Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [42]
4
* * *
Despair is all folly;
Hence, melancholy,
Fortune attends you while youth is in flower.
John Gay, Polly
IN the hard-lit, almost empty lobby of a small theater in Hammersmith Fred Turner is waiting for Rosemary Radley, who is late as usual. Each time the doors fling open and let in some meaningless person and a gust of damp March evening, he sighs, like a gardener who sees his flowers blowing away in a storm; for each minute that passes is one less alone with her.
Maybe Rosemary won’t come at all—that has happened more than once before, though not lately, and still wouldn’t surprise Fred. What still surprises him is that he should be here in this theater waiting for her, and in this mood of high-charged expectation. A month ago all of London for him was like the empty county fairgrounds outside his home town on some cold evening—a sour, dim expanse of cropped stubble and stones. Now, because of Rosemary Radley, it has been transformed into a kind of circus of light; and Fred, as if he were a small child again, stands wide-eyed just within the entrance of the main tent, wondering how he came there and what to do with the sparkling pink spindle of cotton candy he holds in his hand.
Rationally, of course, his being there can be explained as a result of the interest in eighteenth-century drama that brought him to London in the first place, and later gave him something to talk to Rosemary about. (As it turns out, she is remarkably knowledgeable about theatrical history and stage tradition, and has herself appeared in The Beggar’s Opera in repertory.) More fancifully his presence can be explained as the reward of virtue—specifically of the eighteenth-century virtues of civility and boldness.
It was civility, for instance, that made Fred stay on at Professor Virginia Miner’s party last month after he had eaten and drunk as much as seemed polite, though nobody he had met interested him or seemed interested in him. As a result he was still there when Rosemary Radley arrived, fashionably and characteristically late.
He saw her first standing near the entrance beside a pot of pink hyacinths: like them in full bloom, and delicately pretty with what he recognized as a typical English prettiness. She had the sort of looks celebrated in eighteenth-century painting: the round face, roguish eye, small pouting mouth, dimpled chin, creamy-white skin flushed with pink, and tumbling flaxen curls. As soon as he could, Fred crossed the room to observe this phenomenon at closer range, and by persistently standing alongside it eventually managed to be introduced to “Lady Rosemary Radley” (though not by Professor Miner, who knows as Fred now does too that it is not done to use the title socially—just as one wouldn’t properly introduce someone as Mr. or Miss).
“Oh, how do you do.” Fred, who had never met a member of the British aristocracy, gazed at Rosemary with what he now realizes must have appeared a rude intensity—though, as Rosemary said later, she’s used to being stared at; after all she’s an actress. He felt like some traveler who for years has read-of the existence of snow leopards or poltergeists, but never expected to be this near to one.
“An American! I do love Americans,” Rosemary exclaimed, with the light amused laugh that he was presently to know so well.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Fred replied, a little too late, for already she had turned to greet someone else. For the rest of the party he hovered near her, sometimes trying to claim her attention, more often just gazing and listening with the same kind of baffled fascination