Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [55]
Fred starts down the path. It doesn’t seem like a lovely night to him. In the circle of light at his feet the gravel is loose and wet; when he points the torch upward he can see the two-hundred-year-old topiary hedges, dark and dripping, on either side. The fanciful shapes of pigeons, peacocks, owls, and urns seem distorted, almost sinister. In the sky above is a lopsided yellowish moon with a pale greasy ring around it, like a badly fried egg It is bright enough, however, for Fred to circumnavigate the pines and make out the boathouse, a crouching structure of pebblestone with a deep overhanging roof and its feet in inky water.
“Yes?” William opens the door a cautious crack. He is still wearing the baggy knickers and plaid kneesocks in which he portrayed an uncultured schoolboy, and has a rough hairy brown blanket, perhaps the one which earlier was part of the cow, round his shoulders. He looks guilty and disreputable, like some old crazed tramp caught hiding in the outbuildings of an estate. “What did you want?”
“I brought your things.” Fred decides that if he ever, God forbid, has an affair with a married woman, he won’t set foot in her house, not so much on pragmatic or moral grounds as on aesthetic ones.
“Oh, thank you very much.” William opens the door just enough to admit his bag. He doesn’t invite Fred to come in, and Fred doesn’t want to come in.
“Well, see you,” he says, turning away.
From the lake Posy’s house looks unnaturally tall and somehow misshapen; an effect perhaps of its elevation, the shadows and shrubberies that surround it, and the fried-egg moonlight. As Fred walks slowly back up the path past the giant dark vegetable birds and urns, he becomes conscious of a strong impulse not to reenter this house; to hike instead into the nearest village and find a bed for the night somewhere (at the pub, maybe?) and take an early train or bus into London in the morning.
But of course he can’t do that, it would be rude and crazy; and besides there’s Rosemary. He can’t leave her alone with two posturing queers and a bossy adulteress whose hair looks like a wig—though only an hour ago he thought it was all beautiful, the real thing.
James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier; or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James’ prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was just like now . . .
Because, after all, isn’t Rosemary the classic James heroine: beautiful, fine, delicate, fatally impulsive? She thinks of Posy and Edwin as her best friends; she is too generous to see them as they are, too lighthearted and trusting. She needs other, better friends—better in both senses—friends who will shield her from scenes like tonight’s—
Well, isn’t that what he’s here for, the sterling young American champion James himself might have provided? For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel, and again it is dizzying, exhilarating. He laughs out loud and plunges into the blackened shrubberies, toward the house.
5
* * *
The Devil flew from north to south
With (Miss Miner] in his mouth,
And when he found she was a fool
He dropped her onto [Camden] school.
Old rhyme
VINNIE MINER is sitting on a bench in a primary school playground in Camden Town, watching a group of little girls skipping rope. It is a windy April afternoon; gray and white clouds like jumbled soapy washing slosh across the sky, sending alternate brightness and shadow over her notebook. She already has a thick folder of rhymes recorded in this school and several others; but as a contemporary folklorist she is