Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [145]
“So they sent you.” Vinnie manages to keep most of her disaproval out of her voice.
“Yeh, well. Somebody had to come, y’know.” Barbie blinks. “I don’t have a family, or much of a job, so I was kinda disposable.”
“I see.” Vinnie has an image of those shelves in her Camden Town supermarket that hold “disposables”—paper plates and napkins, plastic cups and spoons, aluminum-foil pie tins and the like: made to be used on unimportant occasions and then discarded. A strong dislike for Barbie’s living relatives comes over her. “Well, you’ll be able to go home now.”
“Yeh. Well, un, no. I’ve got to stay another couple days in London. Mom decided we’d better plan on ten days. Anyhow it costs a lot less that way, on the charter. I have a free hotel and everything.”
“Not a very nice hotel, I should imagine,” says Vinnie.
“Uh, no. It’s not specially nice. It’s called the Majestic, but it’s kinda yucky really. How did you know?”
“Because they always are. And what are you planning to do while you’re here?”
“I d’know. I haven’t thought, really. Look at some tourist attractions, I guess. I’ve never been to England before.”
“I see.” The thought comes to Vinnie that she ought to do something about Barbie; that it’s what Chuck would have wanted. She tries to remember some of the things he’d told her about his daughter, but all she can recall is that Barbie’s keen on animals. There’s the Zoo, of course—But the idea of another visit to the Zoo—where only a few weeks ago she was so happy watching the polar bear that looked like Chuck—upsets and depresses Vinnie so much that she can’t bring herself even to mention it.
“Well, so long, then,” Barbie says awkwardly. “Oh, thanks.” She accepts the ugly umbrella, which Vinnie has closed for her since it is no longer raining. “Thanks for everything, Professor Miner. Have a nice day.”
No, Vinnie thinks, shutting the door behind Barbie. It’s too bad what Chuck would have wanted. There’s nothing she can do for someone who, on an occasion like this, would say “Have a nice day.” And hasn’t doing things for other people caused most of the trouble and disruption and pain in her life? Yes, but it has also caused most of the surprise and interest and even in the end joy. Does she, for instance, really wish that she’d never lent Chuck Mumpson that book on the plane?
She begins mechanically to clear away the tea things, thinking of Chuck—that all the time she knew him he had been ill, and had known he was ill. That’s why he’d told Professor Gilson he wanted her to have the picture of Old Mumpson “if anything happened to him.” He knew something might happen to him; all these months he had been living under a kind of death sentence, but failing to take any of the precautions that might have commuted it. He didn’t put much faith in doctors; he had said that to her more than once, the stupid, unlucky . . . Vinnie has to put down the plate she is rinsing and catch her breath. She is shaken by pity for Chuck, living on the edge of a cliff all this time, and knowing it—and shaken by fury at him for deliberately walking so near the edge, for not taking decent care of himself.
And of her too, she thinks suddenly. Because he could very well have died right here in this flat, with a glass of whisky dropping from one big freckled hand and a smoldering cigarette falling from the other as he pitched heavily, fatally, onto her carpet.
Or worse. Vinnie stares out the window, letting water splash unheeded over the rim of the sink. He could have died in her bed, on top of her. She recalls vividly how red Chuck’s face got—with passion, she had thought; how he gasped at the climax—she had thought, with pleasure. Why did he keep taking that chance? How could he do that to her? Is that why he never told her he was ill, fearing, and perhaps rightly, that if she’d known she might never had let him . . . All those times . . .
Miserable, furious, even frightened—though the danger, of course, is past—without knowing exactly what she is doing, Vinnie turns off the faucet and, holding the colander she has been washing, walks