Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [32]
“Well then. What could I possibly do?” She laughs.
“I think you just might speak to Fred.” Though Edwin continues to smile, it is clear from the way he pushes his coffee aside and leans over the blue-and-white checked tablecloth that he is not entirely jesting. “I’m sure he’d listen to you. Considering your position at his college. You could try to persuade him to—what would be his phrase?—cool it, before there’s too much damage done.”
The idea that she might use her academic seniority to persuade persuade—blackmail would be a more accurate word—Fred into breaking off his love affair is disagreeable. Vinnie enjoys wielding her hard-won professional authority, but only in professional matters. Unlike Edwin, she feels a strong dislike, almost a revulsion, from the idea of meddling in anyone’s private life.
“I could, I suppose,” she says, sitting back away from him. “But I certainly am not going to.”
A March afternoon in St. James’s Square. In what she has determined by experiment to be the most comfortable and best lit of the chairs in the London Library Reading Room, Vinnie Miner sits working. Unless she needs some volume available only in the British Museum, she prefers to study in these quiet, elegantly shabby surroundings, which for her are agreeably haunted by the shades of writers past and the shapes of writers present. It is easy for her to imagine the portly, well-dressed spirit of Henry James climbing the stairs in a dignified manner, or that of Virginia Woolf trailing limp crushed twenties silks between two shadowy bookstacks. And almost any day she might see Kingsley Amis, John Gross, or Margaret Drabble in their still incarnate state. Many of her friends, too, use the library; there is almost always someone around to lunch with.
Vinnie’s scholarly research is nearly complete. As soon as it stops raining and warms up a bit she can begin the more exciting part of her project: collecting playground rhymes in city and suburban schools. Already she has spoken to a number of principals and teachers, some of whom have not only given her permission to visit, but volunteered their help in recording rhymes, or even made this part of a classroom project. Here in Britain, she doesn’t have to educate the educators; her interest in folklore is seen as natural and respectable. All that remains is to wait for the weather to improve.
By now Vinnie has more or less forgotten her unpleasant flight to Britain and—most of the time—that hateful article in the Atlantic. So far, no one she knows here has mentioned it; probably no one has even seen it. To help ensure this, since many of her friends regularly use the London Library, on her first visit she took the precaution of removing the March issue of the Atlantic from the top of its pile in the reading room and sliding it under a stack of Archaeology nearby. From time to time the magazine reappears; then she hides it again. One sign of the moderation of her distress is that this morning she merely moved the March issue to the bottom of the heap of Atlantics. As she did so, she imagined L. D. Zimmem as shrunken to about six inches high and crushed flat between the pages of his own article, a kind of unattractive paper doll, staining the paper with a thin sepia smear. It also occurred to her, as it has before, that she might slip the magazine into her canvas shopping bag, sneak it out of the library, and destroy it at her leisure. But all her training is against this final solution. Magazine-burning, in Vinnie’s mind, is nearly as bad as book-burning; besides, in the same issue there is a really excellent article on vanishing wildlife, which many people might enjoy.
The only thing that disturbs her at the moment is her conversation with Edwin Francis at lunch yesterday. Mentally reviewing it, she is not quite comfortable in the most comfortable chair in the reading room. She is annoyed at Fred Turner,