Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [133]
In the sudden silence another Jungian monster can be heard far off, roaring through distant tunnels. Vinnie stares at her own smudged reflection in the opposite window, and then at the notice above it, which recommends a poison for blackbeetles. As the minutes pass, she begins to feel that time has stopped; that she will never reach Hampstead or anywhere else, that she will sit on this seat forever.
If it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, she wouldn’t be here. If he had never existed, he wouldn’t have had a quarreling inconsiderate daughter for Fred Turner to marry. Fred would have married some other much nicer girl, who would not have quarreled with him, who would have come with him to London. He would never have had an affair with Rosemary Radley, and Rosemary would never have insulted Vinnie in a taxi.
It is Zimmern who should be here now, imprisoned in time on an almost empty half-lit train. Vinnie imagines him sitting across from her under the advertisement for blackbeetles, looking rather like a blackbeetle himself. She imagines how as the minutes lengthen toward hours the insects so graphically depicted above Zimmern’s head will begin to crawl out of the poster and down the window frame toward him, how they will crawl in procession onto his shoulders and arms and neck and head; how he will try to brush them off, but it will do no good, for more of them will come out of the picture, and more and more. Zimmern cries out for help, but Vinnie only sits looking steadily at him, watching what happens to him, willing it to happen . . .
The lights blink brighter; the image of L. D. Zimmem fades and vanishes. The engine gives a drunken hiccup and begins to hum. Finally, with a jolt, the train starts off.
Hampstead, when Vinnie reaches it, is at first unthreatening. A blurred haze of interlocking street lights hangs over the High Street, which is well populated with harmless-looking pedestrians, and here and there an illuminated shop window. But the side streets are empty and silent. Now and then she hears the echo on the pavement of some other late walker’s tread, and occasionally a car rushes past her. At East Heath Road she halts, gazing at the path opposite, which disappears between overhanging heavy trees into acres of windy darkness. Really, to venture onto the Heath at this hour would be plain stupidity, just asking for it. The only sensible thing is to turn around and go home now, while the Underground is still running.
Impelled by this idea, Vinnie starts back down Well Walk. “I tried,” she says in her mind to Chuck Mumpson, “But the Heath was pitch-black, and I really didn’t want to get myself mugged.” “Aw, come on, Vinnie,” his voice replies. “You got this far, you can do it. You just gotta have a little gumption.”
All right, damn it, she says to him, turning round again. But as she crosses the road and starts onto the Heath her heart begins to pound warningly. A hazy, pale, nearly full moon is just clearing the trees, and the sky is a strange fluorescent smoke-red. In the fitful night breeze every stooping bush, every overhanging tree is a moving presence; and there are other, worse presences: voices and figures. Vinnie keeps stupidly walking on, feeling more and more frightened and angry at herself for having come, swerving away from every blowing leaf or strolling couple, thinking how insane it is for her to be wandering across Hampstead Heath in the middle of the night on this wild-goose chase. Who knows if she can find the goose Fred Turner on Parliament Hill, among the drifters and tramps and thieves that may be—probably certainly are—prowling about there in the dark? Who knows if she can even find Parliament Hill?
And whether or not she is robbed and injured