Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [116]
“Weird,” is Chuck’s comment. “Sounds to me like she’s having some kinda crackup.”
“I don’t know. It could easily have been deliberate. After all, Rosemary’s an actress. Probably she just doesn’t like Americans. And I expect she never did like me very much.” In spite of herself, Vinnie’s voice wavers.
“Aw, baby. It’s rough to be cursed out like that. I wish I was there; I’d make you feel better.”
“I’m all right, really. It’s just that it upset me, the way she kept changing voices.”
“Yeh, I get what you mean. Myrna used to do something like that. She’d be screaming at me or the kids, or maybe the help, practically out of control. Then the phone would ring, and she’d answer it sweet and smooth as soft ice cream, talking to some client or one of her lady-friends. Just as easy as switching channels. It used to spook me.”
“I can understand that. You wonder which one is real.”
“Yeh. Wal, no. I never wondered that.” Chuck laughs harshly. “Listen, honey. Maybe what you need is to get out of London for awhile. I mean, you don’t hafta be back home till late August, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Wal, I was thinking. There’s a lotta folklore down here in Wiltshire. All these books and manuscripts and stuff in the historical society, I was looking at some of them the other day. And there’s schools here of course, and kids. There oughta be lots of rhymes you could collect. I was thinking, maybe you could come down and stay with me for the summer. There’s plenty of room for you to work here. I’d really like that.”
“Oh, Chuck,” Vinnie says. “That’s kind of you, but—”
“Don’t decide now. Think about it awhile. Okay?”
“Okay,” Vinnie repeats.
Of course she can’t spend the whole summer in Wiltshire, she tells herself after she has hung up; she doesn’t want to leave the London Library and all her friends. But a short visit—several visits, even—that might be possible. And that way she could see Chuck every day, and every night, without anyone in London knowing about it. Yes, why not?
While she wasn’t watching it, Vinnie’s headache has dissolved. She feels able to go out to dinner after all.
10
* * *
“Why dost thou turn away from me? ’Tis thy Polly—”
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
IN Notting Hill Gate, Fred Turner is packing to return home. It is midsummer, and London is in full bloom. Tall horse chestnuts press their green hands and creamy candles of blossom against his windows, and through them a hazy vanilla light seeps into the room, transfiguring its scratched wooden furniture, turning its paint-clogged Victorian woodwork and flowery plaster ceiling decorations into confections of whipped cream. The air is warm and windy, the sky beyond the trees a deep, still blue.
Fred, however, sees little of this. His mood is gray, flat, icy, and bitter as a brackish winter pond. In less than two days he will be gone from London, without having finished his research, seen Rosemary again, or heard from Roo. More than two weeks have passed since he cabled an answer to his wife’s letter: but though his message included the words LOVE and CALL COLLECT, there has been no answer. He had waited too damn long, or Roo never wanted him back in the first place.
As for his work, it is in a dead funk. He goes through the motions of scholarship, reading primary and secondary sources, copying down quotations from Gay’s work and from eighteenth-century critical essays, contemporary records, and true-crime narratives, patching them together somehow into a kind of whole, but it is all false and forced. Everything Fred puts into his two battered canvas suitcases reminds him of failure, of waste. Stacks of notes—skimpy and disordered compared to what they should have been—half-empty notebooks, blank three-by-five-inch index cards. Unanswered letters, including one from his mother and two from students asking for recommendations which should have been dealt with weeks ago. A favorite snapshot of Roo at fourteen with a pet rabbit, taken by her with her first time-release camera; the innocent warmth of her smile, the openness,