Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [53]
“Hey, let’s go,” Fred says.
“No,” Nico hisses through his teeth, in character.
“No?”
“I am not a servant.” Nico’s voice is barely under control. “I don’t pack the dirty clothes of people.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Fred rolls up some suprisingly elegant maroon silk pajamas and stuffs them into the bag. “Don’t be a wimp.”
Nico does not move. He looks insulted; probably he has never heard of a wimp and thinks it is something unspeakable. “Sorry,” Fred says. “Look, maybe you could just pile up those books and papers, all right?”
“All right,” Nico says sullenly.
“What I don’t understand,” Fred goes on, trying to ease the atmosphere in the room, “is why William has to get out of the way so fast. I can understand that maybe Sir James Billings wouldn’t want to meet a lot of strangers when he’s just got back from Turkey late at night. But he must be used to William; after all he’s Posy’s cousin.”
Nico snorts. “You are wrong, and also stupid,” he says, slinging Royal Charles and Betrayal onto the bed.
Fred decides not to notice the word stupid, which Nico has no doubt used as a riposte for wimp. “But he is her cousin; Posy said so when she introduced us before lunch,” he says, starting to pack up William’s leather toilet kit.
“Yes, her cousin, I suppose.” Nico’s tone is scornful. “They are all cousins here. And also her lover.”
“Aw, come on.” Fred thinks of Posy, so blond and queenly and tall, in her way as much the real thing as Rosemary. “I can’t believe that.” He imagines Posy naked, a luscious full-bodied late-Victorian nude, in sexual juxtaposition with the lanky, dim, fiftyish William, the relevant part of whom is somehow represented in his mind by the worn beaver shaving brush with dried white soap on it that he has just stowed away.
“No? Why not?”
“Well, I mean, he’s too old. And he’s not all that attractive either. I mean, hell, Posy’s a beautiful woman.”
“Who can calculate these things?” Nico tosses the Times untidily beside the books. “It’s a matter of opinions. Myself, I would not want to fuck with Lady Posy; you would not want to fuck with Cousin William.”
“No,” Fred agrees vehemently, reminded that Nico, in spite (or perhaps because) of his macho appearance, presumably fucks regularly with Edwin Francis.
“Also, sex, it is not always a matter of only desire, as you must know.” Nico allows a slight unpleasant pause. “Cousin William is not wealthy or famous, but he has many connections. With his help Posy is a feature in the magazines, on the television. Soon she introduces for him six programs about English gardens, for a nice payment. He does much for her.”
And if Cousin William would do as much for me, Nico seems to be saying, I might fuck with him. Or even worse: Rosemary is rich and famous, she does much for you. The conviction that Nico is a sly, second-rate, opportunistic person, a blot on the country-house scene, comes over Fred. “Maybe, but that doesn’t prove—”
“Also you see he stays in the room next to Lady Posy’s, the customary room of the husband.” With a mocking flourish Nico pulls open a paneled oak door, exposing a vertical slice of Posy’s blue-and-white sprigged and ruffled Laura Ashley bedroom.
“So?” Fred says, concealing his fear that Nico is right, but not his dislike.
“So convenient.” Nico smiles.
Fred does not smile. He goes on packing William’s clothes, faster than before. Though most of them are clean, they now feel disagreeable: the tightly rolled thin dark lisle socks, the slippery starched shirts with the name of a Belgravia laundry on the paper band. He does not like them; he does not like the paneled room with its deep tapestry-cushioned chairs and window seat, its distorting mullioned panes, its connecting door. An impulse to walk away comes to him, but his training in manners is strong, and he presses on.
“You’re saying that William had to get out of the house fast because if Posy’s husband saw him here, he’d think they were having an affair,” he says, trying to clarify it in his mind.
“Not think.” Nico’s expression is condescending. “He knows already that they