Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [65]
“Did you find any ancestors in Wiltshire?”
“Yeh.”
“Well, that’s nice.” She adds more milk to her tea, to avert heartburn. “And did you find the wise man, the hermit?”
“Yeh. I found him.”
“That’s very good luck,” Vinnie remarks, wishing he would get the hell on with it. “Lots of Americans come over here to search for their forebears, you know, and most of them don’t find anything.”
“Bullshit.” For the first time that evening Chuck speaks with his normal force, or more.
“What?” Vinnie is startled; her china teacup rattles on its saucer.
“The whole thing was bullshit, excuse me. The earl, the castle—My grandfather, he was just shooting me a line. Or somebody shot him one, maybe.”
“Really.” Vinnie affects surprise, though on consideration it doesn’t seem strange that Chuck Mumpson isn’t descended from the English aristocracy. On the other hand, for her purposes it doesn’t matter whether his ancestor the hermit was an earl or not. “Yes, go on.”
“Okay. Wal, I rented a car from that garage you recommended, and drove down into the country, to this South Leigh. It’s not much of a place: old church, a few houses. I checked into a hotel in a town near there. Then I went to the library, asked how I could get to see the parish registers for South Leigh, like you told me, and the tax records. I found a whole mess of Mumpsons, but they weren’t anybody special. Farmers, most of them, and none of them was named Charles. It took a hell of a long time. Everything kept being out of commission for different dumb reasons, like for instance it was Thursday afternoon. The whole place just shut down in the middle of the week. All the stores too. Hell, no wonder we’ve got so far ahead of them, right?”
“Mm.” The last thing Vinnie wants at this time of night is to start an argument about the comparative economic achievements of America and Britain.
“Anyhow, finally this antiquarian society was open. I talked to the secretary, and she found what looked like it might be the right place, a ways out in the country. Her book said a hermit used to live there, back at the end of the eighteenth century. It was on the estate of some people she’d met once, Colonel and Lady Jenkins their name was. So she called them up, and they invited me over. Mind if I smoke?”
“No, go ahead.” Vinnie sighs. Usually she doesn’t allow cigarettes in her classroom, office, or home; when she gives a party she asks her nicotine-addicted guests to go outdoors or into another room.
“I keep trying to quit.” Chuck takes out a pack. “The doctor says I hafta. But I get real crazy without cigarettes. Can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on anything.” He gives a light false laugh, strikes a match, inhales.
“That’s too bad,” says Vinnie, who has often quietly (and on certain occasions noisily) prided herself on never having smoked.
“Ahhh.” A foul, smelly, gray backwash issues from Chuck’s mouth. “Wal, we all gotta go some way.”
With difficulty, Vinnie refrains from remarking that lung cancer and emphysema, according to all reports, are two of the most unpleasant methods of departure.
“Anyhow, I had almost the whole day to kill before I could see Colonel Jenkins. I was hanging round the antiquarian society reading up on the local aristocracy, and I got into a conversation with this archaeologist guy. He’s working on a dig outside the town, where there used to be an old village. I mean really old, back in the Middle Ages. For him a couple of hundred years is like yesterday. He was finding some stuff, only the best excavation site they had kept filling up with water. Nobody on his crew could figure out where it was coming from or what to do about it. Wal, that’s my line of work; at least it used to be.”
A pained, plaintive note has entered Chuck’s voice. Vinnie recognizes it: it is the whistle of self-pity that has so often in the past called Fido to her. Perhaps because she is still a little blurry from sleep, she imagines Fido hearing it too under the sofa where he has been more or less hibernating for the past two months; waking, blinking open his huge mournful brown