Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [118]
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