Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [62]
“Don’t be silly, darling. Vinnie will agree with me. Now, sit down.” With a flutter of sleeve and a tinkle of silver-gilt bangles Rosemary smooths the banquette beside her.
Their dispute turns out to concern—or have as its pretext—the question of whether Rosemary should hire a cleaning lady. Even before Vinnie hears their arguments she’s on Fred’s side. Rosemary’s Chelsea house is famous for its disorder, its elegant slovenliness; every time Vinnie’s been there it has been cluttered with things that need mending, scrubbing, dusting, polishing, emptying, and throwing away. But Rosemary claims to be perfectly satisfied with her present method of housekeeping, which is to let everything go until she can’t stand it and then ask an agency called Help Yourself to send someone over for a day.
“I can’t bear housecleaning,” she tells Vinnie. “It always reminds me of my mother’s two spinster aunts in Bath, where I was sent to stay as a child during the war—mean, obsessive old things. All their staff had left except this elderly battle-axe Mrs. McGowan, but they insisted on keeping that great ugly barn of a house up. Always cleaning, they were, working their fingers to the bone.” Rosemary extends and flexes her soft ringed hands. “They were fearfully cross with me because I was so careless and untidy. ‘You’re a most inconsiderate child,’ Aunt Isabel used to tell me”—Rosemary assumes an unfamiliar voice, thin and nasal—‘“You can’t expect Mrs. McGowan to pick up after you, she has other things to do. If you don’t change your ways before you’re grown, no self-respecting servant will ever want to work for you.’
“Well, I made up my mind right then. I said to them, ‘I don’t want my room picked up. I like it the way it is.’ Oh, they were shocked. My Aunt Etty said”—another voice, lower and wearier—” ‘No man’ll stay in a house that looks the way your room does now.’ Little she knew.” Rosemary giggles provocatively
Besides, she goes on, charladies always get so dreadfully familiar, trying to involve you in their awful pathetic lives. “You Americans—” She made a face at Vinnie and Fred. “You haven’t any idea what household help is like nowadays in this country. You think if I phone an agency they’ll send me a dear old family retainer out of Upstairs, Downstairs.”
“No—” begins Vinnie, who has never tried to find a cleaning lady in London, because she can’t afford one.
“What I’ll get instead”—Rosemary rushes on—“is some miserable immigrant who speaks only Pakistani or Portuguese and is terrified of electricity. Or else some awful slut who can’t find a proper job in a shop or a factory because she’s too stupid and ill-tempered. And then twice a week I’ll have to hear all about her backache and her constipation and her drunken husband and her delinquent children and her squabbles with the Council over her flat.” Rosemary slides into stage Cockney—“and ’er dawg’s worms and ’er cat’s fleas and ’er budgie’s molt, ooh, the pore dear, ’e’s losin’ ‘is feathers somethin’ awful and won’t touch ‘is bloody birdseed.”
Fred awards the performance a grin of appreciation, then goes on to criticize the script. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” he tells Vinnie. “You can still find a good cleaning lady if you go to the right agency; Posy Billings gave me the name of one when we were there last weekend. If the woman talks too much, well, Rosemary can just leave the house. She can’t do that with Help Yourself, because they send somebody different every time, right?”
“Mm,” Vinnie assents; but what she is thinking is that Fred Turner has received after only a few weeks’ acquaintance what she will probably never receive: an invitation to Posy Billings’ house in Oxfordshire.
“Those people from Help Yourself, see, they’re out-of-work actors and singers and dancers, most of them,” he explains. “They don’t know anything about how to clean a house. When I come over they’re usually just standing holding a dust rag like it was some prop in a play