Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [49]
Though he doesn’t like the way Edwin sometimes makes fun of Rosemary, Fred has to admit that he can’t imagine her as Lady Macbeth, or as full of coarse murderous hate, even for dramatic purposes. Her wish to play violent and tragic parts is one of the things about her that still puzzles him.
Something else he would like to understand about Rosemary is why her pretty house in Chelsea is always such a goddamn mess. At first glance the long double sitting room looks very elegant, though a little faded. But soon, especially in the daytime, you notice that the bay windows are smeared and fly-specked, the sills grainy with soot, the gilt moldings of the pictures chipped, the striped gray satin upholstery blotched and worn, the mahogany table-tops branded with rings and burns. Everywhere there are rumpled newspapers, sticky glasses, muddied coffee cups, full ashtrays, empty cigarette packages, and discarded clothing. Below in the kitchen and in the bedroom upstairs it is worse: the closets are jammed with rubbish, and the bathrooms not always clean. How Rosemary can emerge from all that disorder looking so fresh and beautiful is a mystery—and how she can stand to live in it another one.
Of course Rosemary probably doesn’t know how to do housework, Fred thinks, and he wouldn’t want her to have to learn. But she could certainly hire somebody. Her friends agree with him. What she needs, Posy Billings explained earlier this afternoon when she was showing Fred around her own perfectly kept grounds, is a “daily”—some strong reliable woman who will come in every morning to clean and shop and do the laundry and make lunch, so that Rosemary won’t have to go out to a restaurant. If only Fred could persuade her to hire someone like that—Posy knows of a very reliable agency in London—he would be doing a tremendous good deed.
“Okay,” Fred said as they stood in front of a long perennial border covered by a mulch of clean shredded bark, from which neat clumps of crocus and grape hyacinths emerged. “Okay, I’ll try.”
It won’t be easy, though, he thinks now, imagining Rosemary as he had left her a quarter of an hour ago, lying upstairs in what Posy calls the Pink Room. Its oversize bed has a carved and gilded headboard padded in flowered satin, and a matching quilted spread is drawn up in loose folds to Rosemary’s breasts. She is wearing a nightgown of delicate ivory silk with semitransparent lace insets in the shape of butterflies scattered over it; her white-gold hair falls in fine tendrils across pale-pink scalloped sheets. The pink-silk-shaded bedside lamp casts a blush over her creamy skin, and over the rococo furniture painted in pink and silver, the French fashion plates on the walls, and the silver vase of narcissus on the dressing-table. It also illuminates a confusion of spilt powders and creams on this dressing-table and a shipwreck of discarded clothes on the Aubusson carpet.
No, it won’t be easy to change Rosemary’s ways. She hates talking about “boring practical things” and isn’t capable of concentrating on any subject for long. She is—and for Fred it’s part of her charm—a creature of sudden, random impulse. He sees her as a rare beautiful lacy butterfly like those which decorate her nightgown, fluttering and hovering, dancing near and then away, difficult to catch hold of for more than a moment.
Her present withdrawal, however, is not idiosyncratic. Going to bed when it isn’t bedtime—or at least saying that you are going to bed—is, Fred has discovered, a habitual and respectable social strategem among the British. To declare fatigue without obvious cause isn’t, as in America, to confess physical and/or emotional weakness. Instead, “having a bit of a rest” or “lying down for a while” provides