Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [48]
In the last few weeks Fred has entered a world he had before only read of: a world of crowded, electric first nights, leisurely highbrow Sunday lunches in Hampstead and Holland Park; elegant international dinner parties in Connaught Square and Chester Row. He has been backstage at the BBC studios in Ealing, and at the offices of the Sunday Times, and has met a score of people who were once only names in magazines or on the syllabi of college courses. What is more amazing, some of these people now seem to consider him a friend, or at least a good acquaintance: they remember that he is writing on John Gay and inquire about the progress of his research; they speak to him in a casually intimate manner about their troubles with reviewers or indigestion. (Others, it’s true, forget his name from one party to the next—which is maybe to be expected.)
When he first started seeing Rosemary, Fred wondered why she knew so many celebrities. The answer turns out to be that she herself is a sort of celebrity, though he had never heard of her. As one of the stars of Tallyho Castle, a popular comedy-drama series about upper-class country life, she is familiar by sight to millions of British viewers, some of whom occasionally approach her in shops and restaurants or at the theater. (“Excuse me, but aren’t you Lady Emma Tally? Oh, I really do enjoy that program so much, and you’re one of my very favorite characters!”) As a result, she is better known by sight than some of her more famous but nontheatrical friends.
To Rosemary, Fred realizes now, her popular fame is both welcome and unsatisfying. He has seen how she begins to sparkle and glow when a fan appears, as if some inner lamp had been turned up to 200 watts. He has also heard her say, more than once, that she is tired to death of Lady Emma and of all the other nice ladies she has portrayed on television. What she really wants, she has confided to him, is to act “the great classic parts”—Hedda Gabler, Blanche DuBois, Lady Macbeth—in the theater before she is too old. “I could do them, Freddy, I know I could do them,” she had insisted. “I know what it is to feel murderous, coarse, full of hate.” (If she does, Fred thinks, it’s only by a magnificent leap of intuition.) “All that’s in me, Freddy, it is. You don’t believe me,” she added, turning to look directly at him.
Holding her close, he smiled, then shook his head.
“You don’t think I could act those parts.” A frown had appeared between her fair arched brows, as if some invisible evil spirit were cruelly pinching the skin.
“No, I do. Of course I do,” Fred assured her. “I know you’re good, everyone says so. I’m sure you could do anything you liked.”
But no director has ever been willing to cast Rosemary in such roles. When she is invited to appear on the stage—less often than she would like—it is always in light comedy: Shaw or Wilde or Sheridan or Ayckbourn.
The problem is, as Rosemary’s friend Edwin Francis explained to Fred, that she just doesn’t look like a tragedy queen. Her voice is too high and sweet, and she doesn’t project that