Unless you knew Vinnie well, you would hardly recognize her as the miserable professor who got onto the plane in Chapter One. Perched on an oak settle with her legs tucked under her she looks girlish, almost childish. Her small size and the illustrated cover of her book (on Australian playground games) add to the illusion. Her costume is also juvenile by academic standards: a ruffled white blouse and a deep-flounced tan wool jumper. Round her narrow shoulders is her Liberty wool shawl, which gives her the look of a junior high school student, playing the part of a kindly grandmother. Her spectacles might well be a prop, the lines in her face drawn with eyebrow pencil, and her hair incompletely powdered gray.

“Vinnie darling. Forgive me.” Edwin Francis leans over the table to brush her cheek with his. “How are you? . . . Oh, thank you, dear.” He removes his coat and presents it to the waiter. “You won’t believe what I’ve just heard.”

“I might. Try me,” Vinnie says.

“Well.” Edwin leans forward. Though he is some years younger than Vinnie, his appearance—when he is in good form, as now—also suggests an artificially aged child. In his case, too, smallness of stature plays a part in the illusion; his short limbs, round face and torso, high color, and curly fair hair—now becoming rather sparse—also contribute to the effect. (When he is not in good form—depressed, drinking too much, unhappily in love—he resembles an afflicted Hobbit.) In spite of his innocuous appearance, and a manner that matches it—amused, offhand, self-deprecating—Edwin is a figure of power in the children’s book world and a formidable critic of both juvenile and adult literature: learned, sharp-witted, and, when he chooses, sharp-tongued.

“Well,” he continues. “You know Posy Billings.”

“Yes, of course.” Contrary to Fred Turner’s assumption, Vinnie’s London circle isn’t composed exclusively or mainly of academics. Through Edwin and other friends she is acquainted with publishers, writers, artists, journalists, people in the theater, and even one or two society hostesses like Lady Billings.

“I was talking to Posy this morning, and you were quite wrong. Rosemary has taken up with your colleague Mr. Turner. She’s even proposed bringing him to Posy’s place in Oxfordshire for a weekend.”

“Really,” Vinnie says, frowning a little. Rosemary Radley, an old friend of Edwin’s, is a television and film actress. She is extremely pretty and charming; she also has a history of brief, impetuous, usually disastrous affairs. When Edwin first announced that she had “taken up with” Fred Turner, Vinnie frankly didn’t believe it. They had been seen together at a play, at a party? Very possibly they had; that didn’t mean they had come together, orwere romantically involved. Perhaps Rosemary had invited Fred to the event, because after all he is a nice-looking young man, and one whose transatlantic origin might lend a piquant variety to her usual crowd of admirers. Or perhaps she hadn’t: people always gossiped about Rosemary, often inaccurately: she’d been the heroine of so many BBC and real-life romantic serials.

Edwin particularly enjoys fantasizing about his friends and acquaintances. He likes to hover over their adventures or presumed adventures as he does over whatever Vinnie is cooking when he comes to dinner, occasionally giving the pot a stir or adding a pinch of spices himself. “Really,” Vinnie had once said to him, “you should have been a novelist.” “Oh no,” he had replied. “Much more fun this way.”

Even if things have gone as far as Edwin is claiming now, it can’t be very serious. Rosemary, after all, has frequent impulsive sexual lapses—referred to later with laughter in phrases like “I just don’t know what came over me” or “It must have been the champagne”—and Fred might be a relatively harmless instance of this habit. But she can hardly be serious about him. It isn’t just that she’s older, but that her world is so much more complex and resonant. If talking to Fred for any length of time rather bores Vinnie, who after all is in the same profession and department, what on earth can he have to say that would interest Rosemary Radley? On the other hand, perhaps you don’t have to interest her, as long as you are sufficiently interested in her. Perhaps what she wants is fans, not rival entertainers.

“Of course it’s all your doing,” Edwin remarks, breaking off his loving contemplation of the menu. “If you hadn’t given that party—”

“I never meant for Rosemary to take up with Fred.” Vinnie laughs, for surely Edwin is teasing. “I never even considered—”

“The intentional fallacy.”

“I never even considered it. I thought Fred ought to meet some young people, so I invited Mariana’s eldest daughter. How was I to know she’d turned into a punk rocker? She was perfectly presentable when I saw her at her mother’s last month.”

“Well, you might have asked me,” Edwin says, breaking his current diet and liberally buttering one of the whole-wheat rolls for which Thompson’s is celebrated. Vinnie does not pick this up; if Edwin had his way, she is quite aware, he would dictate the guest lists of all her parties. His social circle is wider and considerably more glamorous than hers, and though she is perfectly happy to have him bring one or two of his well-known friends to her house—as he had brought Rosemary—she doesn’t want it to go any further. One or two celebrities are a social asset; but if you have too many, she has noticed, all they ever do is talk to one another.

“Besides, if Mariana’s daughter’s so punk,” she asks, “why did she bother to come to a party like mine, with that awful spotty young man in black zip-up leather?”

“To annoy her mother, of course.”

“Oh dear. Was her mother annoyed?”

“I think so, very,” Edwin says. “Of course she wouldn’t ever let it show, noblesse oblige.”

“No,” Vinnie agrees, and sighs. “It’s not safe any more, is it, giving parties? One never knows what fateful events are going to be precipitated.”

“The hostess as demiurge.” He giggles, and Vinnie, reassured, joins in.

“Fred’s being at that party wasn’t my fault,” says Vinnie, returning to the subject somewhat later. “It was yours, really. I only asked him because you said I didn’t know any Americans,” she lies.

“I never said any such thing,” Edwin lies, though both of them know that he had recently made this remark, which flattered Vinnie and also aroused in her a guilty patriotism.

“Anyhow, I don’t see why you’re complaining. I would have thought Fred was about the safest sort of person Rosemary could become involved with. Compared to Lord George, or to Ronnie, you have to admit—”

“Oh, I do. I have nothing against Fred per se . . . Thank you, that looks delicious.” Edwin gives his sole véronique a concupiscent glance, then delicately attacks it. “Mmm. Perfect. . . . And I admit he’s beautiful.”

“Too theatrical for my taste.” Vinnie, less passionately, begins on her grilled chop.

“Well of course, for Rosemary that could hardly be an objection.”

“No.” Vinnie laughs. “But the point is, he seems to me almost ideal for a fling.”

“Very likely.” Edwin, against his doctor’s advice, plunges into the creamed potatoes. “But Rosemary isn’t looking for a fling. She’s looking for an undying passion, the way most of us are.” Edwin, like Rosemary Radley, is known for his disastrous romantic affairs, though his are somewhat less frequent and naturally less well publicized. They tend to involve unstable young men, usually recent émigrés from southern European or Near Eastern countries, with menial jobs (waiter, grocer’s clerk, dry cleaner’s assistant) and grandiose ambitions (theatrical, financial, artistic). From time to time one of them leaves Edwin’s flat unexpectedly, taking with him Edwin’s liquor, stereo, fur-collared overcoat, etc. Others have had mental breakdowns in the flat and refused to leave it at all.

Vinnie refrains from remarking that she at least is not looking for an undying passion; Edwin surely knows that by now.

“Maybe it’s Fred we should be worrying about,” Edwin continues. “Her friend Erin thinks she’s going to eat him alive.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Vinnie exclaims. After twenty years she feels a certain amount of loyalty to and identification with the Corinth English Department; and the idea that one of its members (no matter how junior) could be totally consumed by an English actress is displeasing. “He doesn’t look all that digestible to me.”

“Perhaps you’re right . . . Ahh. Have you tried the courgettes?”

“Yes, very nice.”

“Tarragon, obviously. And is there perhaps a little dill?” Edwin gives a gourmet’s frown.

“Hard to say.” Vinnie’s interest in food is comparatively moderate.

“No. Not dill. I must ask the waiter.” Edwin sighs. “So how do you see the future of the affair, then?”

“I don’t know.” Vinnie puts down her fork, considering. “But whatever happens, it can’t last very long. Fred’s going back to America in June.”

“Oh? Who says so?”

“Why, Fred does. He told me himself.”

“Yes; but when did he tell you?”

“What? I don’t know—in December, before he left, it must have been.”

“Exactly.” Edwin gives the wide smile that increases his resemblance, noted before by Vinnie, to the Cheshire Cat.

“But that won’t make any difference. Fred has to be back in Corinth by the middle of June: he’s teaching two courses in summer school.”

“Unless he decides not to.”

“Oh no; that’s impossible,” Vinnie explains. “That’d be most inconvenient for the Department. They wouldn’t like that at all.”

“Really.” Edwin raises his eyebrows, somehow expressing doubt not of the English Department’s annoyance but of its very existence, and even of the existence of Hopkins County, New York. (“Tell us again the wonderful name of that place where you live in the States,” he occasionally says. “What is it? Simpkins County?”)

“Besides, he couldn’t afford it,” Vinnie continues. “Between us, he’s quite hard up.”

“Rosemary has plenty of money,” Edwin says.

This time Vinnie represses her immediate reaction, though the idea that one of her colleagues might allow himself to be kept by an English actress is not only displeasing but disgusting. “I’m sure that Fred’s not serious about her anyhow,” she says. “For one thing, she must be at least ten years older than he, don’t you think?”

“Who knows?” Edwin, who probably does know, shrugs. Officially, and in press releases, Rosemary is thirty-seven; her actual age is a matter of constant speculation among her acquaintances. “Oh yes, now let’s see,” he adds, his eyes lighting as the dessert menu is presented. “A lemon ice, perhaps? Or a teeny little bit of the apricot tart, would that be too fattening? What do you think, Vinnie?”

“If you’re really on a diet, you should have the cantaloupe,” she suggests, refusing for once to be an accessory before the fact; she is annoyed at Edwin both for his discretion about Rosemary’s age and his insinuations about Fred’s motives.

“No; not the cantaloupe.” Edwin continues to study the menu; his expression is both firm and a little injured.

“Just coffee for me, thanks,” Vinnie tells the waiter, offering a good example.

“Two coffees. And I’ll have the apricot tart, please.”

Vinnie does not comment, but it occurs to her for the first time that for such an intelligent man Edwin is disgracefully plump and self-indulgent; that his pretense of dieting is ridiculous; and that his demand that his friends join in the charade is becoming tiresome.

“But we musn’t just enjoy ourselves,” he says a few minutes later, wiping a bit of whipped cream from the side of his muzzle. “We must consider the problem of Rosemary, before there’s another disaster like the Ronnie one. If she keeps breaking her professional commitments to go off with some fellow . . . Well, naturally the word gets round: better not cast Rosemary Radley, she’s not dependable.” Edwin moves his plump forefinger in a horizontal circle, indicating world-wide distribution of this warning. “Jonathan, for instance, I know he wouldn’t consider it after the Greenwich debacle. . . . But she’s been working fearfully hard on that TV special, and in July she’s got to go on location for her series, she mustn’t be upset. I really think it’s your job to do something.”

“To do what? Warn Rosemary against Fred Turner?” Vinnie speaks rather impatiently; while watching Edwin’s loving consumption of his apricot tart it has struck her that in order to shame him into sticking to his diet—what a silly idea!—she has denied herself any dessert. And to no practical purpose, for she isn’t at all overweight; rather the reverse.

“Heavens, no,” Edwin replies soothingly, with the complacent tolerance of the well fed. “We all of us know how little use warnings are with Rosemary; they only incite her. When she rushed off to Tuscany with that painter, Daniel what’s-it, everyone warned her, but it simply made her more determined.”

“Well then. What could I possibly do?” She laughs.

“I think you just might speak to Fred.” Though Edwin continues to smile, it is clear from the way he pushes his coffee aside and leans over the blue-and-white checked tablecloth that he is not entirely jesting. “I’m sure he’d listen to you. Considering your position at his college. You could try to persuade him to—what would be his phrase?—cool it, before there’s too much damage done.”

The idea that she might use her academic seniority to persuade persuade—blackmail would be a more accurate word—Fred into breaking off his love affair is disagreeable. Vinnie enjoys wielding her hard-won professional authority, but only in professional matters. Unlike Edwin, she feels a strong dislike, almost a revulsion, from the idea of meddling in anyone’s private life.

“I could, I suppose,” she says, sitting back away from him. “But I certainly am not going to.”

Vinnie’s scholarly research is nearly complete. As soon as it stops raining and warms up a bit she can begin the more exciting part of her project: collecting playground rhymes in city and suburban schools. Already she has spoken to a number of principals and teachers, some of whom have not only given her permission to visit, but volunteered their help in recording rhymes, or even made this part of a classroom project. Here in Britain, she doesn’t have to educate the educators; her interest in folklore is seen as natural and respectable. All that remains is to wait for the weather to improve.

By now Vinnie has more or less forgotten her unpleasant flight to Britain and—most of the time—that hateful article in the Atlantic. So far, no one she knows here has mentioned it; probably no one has even seen it. To help ensure this, since many of her friends regularly use the London Library, on her first visit she took the precaution of removing the March issue of the Atlantic from the top of its pile in the reading room and sliding it under a stack of Archaeology nearby. From time to time the magazine reappears; then she hides it again. One sign of the moderation of her distress is that this morning she merely moved the March issue to the bottom of the heap of Atlantics. As she did so, she imagined L. D. Zimmem as shrunken to about six inches high and crushed flat between the pages of his own article, a kind of unattractive paper doll, staining the paper with a thin sepia smear. It also occurred to her, as it has before, that she might slip the magazine into her canvas shopping bag, sneak it out of the library, and destroy it at her leisure. But all her training is against this final solution. Magazine-burning, in Vinnie’s mind, is nearly as bad as book-burning; besides, in the same issue there is a really excellent article on vanishing wildlife, which many people might enjoy.

The only thing that disturbs her at the moment is her conversation with Edwin Francis at lunch yesterday. Mentally reviewing it, she is not quite comfortable in the most comfortable chair in the reading room. She is annoyed at Fred Turner, and feels—quite illogically, she realizes—that he is somehow responsible for a slight but definite coolness between her and her oldest London friend and for the fact that Edwin and she had parted yesterday without making plans to meet again. Fred has also somehow deprived her of an apricot tart with whipped cream—a treat that seems even more desirable today after a pub lunch of wafer-thin salmon-paste sandwiches and a rubbery Scotch egg. Why should she be involved in the affairs of some junior colleague whom she hardly knows? If Fred needs to be recommended for a grant, very well; if he wants to have a frolic with a mutual acquaintance, it is no concern of hers. At the same time, Vinnie is uncomfortably aware that if Fred did ask for a recommendation now, it would take some effort to respond with disinterested good will.

Her mistake had been asking him to her party in the first place. In the past, instinct has always warned Vinnie to keep her American colleagues and her English friends apart. She has suspected that if they did meet, they would probably fail to appreciate or would even dislike one another, and that this dislike might rub off on her, staining both existing relationships (“I just don’t understand Vinnie. How could she possibly care for someone like that?”). In one or two cases she had almost disregarded her intuition, but after consideration decided not to risk it. As Edwin once said, social life is like alchemy: mixing foreign elements is dangerous. Last month she had broken her rule for a mere junior colleague; and instead of disliking each other Fred and Rosemary Radley apparently liked each other too well. Trouble either way.

Originally Vinnie had never meant to invite Fred to anything. She knew he was in London, of course—she had seen him several times in the British Museum. She knew he was alone here, having somehow misplaced his wife, though she had no idea how he had done this; one seldom does know personal details about the junior members of one’s department, though there is, in Vinnie’s opinion, more than enough gossip about one’s contemporaries. It had never occurred to her to feel sorry for Fred because he had no spouse with him: after years of detached observation, she doesn’t think that much of marriage.

The whole thing was an accident, really. One gusty wet afternoon, on her way home from a luncheon party, Vinnie had stopped in a grocery store in Notting Hill Gate and run into Fred, who lives nearby. He was looking windblown and damp, and buying two sickly greenish oranges and a can of the wrong kind of vegetable soup for his supper. Vinnie felt an irritated, uncharacteristic concern. At home, except for her students and very close friends, she seldom does anything for anyone else if she can help it; she simply hasn’t the energy. But here was a junior member of her own department, hungry and lost in a foreign city. In Corinth she would have passed him by with hardly a nod; but in London, where she is a different, nicer person, the unfamiliar conviction came to her that she ought to do something about him. Well, I suppose I could ask him to my party next week, she thought. He’s presentable enough.

Too presentable, almost. There is something overfinished about Fred’s looks that reminds Vinnie of the Arrow Collar Man in the advertisements of her childhood—though that isn’t his fault, heaven knows. He doesn’t dress up or act up to his appearance: he wears ordinary, even colorless preppie-professor clothes and has unremarkable good manners. All the same, his appearance sometimes annoys people, especially men: Vinnie remembers the hostile, jocular remarks that were made after his MLA interview. It was lucky for Fred that he had already published two solid articles and was in the eighteenth century, where good candidates are scarce.

Fred’s handsomeness hadn’t saved his marriage either, Vinnie thinks. That wasn’t so hard to understand, perhaps. Such looks arouse false expectations: the noble exterior is assumed to clothe a mind and soul equally great—the Platonic fallacy. Whereas inside Fred, as far as Vinnie can tell, is simply an ordinary, reasonably intelligent young man who knows something about the eighteenth century. Besides, one might get tired of striking, continual beauty after a while, just as one might get tired of being struck continually.

Even as she issued the invitation, Vinnie had regrets. But at the party Fred caused her no anxiety. She noticed that he didn’t spend much time talking to Mariana’s punk daughter and her angry-looking boyfriend—well, who could blame him for that? He ate a good deal, which was understandable considering the financial difficulties suggested by the vegetable soup and his rather desperate inquiries about how one could get Corinth paychecks cashed without a four-week delay. (No way, is the answer.)

Later on at her party Vinnie had noticed that Fred was part of the circle around Rosemary Radley; but then there is always a circle around Rosemary. She has the knack of becoming the center of a group without seeming to dominate it that, Vinnie supposes, any successful actor must possess. Her sphere of influence is rather small—only a few feet in diameter—as you might expect of someone who works mainly in television and films. She cannot, like some stage performers Vinnie has met, effortlessly focus all attention in a large room; but within her range she is invincible. And this somehow without holding forth on any topic, retailing gossip, wholesaling personal confessions, or saying anything especially clever or shocking—anything, really, that would have been out of character for the roles she plays on camera.

Professionally, Rosemary’s specialty is ladies: highborn women of every historical period from classical Greece to modern Britain. She doesn’t portray queens or empresses: she isn’t sufficiently regal or monumental for that. She is extraordinarily pretty rather than in any sense beautiful: pink-and-white-and-gold like a refined Boucher; her features are agreeable but small and unemphatic. What she mainly projects is elegance and breeding—comic, pathetic, or tragic according to the demands of the script—and a sweet, airy graciousness. She is frequently in work, since ladies are overrepresented in British television drama, and is often praised in reviews as one of the few actresses who is totally convincing as an aristocrat. It is sometimes mentioned that this is not suprising, since she is really Lady Rosemary Radley, her father having been an earl.

Rosemary’s private life is generally believed to be unsatisfactory. She has been married twice, both times briefly and unhappily and without issue; now she lives alone in a large beautiful untidy house in Chelsea. Of course some people say it is her own fault that she’s alone: that she is impossibly romantic, asks too much (or too little) of men, is unreasonably jealous, egotistical/a doormat; sexually insatiable/frigid; and so on—the usual things people say of any unmarried woman, as Vinnie well knows. In all this, Rosemary has Vinnie’s sympathy. But, somehow, not her trust.

It is Rosemary’s charm that Vinnie doesn’t trust: the silken flutter and flurry of her social manner; her assumption of a teasing, impulsive intimacy which yet holds its victim at arm’s length. For instance, when someone new comes within her range, Rosemary will often compliment that person extravagantly on some quality or attribute nobody else would have fixed on, or perhaps even noticed. She will declare that she adores some acquaintance, or a cousin, or her greengrocer or dentist, because they are so marvelous at arranging roses, or speak so slowly, or have such curly hair. She always makes this announcement with an air of wondering discovery to everyone who is within listening range, and without regard to whether its subject is sitting next to her or is miles away.

At a luncheon of Edwin’s once, for instance, she sang out during a pause in the hubbub that she really loved the way Vinnie’s friend Jane ate salad. It was no use asking what she meant by that, as Jane discovered. Even if you could get her attention again, which was never easy, Rosemary would only toss back the pale-gold waves of her hair and give her famous laugh—like sunlight sparkling on crystal, a besotted television reviewer had once written—and cry, “Oh, I can’t explain! It’s just—so—wonderful.” And if, as occasionally happened, someone else offered an interpretation, Rosemary would either ignore them or protest that it wasn’t that at all. She couldn’t bear to have her butterfly enthusiasms—or, possibly, her antipathies—analyzed, pinned down.

When they heard—or heard of—Rosemary’s paean to their unique qualities, most people were pleased, because it’s agreeable to be loved and adored, even casually; and because Rosemary was pretty and well known. Even if they didn’t have the least idea what she meant, there was something awfully attractive in the manner of its delivery. Indeed, some of those who hadn’t ever thus been complimented, like Vinnie, began to feel a little left out.

Others, however, were made uneasy. One can for instance picture Rosemary’s dentist alone in his surgery after his famous patient has left. He twists the magnifying mirror attached to his dental unit toward him and frowns into it. Is there really something unusually lovable about the way his hair curls behind his ears? Or is there, on the other hand, something odd about it, something ugly and bizarre? Had Lady Rosemary been laughing at him?

For days after Edwin’s party, Jane said, Rosemary’s encomium kept sliding into her mind and nagging at her. Finally one day she took a container of leftover salad out of her fridge and went and stood in front of the dining-room mirror, peeled back the plastic wrap, and watched herself eating the spicy oil-soaked lettuce leaves and soggy slices of tomato, trying to discover what was so damned adorable about it, or so different from the way most people ate salad. What on earth had Rosemary meant?

The truth was, Vinnie told her, Rosemary probably hadn’t meant anything. It was just nonsense off the top of her head, a way of focusing attention on herself or changing the topic of conversation, perhaps—a musical noise, that was all. Words don’t matter to actors as they do to a literary person. For them meaning is mainly in expression and gesture; the text is just the libretto, a line of empty glasses that the performer can fill with the golden or silver or bronze liquid of his or her voice. At drama schools, Vinnie has heard, they teach you to say “Please close the door” twenty different ways.

In any social network there are always some people who are as it were “friends” by social compulsion, though if the net fell apart they would seldom or never see each other. It is thus with Vinnie and Rosemary. Because of Edwin they meet fairly often, and always behave on these occasions as if they were perfectly delighted, but they don’t like each other very much. At least, Vinnie does not like Rosemary; and she senses that the feeling is mutual. But nothing can be done about it. Vinnie imagines their social network, or perhaps “web” is more like it—fine-spun, elaborately joined, strung across the rainy city from Fulham to Islington, anchored by isolated threads in Highgate and Wimbledon. She and Rosemary are points of intersection in the web, held there now by many silken twisted strands. If they were to break off cordial relations it would leave gaping sticky holes, distressing to everyone. And they are probably not the only two thus unwillingly joined, Vinnie thinks. Still, the web holds, and spreads its elastic, dew-spangled pattern over London: that is the important thing.

“Wal, hey! Aren’t you, uh, Professor Miner?’

Vinnie turns. A very large man is grinning at her; he wears a semitransparent greenish plastic raincoat of the most repellent American sort, and locks of graying reddish-brown hair are plastered to his broad, damp red forehead.

“Metchoo on the plane last month. Chuck Mumpson.”

“Oh, yes,” she agrees without enthusiasm.

“How’s it going?” He blinks at her in the slow way she recalls from the flight.

It? Presumably, her work. Or life in general, perhaps? “Very well, thank you. How about you?”

“Oh, doing okay.” There is no enthusiasm in his voice. “Been shopping.” He holds up a damp-stained paper shopping bag. “Stuff for the folks at home, wouldn’t dare go back without it.” He laughs in a way that strikes Vinnie as nervous and unreal. Either it is in fact the case that Mr. Mumpson would be afraid to return to his “folks” without gifts, or, more likely, the remark is just an example of the debased and meaningless jesting common among half-literate middle Americans.

“Hey, glad I ran into you,” Mumpson continues. “Wanted to ask you something; you know this country lots better than I do. How about a cup of coffee?”

Though she isn’t especially glad that Chuck Mumpson has run into her, Vinnie is moved by the appeal to her expertise and the prospect of immediate refreshment. “Yes; why not.”

“Great. A drink’d be more like it, but I guess everything’s shut now, crazy regulations they have here.”

“Until five-thirty,” Vinnie confirms, glad for once of the licensing laws. She doesn’t care for city pubs, and would especially not care to be seen drinking in one with someone dressed like Mumpson. “There’s a tearoom here in the store, but it’s awfully expensive.”

“No sweat. I’m taking you.”

“Well. All right.” Vinnie leads the way past elaborate ziggurats of biscuits and candied fruits and up the steps to the mezzanine.

“Hey, did you see those guys?” Mumpson says in a loud whisper, jerking his head back at the small table at the head of the stairs where two Fortnum’s employees in Regency dress are having tea and playing chess. “Weird.”

“What? Oh, yes.” She moves on to a more polite distance. “They’re often here. They represent Mr. Fortnum and Mr. Mason; the founders of the store, you know.”

“Oh, yeh.” Turning, Mumpson gives the executives the slow rude animal stare characteristic of tourists. “I get it. A kinda advertising gimmick.”

Vinnie, irritated, does not assent. Of course it is in a sense an “advertising gimmick;” but she has always thought of it as an agreeable tradition. She regrets having accepted Mumpson’s invitation; for one thing, if she isn’t careful she will have to listen for at least half an hour to his tourist experiences, to hear about everything he has seen, bought, and eaten, and what is wrong with his hotel.

“I didn’t realize you were planning to be in England so long,” she says, settling herself on one of the pale-green butterfly-design metal chairs that give Fortnum’s tearoom the look of an Edwardian conservatory.

“Yeh, wal, I wasn’t.” Chuck Mumpson peels off his plastic raincoat, revealing a brown Western-cut leather jacket trimmed with leather fringe, a shiny-looking yellow Western-cut shirt with pearlized studs instead of buttons, and a leather string tie He hangs the raincoat on an empty chair, where it continues to drip onto the crimson carpet, and sits down heavily. “Yeh, the rest of them all went home last month. But I figured once I was here, there was plenty I hadn’t seen; hell, I might as well stay on a while. I was doing the sights with this couple from Indiana I met at the hotel, but they left Monday.”

“I’ve never seen the point of those fourteen-day tours,” Vinnie says. “If you’re going to visit England, you really should allow a month at least. If you can spare the time from your work, of course,” she adds, reminding herself that most people do not enjoy an academic schedule.

“Yeh. Wal, no.” He blinks. “Matter of fact, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m retired.”

“Oh, yes?” Vinnie doesn’t remember his mentioning this on the plane, but no doubt she wasn’t listening. “You retired early,” she adds, since he doesn’t look sixty-five.

“Yeh.” Mumpson shifts about on the pale-green iron chair, which is much too small for his bulk. “That’s what they called it: an early retirement. Wasn’t my idea. I was chucked out, you could say.” He laughs in the too-loud manner of someone joining in a joke of which he is the butt.

“Really.” Vinnie recalls articles she has read about the growing trend toward forced obsolescence among middle-aged executives, and congratulates herself on her university’s tenure system.

“Yeh, chucked on the heap at fifty-seven,” he repeats, in case she hasn’t gotten the pun—after all, she didn’t laugh, he is probably thinking. “Okay, uh—Virginia, what’ll you have?”

“Vinnie,” she corrects automatically, then realizes she has tacitly given Mumpson—Chuck—permission to use her first name. She would prefer Professor Miner, Ms. Miner, or even Miss, but to say so now would be intolerably rude by the informal standards of middle America.

“Chuck” orders coffee; Vinnie tea and apricot tart. Then, wishing to divert him from, if not console him for, his professional misfortunes, she persuades him to try the trifle.

“I’m sure there are advantages in not having to go to work every day,” she remarks brightly after the waitress has left. “For instance, you’ll have time to do many more things now.” What things? she wonders, realizing she has no idea of the probable recreations of someone like Chuck. “Travel, visit your friends, read”—Read? Is this likely?—”play golf, go fishing”—Are there any fish in Oklahoma?—”take up some hobbies—”

“Yeh, that’s what my wife tells me. Problem is, you play golf every day, you get damn sick of it. And I don’t go in much for sports otherwise. Used to really enjoy baseball; but I’m pretty well past that now.”

A person without inner resources who splits infinitives, Vinnie thinks. “It’s too bad your wife can’t be here with you,” she remarks.

“Yeh, wal. Myrna’s in real estate, like I told you, and property is pretty hot now in Tulsa. She’s working her a—” Chuck, in deference to Vinnie’s—or the room’s—air of old-fashioned gentility, displaces the metaphor from below to above—“head off. Raking it in, too.” He makes a loose raking gesture with his broad freckled hand, then lets it fall heavy onto the table.

“Really.”

“Yeh, she’s a real powerhouse. Matter of fact, the way things are going, she’s probably just as glad not to have me hanging round home at loose ends for a while. Can’t really blame her.”

“Mm,” says Vinnie, connecting Chuck’s loose ends in her mind with the dangling rawhide thongs of his tie, which is fastened by a vulgarly large silver-and-turquoise clasp of the sort favored by elderly ranchers and imitation ranchers in the Southwest. She too does not blame Myma for wanting him out of the house. It is also clear to her that after many days alone in what to him is a strange foreign city Chuck is determined to unburden himself to someone; but she is equally determined not to be this someone. Deliberately she steers the conversation toward neutral tourist subjects, the very subjects she had earlier planned to avoid.

In Chuck’s opinion, London isn’t much of a place. He doesn’t mind the weather: “Nah. I like the variety. Back home it’s the same goddamn thing every day. And if you don’t water, the earth dries up hard as rock. When I first got here I couldn’t get over how damn green England is, like one of those travel posters.”

On the other hand, he complains, the beds in his hotel are lumpy and the supply of hot water limited. English food tastes like boiled hay; if you want a half-decent meal, you have to go to some foreign restaurant. The traffic is nuts, everybody driving on the wrong side of the road; and he has a hell of a time understanding the natives, who talk English real funny. Vinnie is about to correct his linguistic error rather irritably and suggest that it is in fact we Americans who talk funny, when their tea arrives, creating a diversion.

“Hey, what’d you say this thing was called?” Chuck points with his spoon at the tumulus of fruit, custard, jam, rum-soaked sponge cake, and whipped cream that has just appeared on the marble-topped table before him.

“Trifle.”

“Some trifle. It’s bigger than a banana split.” He grins and digs in. “Not bad, though. And they sure give you a spoon to match.” Vinnie, enjoying her tart, politely refrains from pointing out that in Britain dessert spoons are always of this size.

Unlike Edwin, Chuck eats rapidly and without style, shoveling in the elaborate dessert as if it were so much alfalfa, while he continues his narration. He has seen most of the standard tourist attractions, he tells Vinnie, but none of them impressed him much. Some actually seem to have offended him—for example, the Tower of London.

“Hell, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but an old abandoned prison. From what the guide told us, it sounded like a lot of the historical characters they shut up in there shouldn’t have been in jail in the first place. They were good guys mostly. But they jammed them into those little stone cells about the size of a horse stall, without any heat or light to speak of. Most of them never got out again either, from what he said. They died of some sickness, or they were poisoned or choked to death or had their heads chopped off. Women and little kids too. I can’t figure out why they’re so damn proud of the place. If you’ve ever been in jail it could really give you the willies.”

“I see what you mean,” Vinnie agrees politely, wondering if Chuck has ever been in jail.

“And those big black ravens out in the yard, prowling around like spooks.” Chuck makes his thick hands into talons and walks them slowly across the green-veined marble. “Jailbirds, I guess you’d call them.”

“Yes.” Vinnie smiles.

“Where I come from, birds like that mean real bad luck. I figured maybe that’s what they put them there for, the guys that built the place. So I asked the guide, was I right.”

“And what did he say?” Vinnie is beginning to find Chuck rather entertaining.

“Aw, he had no idea. He didn’t know anything, he just had this spiel memorized. He showed us what he claimed was the crown jewels, we had to pay extra for that. Wal, it turned out they were only copies, fakes; the jewels were colored glass. The real stuff is locked up somewhere else. Hell, anybody could see that: the crowns and all look like what guys in the Shriners or Masons would wear to some big do.”

Vinnie laughs. “I remember thinking the same thing, years ago. Costume jewelry, I thought.”

“Yeh, right. I complained to the guide, said he must think we were suckers, charging extra for something like that. He got real nervous and huffy; he was kind of a dope anyhow. But I have to admit he was the exception. Most of the people I’ve met here, they wouldn’t mind that kind of talk. They don’t keep telling you how great they are, how they’ve got the biggest and best of everything. They kinda make fun of themselves, even; you can see that from the newspapers.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Y’know, we’ve got a lot of boosters back in Tulsa. Smile, accentuate the positive, keep your eye on the doughnut, that kind of thing. It can get you down, ‘specially if you’re down already. Oral Roberts University, you ever hear of that?”

“No,” says Vinnie, who has but can’t remember why.

“Wal, it’s this college we have in Tulsa, founded by one of those TV preachers. Their idea is, if you’re a Jesus-fearing man or woman and go to church regular you’ll get ahead in life, win prizes, succeed in business, anything you want. It used to sound pretty harmless to me. You lose your job, you see the flip side of the pitch. If you aren’t producing, you’re some kind of sad Christ-forsaken weirdo. Hey, that reminds me. What I wanted to ask you in the first place.” Chuck lowers his spoon. “I got this idea from that book you lent me on the plane, about the American kid who goes back to England, where his grandfather is a duke or something. I forget the name.”

“Yeh. That’s right. Wal, it reminded me of my grandfather when I was a kid, when I was working on a ranch with him summers. He used to talk about how we were descended from some English lord, too.”

“Really.”

“I’m not kidding. Most of our ancestors back in England were just plain folks, he said, but there was one called Charles Mumpson, the same name as him and me, back around Revolutionary times, who was some kind of great lord. He lived on a big estate down in the southwestern part of the country and was a famous local character. Kind of a wise man. He didn’t sleep in his castle, my grandfather said; he stayed in a cave out in the woods. And he wore a special costume, sort of a long coat made from the fur of about a dozen different animals. He was called The Hermit of Southley, and people came from all over the countryside to see him.”

“Really,” Vinnie says again, but with a different intonation. For the first time she feels a professional interest in Chuck Mumpson.

“So anyway, I got the notion that while I’m here I should try and look up this guy and find out more about him and all our ancestors over here. Except I don’t know how to proceed. I went to the public library, but I couldn’t locate anything, I didn’t even know where to start. The trouble is, these dukes and knights and things have a lot of different names, sometimes three or four to a family. And there isn’t any place in that part of the country called Southley.” He grins, shrugs. “I tried to phone you, to get some help, but I must have taken down the number wrong. I got a laundry instead.”

“Mm.” Vinnie naturally doesn’t explain that she had deliberately altered one digit of her number. “Well, there are some standard places you might look,” she says. “There’s the Society of Genealogists, for instance.”

While Chuck writes down her suggestions, Vinnie thinks that his quest is also standard: the typical middlebrow, middleclass, nominally democratic American search for a connection with the British aristocracy—for “ancestors,” a family history, a coat of arms, a local habitation, and a noble name.

Conventional, tiresome. But the particular details of Chuck’s family legend are intriguing to a folklorist: the eccentric lord and local sage clothed in a patchwork of furs in his woodland cave. Mad deistic philosopher? Follower of Rousseau? Herb doctor? Wizard? Or even possibly, in the local folk imagination, the incarnation of some pagan god of the forest, part beast and part man? Half-formed wraiths of a short but rather interesting article stir in her mind. It also amuses her to think of Chuck as, in a debased and transatlantic form, the final incarnation of this classic folk figure—by coincidence, from the southwestern part of his own country and dressed in assorted animal skins.

When the bill arrives, Vinnie, as usual, insists upon paying her share. Some of her friends attribute this to feminist principles; but though Vinnie accepts their interpretation her policy well predates the women’s movement. Essentially, it reflects a deep dislike of being under obligation to anyone. Chuck protests that he owes her something anyhow for her advice; but she reminds him that he got her a ride to London on the Sun Tour bus, so they are now quits.

“Wal. All right.” Chuck crumples up Vinnie’s pound notes in his large red fist. “You know, you remind me of a teacher I had once in fourth grade. She was real nice. She . . .”

Vinnie listens to Chuck’s recollections without comment. It is her fate to remind almost everyone she meets of a teacher they had once.

“Anyhow. What I wanted to say is, it looks like I’m going to be in London a while longer. Maybe we could get together again sometime, have lunch.”

Vinnie declines tactfully; she’s awfully busy this week, she lies. But why doesn’t Chuck let her know how he gets on with his research? She gives him her telephone number—correctly this time—and also her address. If he really wants to find out anything, she adds, he’ll probably have to go to the town or village his ancestors lived in, once he discovers where it is.

“Sure, I could do that,” Chuck agrees. “I could rent a car, maybe, and drive down there.”

“Or you might be able to take a train. Hiring an automobile is frightfully expensive here, you know.”

“That’s okay. Money’s no problem. When Amalgamated threw me out, I got to admit, they threw a lot of stock after me.”

For a moment Vinnie considers adding a fifth problem, sexual frustration, to her list. It is suggested to her by the warm, determined way Chuck grasped her arm—or rather, the arm of her raincoat—just above the elbow as he guided her through Piccadilly Circus toward her bus stop. After all, he is a large, healthy, muscular man; and without those silly, rather vulgar cowboy clothes he would probably not look too bad in a bedroom. Possibly this was what he was, in a blurry way, trying to convey.

But on reflection Vinnie decides this is unlikely. Chuck Mumpson is so obviously a typical middle-American businessman, the sort of person who, if he needs what Kinsey et al. have unromantically called an “outlet”—when she hears the word Vinnie always thinks of an electrical wall socket—will simply purchase one. And Chuck probably already has purchased this wall socket several times, in the hardware and software markets of Soho, no doubt getting stinking drunk beforehand on each occasion as an excuse. (“I was bombed out—didn’t know what I was doing.”) Men of this type never think of anyone like Vinnie in connection with sex; they think of some “cute babe” or “hot little number”—ideally, a number under thirty. What Chuck was pressing for was sympathy, companionship, an understanding listener. It’s probably not very satisfying to talk to whores, and apart from them she is the only woman he knows in Britain.

This conclusion, though unflattering and even, in a very familiar way, irritating and depressing, also reassures Vinnie. There will be no need to fend off the advances of Chuck Mumpson; she only imagined there might be because she is used to thinking of friendship and sex as linked.

As related earlier, Vinnie has throughout her life slept mainly with men whose interest in her was casual and comradely rather than romantic. They seldom used the word “love” to her except in moments of passionate confusion; instead they told her that they were “very fond” of her and that she was great in bed and a real pal. (Possibly as a result, Vinnie detests the word “fond,” which always suggests to her its archaic or folk meaning of “foolish” or “silly.”)

In her youth Vinnie made the painful error of allowing herself to care seriously for some of these people. Against her better judgment, she even married one of them who was on the tearful rebound from a particularly aggravating beauty and, like a waterlogged tennis ball, had rolled into the nearest hole. Over the three subsequent years Vinnie had the experience of seeing her husband gradually regain his confidence and elasticity, begin to bounce about at parties, flirting and dancing with prettier women; hop briefly into the arms of one of his students; and eventually soar entirely beyond the boundaries of marriage, where he was caught and carried off by someone she had once thought of as a good friend.

After her divorce, Vinnie protected herself against emotional attachment to her occasional bed partners by declaring an extramural involvement of her own. She too was in love with someone else, she would hint, someone in another city—though unlike them she never went into details. This strategy was brilliantly successful. The more generous and sensitive of her lovers were relieved of the fear that Vinnie might take them too seriously, and suffer as a consequence; the less generous and sensitive were relieved of the fear that she might “make trouble.”

Moreover, as was perhaps necessary for the ploy to work, it wasn’t quite a lie. As she had done in early adolescence, Vinnie allowed herself to fix her romantic desires on men she hardly knew and seldom saw. These were not, as previously, film stars, but writers and critics whose work she had read, whom she had heard speak or even briefly met at the receptions that generally follow university readings or lectures. She had thus over the years enjoyed imaginary relationships with, among others, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Walker Percy, Mark Schorer, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wilbur. As this list shows, she rather preferred older men; and she insisted on intellectuals. When several members of a women’s group she belonged to in the early seventies confessed that they had passionate fantasies about their carpenter, their gardener, or the mechanic at the service station, Vinnie was astonished and a little repelled. What would be the point of going to bed with someone like that?

Vinnie’s fantasy affairs tended to be of brief duration, though under the influence of a brilliant new book or lecture she sometimes returned to an earlier passion. When, by coincidence, one or two of these distinguished people came to teach for a term at her own university and established cordial relations with Vinnie, she at once broke off her private affair with him. It wasn’t difficult; after all, seen at close range, this man was nothing extraordinary, not a patch on Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, or whoever was center stage at the moment.

After the disastrous experience of her marriage, Vinnie always ended her real affairs whenever she found her current lover getting into her bedtime home movies, or when one of them began to use the word “love” casually, or to announce that he could really imagine getting seriously involved with her. No thanks, chum; I was caught that way once before, she would think to herself. Not that there was always a current lover. For long periods Vinnie’s only companions were the shades of Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, etc., who faithfully every evening appeared to admire and embrace her, commending her wit, charm, intelligence, scholarly achievement, and sexual inventiveness.

In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never found a lover there. Nor is there any sign of one appearing now. And perhaps that’s for the best, she thinks. Because really, isn’t it time? In the popular imagination, and (more importantly) in English literature, to which in early childhood Vinnie had given her deepest trust—and which for half a century has suggested to her what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become—women of her age seldom have any sexual or romantic life. If they do, it is either embarrassingly pathetic or vulgarly comic or both.

In the last year or so Vinnie had begun to think more and more often that what she does with her pals is inappropriate—unbecoming to her station on the railway line of life. The fact that at fifty-four she still had erotic impulses and indulged them with such abandon seemed to her almost shameful. It has been something of a relief for her to be away from home, and chaste; to be as it were on sabbatical from sex—one which might well develop into a long leave of absence or even an early retirement. She is therefore embarrassed and irritated at herself for having, even briefly, imagined Chuck Mumpson standing naked by her bed in Regent’s Park Road. She tells herself to act and feel her age, for heaven’s sake. She certainly doesn’t want someone like Chuck, she tells herself; she doesn’t even want her brilliant, handsome, charming imaginary lovers very much.

As the bus carries her north through the darkening city, away from the sensual attractions of Fortnum and Mason’s and the erotic throbbing noises and flashing colored lights of Piccadilly Circus, into the quiet dim elegant streets around Regent’s Park, Vinnie tells herself again that it is time, and past time, to leave what her mother used to refer to as All That behind. It is time to steer past the Scylla and Charybdis of elderly sexual farce and sexual tragedy into the wide, calm sunset sea of abstinence, where the tepid waters are never troubled by the burning heat and chill, the foamy backwash and weed-choked turbulence of passion.