Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [147]
“Really.” Edwin rises and begins to clear the garden table. “And is that a good thing?”
“Who knows? Fred seems to think it is.” Vinnie sighs; she has a deep distrust of marriage, which in her observation has an almost irresistible tendency to turn friends and lovers into relatives, if not into foes.
“It’s just as well really that he couldn’t get in touch with Posy,” Edwin says a little later, returning from the basement kitchen with a plate of fruit and another of macaroons. “She would have coped magnificently, of course, but she’s not as discreet as she might be . . . Please, help yourself. I especially recommend the apricots.
“I had my suspicions about Mrs. Harris all along, you know,” he continues. “She simply sounded too good to be true.”
“Yes, I thought Rosemary was improving the story sometimes,” Vinnie says. “Or do you mean—do you think there never was any Mrs. Harris?”
“I do, rather. It’s hard to imagine Rosemary doing her own housework, though. I expect she just went on hiring those part-time people—only rather more of them, perhaps, so that Fred would stop complaining of how the place looked.”
“But Fred saw Mrs. Harris at least once. He told me so.”
“Yes, well . . . You know, Rosemary’s always been annoyed that she’s so narrowly typecast. She’s convinced she could play working-class characters, for instance, only no one will ever let her.”
“But she was scrubbing the hall floor, Fred said. I can’t believe—”
“You have to remember her training. She always gets tremendously into her parts. Almost carried away, sometimes. When she’s taping Tallyho Castle, for instance, she starts to have this frightfully gracious lady-of-the-manor manner. I can easily imagine her washing a floor just to get the feel of it.”
“Ye-es.” Vinnie is aware that Edwin is skillfully rationalizing and diminishing what would otherwise seem highly neurotic or even psychotic behavior. “But I think there must have been someone like Mrs. Harris for a while,” she insists. “Even if that wasn’t her real name. I spoke to what I thought was Mrs. Harris on the telephone twice at least. She’d have to be an awfully gifted actress.”
“Oh, she’s gifted,” Edwin agrees, carefully skinning a ripe peach with one of his ivory-handled Victorian fruit knives. “She can imitate just about anyone. You should hear her do your cowboy friend, Chuck what’s-his-name. How is what’s-his-name, by the way?” he adds, changing the subject with his customary deftness. “Is he still digging for ancestors down in Wiltshire?”
“Yes—no,” Vinnie replies uncomfortably. Though she has been at Edwin’s for nearly two hours, and spoken to him earlier on the phone, she hasn’t dared to mention Chuck. She knows it will be nearly impossible for her to tell the story without falling apart as she has been falling apart at intervals for the past ten days. But she plunges in, beginning with Barbie’s telephone call.
“So the wife and the son couldn’t make it to England,” Edwin remarks presently.
“No. Of course, it’s just a convention that when someone dies you have to hurry to the fatal spot. It doesn’t actually do them any good.”
“I suppose not. Still, it does give one a certain opinion of Chuck’s relatives.”
“It does.” Vinnie continues with her story. Several times she hears a tell-tale wobble in her voice, but Edwin seems to notice nothing.
“So there’s some corner of an English field that is forever Tulsa,” he says finally, smiling.
“Yes.” Vinnie strangles the cry that rises in her.
“Poor old Chuck. Rather awful to go out like that, so unprepared and sudden and far from home.”
“I don’t know,” Vinnie says, lowering her head and pretending to be spitting out a grape-seed to conceal her face. “Some people might prefer it. No fuss, you know. 1 think I’d rather have it that way myself.” She imagines herself dead, and her ashes scattered like Chuck’s over a hillside field that’s she’s never seen and never will see. A longing comes over her to look upon that place; to visit the grotto where Old Mumpson lived,