by Alison Lurie
Ostensibly, it is a half-length portrait of one of those urchins who for a small fee used to light travelers through the streets of eighteenth-century London at night. This Cupid is no plump, laughing, naked babe: he is slight, shabbily dressed in contemporary costume, and seems about nine or ten. He is good-looking—indeed, he rather resembles Fred himself at that age—but quite obviously a dark angel. He has small black bat wings, and holds his long smoldering dark torch in a phallic position, braced against his crotch; a spurt of flame and stained smoke rises from it into the sooty air. Cupid, however, looks away from the torch over his shoulder and down to the left, with a brooding, sorrowful expression—regret for what he has done to so many humans, maybe. Behind him, sketchily indicated, is a London street along which an ill-matched couple can be seen walking away: the man tall and stick-thin, the woman grossly fat, like Jack Sprat and his wife.
Yes, Fred thinks: this is the little dark god who has scorched him—he can feel the wound blistered and smoldering still—twice mismatched, to two beautiful angry impossible women he can’t get out of his mind. To be unhappily in love with one woman is bad enough, but to be longing after two alternately is laughable. Roberto certainly would laugh.
Smarten up, he tells himself. Forget about them. Get on with your damn packing. He yanks out the jammed top drawer of the desk angrily, causing it to tilt downward and scatter its contents onto the floor: pencils, paper clips, old bus maps, pamphlets about tourist attractions. Among the avalanche of debris something falls with a heavier, more metallic sound. Fred bends to look and recognizes the keys to Rosemary’s house in Chelsea, which he thought he’d lost weeks ago.
The house is empty now, probably. He could go there this afternoon and reclaim his possessions, which he doesn’t want to lose—especially the book, which is annotated, and his Ragg sweater. Rosemary will never even know he’s been there, or miss anything. Her books are many and disordered, and her closet, being outside Mrs. Harris’ theater of operations, is always in chaos. Okay, let’s go. He jams the drawer back into the desk, and its former contents into the wastebasket, and sets out. At Notting Hill Gate, too impatient to walk, he descends into the tube station.
But as he sits on the Circle Line train being shaken toward South Kensington, its whining roar begins to sound a chorus of doubts. What if somebody is staying at Rosemary’s? What if the lock has been changed? What if one of the neighbors sees him and calls the police? AMERICAN PROFESSOR HELD IN BURGLARY OF STAR’S CHELSEA HOME.
As he stands in South Kensington Underground Station, still hesitating, a sign pointing the way TO MUSEUMS reminds Fred that he has been in London for five months without visiting the Victoria and Albert, so highly recommended by everyone as a repository of eighteenth-century furniture and artifacts. He decides to stop there first while he makes up his mind. If he doesn’t go on to Rosemary’s, at least he will have done something professionally useful.
Five minutes later he has passed from the warm sunny afternoon into the cool, cavernous galleries and halls of the V and A. They are almost deserted, maybe because of the weather outside. Thousands of decorative art objects lie unregarded in a shadowy gloom, through which here and there a dusty band of sunshine slants down from the tall Victorian Gothic windows to spotlight a carved medieval chest or a Georgian silver teapot. No such light strikes into Fred’s psyche: it remains uniformly clouded and chill. Everything before him is handsome, highly finished, the best of its kind; but he is unmoved. These great rooms full of national treasures don’t seem to him rich and complex and historic, but overcrowded, overdecorated—collections of too many expensive old things. He has, as Rosemary and her friends would have put it, gone off England. London especially oppresses him; it seems so crowded with architecture and furniture and tradition that there is no room to move. The city is weighted down with ghosts, haunted by its long history just as he is haunted by his short one: by the history of his affair with Rosemary and by her own past history.
These last weeks in London Fred has felt as lonely and shut out of life as he did his first month here. He has hardly spoken to any of the natives, except as a tourist might; he hasn’t seen a single one of the many people he met through Rosemary. Or, to be more accurate, he hasn’t seen them in the flesh. In the media they are everywhere: explaining the human body and international law on television; appearing in plays and films; giving their opinions about cultural events on the radio; being interviewed by newspapers; answering difficult questions with charm and erudition on quiz shows and current affairs programs. Whenever Fred opens a magazine one of them is telling him what to think about Constable or how best to cook asparagus or support nuclear disarmament. And if they aren’t quoted, they are referred to—most disagreeably, by an item in Private Eye noting that “Lady Rosily Raddled,” as it habitually calls her, has “dissolved her Yankee connection,” and making reference to a long list of other melted connections, some of them involving men Fred has met several times but never imagined that Rosemary had once slept with.
Of course he hadn’t thought that she had no past, Fred tells himself as he wanders disconsolate down a long gallery of late-Renaissance furnishings toward a looming pillared structure described on a placard as The Great Bed of Ware and said to have housed up to a dozen sleepers a night. But to be referred to in print as just one of a series—Fred clenches his teeth and focuses again on the Great Bed, associating it in his mind with Rosemary and her lovers. There is room here between these twisted columns for all those mentioned or hinted at in Private Eye, and more. And no doubt there were more. He’s only the most recent—by now, maybe not even that. Against his will he sees Rosemary, in her pale satin nightgown scattered with lace butterflies, sporting in the Great Bed with a dozen shadowy naked male figures. The legs, the arms, the cocks, the backsides—her tumbled pale-gold hair—the stained and tumbled bedclothes—the rebound of springs, the smell of sex . . .
To shake off this hallucination, Fred moves nearer and puts his hand on the unwrinkled brocade coverlet, receiving a shock: the Great Bed of Ware is as hard as stone.
But why should he be surprised? Functionally speaking this is no longer a bed. No one will ever sleep or fuck in it again. No one will sit in these high-backed oak chairs: their stringy crimson velvet seats, now faded to pink, are protected from contemporary rear ends by tarnished gilt cords. The engraved goblets in the glass cases will never again hold water or wine; the pewter plates will never be heaped with the roast beef of Old England.
Art museums are better. Paintings and sculptures continue to serve the purpose for which they were made: to be gazed at and admired, to interpret and shape the world. They live on, immortal, but all this sluff is functionally dead; no, worse, fixed in a kind of living death, like his passion for Rosemary Radley. There’s something futile, something hideous, about this immense Victorian junkshop full of expensive household things: all these chairs and dishes and cloths and knives and clocks, so many of them, too many of them, preserved forever in frozen uselessness, just as his passion for Rosemary and his love for Roo are uselessly preserved.
A revulsion from the thousands of undead objects that surround him on all sides seizes Fred, and he starts to walk, then to run toward the staircase and the exit. Outside the vast cocoa-colored mausoleum he takes deep breaths of a living air that smells of auto exhaust and cut grass. Okay, what shall he do now? Is it safe to rescue his clothes from Rosemary’s house, or should he abandon them to a V and A zombie existence?
If Rosemary were only in London—If only he’d found the damn key when she was still around—Yes, then he could have gone to the house whether she’d invited him or not, let himself in, and told her and showed her that he loved her, sworn he wasn’t tired of her. How could he be tired of Rosemary, for Christ’s sake?
If only he’d gone there sooner after their quarrel . . . Or, two weeks ago at the radio station, if only he’d been bolder, if he’d pushed his way into the studios behind some of those other people, found Rose
mary, made her listen to him—Why has he become so slow, so cautious, so respectful of rules and conventions and public opinion; why has he become so—yes, that’s it—so goddamn English?
Look at him now: nearly thirty years old, nearly six arid a half feet tall, a professor at a major American university, standing dumbly in front of the V and A shifting from one foot to the other, too fucking chicken to go and get his own goddamn sweater back. For Christ’s sake, stop acting like some British twit, he tells himself, and begins to stride south toward Chelsea.
When Fred reaches Cheyne Square twenty minutes later, he understands his reluctance better. The house looks exactly, painfully the same; it is hard to believe that Rosemary—his real Rosemary, not the phony imitation of the radio station—won’t in a moment open the shiny lavender front door and hold up her heart-shaped face for his kiss. He feels deeply reluctant to enter the familiar rooms again, to pass through them as an intruder. If only it hadn’t all gone wrong he might now, today—A tight choked feeling fills his chest, as if he’d swallowed a wet balloon.
Fighting down the sensation, fixing his mind on the image of a gray sweater, Fred climbs the steps and rings the bell; he hears the two familiar musical notes of the chime within, but nothing more.
“Rosemary!” he calls finally. “Rosemary! Are you there?”
Silence. After ringing the bell again, and waiting a few more minutes, he puts his key in the lock.
The house, as he had expected, is darkened and silent. He shuts the door behind him, and forestalls the shrill clamor of Rosemary’s burglar alarm by clicking the switch under the gilt-legged hall table as he has so often done at her request.
The shutters are closed in the long drawing room, but even in this light its total disorder is evident. Newspapers and cushions are strewn on the floor, plates and glasses on the tables. Evidently Mrs. Harris too is away on holiday. He searches round for his book, but can’t see it anywhere; maybe it’s upstairs.
As Fred starts for the hall he hears noises below: a thump and a scuffling of feet. He halts, holding his breath, listening. Has Rosemary lent the house to someone? Have burglars got in in spite of the alarm system? His first impulse is to turn and run, abandoning his possessions, but this strikes him as cowardly and twit-like. Instead he looks round for a weapon, then grabs a tight-rolled black umbrella from the Chinese urn by the hall table. The poker would be more effective; but if it’s not burglars the umbrella will pass as part of his getup. That it’s a sunny afternoon won’t matter: in London many men carry such umbrellas in all weathers, as Gay and his contemporaries carried canes.
Clutching the bamboo handle so tightly that his knuckles whiten, Fred descends the dark, twisting backstairs. In the basement kitchen a greeny half-dusk seeps through the net of ivy that shrouds the barred window. A woman—Mrs. Harris, he recognizes her by her headscarf, and the mop and bucket leaning against the sink—is sitting in a rocker at the far end of the long room. In front of her is a glass and a nearly empty bottle of what looks like Rosemary’s gin.
“So it’s you,” says Mrs. Harris in a drunken, hostile cockney, hardly raising her head to look at him. Though Fred has seen her only once before, and then only briefly, he is aware of her appearance as greatly altered for the worse. Her shoes are off, and shreds of hair hang thickly over her face. “I thought you were off to the States.”
“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”
“Y’are, are you?” Her voice is slurred, shaky. “Then what the bloody ’ell are you doin’ ’ere?’”
“I’ve come to pick up some clothes I left,” Fred explains, repressing his irritation. “I heard noises, so I came down to see what was going on.”
“Oh, yeh,” Mrs. Harris sneers.
“Yeh.” He is not going to be intimidated by a drunken charwoman.
“Creepin’ into the ’ouse behind my back. I oughta call the p’lice.” She grins tipsily.
Fred doesn’t believe for a moment that Mrs. Harris will call the police, but it occurs to him that she will certainly report his visit to Rosemary, no doubt with disagreeable embellishments. “And what are you doing here?” he asks, taking the offensive.
Mrs. Harris stares at him through the gloom in a boozy, fixed way. “You tell me, Professor Know-All,” she says finally.
Fred flinches. “Professor Know-All” was one of Rosemary’s private nicknames for him, used half fondly, half mockingly when he brought forth some item of general information. Where has Mrs. Harris heard it? Either Rosemary has told her, or Mrs. Harris has listened in on their phone calls.
“Lady Rosemary’s still away, isn’t she?” Fred asks. A desperate hope has come to him that his love may have returned, or be about to return before he leaves London. Maybe Mrs. Harris has been told to come in and prepare the house for her. Some preparation! But he tries to speak pleasantly, or at least neutrally. “Is she coming back soon?”
For a long moment Mrs. Harris does not answer. Finally she shrugs. “Could be.” Either she doesn’t know, or—more likely—she has been told, or chooses, not to say.
“I wondered if you were expecting her today.” No answer. “Or tomorrow, maybe.” No answer. “Well, I guess I’ll go and get my things.”
“Right. Clear out all your bloody mess, and good riddance,” Mrs. Harris growls, reaching for the gin bottle.
Fred climbs back up to the hall, thinking that when Rosemary does get home she is in for a shock, unless Mrs. Harris manages to pull herself together first. Somebody, not him, should warn her—should tell her what her perfect charlady has been doing in her absence.
He returns the defensive umbrella to the urn and ascends the graceful white curve of the stairs to Rosemary’s bedroom. It is much brighter here: one tall shutter of the bay window has been folded back, and a broad band of gold-dusted sunlight fans across what he has always thought the most beautiful room in this beautiful house: high-ceilinged, elegantly proportioned, lavishly mirrored. The walls are painted a subtle shade of rosy cream, the woodwork and the flowery plasterwork and fireplace are white; the furniture is white-and-gilt French provincial. Right now, however, the place is one hell of a mess. Drawers hang open, spilling their contents; a lamp lies fallen; the pillows and bedclothes of the four-poster have been dragged to the floor, and the dressing table is a confusion of overturned bottles and broken glass from which a stale sticky-sweet odor rises.
Fred feels a sinking of despair and guilt and longing at this mute testimony to Rosemary’s state of mind when she left London; then fury at Mrs. Harris. It is really disgusting of her not to have cleaned up, not to have spared Rosemary—and all right, himself—such a sight. This is followed by a second spasm of guilt as it occurs to him that it was he who had persuaded Rosemary to hire Mrs. Harris. In a way he is responsible for the state the house is in, and for the drunken slut sitting in the darkened basement. Well, nothing can be done about that now.
He glances into the mirrored, peach-tiled bathroom, but it is so littered and foul—the toilet, for instance, is full of turds—that he decides to forget his razor and toothbrush. Has Mrs. Harris—disgusting idea—been treating the place as her own, pawing over Rosemary’s things, using her bathroom, maybe even sleeping off a drunken stupor in her white-and-gold four-poster bed?
That would explain the disorder, and more logically. When he last saw Rosemary—when he heard her voice in the radio station, rather—she wasn’t in an emotionally disturbed state, but very much in control. Perfectly happy, in fact. He hears her light, melodious voice again: “Thank you, Dennis, and I think it’s quite marvelous to be here.” She doesn’t care about him any more; maybe she never cared.
With a kind of shudder Fred picks his way across the debris-strewn pastel-flowered Chinese carpet and opens the walk-in closet. Yes; there is his sweater, sagging from a clothes hook at the back. He throws it over his arm and looks round for the shirt, but all he can see is Rosemary’s clothes, hanging empty on all sides: her long pink cape, her forget-me-not-blue qu
ilted robe, her gauzy blouses, and her rows of high-heeled sandals like the cages of delicate birds. Many of these garments flutter in his mind with some intimate memory. There is the trailing pale-gray evening dress printed with the blurred shadows of leaves; he remembers how he had caressed a cobwebby fold of it secretly between his fingers all through Così fan tutte; there is the apple-green silk voile she wore at her party, which whispered so caressingly as she moved.
Fred feels weak and exhausted, as if he had been running a marathon or playing squash for an hour. He leans against the frame of the closet door and tries to breathe normally. But it is no use; the balloon that has been in his chest ever since he got to Cheyne Square begins to deflate with a wet whinnying sound. Weeping, he knocks his head rhythmically against the door jamb to provide a counterirritant. And as he does so, he becomes aware of another, less evenly rhythmical noise from below: the noise of Mrs. Harris staggering up the stairs, banging into the wall as she comes. The way it sounds, she is so drunk she can hardly walk.
He retreats into the dimness of the closet, hoping she isn’t headed this way or won’t see him; but no such luck. She pauses in the hall, breathing audibly, then stumbles into the bedroom and leans for support on the chest of drawers.
“Missing your sweetie, are you?” she says. Fred realizes that even from the back his posture must be so eloquent of misery that a drunken charwoman can read it. Not trusting himself to look at her, let alone reply—and what would be the point anyhow?—he begins sliding Rosemary’s clothes along the rod, searching for his blue workshirt and hoping that Mrs. Harris will go away.
Instead she lurches across the room toward him, catching her foot in the bedspread and only saving herself by grabbing the bedpost with both hands; then she lurches on into the closet behind Fred.