Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [76]
Besides making ominous predictions, some of the guests tonight try to pump Fred about Mrs. Harris. As Rosemary had remarked, it isn’t easy to find a good English-speaking charlady in London. “You wait and see,” she told Fred. “There’ll be plenty of people who’ll want to lure Mrs. Harris away, even though they call themselves my friends. You musn’t tell anyone anything about her, even what her days are; promise me, darling.” Fred, thinking it unnecessary, had nevertheless promised. Now he sees that Rosemary was right. More than one of her guests, when she is out of hearing, make pointed inquiries: How much does Mrs. Harris ask? Does she have a free day? Fred replies truthfully to both questions that he doesn’t know. An elderly actress called Daphne Vane, who had starred with Rosemary in Tallyho Castle until her pathetic on-screen death from pneumonia last season, is especially persistent.
“I’d really like so much to meet Mrs. Harris,” Daphne murmurs in the wistful, breathy manner that made her a romantic heroine of the stage and screen half a century ago. “She sounds like the genuine article, and one comes across that so seldom now. I had so much hoped that she would be at the party—helping, you know.” She glances round the room, making great play with her famous feathery eyelashes.
“She’s not here,” Fred tells Daphne. “Rosemary didn’t ask her to serve; she says Mrs. Harris isn’t very presentable.”
“No? Well, one can’t have everything, can one? But perhaps she’s below in the kitchen?” Fred shakes his head; if he had nodded, he suspects, nothing would have prevented the unworldly, ethereal-looking Daphne from scooting down the back stairs to the basement. “Do you know what her days are?”
“I’m not sure, no.”
“What a pity.” Daphne gives him the sweet, condescending smile she might give some village idiot; then, without seeming to move, she floats-off into another conversation.
In fact Fred knows very well that Mrs. Harris comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, since he can’t visit Rosemary then—and, after one attempt, she won’t come to his flat. Though he did all he could to make the place attractive, his love hardly spent five minutes there. Drawing her pale fur coat more closely about her, she declared it “absolutely freezing” and “frightfully unromantic,” and declined even to sit on the sofa bed where Fred had pictured her lying half naked.
Efficient as she is, Mrs. Harris has her defects. She can’t bear to have anybody “underfoot” while she cleans. She also refuses to answer the phone and take messages, claiming that it puts her off her work. Occasionally she will snatch up the receiver, shout “Nobody ‘ome!” and bang it down again; more often she just lets it ring. Some of Rosemary’s friends view this as another sign of dangerous battiness; Fred’s own suspicion is that Mrs. Harris is more or less illiterate. That would help to explain why such a hard-working and reliable woman hasn’t been able to find a better-paying job.
In support of the battiness theory, however, it has to be said that Mrs. Harris also won’t answer the door. Last Tuesday afternoon, when Fred discovered that he was free that evening after all, because the Vogelers’ baby had a cold, and he wasn’t able to reach Rosemary on her private line or get a message through her answering service, he decided to go to the house. He knocked, rang, and called out her name; but though he could hear muffled noises within, nobody came. Finally he scribbled a note on the back of an envelope.
As he pushed back the letter-flap, Fred was aware of motion inside the house. He stooped to the newly polished brass slot, and got his first glimpse of Mrs. Harris at the other end of the darkened hall, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees: a shapeless