by Alison Lurie
“Don’t do that now, lovey,” she says. “Let’s make hay.”
Fred stiffens. “Making hay” was his and Rosemary’s most private code phrase. On bright days like this one the westering sun would shine into this room and onto the canopied bed. Rosemary loved to lie in it, to feel it warming and coloring her white skin. “Come on, darling. Let’s make hay while the sun shines,” she had said to him once, laughing softly. A few days later he had bought her a print of Breughel’s The Haymakers, and she had tacked it on the pale-flowered wallpaper above the night stand; it is still there. He knows now for sure that Mrs. Harris has been spying on them, sneaking round and listening at doors and/or on the kitchen extension. Sick, sickening. He turns away, giving up on his book and his shirt, wanting now only to get the hell out of here.
“Excuse me, please,” he says angrily.
But Mrs. Harris doesn’t move aside. Instead she stumbles even closer. Her dirty face, what little Fred can see of it under the peroxided hair, is smeared with what looks like a mixture of soot and lipstick; he can smell her unwashed odor and her foul breath. She puts out her hand, and the soiled flowered wrapper she is wearing falls open it; beneath it is incongruously white, voluptuous naked flesh.
“Oh, darling!” she whispers in a drunken, wheezing imitation of Rosemary’s voice. She grabs Fred’s arm; she sags toward him and begins to rub her body against his.
“Quit that!” he cries. He tries to push Mrs. Harris away gently, but she is unexpectedly strong. “Let go of me, you dirty old cow!”
The charwoman’s grip slackens. He shoves her aside with such force that she falls onto the closet floor among Rosemary’s shoes, giving a kind of startled animal howl.
Fred doesn’t stay to see whether Mrs. Harris is hurt, or to help her up. Clutching his sweater, not looking back, he flees from the room and down the curving staircase two steps at a time, and slams out of the house.
Once in the street he keeps walking, at first not choosing any direction. But as he strides on, putting block after block between himself and Cheyne Square, his shock and disgust gradually moderate into embarrassment. He turns south toward the river, reaches the Embankment, and crosses the road. There he stops, leaning on the stone parapet, with the wide calm panorama of the Thames before him. The tide is almost full, and the houseboats moored upriver along the near bank rock rhythmically on its swell. To his left is the Meccano-set rococo of the Albert Bridge, with the high-summer green of Battersea Park beyond; to his right the solid Romanesque brickwork of Battersea Bridge. Slowly, the flow and pale shine of the water, the steady churning of a string of barges headed downstream, the passage of flocked clouds overhead in the glowing sky, begin to calm him.
He will never be able to dream sentimentally about Rosemary’s bedroom again, Fred thinks; but hell, maybe that’s for the best. Who wants to be haunted by some goddamn room? He admits to himself that he hadn’t gone back only for his things, but in the stupid vain hope of seeing Rosemary again. In spite of everything he isn’t over her. Maybe he only got what he deserved. His job now is to forget Rosemary, who has obviously forgotten him and is enjoying herself in some luxurious country place.
In a calmer state of mind, Fred leaves the river and heads home. He has more packing to do, and in a couple of hours he is having supper and going to a late film with two old friends who have just arrived in England for the summer.
By the time Fred meets Tom and Paula his equilibrium is nearly restored, though he remains depressed. Their pleasure at the reunion and their eagerness for information about London raise his spirits somewhat. He is reminded that all American academics are not like the Vogelers (whom he has seen too much of lately) or like Vinnie Miner. A keen homesickness comes over him, a longing for American scenes and American voices, for people like Paula and Tom who say what they think without irony, who won’t ever pretend to like him and then drop him casually and graciously.
Over crepes and Beaujolais at Obelix, around the corner from his flat, Fred recommends to his friends a number of London sights, restaurants, and cultural events, without revealing his disillusion with the place. (Why discourage them, after all? They’re only here for a few weeks.) He also relates a censored version of the scene that afternoon with Mrs. Harris. He doesn’t say, for instance, that he had a key to the house; and Rosemary is transformed into “some people I know who are out of town.” Stripped of these aspects, his experience that afternoon begins to seem almost comic, in a rough way—a scene from Smollett, or maybe a cartoon by Rowlandson. It becomes a jocular tale, a kind of jest or fabliau, and is a riotous success with Tom and Paula.
“Great story,” Tom pronounces. “It would only happen to you.”
As he lies in bed much later that evening Fred recalls this comment, which at the time made him uncomfortable. But of course Tom, who has never heard of Rosemary, meant it as a kind of compliment. Because of Fred’s appearance, he was saying, it is comically appropriate that a drunken cockney charwoman should make obscene proposals to him.
It is true that over the years Fred has received other unwelcome—though less comically revolting—offers of this sort. Girls and women he has hardly looked at and never would look at have sometimes, there’s no denying it, thrown themselves at him, or at least in his general direction, causing him acute embarrassment. His male friends have often been less than sympathetic. Hell, they sometimes say, they wouldn’t complain if girls were falling all over them—not realizing what it’s really like to be heavily fallen upon by some woman you don’t want, even if some other guy does.
Physical attraction is a mystery, Fred muses as he watches the lamplight playing on his wall through the leaves outside. It makes a pattern like that of the dress Rosemary wore to Così fan tutte, which folded itself closely round and floated loose below her apple-blossom breasts, that he will never see or touch or kiss again.
Why is it that something which makes a beautiful woman like Rosemary more beautiful—for instance, large soft white breasts—makes a slattern like Mrs. Harris even more disgusting? Mrs. Harris’s breasts aren’t really any heavier than Rosemary’s, he thinks, allowing himself to visualize the scene in the closet for the first time; they are about the same size. They have the same kind of big strawberry-pink nipples, and there was even the same sort of pale-brown mark on the left one, like an ostrich feather—
No. Lying between the sheets, Fred shudders from head to toe. No, he must have imagined it.
But the memory is photographically clear. Mrs. Harris has Rosemary’s breasts. She is about the same size as Rosemary; she has almost the same color hair. She seems to be living in Rosemary’s house, drinking Rosemary’s gin, sleeping in Rosemary’s bed.
Of course her voice and accent were completely different. But Rosemary’s an actress; she’s often imitated Mrs. Harris. Oh, Jesus Christ. Fred sits up in the darkened room with his mouth hanging open as if he were seeing some foul ghost.
But hold on a minute. He’s met Mrs. Harris before, he would’ve noticed—Yeh, but he only met her for a moment, one evening when he’d got to the house too early. Mrs. Harris had opened the door a crack and, hardly looking at him, grumbled that Lady Rosemary wasn’t home yet. She wouldn’t even let him in to wait; he had to go to the pub round the corner.
She wouldn’t let him in—she wouldn’t ever let anyone in when she was working there—not because she couldn’t stand people underfoot, like Rosemary said, but because they might recognize her—because she was—Because the drunken harridan whom he called a filthy old cow and knocked onto the bedroom floor this afternoon was his false true love, the star of stage and screen, Lady Rosemary Radley.
Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ. Though he is unconscious of having got out of bed, Fred now finds himself standing naked in a patch of blurred moonlight, pounding his fist against the wall. He stops only because he hears steps overhead; the repeated reverberating thud has woken another tenant—or worse, his landlord.
Maybe there was a Mrs. Harris once. A
nd then she left, only Rosemary didn’t tell anybody, and she kept on answering the phone in Mrs. Harris’ voice. Or maybe there never was any Mrs. Harris; maybe Rosemary was cleaning the house herself the whole goddamn time.
How could he have been so dumb and deaf and blind this afternoon? Why hadn’t he known?
Because Rosemary had fixed in his head the idea of herself as beautiful and graceful and refined and aristocratically English, and anyone who wasn’t that, even if they were living in her house and sleeping in her bed and speaking with her voice, wasn’t Rosemary. So when she decided she didn’t want to see him or talk to him all she had to do was put on Mrs. Harris’s clothes and Mrs. Harris’s accent. That was what she’d done today. And she’d deliberately mocked him by using their private lovers’ language; she’d destroyed everything they’d ever had together.
And maybe that’s how it had been the whole goddamn time, Fred thinks, staring out the open window into the windy half darkness. Because if Rosemary had ever really loved him, she wouldn’t have pulled a trick like that. All these months he’s loved somebody who was as much a theatrical construct as Lady Emma Tally. She’d been putting him on the whole goddamn time, pretending to be Lady Rosemary when she wanted him and pretending to be Mrs. Harris when she didn’t—and God knows who she really was.
Well, now he’s got the message. She doesn’t want to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her either. Even if she were to welcome him back passionately, to be again the Rosemary he’d loved, he wouldn’t believe it. He’d always be looking and listening for clues that she was only acting a part.
Fred flings himself onto his bed, where he lies for a long time staring at the play of nervous shadows on the paint-clogged Victorian plaster garlands of the ceiling. At last, despairing of sleep, he gets up. He pulls on some clothes, turns on the lights, and starts cleaning the fridge and the kitchen cupboards, throwing out most of the food and saving the rest for the Vogelers, with whom he will be having a final supper this coming evening. A bottle with an inch or two of Scotch remaining in it doesn’t seem worth lugging to Hampstead, so Fred pours it into a glass, adds lukewarm tap water, and drinks as he works.
As he clears the cupboard over the sink, he stops dead with a package of McVitie’s Cream Crackers in his hand, suddenly remembering Rosemary’s party, and Edwin Francis standing on the stairs eating one of these crackers overloaded with pâté, and confiding in his nervous nice-old-lady manner that he was worried about Mrs. Harris’s effect on Rosemary. He hears Edwin saying: “She can get a bit frantic . . . She can get into rather a state sometimes.”
Suppose Rosemary hadn’t been playing Mrs. Harris as a joke, out of rage and spite when she saw Fred, whom she thought she’d got rid of, walk into her kitchen. Because she couldn’t have expected him. Whether he’d been there or not she would have been sitting drinking in the basement in Mrs. Harris’s clothes.
Suppose she wasn’t just acting; suppose she was “in a state,” whatever that means. What if Fred isn’t the only one who doesn’t know who Rosemary is? What if she doesn’t know either? What if she is a disturbed person, and there’s something really wrong with her?
Maybe Rosemary has started to drink at other times before this; maybe she’s become “frantic”—had some kind of breakdown—in the past, maybe more than once. Is that what Edwin was hinting? Was he trying to warn Fred?
No. More likely Edwin was asking for his help, just as he’d claimed, twittering that he wouldn’t feel comfortable unless Fred promised to “look out for our Rosemary.” Fred hadn’t paid any attention; he hadn’t looked out for their Rosemary. He hadn’t been able to, because an hour or two later she’d thrown him out of her house. Anyhow, he hadn’t thought she needed to be looked after.
But maybe she needs it now, he tells himself as he stands in the kitchen holding the box of crackers. If she’s on a binge or having a nervous breakdown or both, somebody ought to be taking care of her. The trouble is, who?
By three A.M. he has finished the Scotch, two leftover beers, and most of a bottle of souring white wine. He is drunk in Notting Hill Gate, and Rosemary is drunk or mad in Chelsea It’s all too goddamn much for him. He wants to go home to America; he wants to see Roo again. Only by now she probably doesn’t want to see him, he thinks, falling back onto the bed without bothering to take off his clothes, and dizzily spiraling into unconsciousness.
When Fred comes to, with a headache like an ax blow, the sun is high in the sky and hot on his disordered bed. Too ill to think of eating anything, he stands in the shower for a long time soaking his headache, with little effect. The one clear thought in his mind is that he’s got to tell somebody to look out for Rosemary before he leaves. He bundles his dirty clothes together with the dirty sheets and towels and drags them through the streets to the laundromat. While they slosh about in the machine in a queasy way that makes his headache worse, he goes to the pay phone and tries to call Edwin Francis, who ought to be back from Japan by now. Then he tries to get Posy’s or Nadia’s number from William Just at the BBC. Finally, because he can’t think of anyone else, he calls Vinnie Miner. None of these people are in, and for the rest of the day and the evening they continue not to be in. But he keeps on trying.
11
* * *
Don’t care was made to care,
Don’t care was hung,
Don’t care was put in a pot
And boiled till she/he was done.
Old rhyme
AT the London University School of Education, Vinnie Miner is attending a symposium on “Literature and the Child” and becoming steadily more bored. The subject is promising, and the first panelist was a friend of hers and an amusing speaker; but the other two have begun to annoy her greatly. One is a fat educational psychologist named Dr. O. C. Smithers; the other a tense young pedant called Maria Jones who is devoting her life to a study of early etiquette books.
In Britain, Vinnie has observed, most lecturers feel an obligation to entertain their listeners and to avoid jargon; it is therefore usually safe to attend any public talk if the topic seems interesting. Maria Jones, however, is too nervous to think of her audience, and is made almost inaudible by shyness; and Dr. Smithers is too self-satisfied. He has, as he puts it, “studied extensively in the United States,” and delivers his platitudes with a bland transatlantic pompousness. Like some American educators, he insists upon speaking of The Child as a sort of abstract metaphorical figure—one of those Virtues or Graces represented in stone on public monuments. Smithers’ abstract Child is full of Needs that are in danger of being “unmet” and of Creative Potential that must be “developed” if “he-or-she” is to become a “full human being.” Vinnie has always especially detested the latter phrase; this evening it has an ironic ring—seeming inevitably to refer to Smithers’ own physique, which is of a rotundity rare in Britain. In Vinnie’s own country, according to statistics (borne out by her own observation) one out of three men over thirty is overweight. Here most remain trim; but those few who do become fat, as if by some law of averages, often becomes excessively so. In the same way, those British minds that allow themselves to be filled with jargon swell to sideshow proportions.
Warming to his subject, exceeding his allotted twelve minutes, Smithers declares that The Child’s “moral awareness” must be awakened by “responsible literature.” The frictions and stresses of Our Contemporary World press hard upon The Child; he-or-she (Smithers, no doubt aware that the majority of his audience is female, has used this awkward pronoun throughout his talk) must be able to look to literature for guidance.
Vinnie yawns angrily. There is no Child, she wants to shout at Smithers, there are only children, each one different, unique, as we here in this room are unique—perhaps more so, for we are all in the same profession and have been sanded down over time by the frictions of your nasty Contemporary World.
How much nicer and less boring it would be if we were all still children, Vinnie thinks. Then, as she often does o
n boring public occasions, she relieves her restlessness by imagining the weight of years lifted suddenly from everyone in the room. The older members of the audience, like herself, become children of ten or twelve; the undergraduates mere babies. Whatever their new age, all those present, upon finding themselves transformed, share a single thought: Why am I sitting here on this chair listening to this nonsense? At their table, the speakers and the moderator look at each other with surprise. Smithers, who is now a fat, earnest boy of six, drops his notes to the floor. Vinnie’s friend Margaret—already at nine a sensible, kind, observant little girl—leans over to comfort Maria Jones, who is now only about three years old, but already painfully anxious in public. Margaret wipes Maria’s brimming tears and helps her to climb down from the platform. In the audience the baby students toddle about, playing house under overturned chairs, scribbling on the walls with pencil and chalk, building and demolishing textbook towers with shrieks of mirth.
It would be only just if some minor, humorous god, perhaps The Child Him-Herself, were to work such a metamorphosis, Vinnie thinks. The very idea of making children’s literature into a scholarly discipline, of forcing all that’s most imaginative and free in what Smithers calls Our Cultural Heritage into a grid of solemn pedantry, pompous platitude, and dubious textual analysis—psychological, sociological, moral, linguistic, structural—such a process invites divine retribution.
Though it has given her a livelihood and a reputation, not to mention these happy months in London, Vinnie has a bad conscience about her profession. The success of children’s literature as a field of study—her own success—has an unpleasant side to it. At times she feels as if she were employed in enclosing what was once open heath or common. First she helped to build a barbed-wire fence about the field; then she helped to pull apart the wild flowers that grow there in order to examine them scientifically. Ordinarily she comforts herself with the thought that her own touch is so light and respectful as to do little harm, but when she has to sit by and watch people like Maria Jones and Dr. Smithers dissecting the Queen Anne’s lace and wrenching the pink campion up by its roots, she feels contaminated by association.