Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [77]
“Hello!” Fred called. “I’ve left a note for Lady Rosemary—could you give it to her, please?” Mrs. Harris didn’t answer, but turned her back and resumed scrubbing.
Though she won’t speak to callers, Mrs. Harris does talk freely to her employer, and at length. Her conversation isn’t the burden Rosemary feared, but a source of entertainment. Mrs. Harris’ doings and remarks—maybe somewhat edited or heightened—are now regularly relayed by Rosemary to all her friends. Mrs. Harris believes that looking at the full moon through glass makes you loony, unless it’s over your left shoulder. She eats Marmite and golden-syrup sandwiches to build up her blood. She goes to the greyhound track and bets on dogs with names that begin with S for Speed or W for Win. “Them races are fixed, see, everybody knows that,” she has confided to Rosemary. “But there’s clues.”
Mrs. Harris’ specialty, however, is gnomic, usually sour pronouncements on current events and famous persons. She dislikes all politicians and most members of the royal family, though she remains loyal to “Princess Margaret Rose” in spite of the scandals about her love life. “Misguided she was, is all, misguided and betrayed by that midget.” Fred can hear Rosemary repeating this latest mot even now, mimicking her charlady’s voice—rough and cockney, with a hint of boozy sentiment—and indicating with a broad gesture the supposed height of Lord Snowdon.
Fred has even found himself telling Mrs. Harris stories to friends like the Vogelers. In spite of her ill-temper, she has been gradually assimilated into his image of England. Most American visitors—like, say, Vinnie Miner—are attracted mainly to the antique, the picturesque, and the noble aspects of Britain. Fred’s love is wider-ranging: essentially it comprehends whatever has been hymned in song or told in story. In his present high mood he embraces even what he might deplore in America. Slag heaps remind him of Lawrence, pawnshops of Gissing; the pylons that deface the Sussex hills suggest Auden, the sooty slums of South London, Doris Lessing. In his mouth, canned plum pudding tastes of Dickens; to his ear, every overweight literary man sounds a little like Dr. Johnson. Seen through these Rosemary-tinted glasses, Mrs. Harris is a character out of eighteenth-century literature: a figure from the subplot of some robust comedy illustrated by Hogarth or Rowlandson. Fred not only appreciates her eccentricities, he takes a proprietary pride in them. After all, if it hadn’t been for him she’d never have been hired.
The doorbell sounds again. Fred goes to answer it and sees that Joe and Debby Vogeler have arrived, and that they have brought with them—against his instructions—their baby.
“The sitter never showed up,” Debby says in an aggrieved voice as soon as Fred opens the door, as if this were somehow his fault. “So we had to bring Jakie.”
“He’s been very good all the way here,” Joe says in a more conciliatory tone. “He’s been sleeping mostly.” The baby is suspended against Debby’s bosom in a sort of scruffy blue canvas hammock, with his fat legs sticking out on both sides and his bald head lolling against her neck. Debby is got up to match in a washed-out denim jacket, a long ruffled denim skirt, and clogs, as if she were about to appear on Prairie Home Companion. Joe wears his usual shabby-academic costume: thick spectacles, worn cord jacket, pilled and sagging gray turtleneck jersey, scuffed loafers. Though Fred is used to seeing the Vogelers in clothes like these, his friends strike him as deliberately and even aggressively ill-dressed for the occasion. In one respect, however, they are improved: the fine weather has restored their health, and for the first time none of them has an obvious cold.
“Come on in; great to see you,” he says, trying to sound