Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [113]
“Oh he does, does he.” Rosemary’s voice has thickened and coarsened oddly; if they hadn’t been alone Vinnie would have looked round to see who else was speaking.
“Yes, he told me so. And I believe him,” she adds.
“I suppose you might,” Rosemary says, again in her characteristic upper-class drawl. “But you don’t know much about men, Vinnie. They’re liars, the lot of them.”
Vinnie glances nervously at the back of the taxi-driver’s head; then she sits forward and tugs the glass panel shut.
“Listen, sweetie, when they’re making up excuses to leave you, men always start telling everyone you’re a wonderful woman.” Rosemary’s accent continues to alternate disconcertingly between refined and vulgar, as if she were trying out for some inappropriate low-comedy role but was unable to sustain the illusion. “That’s what they always say, the bastards. It’s a kind of omen.”
“It’s not an excuse, really. You’ve got to understand . . .” With increasing weariness Vinnie begins to explain the tenure system in American universities.
“You’re wastin’ your breath, dearie,” Rosemary interrupts. “I don’t give a fart for all that. All I know is he’s sneakin’ out on me,” she says in her low-comedy voice—a voice Vinnie has heard before, but where?
“Fred isn’t sneaking—” she begins.
“1 need him, Vinnie,” Rosemary wails, pathetically ladylike again, with a half sob. “You tell him to forget his silly job. If he doesn’t come back and stay with me, I’ll be all alone again. You don’t know what that’s like for me.” She leans toward Vinnie as she speaks—breathes toward her; and Vinnie realizes what she should have realized sooner: that Rosemary isn’t merely tipsy, but quite drunk.
Annoyed, she tries to calm her, speaking slowly and firmly as she would to an anxious class. “Of course you’re not alone. You have so many friends, so many beaux, I’m quite sure—”
“That’s what you think, my dear. You think a lot of men want to sleep with me. I used to think that myself.” Her voice alters. “Bloody little fool that I was. Men don’t want to sleep with me, they want to have slept with me. They want to be able to tell their mates, ‘Oh, Lady Rosemary Radley, the television star? Yes, I do know her. In fact, I knew her very well, at one time.’ “Rosemary has slipped into a third voice: tenor, smarmily insinuating.
“That’s how they all are, the bastards,” she continues, her accent shifting again. “Except for Freddy. Freddy knew I was an actress, but it didn’t mean fuck-all to him. He’d never even heard of Tallyho Castle before he met me. I thought all you Americans were mad about British TV, but he didn’t even own a set, for Christ’s sake. He never even saw the show, he loved me anyhow.” Rosemary is sobbing now, her face distorted in a way it never becomes when she weeps on camera. “But he’s a bastard like the rest of them.”
The taxi is in Oxford Street now, snarled in a skein of other vehicles. From either side their drivers and passengers, with the covert but avid interest of the British in personal disaster, regard the drunken and weeping woman from whom they are separated by only a sheet of glass.
“He keeps on phoning my service, but I don’t dare see him or talk to him. I bloody couldn’t take it, Vinnie, unless I knew he was coming back for good, I—” Rosemary breaks off, perceiving that she has an audience.
“Yah!” she screams suddenly, turning with an ugly face and a coarse gesture to the nearest spectator, a portly well-dressed man in an adjoining taxi. He flinches visibly, then turns away with an unconvincing attempt at casualness.
Rosemary laughs wickedly, almost hysterically. Then she flings herself across the cab and repeats the performance at Vinnie’s open window, horrifying a young woman at the wheel of a Mini. “Yah, you nosy bitch! Why don’t you mind your own business!” She flops back into her seat, grinning. The pale silk cocoon of her cape