Overall, Vinnie’s working hypothesis about the differences between British and American game rhymes has been supported. The British texts do tend to be older, in some cases suggesting a medieval or even an Anglo-Saxon origin; they are also more literary. The American rhymes are newer, cruder, less lyrical and poetic.

More complex analysis will come later; she can see already, however, that violence is common in the verses of both countries, something that wouldn’t surprise any trained observer and doesn’t surprise Vinnie, who has never thought of children as particularly sweet or gentle.

Since she is an authority on children’s literature, people assume that Vinnie must love children, and that her own lack of them must be a tragedy. For the sake of public relations, she seldom denies these assumptions outright. But the truth is otherwise. In her private opinion most contemporary children—especially American ones—are competitive, callous, noisy, and shallow, at once jaded and ignorant as a result of overexposure to television, baby-sitters, advertising, and video games. Vinnie wants to be a child, not to have one; she isn’t interested in the parental role, but in an extension or recovery of what for her is the best part of life.

Indifference to actual children is fairly common among experts in Vinnie’s field, and not unknown among authors of juvenile literature. As she has often noted in her lectures, many of the great classic writers had an idyllic boyhood or girlhood that ended far too soon, often traumatically. Carroll, Macdonald, Kipling, Burnett, Nesbit, Grahame, Tolkien—and the list could be extended. The result of such an early history often seems to be a passionate longing, not for children, but for one’s own lost childhood.

As a little girl Vinnie too was unusually happy. Her parents were good-tempered, fond of her, and comfortably circumstanced; her first eleven years were passed in agreeable and varied semirural surroundings. It was no handicap not to be beautiful then, and all children are small. Vinnie was clever, energetic, popular. Though her size prevented her from excelling at most sports, she gained authority through her self-confidence and her good memory for games, rhymes, riddles, stories, and jokes. She loved everything about those years: the hours in the classroom and on the playground; the thrilling exploration of overgrown vacant lots, alleys, woods, and fields; the visits to stores and museums; the picnics and summer trips to the mountains or seaside with her parents. She loved the books—indeed, she still prefers children’s literature to most contemporary adult fiction. She loved the toys, the songs, the games, the Saturday matinees at the neighborhood movie house, the radio programs (especially “Little Orphan Annie” and “The Shadow”). She loved the round of holidays, from January first—when she helped her parents toast the baby New Year in nonalcoholic foamy eggnog—to Christmas with its elaborate family ceremonial and gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins.

Then suddenly, when Vinnie was twelve, her parents moved to the city. In her new school she was skipped a grade, and found that she had lost everything important to her in life and become a disadvantaged adolescent—an undersized, pimply, flat-chested, embarrassingly plain “grind.” The pain of this transformation is something she has never quite got over.

As it turned out, though, Vinnie didn’t have to relinquish childhood forever. No one really has to, she believes, and often declares. The message of all her lectures and books and articles—sometimes explicit, more often implied—is that we must, as she puts it, value and preserve childhood: we must “cherish the child within us.” This isn’t of course an original theme, but one of the basic doctrines of her profession.

The cloudy laundry overhead has thickened; the school building, a castellated structure of sooty Victorian brick, intercepts the declining sun. The skipping rope ceases to define its magical space, falls limp, becomes only a length of old clothesline. As the little girls prepare to leave, Vinnie consults with them to check on some of the textual variations she had heard; she thanks them, and writes down their names and ages. Then she puts away her notebook and follows the children’s route across the chilly, darkening playground, wrapping her coat closer, looking forward to her tea.

“Hey! Hey, missis.” The girl who has accosted her is standing against the smoke-stained, graffiti-scrawled brick wall of the narrow passage that runs past the school to the street. She is older than the children who were jumping rope—perhaps twelve or thirteen—skinny, and poorly dressed in a semi-punk style. A soiled once-pink Orion cardigan is pinned together over her school uniform skirt and a red-and-black T-shirt advertising some rock group. Her complexion is bad; her cropped hair has been dyed a nasty shade of pale magenta, and resembles the synthetic fur of those stuffed toys that are won—or more often not won—at Bank Holiday fairs.

“Yes?” Vinnie says.

“I got somethin’ to tell you.” The girl grabs a fold of Vinnie’s coat sleeve. “My sister says you’re wantin’ rhymes. Rhymes you wouldn’t tell the teachers.” She grins unattractively; her teeth are chipped and irregular.

“I’m collecting all sorts of rhymes,” Vinnie says, with a professionally friendly smile. “What I told your sister’s class was that there might be some they wouldn’t want to recite in public, because they weren’t very polite.”

“Yeh, that’s what I mean. I know a lotta those.”

“That’s nice,” Vinnie says, repressing her desire for tea. “I’d like to hear them.” The girl is silent. “Would you like to say some for me?”

“Maybe.” A precocious shrewdness twists the spotty unformed features. “How much you paying?”

Vinnie’s first impulse is to break off the conversation. No child or adult has ever before proposed to sell material to her; the very idea is unseemly. Folklore by nature is free, uncopyrighted—as a Marxist colleague says, it’s not part of the capitalist commodity system—and this for Vinnie is part of its glory. But it’s possible that this unpleasant little girl knows some interesting, even unique rhymes; and Vinnie has learnt in over thirty years never to turn down material, or judge the value of the text by an informant’s appearance. Besides, God knows the child looks as if she could use the money.

“I don’t know.” She laughs awkwardly. “How about fifty pence?”

“Okay.” The reply is animated, almost avid. Vinnie realizes she’s offered much more than was expected. She gets out her notebook and pen; then, noticing the child’s suspicious stare, she rummages in her purse. When she first came to England, the old silver coinage was still in use; the new octagonal fifty-pence piece, once she finds it, looks more than ever like some sort of cheap medal. Britannia, sitting between her lion and her shield, seems shrunken, defensive.

And where is Vinnie to sit? Reluctantly she lowers herself onto the only available horizontal surface, a ledge of dirty-looking cement alongside the school building.

Clutching the coin, the mauve-haired girl darts down the alley to scan the now-empty playground, then back in the other direction toward the street. Perhaps it was all a begging trick, Vinnie thinks. But after surveying the scene the child sidles back up the passage.

“Okay,” she says.

“Just a moment, please.” Vinnie opens her notebook. “Could you tell me your name?”

“Wha’ for?” The child takes a step back.

“It’s just for my records,” Vinnie says in a reassuring tone. “I’m not going to tell anyone.” This isn’t strictly true: in her published work she always identifies and thanks her informants, and over the years more than one child, coming across Vinnie’s books or articles later, has written to thank her in turn.

“Uh. Mary, uh, Maloney.”

The manner of delivery makes Vinnie certain that this is not the child’s name; but she writes it down. “Yes. Go ahead.” “Mary Maloney” bends toward her and says in a hoarse whisper:

“Yeh. You got it.”

“Thank you. Would you like to say another one?”

Mary Maloney slouches against the sooty bricks above Vinnie, mute. The ripped hem of her skirt hangs down on one side; she wears sagging pink bobby socks and scratched red plastic clogs, and her thin white legs are prickled with gooseflesh. “You want more, you gotta pay for more,” she whines.

Now it is Vinnie’s turn to be silent; the sordidness of the transaction has overcome her.

“I betcha you’ll get more brass ‘n that when you sell my stuff.”

“I don’t sell these rhymes.” Vinnie tries to say this pleasantly, to keep both distaste and rebuke out of her voice.

“Yeh? What d’you do with them, then?”

“I collect them, for, uh”—How can her life’s work be explained to a mind like this?—“for the college where I teach.”

“Oh yeh?” The girl gives her the look one gives a liar whose bluff one has decided not to call. It is clear that she believes Vinnie to be collecting dirty rhymes for some dubious, even perverse purpose. It also seems likely that for enough money she would sell Vinnie, or anyone else, anything they wanted—that she would say and do horrors. “Okay.” A peeved sigh. “Tenpence.”

Now that she is in so far Vinnie feels somehow constrained to go on. She reopens her purse and extracts another tinny, debased coin. Mary Maloney leans closer, so close that Vinnie can see the dark, dandruff-clogged roots of her synthetic mauve hair, and smell her sour breath.

“Thanks, that’s enough,” she says, shutting her notebook on the unfinished rhyme and rising to her feet. “Thank you for your help.” She gives a tight smile. A cold wind has begun to scour the darkening playground and funnel through the passageway, blowing shreds of paper rubbish with it.

“Hey, I ain’t finished.” Mary Maloney follows her out into the street.

“That’s all right; I have enough now, thank you.” Vinnie begins to walk down Princess Road; but the girl follows closely, clutching at her coat.

“Hey, wait! I know lots more rhymes. I know some really dirty ones.” Mary Maloney presses nearer; in her clogs, she is taller than Vinnie, who always wears sensible low heels on field trips.

“Would you let go of me, please,” Vinnie exclaims, her voice tight with revulsion and, it must be admitted, fear. The street is almost empty, the clouds low and unpleasant.

“Mary had a little lamb—”

A dread of hearing what will come next gives Vinnie the strength to pull her coat away. Breathing hard, not looking back, she walks off as fast as she can go without actually running.

It might be possible, she decides, buttering the second half of her cinnamon bun, to exclude those last two texts from her study. After all they are not, to paraphrase her projected title, British Rhymes of Childhood, but rather rhymes of a precocious and corrupt adolescence. Besides, she never got Mary Maloney’s age; very likely she is older than she looked, undersized like many slum-dwellers, maybe fourteen or even fifteen, not a child at all.

All the same she feels a nagging unease. Mary Maloney remains in her mind: the skinny white gooseflesh legs, the flat dirty face, the chipped teeth, the matted acrylic hair; the pressure of her greed and her need.

It also occurs to Vinnie that in a sense the girl was right: she will get more than tenpence for each rhyme in her notebook when her study is published. And more still if, as she hopes, Janet Elliot in London and Marilyn Krinney in New York agree to print a selection of her rhymes as a children’s book; negotiations for this project are already underway. And what would her Marxist friend say to that? Depending on his mood, which is highly unstable, he might say either “Well, we all have to live” or “Capitalist bitch.”

Of course if she doesn’t use Mary Maloney’s contribution she won’t be exploiting her. No; she’ll only be exploiting the scores, hundreds even, of schoolchildren who for thirty years have told her their rhymes, stories, riddles, and jokes for nothing. But to think this way is ridiculous. It is to condemn every folklorist who ever lived, from the Grimm brothers on.

Yes, Vinnie thinks, she will forget those rhymes, as she prefers to forget much of adult folklore. A scholar, of course, cannot afford to be prudish, and over the years she has recorded a good deal of off-color material with hardly a quiver. Children are given to bathroom humor:

But some of the jokes told by grownups and collected by other folklorists really gross Vinnie out, as her students would say. They are not only filthy, they emphasize an aspect of the relations between men and women that she prefers not to look at too closely. However carried away by sex—and at times she has been carried far—Vinnie always returns with a slight sense of embarrassment. Intellectually she considers the physical side of love ridiculous at best, certainly unaesthetic—not one of nature’s best inventions. The female organs seem to her damp and cluttered; that of the male positively silly, a pink unnatural toadstool sort of thing. As the only child of modest, even rather squeamish parents, Vinnie was six years old before she saw a naked human male—a friend’s baby brother. Because she was a polite child she made no comment on what appeared to her a kind of unfortunate growth on the baby’s tummy, a sort of large fleshy wart. Subsequently, through contemplation of public sculptures and her parents’ art books, it occurred to her that other males besides little Bobby had this handicap, though in art it was usually concealed, or partly concealed, by a sculptured or painted leaf. Other men, she concluded from a visit to Rockefeller Center and a photograph in Life of the Oscar Award, were not so deformed. When she discovered the truth, Vinnie’s main feeling was one of pity. A decade later she saw her first erect penis; in spite of all she now knew, her first thought was that it looked infected: sore, red, puffy. Though she has tried to suppress them, these ideas are never far from Vinnie’s consciousness. She has never got used to the way sex looks.

But though it looks foolish or even disgusting, Vinnie presently found, sex feels wonderful. She didn’t find that odd, since it is the same way with food: an oyster or a plate of spaghetti is far from attractive in itself. The solution to the problem was simple: you either make love in the dark or shut your eyes. Of course, this hasn’t always been possible. In graduate school she once broke up with a most attractive man because the wall opposite his bed was one large gold-framed mirror salvaged from a demolished building nearby. Vinnie managed to keep her eyes closed most of the time, but she couldn’t help opening them once in a while; and then the sight of her own thin white legs wrapped around her friend Paul Cattleman’s brown hairy back filled her with a deep embarrassment that almost wholly quenched her pleasure.

While she was growing up Vinnie often heard the minister of her parents’ church say that love (the married sort, of course) was a God-given blessing. Vinnie herself is not religious, though she is somewhat superstitious, and she does not blame the human reproductive process on anyone. But if she were to imagine the sort of God who might have arranged it, he would hardly inspire veneration. She sees one of those fat, undignified, naked bronze deities that are occasionally offered for sale in Oriental shops, whose human avatars are worshiped by the least stable of her students. Some little plump godling, with a limited imagination and the giggly, vulgar sense of humor one sometimes sees in young children.

Before she left America, Vinnie had rather dreaded the prospect of being without physical love for six months, and anticipated with anxiety the frustration and/or unsuitable incidents it might bring into her life—the necessity of calling too desperately on fantasy affairs. But as it turns out, she has been less often painfully troubled by desire than in the past, perhaps because of her age.

Even in her fantasy life, she has noticed, professional recognition has of late tended to replace romance. As she drowses over a book, or lies among her pillows drifting into sleep, public bodies rather than private ones approach her. She accepts their advances as warmly and graciously as before, but now in a vertical rather than a horizontal position, and clad not in her best black nightgown but in the black gown and colored silk hood appropriate to the recipient of various prizes and honorary degrees. It annoys Vinnie that she is enough a woman of her generation to be rather ashamed of these imaginings when fully awake. Among her feminist students they would be thought far less embarrassing than the other sort of fantasy; even admirable. But Vinnie has been brought up to believe that though a man may work for wealth or fame, a woman must labor for love—if not that of a husband or children, at least that of a profession.

No, Vinnie doesn’t miss sex as much as she had feared. What she misses is the affectionate and romantic side of love, insofar as she has known it: the leisurely walks in the woods, the exchange of notes, the rapid concealed half-caress at the crowded party, the glance across the lounge at the faculty club, the sense of sharing a complex, secret life. But she is used to missing all this—she has been short of it almost all her life.

And here in London she thinks of it rather less often, for there is so much else to entertain her. Tonight, for instance, she’s going to the English National Opera with a friend whom she considers one of the nicest people and best authors of children’s fiction in Britain.

As Vinnie gives up all hope of coffee and heads back toward the stairs, she sees Rosemary Radley and Fred Turner sitting on a bench. That they should be here together doesn’t surprise her. Everyone knows about them now; Rosemary has even been mentioned in Private Eye as “discussing Ugandan affairs with a gorgeous young American don.” She has also, presumably because of Fred, canceled out of a film now being shot in Italy. It wasn’t a very large role, admittedly; but a fair amount of money was involved—and, as everyone says, Rosemary has to think of her reputation; she isn’t getting any younger.

None of this gossip seems to affect the lovers. They go everywhere together, and Vinnie has to admit that they make a handsome couple. Rosemary of course is famous for her looks, and more than one of her friends has compared Fred’s profile to that of Rupert Brooke—which is fine if you like that rather flamboyant sort of appearance, Vinnie thinks. Nor do they seem mismatched as to age: Fred’s seriousness of manner, and Rosemary’s delicate playfulness, help to cancel the difference. And they are evidently good for each other. Fred has cheered up amazingly, and Rosemary’s scatty manner has moderated. She still darts from one topic to the next, but far more smoothly.

What strikes Vinnie about them now isn’t so much the way Fred is looking at Rosemary—she’s seen plenty of people stare at Rosemary like that, including some who don’t much like her—but rather Rosemary’s unwavering concentration on Fred.

Like many actors, Rosemary usually broadcasts rather than receives impressions. She also seems unable as a rule to fix her attention on anyone or anything for more than a few moments; perhaps this helps to explain why she hasn’t ever had any real success on stage. Television, on the other hand, is shot in tiny segments: it doesn’t require an extended and developed performance, only a concentrated brief intensity of expression, something Rosemary is certainly capable of—even famous for—in private life.

Her normal modus operandi is to leap charmingly and distractingly from subject to subject, mood to mood, and person to person, often so quickly that the outlines of her conversation and even of her appearance seem to blur; one is left with an impression of sparkle and flutter. Her clothes produce the same effect. Rosemary never follows current fashion, but has developed a style of her own. Everything she wears shimmers and billows and dangles; she seems not so much dressed as loosely draped in flimsy, flowery, lacy stuffs: veils and scarves and floating gauzy blouses and trailing skirts and fringed silk shawls. Her hair too is continually in flux: tinted and streaked in varying shades from pale gold to bisque, it alternately gathers itself up in soft coils, falls in flossy clouds about her shoulders, or extends wayward tendrils and curls in all directions.

Tonight, though, Rosemary seems unusually tranquil. Light but serene blonde waves lie on her brow; her ropes of blue and silver beads and her long chiffon dress printed with shadowy azure flowers fall undisturbed toward the floor; her gaze is steady on Fred. Vinnie has to speak twice before either of them notices her.

“Oh, uh-Vinnie, hello.” Fred rises smoothly, but stumbles over her first name, which she has recently invited him to use. “I’m glad you’re here. I need support; Rosemary’s being very stubborn. You’ll tell her I’m right.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. Vinnie will agree with me. Now, sit down.” With a flutter of sleeve and a tinkle of silver-gilt bangles Rosemary smooths the banquette beside her.

Their dispute turns out to concern—or have as its pretext—the question of whether Rosemary should hire a cleaning lady. Even before Vinnie hears their arguments she’s on Fred’s side. Rosemary’s Chelsea house is famous for its disorder, its elegant slovenliness; every time Vinnie’s been there it has been cluttered with things that need mending, scrubbing, dusting, polishing, emptying, and throwing away. But Rosemary claims to be perfectly satisfied with her present method of housekeeping, which is to let everything go until she can’t stand it and then ask an agency called Help Yourself to send someone over for a day.

“I can’t bear housecleaning,” she tells Vinnie. “It always reminds me of my mother’s two spinster aunts in Bath, where I was sent to stay as a child during the war—mean, obsessive old things. All their staff had left except this elderly battle-axe Mrs. McGowan, but they insisted on keeping that great ugly barn of a house up. Always cleaning, they were, working their fingers to the bone.” Rosemary extends and flexes her soft ringed hands. “They were fearfully cross with me because I was so careless and untidy. ‘You’re a most inconsiderate child,’ Aunt Isabel used to tell me”—Rosemary assumes an unfamiliar voice, thin and nasal—‘“You can’t expect Mrs. McGowan to pick up after you, she has other things to do. If you don’t change your ways before you’re grown, no self-respecting servant will ever want to work for you.’

“Well, I made up my mind right then. I said to them, ‘I don’t want my room picked up. I like it the way it is.’ Oh, they were shocked. My Aunt Etty said”—another voice, lower and wearier—” ‘No man’ll stay in a house that looks the way your room does now.’ Little she knew.” Rosemary giggles provocatively

Besides, she goes on, charladies always get so dreadfully familiar, trying to involve you in their awful pathetic lives. “You Americans—” She made a face at Vinnie and Fred. “You haven’t any idea what household help is like nowadays in this country. You think if I phone an agency they’ll send me a dear old family retainer out of Upstairs, Downstairs.”

“No—” begins Vinnie, who has never tried to find a cleaning lady in London, because she can’t afford one.

“What I’ll get instead”—Rosemary rushes on—“is some miserable immigrant who speaks only Pakistani or Portuguese and is terrified of electricity. Or else some awful slut who can’t find a proper job in a shop or a factory because she’s too stupid and ill-tempered. And then twice a week I’ll have to hear all about her backache and her constipation and her drunken husband and her delinquent children and her squabbles with the Council over her flat.” Rosemary slides into stage Cockney—“and ’er dawg’s worms and ’er cat’s fleas and ’er budgie’s molt, ooh, the pore dear, ’e’s losin’ ‘is feathers somethin’ awful and won’t touch ‘is bloody birdseed.”

Fred awards the performance a grin of appreciation, then goes on to criticize the script. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” he tells Vinnie. “You can still find a good cleaning lady if you go to the right agency; Posy Billings gave me the name of one when we were there last weekend. If the woman talks too much, well, Rosemary can just leave the house. She can’t do that with Help Yourself, because they send somebody different every time, right?”

“Mm,” Vinnie assents; but what she is thinking is that Fred Turner has received after only a few weeks’ acquaintance what she will probably never receive: an invitation to Posy Billings’ house in Oxfordshire.

“Those people from Help Yourself, see, they’re out-of-work actors and singers and dancers, most of them,” he explains. “They don’t know anything about how to clean a house. When I come over they’re usually just standing holding a dust rag like it was some prop in a play they didn’t understand, or they’re pushing the vacuum back and forth over the same place in the carpet, talking about the theater and trying to persuade Rosemary to get them a part in Tallyho Castle.”

“Not always.” Rosemary protests, with a soft giggle.

“And if she goes out,” he continues, “if she doesn’t watch them every minute, the people from Help Yourself help themselves to her whisky and her pâté and her opera records and sometimes even her clothes. They smear her windows with detergent and ruin her parquet with soap and hot water and tear up her silk scarves for dust rags.”

As Fred relates these disasters, Vinnie is struck not only by his grasp of the details of housekeeping but by his familiarity with Rosemary’s domestic circumstances. Evidently he’s not actually living with her now, but Vinnie wonders if he might be planning to move in, especially if conditions improve. She thinks of the remark of Rosemary’s aunt, that no man would stay in her niece’s house because of its disorder. As Rosemary implied, her aunt had been wrong: many men have stayed in her house. On the other hand, none has done so for very long.

Before Vinnie can pronounce any judgment in the dispute, the bell rings for the second act. Just as well, she thinks as she climbs the stairs to the balcony, jostled aside by larger and heavier persons. It’s always a mistake for an outsider to venture an opinion in arguments of this sort, which are often largely a sort of amorous play. At least for Rosemary the quarrel seemed no more than a pretext for dramatic monologue and affectionate banter. At times she’d even taken the other side, adding weight to Fred’s case by telling how she once came home to find a youth from Help Yourself soaking in pink bubbles in her tub. “And he wasn’t even attractive! He was rather pudgy, and soapy and apologetic, and later I found he’d used up all my Vitabath.”

But Fred, underneath his light manner, is singing the basso part. He has a temperamental commitment to the idea of order, already demonstrated to Vinnie in meetings of the Corinth Library Committee. The dusty chaos of Rosemary’s house would surely seem to him a most unsuitable backdrop for their love duet. Also, no doubt, he doesn’t much care to have ambitious young actors chatting intimately with Rosemary, or sloshing about (however pudgily) in her bathtub.

Vinnie’s guess is that Rosemary will win the argument. She’s used to having her own way, and besides it’s her house, not to mention her country. But there is something in Fred’s manner that suggests he won’t give up easily. On the Library Committee this past autumn he was—though always polite—quite stubborn: willing to prolong a meeting well past five o’clock to gain his point. Vinnie had thought that this might be because he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment. On the other hand, perhaps stubbornness was part of Fred’s character—and as such possibly a cause rather than a result of his newly single state.

Another longer ring. Cautiously, she crawls out from under the down comforter and pads barefoot along the hall in her flannel nightgown and bathrobe. The light from the entryway spills down through the transom onto the cold black-and-white tiles, and Vinnie feels a shiver up her legs. Her vision of the unknown caller multiplies, and she imagines on the doorstep an aggregation of drunken vagrants, then a gang of mauve-haired teenage punks chanting foul rhymes.

A third ring at the bell, more prolonged, somehow plaintive. It is spiritless of her to cower behind two locked doors like this, Vinnie thinks. London is not, like New York, an anonymously indifferent city. She is acquainted with her neighbors in the house; if she were to scream they would come hastening to see what was the matter, the way everyone (including Vinnie) did when the baby-sitter upstairs scalded herself last month. Holding her bathrobe closely around her, she opens the door of the flat.

“Yes?” she calls shrilly. “Who is it?”

“Professor Miner?” An American male voice, muffled by the heavy slab of oak that is the outer door.

“Yes?” Her tone is less fearful now, more impatient.

“It’s Chuck. Chuck Mumpson, from the plane. I hafta tell you something.”

“Just a moment.” Vinnie stands considering. It must be well past eleven, an impossible hour for a social visit, and she hardly knows Chuck Mumpson. She hasn’t seen him since they had tea at Fortnum and Mason’s, though he phoned once to report on his genealogical search. (Following Vinnie’s advice, he had located a village in Wiltshire called South Leigh—“They spell it different, like you said they might”—and was planning to visit it.) If she tells him to go away, she can return to bed and get enough sleep to be in decent shape for her nine A.M. appointment at a primary school in South London. On the other hand, if he goes away he may never come back, and she will never know what he has found out about his ancestor the local folk figure.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she calls.

“Okay,” Chuck shouts back.

Vinnie returns to the bedroom and gets back into the dress she wore to the opera. She pulls a brush through her hair and gives a critical, discouraged glance at her face; but neither it nor her guest seem worth the effort of makeup.

Her first impression of Chuck as he steps into the light is unsettling: he looks ill, sagging, disheveled. His leathery tan has faded to a grayed pallor; his piebald hair, what there is of it, is uncombed; his awful plastic raincoat is creased and mildewed. As she shuts the door of the flat he sways and staggers sideways, then recovers and stands gazing into the hall mirror in a fixed, dull way.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“No, I guess not.”

Instinctively, Vinnie steps back.

“Don’t worry. I’m not drunk or anything. I’d like to sit down, okay?”

“Yes, of course. In here.” She switches on a lamp in the sitting room.

“Been walking a long ways.” Chuck lowers himself heavily onto the sofa, which creaks under his weight; he is still breathing hard. “I saw your light, figured you were still up.”

“Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t explain that she always keeps the desk lamp on in the study, which faces the street, in order to confound burglars. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or a drink?”

“Doesn’t matter. A drink, if you’ve got one.”

“I think there’s some whisky.” In the kitchen Vinnie pours a rather weak Scotch and water and puts the kettle on so that she can have tea, wondering what disaster it is that has overtaken Chuck Mumpson.

When she returns, he is still sitting there staring out into the room; he looks wrong and too large for her flat and for her sofa. “Wouldn’t you like to take off your raincoat?”

“What?” Chuck blinks toward her. “Oh yeh.” He grins weakly. “Forgot.” He heaves himself up, peels off the stained plastic, and drops down again, looking no better. The jacket of his Western suit has been snapped together wrong, so that the left side is higher than the right, and one point of his collar sticks out at an angle. Vinnie makes no comment on this; Chuck Mumpson’s appearance is none of her concern.

“Here you are.”

Chuck takes the glass and sits holding it as if stupefied.

“What’s happened?” Vinnie asks, both apprehensive and impatient. “Is it—your family?”

“Nah. They’re all right. I guess. Haven’t heard lately.” Chuck looks at the glass of whisky, lifts it, swallows, lowers it, all in slow motion.

“Did you find any ancestors in Wiltshire?”

“Yeh.”

“Well, that’s nice.” She adds more milk to her tea, to avert heartburn. “And did you find the wise man, the hermit?”

“Yeh. I found him.”

“That’s very good luck,” Vinnie remarks, wishing he would get the hell on with it. “Lots of Americans come over here to search for their forebears, you know, and most of them don’t find anything.”

“Bullshit.” For the first time that evening Chuck speaks with his normal force, or more.

“What?” Vinnie is startled; her china teacup rattles on its saucer.

“The whole thing was bullshit, excuse me. The earl, the castle—My grandfather, he was just shooting me a line. Or somebody shot him one, maybe.”

“Really.” Vinnie affects surprise, though on consideration it doesn’t seem strange that Chuck Mumpson isn’t descended from the English aristocracy. On the other hand, for her purposes it doesn’t matter whether his ancestor the hermit was an earl or not. “Yes, go on.”

“Okay. Wal, I rented a car from that garage you recommended, and drove down into the country, to this South Leigh. It’s not much of a place: old church, a few houses. I checked into a hotel in a town near there. Then I went to the library, asked how I could get to see the parish registers for South Leigh, like you told me, and the tax records. I found a whole mess of Mumpsons, but they weren’t anybody special. Farmers, most of them, and none of them was named Charles. It took a hell of a long time. Everything kept being out of commission for different dumb reasons, like for instance it was Thursday afternoon. The whole place just shut down in the middle of the week. All the stores too. Hell, no wonder we’ve got so far ahead of them, right?”

“Mm.” The last thing Vinnie wants at this time of night is to start an argument about the comparative economic achievements of America and Britain.

“Anyhow, finally this antiquarian society was open. I talked to the secretary, and she found what looked like it might be the right place, a ways out in the country. Her book said a hermit used to live there, back at the end of the eighteenth century. It was on the estate of some people she’d met once, Colonel and Lady Jenkins their name was. So she called them up, and they invited me over. Mind if I smoke?”

“No, go ahead.” Vinnie sighs. Usually she doesn’t allow cigarettes in her classroom, office, or home; when she gives a party she asks her nicotine-addicted guests to go outdoors or into another room.

“I keep trying to quit.” Chuck takes out a pack. “The doctor says I hafta. But I get real crazy without cigarettes. Can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on anything.” He gives a light false laugh, strikes a match, inhales.

“That’s too bad,” says Vinnie, who has often quietly (and on certain occasions noisily) prided herself on never having smoked.

“Ahhh.” A foul, smelly, gray backwash issues from Chuck’s mouth. “Wal, we all gotta go some way.”

With difficulty, Vinnie refrains from remarking that lung cancer and emphysema, according to all reports, are two of the most unpleasant methods of departure.

“Anyhow, I had almost the whole day to kill before I could see Colonel Jenkins. I was hanging round the antiquarian society reading up on the local aristocracy, and I got into a conversation with this archaeologist guy. He’s working on a dig outside the town, where there used to be an old village. I mean really old, back in the Middle Ages. For him a couple of hundred years is like yesterday. He was finding some stuff, only the best excavation site they had kept filling up with water. Nobody on his crew could figure out where it was coming from or what to do about it. Wal, that’s my line of work; at least it used to be.”

A pained, plaintive note has entered Chuck’s voice. Vinnie recognizes it: it is the whistle of self-pity that has so often in the past called Fido to her. Perhaps because she is still a little blurry from sleep, she imagines Fido hearing it too under the sofa where he has been more or less hibernating for the past two months; waking, blinking open his huge mournful brown eyes.

“Wal,” Chuck continues, “I said I’d go out and look his setup over. Turned out what they’d done was, they’d got one of the pumps hooked up wrong, so most of the water they took out was running right back into that excavation.

“So this guy, Professor Gilson his name is, got his team together, and we moved the pipes, and the water started to go down. I felt real set up with myself. I got my camera and took a load of pictures of them and the site and some of the stuff they’d found. Then we all went and had a beer to celebrate, and then we had lunch in the local pub. Better food than I ever got in my London hotel by a long shot, and a lot cheaper too. I told everybody what I was doing in Wiltshire, and how I was going to locate my ancestor the earl that afternoon. Asshole that I was. I should’ve known what was coming, with my luck.”

“Mm,” Vinnie says. The call is unmistakable now; Fido crawls out from under the sofa to lie at Chuck’s feet.

“What I did instead was kinda went back to the hotel and got all spiffed up; I was muddy from the dig, and I wanted to look like I was related to a lord. I was disappointed at first when I saw the Jenkins’ place: it wasn’t my idea of a castle. No towers or moat or anything. But it was a great big old stone house, over two hundred years old I found out later, with a pediment and columns and sculptures of Roman emperors on the lawn with two-hundred-year-old moss growing on them. And the grass was like Astroturf sprinkled with little flowers. I thought, yeh, this’ll do okay. My head was full of blown-up ideas. I knew Colonel and Lady Jenkins had only owned the house for thirty years, so I figured my ancestors must have sold the place sometime. Maybe they were living somewhere else grander, or maybe they’d all died off by now. That’d be too bad in a way, because I wouldn’t get to meet them; but then maybe I’d turn out to be the long-lost heir, why not? I mean it could’ve been like that, right?”

“I suppose so,” says Vinnie, distracted by her vision of Fido, who is now wagging his dirty-white tail and gazing eagerly up at Chuck.

“Only it wasn’t. Colonel and Lady Jenkins knew all about it. They took me to see the hermitage down in the woods behind the house. It was what they called a grotto—sort of a natural cave in the rocks next to a stream, built out with cement and pebbles and shells into a kinda little stone room. It had an arched door and one window, and the back walls were dripping wet. It was full of moss and dead leaves and spiderwebs and a couple old pieces of furniture made out of logs with the bark still on, like you see in national parks, y’ know.”

“Mm.”

“Of course nobody lives there now, but they said there was a hermit once upon a time. Only he wasn’t any lord, he was just some old guy that was hired to stay in the grotto. Rich people used to do that back then, Colonel Jenkins told me, the same way a Tulsa businessman with a ten-acre ranch will buy himself a coupla horses or a few head of cattle: not for profit, just to make the place look good, to decorate it, like. So they bought this guy. The Jenkinses showed me a picture of the grotto, when it was new, in an old book. The hermit was standing in front of it, with a scraggy beard and long hair and a droopy straw hat like some old bag lady.”

“Still, there’s no proof it was your ancestor,” Vinnie says.

“It was him all right. He was called Old Mumpson, and he got twenty pounds a year and his board, it was all in the book. He couldn’t even write, he had to sign his name with an x, he was just a dirty old bum.”

In Vinnie’s mind, Fido rises to his legs and places his front paws on Chuck’s knee. “But what about the story your grandfather told you?” she asks. “About your ancestor being a kind of wise man, and the cloak made out of a dozen kinds of fur?”

“Who knows? It coulda been fur in the picture, you couldn’t tell for sure. Colonel and Lady Jenkins’d never heard any of that stuff, though they were interested, said they were going to write it all down. They were real nice to me. They gave me tea and cake and muffins and homemade jam. The jam was kind of a weird green color, but it tasted okay. It was made out of goose berries, whatever they are. And they showed me all over the place and answered all my questions. But I could tell they thought I was a poor dumb jerk, looking for earls in a dirty wet cave in the woods. They’re loaded with ancestors themselves, real ones. The house was full of oil paintings of them.”

“That’s too bad,” Vinnie says, referring to her own frustration as well as Chuck’s.

“It about knocked me out. First thing, I just wanted to get out of there. I drove to London and turned in the car and checked back into that hotel I stayed in before, near the Air Terminal, and all the time I felt worse and worse. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep or eat anything or even sit still in the room. Finally I went out for a walk. Didn’t have any idea where I was going, must’ve walked half over London. Then I thought of you.” He sags back against the sofa and falls silent.

Research has its dangers, Vinnie thinks, looking at him. The study of children’s literature, for instance, has revealed to her a number of things she is glad she did not know as a child and is not very glad to know now: for instance, that Christopher Robin Milne’s schooldays were made miserable by his association with the Pooh books; or that The Wind in the Willows is full of Tory paranoia about the working class. Some adult fantasies, such as Chuck Mumpson’s belief in an aristocratic ancestor, might also be better left alone.

“Well, of course it’s a disappointment.” Vinnie speaks briskly so as not to encourage Fido. “But I can’t really see why you’re so upset. After all, most people don’t have ancestors. Some of them don’t even have descendants.” Fido turns his head and gives Vinnie a hopeful look. “I mean, you’re no worse off now than you were before.”

“That’s what you think.” Chuck gives a suppressed groan that reengages Fido’s total attention. “You don’t know what it’ll mean for me back in Tulsa. Myrna’s relations, they’re high-class people: got charts of their family going back to before the Revolution. They’ve always snooted me. They didn’t like what I came from or my language or the kinda jobs I had. Sanitary engineer, Myrna’s mother thought that was a dirty word. She told Myrna once it always reminded her of sanitary napkin.”

“Really,” says Vinnie, forming a negative opinion of Myrna’s relatives’ claims to gentility.

“And her sister, she’s a psychologist, got a degree from Stanford University. She said to Myrna the reason I missed my job so bad was my mind was stuck at the age of three, and secretly all I wanted was an excuse to play with my poo-poo.”

“Really.” Vinnie says again, but this time with some indignation.

“After Amalgamated flushed me out it was worse. It was ‘Wal, Myrna, I always told you so.’”

“I suppose everyone has relatives like that,” Vinnie says, though in fact she does not. It was her so-called friends, rather, who had warned her that her husband was still carrying the torch for his former girlfriend and that her marriage wouldn’t last—and had later reminded her of how prescient they had been. “You’ve simply got to ignore them.”

“Yeh. I try. But Myrna doesn’t. When I couldn’t find another job she figured her sister was right all along. Thought I wasn’t making an effort. Hell, I must’ve sent out near a hundred inquiries and résumés. But the thing of it is, nobody wants to hire a guy who’s fifty-six, fifty-seven. The benefit package is too expensive, and you naturally figure he’s past his best effort. Hell, I used to think that way myself.”

“Mm,” Vinnie says, remembering certain meetings of the tenure staff of her department. “I suppose many people do.”

“After a while I about gave up. I started drinking too much, mostly at night at first, when I couldn’t sleep. It was better then. The place was quiet, and I didn’t have to talk to Myrna, or watch the maid hustling around, following me all over the house with the damn vacuum cleaner. If I felt real bad, I’d keep at the booze till I passed out. Some days I didn’t get out of bed till the middle of the next afternoon. Or I’d get in the car and drive, most of the night sometimes, going nowhere like a goddamn rat out of hell. I mean bat.” Chuck laughs awkwardly. “So then I was in this smashup.”

“Yes,” Vinnie prompts after a minute, but he does not continue. “An accident? Were you hurt?”

“Naw; nothing much. I—. Never mind. It was bad. I totaled the car, and the cops took me in for DWI. That about finished it for Myrna. She used to like me pretty well once, but after that she didn’t even want to look at me. She couldn’t wait to get me on that plane. She’s ashamed of me now, they all are. Greg and Barbie too.” Fido, triumphant, puts his paws on Chuck’s shoulders and enthusiastically licks his broad weatherbeaten face.

“Oh, I don’t think—” Vinnie says, and stops. Maybe Chuck’s wife and grown children are ashamed of him; how should she know?

“That’s why I didn’t go home with the damn package tour. I was sick as hell of London, but I couldn’t face Tulsa again. I kept thinking, the best thing for everybody would be if I never came back. Myrna would carry on, but she’d be relieved really. She’d be free, and she’d be respectable. There’s this developer, this fat guy she sold a big land parcel to for a shopping plaza, that has a crush on her and a lot of dough and big political ambitions. Myrna would take to that: she always wanted me to run for some office. Her family would’ve put up the cash, only I couldn’t see it; I never liked politicians. But this guy’s also got born-again Christian principles, and real conservative fundamentalist backing. He could marry a widow, but not a divorcee.

“Anyhow, I kept thinking, if I was out of the way Myrna could cut her losses. Wal, y’know, I couldn’t get the hang of the traffic over here, those tinny little cars they have that you can’t hardly see coming at you, and the crazy two-story buses. I tried to remember to look in the wrong direction and do everything backward, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. A couple of times it was a damn near thing. I didn’t care; I used to think, okay, why not—I’ve had a pretty fair life.”

A strange impulse comes over Vinnie, an impulse to emulate Fido, to embrace and comfort this large stupid semiliterate man. She is irritated at herself, then at him.

“Oh, come on. Don’t overdramatize,” she says to both of them.

“Naw. That’s what I thought, honest. Only once I’d talked to you in that restaurant, and ‘specially after I located South Leigh, I started to feel better. I thought, okay, maybe I’ll show them yet. I’ll come home with fancy English relations, a castle, maybe a set of those plates they sell here, with gold rims and a coat of arms painted on them. Hey, look, I’ll say to Myrna, I’m not such a worthless bum as you thought. Let’s tell your mother and your pissfaced sister about my ancestors, honey. And the kids, they’d like it too. It’d be something I could give them, make it up to them, kinda. This afternoon down in South Leigh I mailed Myrna a card; it said ‘Hot on the trail of Lord Charles Mumpson the First, looks like Grampa was right.’ Wait till she finds out. I’ll never hear the last of it. Myrna loves a good joke, ‘specially if it’s on me.”

“Does she,” says Vinnie, forming an even more negative opinion of Chuck’s wife.

“Runs in the family. Her Uncle Mervin, he’ll work a gag to death. All he needs is a fall guy.”

“Really.” It is a long time since Vinnie has heard this term. She imagines Chuck as a fall guy, a kind of debased stuntman made to perform over and over again for the amusement of his wife’s relatives. “Well, if it’s going to be like that, don’t tell them.”

“Yeh-uh.” He sits forward. “Naw. What about the goddamn postcard?”

“Say it was a mistake, a false lead. For heaven’s sake, Chuck, show a little initiative!”

“Yeh. That’s what Myrna always tells me.” He sags back into the cushions, hugging Fido to him.

“All right then, don’t show a little initiative,” Vinnie says, losing her temper. “Lie down in the street and let a bus run over you if you want to. Only stop being so damn sorry for yourself.”

Chuck’s square, heavy jaw falls; he stares at her dumbly.

“I mean, for God’s sake.” She is breathing hard, suddenly enraged. “A white Anglo-Saxon American male, with good health, and no obligations, and more money and free time than you know what to do with. Most people in the world would kill to be in your shoes. But you’re so stupid you don’t even know how to enjoy yourself in London.”

“Yeh? Like forinstance?” Chuck sounds angry now as well as hurt, but Vinnie cannot stop herself.

“Staying in that awful tourist hotel, like forinstance, and eating their terrible food, and going to ersatz American musicals; when the town is full of fine restaurants, and you could be at Covent Garden every night.”

Chuck does not respond, only gapes.

“But of course it’s none of my business,” she adds in a lower tone, astonished at herself. “I didn’t mean to shout at you, but it’s very late, and I have to get up early tomorrow and visit a school in Kennington.”

“Yeh. All right.” Chuck looks at his watch, then stands up slowly; his manner is injured, stuffy, formal. “Okay, Professor, I’m going. Thanks for the drink.”

“You’re welcome.” Vinnie cannot bring herself to apologize further to Chuck Mumpson. She shows him out, washes his glass and her teacup and sets them to dry, gets back into her flannel nightgown, and climbs into bed, noting with disapproval that it is ten minutes past twelve.

But instead of slowing into sleep, her mind continues to revolve with a clogged, grating whir. She is furious at herself for losing her temper and telling Chuck what she thinks of him, as if that could do any good. It is years since she flamed out like that at anyone; her usual expression of anger is a tight-lipped, icy withdrawal.

She is also furious at Chuck: for waking her up and depriving her of necessary sleep, for failing to discover interesting folkloric material in Wiltshire, and for being so large and so unhappy and such a hopeless nincompoop. He and his story remind her of everything she dislikes most about America, and also of things she dislikes in England: its tourist hotels, its tourist shops, its cheapened and exaggerated self-exploitation for the tourist trade, the corruption of many of its citizens by American commercial culture into an almost American illiterate coarseness (“I wish I wuz a seagull, I wish I wuz a duck . . .”).

Why is she being persecuted by transatlantic vulgarity in this awful manner? It really isn’t fair, Vinnie thinks, turning over restlessly. Then, hearing the silent whine in this question, she glances mentally round for Fido. But her imagination, usually so vivid, fails to manifest him. Instead she sees a dirty-white long-haired dog trailing Chuck Mumpson down Regent’s Park Road in the fog from streetlamp to streetlamp, panting at his side in the fuzzy yellow glare as Chuck unsuccessfully tries to hail a taxi.

Fido’s infidelity astonishes Vinnie. For the nearly twenty years of his life in her imagination he has never shown the slightest interest in or even awareness of anyone except her. What does it mean that she should now so vividly picture him following Chuck Mumpson across London, or making sloppy canine love to him? Does it mean, for instance, that she is really sorry for Chuck, perhaps even sorrier than she is for herself? Or are he and she somehow alike? Is there some awful parallel between Chuck’s fantasy of being an English lord and hers of being—in a more subtle and metaphysical sense, of course—an English lady? Might there be someone somewhere as impatiently scornful of her pretensions as she is of his?

Almost as uncomfortable to contemplate is the idea that she is partly responsible for Chuck’s illusion—and, as a logical consequence, for his disillusion. As if she’d ever promised that he would turn out to be a scion of some noble family! She begins to lose her cool again.

Well, after all, as he said, it might have turned out that way: there are plenty of nincompoops in the British aristocracy. Vinnie’s memory provides her at once with examples, including that of Posy Billings, who is not at all what Vinnie means by “a real English lady.” On the other hand, Rosemary Radley, annoying as she sometimes is, has to be granted the epithet. Rosemary would never have flown into a rage as Vinnie did this evening; she wouldn’t have made Chuck Mumpson feel even worse and more stupid than he felt when he arrived. If she had been there to witness the scene, she would have turned her face away as from any unkindness, any unpleasantness.

And what about Chuck himself? Though he probably has only the most conventional idea of what a lady is, he will hardly think of Vinnie as one now. He will think instead that she is uncontrolled and unfeeling—in other words, both messy and cold.

Of course in a way it doesn’t matter, Vinnie tells herself, turning over in bed, since she will obviously never see Chuck Mumpson again. She has thoroughly depressed and offended him, and presently he will go and do himself in—or, far more likely, lumber on back to Oklahoma—with disagreeable if fading memories both of England and of Professor Miner.

It is 12:39 by the poison-green light of the digital alarm clock. Vinnie sighs and turns over in bed again, causing her nightgown to twist itself round her into a tight, wrinkled husk that resembles her thoughts. With an effort she revolves in the opposite direction, unwinding herself physically; then she begins to breathe slowly and rhythmically in an attempt to unwind herself mentally. One-out. Two-out. Three-out. Four—

The telephone rings. Vinnie startles, lifts her head, crawls across the bed, and gropes in the dark toward the extension, which rests on the carpet because her landlord has never provided a bedside table. Where the hell is it?

“Hello,” she croaks finally, upside down and half out of the covers.

“Vinnie? This is Chuck. I guess I woke you up.”

“Well yes, you did,” she lies; then, abashed at the sound of this, adds, “Are you all right?”

“Yeh, sure.”

“I hope you’re not still upset about what I said. I don’t know why I blew up like that; it was rude of me.”

“No it wasn’t,” Chuck says. “I mean, that’s why I called. I figure maybe you were right: maybe I oughta give London another chance before I lie down in front of a bus . . . Wal, so, if you’re free sometime this week, I’ll take you anywhere you say. You can pick a restaurant. I’ll even try the opera, if I can get us some decent seats.”

“Well . . .” With considerable difficulty Vinnie rights herself and crawls backward into bed, dragging the telephone and the comforter with her. “I don’t know.” If she refuses, she thinks, Chuck will go back to Oklahoma with his low opinion of London and of Vinnie Miner intact; and she will never see him again. Also she will miss a night at Covent Garden, where “decent seats” cost thirty pounds.

“Yes, why not,” she hears herself say. “That’d be very nice.”

For heaven’s sake, what’d I do that for? Vinnie thinks after she has hung up. I don’t even know what’s on this week at Covent Garden. I must be half asleep, or out of my mind. But in spite of herself she is smiling.