Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [74]
After all, even for him it had taken time. Now, though, the doubts he had had earlier—and in a weak moment hinted at to Joe and Debby—seem to him shameful, mean-spirited. It would have been cowardly to hold back from Rosemary because the more he cares for her now, the more he will miss her later. Nothing could be worse than having to say to himself for the rest of his life: “Rosemary Radley loved me, but I couldn’t really get into it because I didn’t like some of her friends—because she lived too expensively—because I knew I was leaving London in June and might not see her again for almost a year.”
If Joe and Debby couldn’t understand that yet, Rosemary and her world certainly would. Fred remembers an interview in the Times last week with a friend of Rosemary’s named Lou, in which he announced that he’d told his agent to turn down all television and film offers because he had a chance to play Lear for two weeks in Nottingham. “Where the theatre is doesn’t matter; the length of the run doesn’t matter,” he was quoted as declaring. “When you get a chance like that nothing else counts.”
“What an old dear Lou is,” Rosemary had added, after reading this passage aloud to Fred. “Of course, I rang up directly to congratulate him. Really, I told him, he should have had the part long ago, he’s a marvelous actor, a real genius. And there’s no need to go on a diet, I said, why on earth shouldn’t Lear be fat? He probably was fat, and his riotous knights too, from eating and drinking so much and using up all Goneril’s provisions. You don’t hear about them working or exercising, do you? I said to him, ‘Lou darling, you’re quite wrong, you musn’t try to take off a single ounce; you know your voice is always better after a good meal.’ I only wish I could say the same, but it’s just the reverse for me. As soon as I start working again I’ll have to starve myself, look at all this flesh.” Rosemary lifted the edge of a kimono embroidered with blue and gray chrysanthemums to reveal a pink, deliciously rounded thigh and hip. “No, Freddy darling, I didn’t mean . . . Oh, dearest . . . Ahhh . . .”
Thinking of this moment again, and the moments that followed it, Fred rises from the bench and, as if drawn by a magnetic force, strides toward Chelsea.
Even before most of the guests have arrived it’s clear that Rosemary’s party is a success. The weather is fine, the house looks great: the window boxes and the stone urns by the steps have been scoured clean and overflow with white geraniums and satiny ivy; through the open French doors the back garden is a haze of green. Inside, too, everything glows—at least everything that’s visible to guests: Fred, looking for a place to put some coats, opens the door to Rosemary’s bedroom, then slams it hastily on chaos. Evidently Mrs. Harris was so busy downstairs that she didn’t have time for anything else.
Descending the stairs again, Fred looks down into a scene that resembles a commercial for some luxury product: the perfectly elegant party. The double drawing room is a dazzle of flowers and light and stylishly dressed people. Many of Rosemary’s friends are good-looking, many are well known, and some are both. There are only a few who rather spoil the effect, who would never have been cast if this were in fact a commercial. For instance, little Vinnie Miner, who is wearing one of what Rosemary calls “her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle costumes”—all starched white cotton and fuzzy pale-brown wool like the fur of some small animal. Fred recalls with amazement how formidable she had seemed to him only a few months ago. Already he has absorbed the view of Rosemary and her friends, that Vinnie, though clever and likeable, is a bit of a comic turn, with her passion for Morris dancing and children’s books and everything British that is quaint and out-of-date.
“Vinnie, hello. How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.” Vinnie tilts