to do this.

  “That’s right,” Debby says. “I mean, after all, there was never any future in it. Just for one thing, Rosemary Radley’s much too old for you.”

  “I don’t see that,” Fred says with an edge in his voice. “You’re older than Joe, aren’t you?”

  “I’m fifteen months older; that hardly signifies,” Debby returns, not very pleasantly.

  “All right. So Rosemary’s thirty-seven. What the hell difference does that make, if we love each other?” says Fred, wishing he had never confided in the Vogelers or maybe even met them.

  “Rosemary’s
not thirty-seven,” Debby says. “No way. She’s about forty-four, or maybe forty-five.”

  “Oh, come on. She is not.” He laughs angrily.

  “I read it in the Sunday Times.”

  “So what; that doesn’t make it true,” Fred says, recalling how often his love had complained of the disgusting lies printed about her and other actors. “Screw them.”

  “All right, don’t believe it.” Debby’s tone combines annoyance and condescension. “No, no Jakie! You don’t really want that.” She stoops and pries from her baby’s fingers a half-squashed rubber ball with a cracked and faded Union Jack pattern. “Nasty, dirty thing. Joe, would you hold onto him a moment?” Debby transfers the struggling baby’s hand to his father, then hurls the ball away up the weedy slope. Jakie stares after it, then lets out a surprised howl.

  “Look, Jakie, look!” his father cries, trying to distract him. “See the, uh, boat.” He points to a painted dinghy moored on the farther shore. “Oh, hell.”

  The squashed rubber ball has reemerged from the weeds; it bounces across the path ahead of them and into the sliding frog-green water of the canal, where it joins a flotilla of debris that includes a plastic bleach bottle, half an orange, and bits of waterlogged wood and straw. “No, Jakie!” He holds the straining, screaming child back. “Bad germs. All gone now.”

  “You don’t want that dirty old ball,” Debby insists—an obvious lie, Fred thinks. “Stop that right now!” The baby, in a paroxysm of frustrated desire, is kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs; his face is distorted into a red gargoyle mask.

  “Oh, shit,” Joe sighs. “Come on now, Jakie. Up you go.” He hoists the struggling, howling gnome to his shoulder. “A-one, a-two.” Joe begins to bounce his son in what Fred supposes is meant to be a soothing manner, at the same time striding rapidly down the towpath, followed by Debby and the stroller. “A-one, a-two. That’s-a-baby.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry if what I said annoyed you,” Debby remarks, as they outdistance the floating ball and Jakie’s screams diminish to a fretful gurgle.

  “That’s all right,” says Fred, feeling magnanimously sorry for the Vogelers, parents of a retarded infant troll.

  “It’s just like, I don’t like to see you so down over something like this.”

  “Like okay,” Fred says. “It’ll pass,” he adds, thinking that with luck he and his love will be together again by this time tomorrow.

  “Sure it will,” Joe tells him. “Rosemary Radley’s not what you really want anyhow.”

  “Once you’re back in America, I bet you’ll read the whole experience a lot differently,” says his wife.

  “Mh,” Fred mutters; it has just occurred to him that to the Vogelers his passion for Rosemary is more or less exactly equivalent to Jakie’s passion for an old rubber ball.

  “That’s right,” Debby agrees. “You need a woman with some real intellectual substance. That’s what I’ve always thought,” she continues, mistaking Fred’s silence for receptivity. “Someone you can really communicate with on your own level. Share your ideas with.”

  “Right,” Joe puts in. “For instance, somebody like Carissa.”

  “Carissa wouldn’t ever have behaved in such a flighty, irrational way. You always know exactly where you are with Carissa. She’s really up front; I remember once when she—”

  “Look, Debby,” Fred interrupts, halting and turning to face her. “Do me a favor: quit mentioning Carissa to me. Carissa is not the point.”

  “But she is the point,” says Joe. “Oh, all right,” he concedes, registering Fred’s expression. “If that’s the way you feel.”

  “That’s the way I feel, God damn it,” Fred says. It occurs to him that he and the Vogelers are on the verge of a real quarrel—maybe of a break in their seven-year friendship. But in his present mood he doesn’t give a shit.

  All of them are stopped on the towpath now, facing one another. But the slippery greenish water still pours by, bearing its flotsam and jetsam. Jakie, gazing over his father’s shoulder, sees his lost prize approaching and begins to babble excitedly. “Oooh! Oo-ah-um! Ba—boo—ball!”

  “Ball!” Joe cries. “He said ‘ball,’ Debby!”

  “I heard him!” Debby’s cross, set face breaks into a delighted grin. “Jakie, darling. Say it again. Say ‘ball.’”

  “Boo-uh-aw! Bah-aw. Ball!” The baby strains toward his object of desire as it floats by, surrounded by waterlogged crap.

  “He said ‘ball,’” his mother declares with triumph.

  “His first word.” His father’s voice trembles.

  “Ball,” Debby breathes. “Did you hear that, Fred? He said ‘ball.’” But she and Joe hardly wait for an answer; forgetting Fred, they gaze at their son with relief and awe, then clasp him in a double embrace and cover him with happy kisses.

  Fred’s confrontation with Rosemary the next day has been planned without her knowledge or consent. A listing in the Sunday papers had informed him that she was appearing on a radio program featuring the newly published memoirs of her friend Daphne Vane, and he had determined to be there. After a morning of trying (without success) to work on his book, he checks the time and the address again and sets out.

  The studio, when he finds it, is discouraging—not the sort of place anyone would choose for a lovers’ meeting. Fred would have preferred the BBC building in Portland Place, where he once went with Rosemary: a comic temple of art deco design with a golden sunburst over the door and a bank of gilded elevators. Behind them was a warren of corridors down which eccentric-looking persons hurried with White Rabbit expressions. The sound rooms were cosy burrows furnished with battered soft leather chairs and historical-looking microphones and switchboards; the Battle of Britain still seemed to reverberate in the smoky air.

  This commercial station is cold and anonymous and ultra-contemporary; its glass-fronted lobby is decorated in Madison Avenue minimalism. A dozen or so teenagers slump on plastic divans, chewing gum and jiggling their knees to the pounding beat of rock music.

  “I’m here to meet Rosemary Radley,” Fred shouts through the din at a sexy young receptionist with magenta lips and greasy-green iridescent eyelids. “She’s going to be on the Lively Arts program at four.”

  “What name, please?”

  Fred pronounces it, thinking a second later that maybe he should have claimed to be somebody else.

  “Just a sec, baby; see what I can do.” She gives him an openly admiring look and a glossy ripe-plum smile, and lifts a red telephone. “They’re trying to locate her.” She smiles at Fred again. “You from America?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I thought so. That’s my dream, to go to the States.” She listens to the phone again, her smile tightening from plum to prune; finally she shakes her head.

  “Tell her it’s important. Very important.”

  The receptionist gives him a different sort of look, equally admiring but less respectful; Fred realizes that she has reclassified him from VIP to groupie. She speaks again into the shiny red phone.

  “Sorry. Nothing doing,” she says finally. “I’d let you in, but they’d give me hell.”

  “I’ll wait till the program’s over.” Fred makes for a cube covered in shiny black imitation leather. As he sits on its edge, waiting, other visitors approach the desk; after checking by phone the receptionist presses a buzzer, allowing them to pass through the quilted, metal-studded imitation-leather doors behind her. The rock music continues, then blares to a crescendo, inspiring some of the lounging teenagers to rise and dance with hysterical, jerky motions.

  The music crashes to a halt and is followed by a string of deafening commercials. The teenagers swarm toward the rear of the lobby, some of them holding out what look like autograph books.

  “Don’t miss this amazing opportunity! Call NOW! . . . Stay tuned now for The Lively Arts.” There is a surge of mood-music.

  “Welcome again to The Lively Arts.” A different voice, fluty and confiding. �
��I am your host, Dennis Wither. This afternoon we have a real treat in store: we’re going to be talking to Dame Daphne Vane, whose autobiography, Vane Pursuits: A Life in the Theatre, has just been published by Heinemann. Dame Daphne is here in the studio, and with her is Lady Rosemary Radley, star of the prizewinning television series Tallyho Castle . . .”

  The punk teenagers look grossed-out at this news; some groan, one pantomimes nausea. Fred gives him a hostile look. He knows that Rosemary’s show, popular as it is, has detractors. Some highbrow liberals, for instance, consider its picture of village life sentimental and snobbish. But these idle, loud-mouth kids, pretending to vomit at Rosemary’s name—He’d like to murder them.

  “We’ll be back in a moment.” While an idiotic musical plug for shampoo (“Dreamier—lovelier!”) reverberates round the lobby, a skinny man in a nail-studded white leather coverall pushes his way out through the doors behind the reception desk, followed by two fatter men in cheap suits. The teenagers converge on him with shrill cries.

  The celebrity, whoever he is, moves on across the lobby, smiling tensely. He stops to sign a few autographs, then breaks for the street doors and a waiting limousine, while the fat men run interference. I might as well be back in New York already, Fred thinks, watching this scene with distaste.

  Suddenly Rosemary’s beautiful trilling laugh, electronically magnified to three times life size, fills the room. Fred’s heart flops like a fish.

  “Thank you, Dennis darling, and I think it’s quite marvelous to be here.” Her sweet, clear, perfectly modulated upper-class voice echoes from one wall to another, as if an invisible Rosemary Radley sixteen feet tall were floating in the air above his head.