Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [148]
“Not me.” Edwin helps himself to the last of the macaroons, of which he has already had more than his fair share. “When I die, I want it to be in my own bed, with flattering interviews in the papers and tearful farewell visits from all my friends and admirers. I want to be prepared for it, not just hit over the head.”
“Well, Chuck should have been prepared,” Vinnie says. “The doctor told him not to drink or smoke; he told him to be careful, his daughter said, but he wouldn’t listen. Climbing three flights of stairs on such a hot day! It really makes me furious. And he probably had a cigarette and a drink in some pub before that. So stupid of him.” Realizing that she has spoken with more feeling than is appropriate, Vinnie gives a false laugh.
“Poor old Chuck,” Edwin says again. “He was quite a character, wasn’t he? Do you remember . . .”
Yes, Vinnie thinks as Edwin relates his anecdote; for her London friends Chuck Mumpson was a character, a comic type—not a real person. And she, who had known him better and should have known better, had put off going to him in Wiltshire not only because she was afraid to trust herself to any man, but because she didn’t want to be associated with him in their minds or even in her own. It was as if, in her blind Anglophilia, she had even taken on what are said to be the characteristic English weaknesses of timidity and snobbishness—neither of them, in fact, particularly characteristic of those English she knows best.
“Still,” Edwin concludes, “I did rather like him, didn’t you?”
“No,” Vinnie is extremely surprised to hear herself say. “I didn’t ‘rather like Chuck,’ if you want to know. I loved him.”
“Really.” Edwin moves his chair back from the table, and incidentally away from the force of Vinnie’s statement and perhaps its content.
It’s true, Vinnie thinks. Chuck had loved her, and—she says this to herself with surprise and difficulty—she had loved him. “Yes.” She meets his stare, his insulting slight smile.
“Well, we did all rather wonder sometimes,” he says at last. “But I never really thought you—” He recollects his manners and breaks off. “I do understand,” he says in another tone, consoling and sympathetic. “These things happen. As I know all too well, you can love someone you don’t admire—love them passionately, even. Of course that’s not very nice for either of you.” A cloudy, fixed look comes over his small neat features; he stares past Vinnie and the orderly little courtyard with its clean white gravel and clipped roses, into the part of his life that she has always preferred to know nothing of.
“But I did admire Chuck,” Vinnie says, realizing the truth of this as she speaks.
“Really. Well, no doubt he was admirable, in his own way. One of nature’s noblemen.”
“I—” Vinnie begins, and chokes herself off. The patronizing phrase enrages her, but she doesn’t trust herself to speak without screaming or crying. And after all, what right has she to scream at Edwin for thinking as she had thought for months?
“Well,” he says, splashing the last of the wine into their balloon glasses. “We mustn’t judge everyone by our own silly standards. I suppose we ought to learn that at our mother’s knee.”
“I suppose so,” says Vinnie, thinking that she did not learn it then, and that if she had, her whole life might have been different. “How is your mother, by the way?” she adds, hoping to divert Edwin.
“Oh, very well, thank you. Her arthritis is much better—one good effect of this frightful heat.”
“That’s nice.” To Vinnie the day is only pleasantly warm, but she is used to the British intolerance of temperatures over seventy-five degrees.
“If she stays well, I’m thinking of giving a little luncheon for her next week; I hope you’ll be able to come.”
“I’m not sure,” Vinnie says. “I may be going down to the country this weekend, and if I do I won