Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [82]
“Very well,” she says, in a tremulous version of what Edwin Francis calls “her Lady Emma voice.” Fred has heard this voice before, but not often, and only directed to recalcitrant taxi drivers or waiters. “In that case I’m afraid I must ask you to leave my house now.” She walks gracefully to the front door, and opens it.
“Rosemary, wait.” Fred hastens after her.
“Out.” Though she speaks through a tangled curtain of pale hair, and with one lovely breast still half exposed, her tone is chilly and formal. “Out, please.” She points the way at a downward angle, as if speaking to a dog or cat.
Years of training in good manners now work to Fred’s disadvantage. Without consciously willing it, he steps across the threshold.
“Listen to me a moment, damn it—” he begins, but she slams the door on him.
“Wait! This is crazy, Rosemary,” he shouts at the glossy lavender paint, the brass dolphin knocker. “I love you, you know that. I’ve never been so happy in my life . . . Hey, Rosemary. Rosemary!” There is no answer.
7
* * *
[Vinnie Miner] is no good,
Chop her up for firewood.
If she is no good for that,
Give her to the old tomcat.
Old rhyme
FOR the first time this spring Vinnie is ill, with a heavy wet cold that threatens to develop into bronchitis. She lies huddled in bed this mild showery morning under the down-filled comforter, with a flannel-covered hot-water bottle at her feet, and a roll of loo paper by her head because she has used up all the tissues in the flat. The hot-water bottle is lukewarm, and the carpet by the bed is littered with damp wads of paper, offensive to her natural tidiness; but she is too weary and depressed to do anything about either discomfort.
Vinnie’s cold is an embarrassment to her as well as an irritation. She has always declared and believed that she never gets ill in England—that the viruses and headaches that afflict her in Corinth cannot follow her across the Atlantic to what she feels is her ecologically correct habitat. What is she to say now?
Even worse, she suspects a psychological source for her affliction, though she doesn’t believe in such things. She was perfectly well until last week, when she heard that her grant wasn’t going to be extended for another six months. It wasn’t this news that made her ill—she hadn’t really counted on more support—but a letter in the same mail from an acquaintance in New York: a well-known scholar, one of the judges who had awarded Vinnie her original grant. This woman now wanted to dissociate herself from the recent decision. “I really tried,” she wrote, punctuating her words with a heavy black underline. “But I simply couldn’t convince them. I’m afraid it wasn’t any help that Lennie Zimmern is on the committee this year—and by the way, I should tell you that lots of people consider his remarks about you in the Atlantic most unfair.”
In other words, Vinnie thinks, unwinding another length of scratchy paper and blowing her small inflamed nose, if it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, I might have had another six months in London. Paranoid ideas, like little invisible bats, unhook themselves from behind the tops of the drawn shutters and flitter about the darkened bedroom, occasionally landing on something with a squashy plop. Why is she being persecuted this way by Professor Zimmern, who doesn’t even know her? What has he got against her?
In the view of Chuck Mumpson, there is no use looking for a personal motive. Chuck’s views are known to Vinnie because, feeling that she had to talk to somebody, she had selected him as the least likely among her acquaintances to gossip, to judge, or to pity her. Two days ago, over the phone to Wiltshire, she gave him a slightly scaled-down version of Zimmern’s continuing persecution, speaking of herself as merely “very annoyed” and of Zimmern as “malicious.”
“I d’know, Chuck said. “It doesn’t hafta have been malicious, necessarily. Those