Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [63]
“Not always.” Rosemary protests, with a soft giggle.
“And if she goes out,” he continues, “if she doesn’t watch them every minute, the people from Help Yourself help themselves to her whisky and her pâté and her opera records and sometimes even her clothes. They smear her windows with detergent and ruin her parquet with soap and hot water and tear up her silk scarves for dust rags.”
As Fred relates these disasters, Vinnie is struck not only by his grasp of the details of housekeeping but by his familiarity with Rosemary’s domestic circumstances. Evidently he’s not actually living with her now, but Vinnie wonders if he might be planning to move in, especially if conditions improve. She thinks of the remark of Rosemary’s aunt, that no man would stay in her niece’s house because of its disorder. As Rosemary implied, her aunt had been wrong: many men have stayed in her house. On the other hand, none has done so for very long.
Before Vinnie can pronounce any judgment in the dispute, the bell rings for the second act. Just as well, she thinks as she climbs the stairs to the balcony, jostled aside by larger and heavier persons. It’s always a mistake for an outsider to venture an opinion in arguments of this sort, which are often largely a sort of amorous play. At least for Rosemary the quarrel seemed no more than a pretext for dramatic monologue and affectionate banter. At times she’d even taken the other side, adding weight to Fred’s case by telling how she once came home to find a youth from Help Yourself soaking in pink bubbles in her tub. “And he wasn’t even attractive! He was rather pudgy, and soapy and apologetic, and later I found he’d used up all my Vitabath.”
But Fred, underneath his light manner, is singing the basso part. He has a temperamental commitment to the idea of order, already demonstrated to Vinnie in meetings of the Corinth Library Committee. The dusty chaos of Rosemary’s house would surely seem to him a most unsuitable backdrop for their love duet. Also, no doubt, he doesn’t much care to have ambitious young actors chatting intimately with Rosemary, or sloshing about (however pudgily) in her bathtub.
Vinnie’s guess is that Rosemary will win the argument. She’s used to having her own way, and besides it’s her house, not to mention her country. But there is something in Fred’s manner that suggests he won’t give up easily. On the Library Committee this past autumn he was—though always polite—quite stubborn: willing to prolong a meeting well past five o’clock to gain his point. Vinnie had thought that this might be because he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment. On the other hand, perhaps stubbornness was part of Fred’s character—and as such possibly a cause rather than a result of his newly single state.
As she lies in bed later that evening, sinking into an agreeable unconsciousness, with Mozart’s tunes drifting vaguely through her head, Vinnie hears what is unmistakably the sound of her doorbell. Startled, she lifts her head from the pillow. Her first thought is of the habitués of the local municipal lodging-house—slovenly meat-faced men in soiled clothes who lounge on the benches by the railway underpass in good weather, passing a bottle in a crumpled paper bag, or lurch along the streets near Camden Town tube station mumbling to themselves or to strangers. Her next, crazier notion is that the girl from the playground has somehow found out where she lives and is waiting on the stoop to recite the rest of her filthy nursery rhymes the moment Vinnie opens the front door.
Another longer ring. Cautiously, she crawls out from under the down comforter and pads barefoot along the hall in her flannel nightgown and bathrobe. The light from the entryway spills down through the transom onto the cold black-and-white tiles, and Vinnie feels a shiver up her legs. Her vision of the unknown caller multiplies,