Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [75]
“Oh, very well, thanks,” Fred lies.
“That’s good. How nice the house looks! It’s really amazing. I suppose it’s all due to Mrs. Harris?”
“Well, more or less.”
“Excuse me, please, ma’am. ‘Scuse me.” Behind him Fred hears for the first time in his life an American accent: loud, flat, nasal. Is that how he sounds to everyone here, every damn time he opens his mouth? “Here you are, Vinnie.” A large balding man in late middle age, got up like an American country-and-western singer in cowboy boots and a suede jacket with fringe, hands her a glass. “One dry sherry, honey, like you ordered.”
“Oh, thank you,” Vinnie says. “Chuck, this is Fred Turner, from my department in Corinth. Chuck Mumpson.”
“Wal, howdy.” Chuck extends a broad, fleshy red hand.
“How do you do,” Fred replies guardedly. His immediate thought is that Chuck’s accent and costume, so exaggerated and inappropriate to this party, are assumed—and maybe his name as well. This is not an American, but one of Rosemary’s theatrical friends amusing himself by taking on a role—something he has learnt that actors occasionally do when they have been too long between engagements.
“Heard a lot about you.” Chuck grins.
Fred asks himself what this man, whoever he is, has heard. Probably that he is Rosemary’s lover. “I haven’t heard anything about you,” he says, consciously listening to his own voice for the first time since adolescence. The pronunciation is similar, he decides, but the tune different. In fact, over the past few months Fred has taken on, not a British accent, but a British intonation and vocabulary. Almost unconsciously, he has begun to imitate the characteristic melody of British speech, with its raised final notes; consciously, so as to be understood, he now uses terms like lift, lorry, and loo instead of elevator, truck, and bathroom.
“Chuck’s from Oklahoma,” Vinnie says.
“Oh, yeh?” There is still an edge of doubt in Fred’s voice—though it seems unlikely that Vinnie would conspire in some actor’s impersonation. “I’ve never been there, but I saw the movie.”
“Haw-haw.” Chuck gives a genuine, or very plausible, western guffaw. “Wal, it isn’t much like the movie, not any more.”
“No, I guess not.” This uncomfortable conversation is interrupted by the arrival of more guests, and more behind these. Soon the long high-ceilinged room is thronged. The twin chandeliers, their prisms newly polished, scatter light and echo the tinkle and splash of liquids poured into crystal, of high-pitched laughter and exclamation.
The miracle wrought by Rosemary’s new cleaning lady does not pass unnoticed. All her friends compliment her on it, including some who had speculated earlier that maybe Mrs. Harris wasn’t as wonderful as Rosemary and Fred made out. Neither of them might know whether a house had been properly cleaned, some suggested; others said that Mrs. Harris sounded too good to be true. Now that the evidence is before them they take another line.
“Perhaps it’s a bit too perfectly cared for,” Fred overhears one guest remark. “One almost feels one’s in some National Trust property.”
“Yes, exactly,” agrees her companion. “I expect Mrs. Harris is one of those types who have an absolute obsession with cleanliness. People like that, of course they’re a little bit crazy,” continues this friend, whose own flat could have used a visit from Mrs. Harris. “Rosemary had better be careful she isn’t murdered in her bed one day.”
This sort of spite on the part of Rosemary’s friends is a new development. In the past, envy of her prettiness, fame, high spirits, charm, and income—television, even British television, pays well—has always been tempered by compassion for her disorderly living conditions and her history of romantic disaster. Though widely courted, she always seemed to end up with the least stable and attractive of her many suitors. Moreover, the men she chose were usually married, and presently they either returned to their wives or, worse, left