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By Root 770 0

’t seen a single one of the many people he met through Rosemary. Or, to be more accurate, he hasn’t seen them in the flesh. In the media they are everywhere: explaining the human body and international law on television; appearing in plays and films; giving their opinions about cultural events on the radio; being interviewed by newspapers; answering difficult questions with charm and erudition on quiz shows and current affairs programs. Whenever Fred opens a magazine one of them is telling him what to think about Constable or how best to cook asparagus or support nuclear disarmament. And if they aren’t quoted, they are referred to—most disagreeably, by an item in Private Eye noting that “Lady Rosily Raddled,” as it habitually calls her, has “dissolved her Yankee connection,” and making reference to a long list of other melted connections, some of them involving men Fred has met several times but never imagined that Rosemary had once slept with.

Of course he hadn’t thought that she had no past, Fred tells himself as he wanders disconsolate down a long gallery of late-Renaissance furnishings toward a looming pillared structure described on a placard as The Great Bed of Ware and said to have housed up to a dozen sleepers a night. But to be referred to in print as just one of a series—Fred clenches his teeth and focuses again on the Great Bed, associating it in his mind with Rosemary and her lovers. There is room here between these twisted columns for all those mentioned or hinted at in Private Eye, and more. And no doubt there were more. He’s only the most recent—by now, maybe not even that. Against his will he sees Rosemary, in her pale satin nightgown scattered with lace butterflies, sporting in the Great Bed with a dozen shadowy naked male figures. The legs, the arms, the cocks, the backsides—her tumbled pale-gold hair—the stained and tumbled bedclothes—the rebound of springs, the smell of sex . . .

To shake off this hallucination, Fred moves nearer and puts his hand on the unwrinkled brocade coverlet, receiving a shock: the Great Bed of Ware is as hard as stone.

But why should he be surprised? Functionally speaking this is no longer a bed. No one will ever sleep or fuck in it again. No one will sit in these high-backed oak chairs: their stringy crimson velvet seats, now faded to pink, are protected from contemporary rear ends by tarnished gilt cords. The engraved goblets in the glass cases will never again hold water or wine; the pewter plates will never be heaped with the roast beef of Old England.

Art museums are better. Paintings and sculptures continue to serve the purpose for which they were made: to be gazed at and admired, to interpret and shape the world. They live on, immortal, but all this sluff is functionally dead; no, worse, fixed in a kind of living death, like his passion for Rosemary Radley. There’s something futile, something hideous, about this immense Victorian junkshop full of expensive household things: all these chairs and dishes and cloths and knives and clocks, so many of them, too many of them, preserved forever in frozen uselessness, just as his passion for Rosemary and his love for Roo are uselessly preserved.

A revulsion from the thousands of undead objects that surround him on all sides seizes Fred, and he starts to walk, then to run toward the staircase and the exit. Outside the vast cocoa-colored mausoleum he takes deep breaths of a living air that smells of auto exhaust and cut grass. Okay, what shall he do now? Is it safe to rescue his clothes from Rosemary’s house, or should he abandon them to a V and A zombie existence?

If Rosemary were only in London—If only he’d found the damn key when she was still around—Yes, then he could have gone to the house whether she’d invited him or not, let himself in, and told her and showed her that he loved her, sworn he wasn’t tired of her. How could he be tired of Rosemary, for Christ’s sake?

If only he’d gone there sooner after their quarrel . . . Or, two weeks ago at the radio station, if only he’d been bolder, if he’d pushed his way into the