Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [146]
But if Chuck really wanted to live, why did he go on making such passionate love to her? Wasn’t that just plain stupid?
No, Vinnie thinks. Not stupid on his terms, because that was one of the things he had wanted to live for. He loved me, she thinks. It was true all the time. What a horrible bad joke, that after fifty-four years she should have been loved by someone like Chuck, who on top of everything else that’s wrong with him is dead and scattered on the side of a hill somewhere in Wiltshire: If she’d believed him; if she’d known; if she’d said—
A wave of confused memory and feeling churns up inside her; still clutching the wet colander in one hand, she falls onto the bed, weeping.
“Rosemary? Oh, she’s fine now, really.” Edwin Francis says, helping Vinnie to more shrimp salad. It is a warm afternoon a week later, and they are having lunch in his tiny, beautifully tended Kensington courtyard.
“Really?” Vinnie echoes.
“I saw her two days ago, just before she left for Ireland, and she was in top form. But I don’t mind telling you, it was a near thing.”
“Really,” she says, with quite another intonation.
“Now this mustn’t go any further.” He pours them both more Blanc de Blanc, then looks hard at Vinnie. “I wouldn’t say anything even to you, but I want you to understand the situation, so you’ll see how important it is for us to be very very discreet.”
“Yes, of course,” Vinnie says, becoming a little impatient.
“You see, there have been, mm, other episodes in the past . . . Well, nothing quite like this, but Rosemary often gets . . . well, a bit odd when she isn’t working steadily.”
“Oh?”
“It’s no joke, really, you know, always having to be a lady. Or a gentleman, if it comes to that. The best of us—and I do believe, in a way, that Rosemary is one of the best—might find it a strain.”
“Yes,” Vinnie agrees. “It must have been rather difficult for you,” she prompts, since Edwin remains silent.
“Well. Initially. Then . . . Well, as it happens, there’s this extremely gifted doctor—Rosemary’s seen him before, actually. He was tremendously helpful. Luckily, she has a complete amnesia for most of the worst period.”
“Really.”
“Yes. You know, drink does that sometimes. She doesn’t remember Fred’s coming round to the house at all, for instance.”
“I suppose that’s just as well.”
“Oh, I think so. A mercy, the doctor said. But you mustn’t say anything about any of that to anyone. Seriously. Promise.”
“Of course, I promise,” Vinnie says. The British hush-hush attitude towards psychotherapy is something that, in spite of her Anglophilia, she has never quite understood. Eccentricity, even eccentricity of a sort that would be designated “sick” in America, is admired over here. Men who dress up like Indian chieftains and hold pow-wows, women who keep fifty Siamese cats in royal splendor, are written up admiringly in the newspapers. But ordinary neurosis is denied and concealed. If you consult a psychologist, it is something to be hidden from everyone while it is going on and forgotten as soon as possible afterward.
If Rosemary were an American actress, Vinnie thinks, she would already be in therapy, and would refer with easy familiarity to “my analyst” on every possible occasion. She might very well give interviews about her problems with drinking. And her split personality—if in fact it was really split, and not just an act—would be discussed on talk shows and celebrated in People magazine.
“And you mustn’t say anything to Fred, either. Let him think it was all theatrics. Have you heard from Fred, by the way?”
“Yes, I had a letter—well, a note. He wanted