Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [101]
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