Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [99]
If he could only find the key to Rosemary’s house that she once gave him, he would go there and wait for her to come home. But the damn thing is lost; he must have left it behind the day of the party. Without it, he does what he can: he phones again and again; he even goes to the house in Chelsea, but nobody is ever home, except, once, Mrs. Harris, who won’t let him in or take a message, only shouts through the locked door something that sounds like “bugger off!” Is Rosemary staying somewhere else? Has she left town? He tries her agent, but now the man is coolly and smoothly uncommunicative. He is awfully sorry, he says, but he has no idea where Rosemary might be—two evident lies.
Rosemary’s friends are more agreeable, but just as unhelpful. And their agreeableness, Fred realizes now, is and always was generic rather than specific. In the past, because he was Rosemary’s current boyfriend, they had inquired about his work and solicited his opinions on matters cultural, political, and domestic. Now they have dropped him—though in all cases with the gentlest and most casual motion, as if brushing a crumb to the floor. They all have charming manners; when he telephones they are uniformly pleasant, but rather vague and always “awfully busy.” Some seem to have difficulty remembering who he is (“Oh yes, Fred Turner. How nice to hear from you”). Though he isn’t leaving for several weeks, they wish him a pleasant journey back to “the States” as if he were just about to step onto a plane. His questions about Rosemary are passed over as if unheard, or met with what he is beginning to recognize as the classic waffling manner of the British upper classes when confronted with the insignificant unpleasant. (“Goodness, I haven’t the faintest—wasn’t she going to the Auvergne or somewhere like that?”) Rosemary’s closest friends, who might have been more helpful, and with whom he could have been more direct, are unavailable. Posy lives out of town, and he doesn’t have her (unlisted) number; Erin, Nadia, and Edwin are abroad.
His colleague and fellow-citizen Vinnie Miner is also of no use. When he saw her last week at the British Museum she promised to speak to Rosemary for him, promised to explain that Fred didn’t want to leave London, that he loves her—Nothing has come of that commission, if she carried it out, which he doubts. And even if she did, Fred thinks, she probably didn’t make much of a job of it. If Vinnie ever in her life experienced real romantic love, let alone sexual passion, she has probably forgotten it.
Whereas he, Fred, is—shit, he might as well admit it—emotionally and physically obsessed. All he can think of, day and night both, is Rosemary. He tries to work at home, he goes to the BM, but he can’t concentrate, can’t read, can’t take notes, can’t write. And this although he has, for the first time in months, all the time in the world: long empty days and nights.
Again, just as he did last winter, he has taken to wandering about London. But now he knows that the city exists; that a rich, complex, intense life goes on within its walls, behind its shuttered and curtained windows. Everywhere he passes houses, restaurants, office buildings, shops, and blocks of flats where he has been with Rosemary; the streets themselves shimmer with the almost visible ghosts of his love affair. In this keyed-up state he often thinks he sees Rosemary herself at a distance: going into Selfridge’s, or in the intermission crowd at a theater; he spots her pale-gold halo of hair and light tripping walk three blocks away down Holland Park Road or getting out of a taxi in Mayfair. His heart pounds; he races, dodging traffic and shoving aside pedestrians, toward what always turns out to be some stranger.
Today Fred is in a part of London where he has little hope of coming upon Rosemary. He is walking along the Regent’s Canal