Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [122]
Fred feels weak and exhausted, as if he had been running a marathon or playing squash for an hour. He leans against the frame of the closet door and tries to breathe normally. But it is no use; the balloon that has been in his chest ever since he got to Cheyne Square begins to deflate with a wet whinnying sound. Weeping, he knocks his head rhythmically against the door jamb to provide a counterirritant. And as he does so, he becomes aware of another, less evenly rhythmical noise from below: the noise of Mrs. Harris staggering up the stairs, banging into the wall as she comes. The way it sounds, she is so drunk she can hardly walk.
He retreats into the dimness of the closet, hoping she isn’t headed this way or won’t see him; but no such luck. She pauses in the hall, breathing audibly, then stumbles into the bedroom and leans for support on the chest of drawers.
“Missing your sweetie, are you?” she says. Fred realizes that even from the back his posture must be so eloquent of misery that a drunken charwoman can read it. Not trusting himself to look at her, let alone reply—and what would be the point anyhow?—he begins sliding Rosemary’s clothes along the rod, searching for his blue workshirt and hoping that Mrs. Harris will go away.
Instead she lurches across the room toward him, catching her foot in the bedspread and only saving herself by grabbing the bedpost with both hands; then she lurches on into the closet behind Fred.
“Don’t do that now, lovey,” she says. “Let’s make hay.”
Fred stiffens. “Making hay” was his and Rosemary’s most private code phrase. On bright days like this one the westering sun would shine into this room and onto the canopied bed. Rosemary loved to lie in it, to feel it warming and coloring her white skin. “Come on, darling. Let’s make hay while the sun shines,” she had said to him once, laughing softly. A few days later he had bought her a print of Breughel’s The Haymakers, and she had tacked it on the pale-flowered wallpaper above the night stand; it is still there. He knows now for sure that Mrs. Harris has been spying on them, sneaking round and listening at doors and/or on the kitchen extension. Sick, sickening. He turns away, giving up on his book and his shirt, wanting now only to get the hell out of here.
“Excuse me, please,” he says angrily.
But Mrs. Harris doesn’t move aside. Instead she stumbles even closer. Her dirty face, what little Fred can see of it under the peroxided hair, is smeared with what looks like a mixture of soot and lipstick; he can smell her unwashed odor and her foul breath. She puts out her hand, and the soiled flowered wrapper she is wearing falls open it; beneath it is incongruously white, voluptuous naked flesh.
“Oh, darling!” she whispers in a drunken, wheezing imitation of Rosemary’s voice. She grabs Fred’s arm; she sags toward him and begins to rub her body against his.
“Quit that!” he cries. He tries to push Mrs. Harris away gently, but she is unexpectedly strong. “Let go of me, you dirty old cow!”
The charwoman’s grip slackens. He shoves her aside with such force that she falls onto the closet floor among Rosemary’s shoes, giving a kind of startled animal howl.
Fred doesn’t stay to see whether Mrs. Harris is hurt, or to help her up. Clutching his sweater, not looking back, he flees from the room and down the curving staircase two steps at a time, and slams out of the house.
Once in the street he keeps walking, at first not choosing any direction. But as