Fred is on his way across town to a drinks party (he has learnt not to say “cocktails”) at Rosemary Radley’s. Near the Round Pond he checks his watch, then sits down on a bench to wait a few minutes so that he won’t arrive too soon. He has offered to come early and help, but Rosemary wouldn’t hear of it. “No, Freddy darling. I want you just to enjoy yourself. You mustn’t get here a minute before six. The caterers will do everything—and Mrs. Harris, of course.”

For Fred has won their argument, and Rosemary has hired a cleaning lady. He hasn’t met her yet, but she sounds great. According to Rosemary she is a hard worker and very thorough: she gets right down on her hands and knees to wax the floors. What’s more, she doesn’t talk Rosemary’s ear off about her husband or her children or her pets: she has no children or pets, and she is long divorced from her drunken husband.

Insisting that she hire Mrs. Harris is one good thing Fred has done for Rosemary. She has done much more for him: she has transformed him from a depressed, disoriented visiting scholar to his normal confident self. His earlier anomie, Fred realizes now, was occupational. Psychologically speaking, tourists are disoriented, ghostly beings; they walk London’s streets and enter its buildings in a thin ectoplasmal form, like a double-exposed photograph. London isn’t real to them, and to Londoners they are equally unreal—pale, featureless, two-dimensional figures who clog up the traffic and block the view.

Before he met Rosemary, Fred didn’t really exist for anyone here except a few other academic ghosts. Nor did London really exist for him. He wasn’t so much living in Notting Hill Gate as camping out there so that he could walk every day to the British Museum and sit before a heap of damp-stained, crumbling leather-bound books and foxed pamphlets. Now the city is alive for him and he is alive in it. Everything pulses with meaning, with history and possibility, and Rosemary most of all. When he is with her he feels he holds all of England, the best of England, in his arms.

He has wholly recovered from the panic that seized him last month in Oxfordshire, when he was frightened by a few topiary birds and a too-vivid memory of the novels of Henry James into condemning an entire society. His distrust of Edwin and Nico remains—homosexuals have always made Fred uneasy, maybe because so many of them have propositioned him. But he feels fine about Posy Billings and William Just; he looks back on his moral indignation that night as priggish and provincial.

Among Rosemary’s long-married friends, he has found, arrangements like that of the Billings are common. More often than not, husbands and wives have agreed to allow each other a discreet sexual freedom, which their friends then take for granted. Everyone knows who Jack or Jill is “seeing” at the moment, but no one mentions it—except maybe to ask whether Jill would rather have her husband or her lover invited with her to some party. The couples remain amicable, sharing a house or houses, concerned for each other’s welfare and that of their children, giving dinners and celebrating holidays together. As Rosemary says, it’s a much more civilized way of coping with passionate impulse than the American system. One avoids open scandal, and also the tantrums of self-righteous possessive jealousy—which, as she points out, usually end in dreadful messy scenes, economically vindictive divorces, and the destruction of homes, children, reputations, and careers. Nor is there any of the frantic defensiveness and public display of the so-called open marriages that she’s seen among actors in the States (and Fred, now and then, among graduate students)—and which, as Rosemary remarks, never work anyhow. “It’s exactly like leaving all the doors and windows open in a house. You get nasty drafts, and very likely you’ll have burglars.”

The strain on Fred’s budget has also been eased—at least temporarily—by a loan from the Corinth University Credit Union, arranged by mail with some difficulty. With luck it will just about last until he leaves. He can go to restaurants with Rosemary now without always ordering salad; he can buy her the flowers she loves so much. If he has to skimp and save for the next year or so, hell, it’s worth it.

Only two things currently trouble Fred. One is the fact that his work on John Gay isn’t getting on too fast. When he was first in London, depression slowed him down; now euphoria does so. In comparison to the world outside its walls, the BM seems even more oppressive than before. He is irritated at having to show his pass on entry to the suspicious guard, who ought to know him by now; and he detests having his briefcase searched on departure. He is even more impatient when the volumes he wants turn out to be in the deposit library at Woolwich (two days’ wait) or in use by other readers (one to four days’ wait). And the less often he goes to the Bowel Movement the worse it gets, since books placed on temporary reserve by Fred or any other reader fail to rise again on the third day and are, with infinite slowness, returned to their dark tombs.

Though he knows this rule, several days more and more often intervene between Fred’s visits to the library, and more and more of the books he has been using have now disappeared somewhere within the system; the slips come back marked NOT ON SHELF, DESTROYED BY BOMBING, or—most infuriatingly of all—OUT TO F. TURNER. Meanwhile there is so much to do in London, so many plays and films and exhibitions to see with Rosemary, so many parties. The hell with it, Fred tells himself almost every day. He’ll learn a lot more about British theatrical history and tradition by listening to Rosemary and her friends than by sitting in a library—something that, Christ knows, there’ll be time enough for back in Corinth.

The other weight on Fred’s mind is heavier, though it consists not of a stack of books but of an airletter almost lighter than air. The letter is from his estranged wife Roo, and is her first in four months—though Fred has written her several times: asking her to forward his mail, returning her health insurance card, and inquiring for the address of a friend who’s supposed to be at the University of Sussex. Roo, as he might have expected, hasn’t forwarded the mail, acknowledged the card, or provided the address.

But now, like a tardy bluebird of peace returning late to a deserted ark after three times forty days and nights, this blue airletter has flapped its way across the ocean to him. In its beak it holds, no question about that, a fresh olive branch.

Faced with this evidence of Roo’s contrition and candor—he has never known her to tell a lie, even when it would have been socially convenient—Fred has to admit that he had accused her falsely. If Roo had had an affair he would have been the first to hear about it, from her. She was telling the truth when she said she never had anything to do with those two other cocks in the exhibit except to photograph them. More than likely they belonged to an old friend of hers from art school who is now working in New York, and his homosexual lover. In fact, she was guilty of nothing worse than bad taste.

But in Rosemary’s world bad taste is not nothing: it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual flaw. Fred remembers her saying only the other day, when discussing a mutual acquaintance with Posy: “I can understand how anyone might get carried away temporarily by Howie’s looks, and his talent, but what I really don’t see is how Mimi could possibly bring herself to move into that dreadful Kentish Town flat of his, with the plastic ferns and the bullfight posters.” “And those frightful gold-flocked shiny curtains, like cheap Christmas ribbon,” Posy agreed. “She must be out of her mind.” Their unspoken assumption was that anyone who would choose such a spuriously natural (the ferns), spuriously virile (the posters), and spuriously elegant environment must be false in other ways as well. And probably, Fred thinks now, recalling his own impressions of Howie, an ITV television executive, Rosemary and Posy are right.

Roo’s bad taste, of course, is of a different sort, crude rather than phony—some but not much better. Fred, like Mimi, had been carried away by looks and talent; that was what Rosemary would have said. Yeh, maybe. But however bad her taste, Roo is a person he used to care a lot for, and his wife. The least she deserves from him now is the truth. But how can he give her that? “Thanks for your letter, it was great to hear from you, but I’m in love with a beautiful English actress, have a good day.” Not wanting to write these sentences, or some mealy-mouthed equivalent of them, Fred has put off answering Roo’s letter for nearly two weeks. He doesn’t want to have to think about her now, nor does he want to think ahead to his return to Corinth. When they do meet he will apologize and explain; she will understand. Or maybe she won’t understand. It almost doesn’t matter; nothing matters now except his passion for Rosemary Radley.

Possession hasn’t decreased the intensity of Fred’s desire. If the excitement of the chase is over, it has been replaced by the knowledge that his triumph must be brief. Joe and Debby Vogeler, typically, take the pessimistic view. Wasn’t it really a mistake to get so involved emotionally, Debby wondered, when he knew he had to leave England next month? Since she hadn’t exactly framed this remark as a question, Fred didn’t have to answer it; but inwardly he swore a strong No. Not for the first time, he thought that the Vogelers’ world-view was as limited and narrow as the triangular house that had been allotted to them here, as if by the poetic justice of some supernatural real estate agent.

But then Joe and Debby don’t know Rosemary or Rosemary’s London. He had told them about Vinnie Miner’s party and others that had followed—how amazing Rosemary was, what interesting people she knew, how friendly most of them were. The Vogelers, however, remained sceptical.

“Sure, maybe they were cordial to you for a few minutes,” Debby said, as the three of them sat in the triangular house on a wet dark afternoon, among a clutter of Sunday papers and plastic toys. “They learn nice manners in their schools. But will you ever see any of them again? That’s what it’s really all about. When we were first here, Joe and I went to lunch with this elderly writer that his aunt knows, in Kensington, and everybody was very pleasant and said how they hoped to see us again, but nothing ever came of it.”

“It was Jakie.” Joe gestured at his son, who was sitting on the floor in a fuzzy white coverall stained with baby food, tearing up the Observer Magazine. “We shouldn’t have brought Jakie.”

“Jakie was perfectly good,” Debby protested. “He didn’t cry or anything. And he didn’t really hurt that old cat, he was just playing. I don’t know why they all got so excited.”

“They didn’t like him sitting on your lap at lunch, either,” Joe said.

“Well, too bad. What was I supposed to do with him? I bet they wouldn’t have liked it any better if Jakie had been crawling round the floor. Besides, he could have hurt himself on that lumpy antique furniture.”

They don’t understand, Fred thought then, resolving that he would arrange for Joe and Debby to meet Rosemary soon (and in the absence of Jakie). When they see her, or at least when they get to know her and her friends, he thinks now, sitting on the bench in Kensington Gardens, they’ll understand how great most of them are.

After all, even for him it had taken time. Now, though, the doubts he had had earlier—and in a weak moment hinted at to Joe and Debby—seem to him shameful, mean-spirited. It would have been cowardly to hold back from Rosemary because the more he cares for her now, the more he will miss her later. Nothing could be worse than having to say to himself for the rest of his life: “Rosemary Radley loved me, but I couldn’t really get into it because I didn’t like some of her friends—because she lived too expensively—because I knew I was leaving London in June and might not see her again for almost a year.”

If Joe and Debby couldn’t understand that yet, Rosemary and her world certainly would. Fred remembers an interview in the Times last week with a friend of Rosemary’s named Lou, in which he announced that he’d told his agent to turn down all television and film offers because he had a chance to play Lear for two weeks in Nottingham. “Where the theatre is doesn’t matter; the length of the run doesn’t matter,” he was quoted as declaring. “When you get a chance like that nothing else counts.”

“What an old dear Lou is,” Rosemary had added, after reading this passage aloud to Fred. “Of course, I rang up directly to congratulate him. Really, I told him, he should have had the part long ago, he’s a marvelous actor, a real genius. And there’s no need to go on a diet, I said, why on earth shouldn’t Lear be fat? He probably was fat, and his riotous knights too, from eating and drinking so much and using up all Goneril’s provisions. You don’t hear about them working or exercising, do you? I said to him, ‘Lou darling, you’re quite wrong, you musn’t try to take off a single ounce; you know your voice is always better after a good meal.’ I only wish I could say the same, but it’s just the reverse for me. As soon as I start working again I’ll have to starve myself, look at all this flesh.” Rosemary lifted the edge of a kimono embroidered with blue and gray chrysanthemums to reveal a pink, deliciously rounded thigh and hip. “No, Freddy darling, I didn’t mean . . . Oh, dearest . . . Ahhh . . .”

Thinking of this moment again, and the moments that followed it, Fred rises from the bench and, as if drawn by a magnetic force, strides toward Chelsea.

Descending the stairs again, Fred looks down into a scene that resembles a commercial for some luxury product: the perfectly elegant party. The double drawing room is a dazzle of flowers and light and stylishly dressed people. Many of Rosemary’s friends are good-looking, many are well known, and some are both. There are only a few who rather spoil the effect, who would never have been cast if this were in fact a commercial. For instance, little Vinnie Miner, who is wearing one of what Rosemary calls “her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle costumes”—all starched white cotton and fuzzy pale-brown wool like the fur of some small animal. Fred recalls with amazement how formidable she had seemed to him only a few months ago. Already he has absorbed the view of Rosemary and her friends, that Vinnie, though clever and likeable, is a bit of a comic turn, with her passion for Morris dancing and children’s books and everything British that is quaint and out-of-date.

“Vinnie, hello. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.” Vinnie tilts her head up to look at Fred. “What a big party, I didn’t realize. And how are you? How is your book on Gay coming along?”

“Oh, very well, thanks,” Fred lies.

“That’s good. How nice the house looks! It’s really amazing. I suppose it’s all due to Mrs. Harris?”

“Well, more or less.”

“Excuse me, please, ma’am. ‘Scuse me.” Behind him Fred hears for the first time in his life an American accent: loud, flat, nasal. Is that how he sounds to everyone here, every damn time he opens his mouth? “Here you are, Vinnie.” A large balding man in late middle age, got up like an American country-and-western singer in cowboy boots and a suede jacket with fringe, hands her a glass. “One dry sherry, honey, like you ordered.”

“Oh, thank you,” Vinnie says. “Chuck, this is Fred Turner, from my department in Corinth. Chuck Mumpson.”

“Wal, howdy.” Chuck extends a broad, fleshy red hand.

“How do you do,” Fred replies guardedly. His immediate thought is that Chuck’s accent and costume, so exaggerated and inappropriate to this party, are assumed—and maybe his name as well. This is not an American, but one of Rosemary’s theatrical friends amusing himself by taking on a role—something he has learnt that actors occasionally do when they have been too long between engagements.

“Heard a lot about you.” Chuck grins.

Fred asks himself what this man, whoever he is, has heard. Probably that he is Rosemary’s lover. “I haven’t heard anything about you,” he says, consciously listening to his own voice for the first time since adolescence. The pronunciation is similar, he decides, but the tune different. In fact, over the past few months Fred has taken on, not a British accent, but a British intonation and vocabulary. Almost unconsciously, he has begun to imitate the characteristic melody of British speech, with its raised final notes; consciously, so as to be understood, he now uses terms like lift, lorry, and loo instead of elevator, truck, and bathroom.

“Chuck’s from Oklahoma,” Vinnie says.

“Oh, yeh?” There is still an edge of doubt in Fred’s voice—though it seems unlikely that Vinnie would conspire in some actor’s impersonation. “I’ve never been there, but I saw the movie.”

“Haw-haw.” Chuck gives a genuine, or very plausible, western guffaw. “Wal, it isn’t much like the movie, not any more.”

“No, I guess not.” This uncomfortable conversation is interrupted by the arrival of more guests, and more behind these. Soon the long high-ceilinged room is thronged. The twin chandeliers, their prisms newly polished, scatter light and echo the tinkle and splash of liquids poured into crystal, of high-pitched laughter and exclamation.

The miracle wrought by Rosemary’s new cleaning lady does not pass unnoticed. All her friends compliment her on it, including some who had speculated earlier that maybe Mrs. Harris wasn’t as wonderful as Rosemary and Fred made out. Neither of them might know whether a house had been properly cleaned, some suggested; others said that Mrs. Harris sounded too good to be true. Now that the evidence is before them they take another line.

“Perhaps it’s a bit too perfectly cared for,” Fred overhears one guest remark. “One almost feels one’s in some National Trust property.”

“Yes, exactly,” agrees her companion. “I expect Mrs. Harris is one of those types who have an absolute obsession with cleanliness. People like that, of course they’re a little bit crazy,” continues this friend, whose own flat could have used a visit from Mrs. Harris. “Rosemary had better be careful she isn’t murdered in her bed one day.”

This sort of spite on the part of Rosemary’s friends is a new development. In the past, envy of her prettiness, fame, high spirits, charm, and income—television, even British television, pays well—has always been tempered by compassion for her disorderly living conditions and her history of romantic disaster. Though widely courted, she always seemed to end up with the least stable and attractive of her many suitors. Moreover, the men she chose were usually married, and presently they either returned to their wives or, worse, left both the wife and Rosemary for some other woman. Thus, however pretty and successful she might be, her friends have been able to love and worry about Rosemary, her acquaintances to like and pity her. But now that she has a perfect house in Chelsea and a handsome, apparently unattached young lover, many of them cannot forgive her.

Besides making ominous predictions, some of the guests tonight try to pump Fred about Mrs. Harris. As Rosemary had remarked, it isn’t easy to find a good English-speaking charlady in London. “You wait and see,” she told Fred. “There’ll be plenty of people who’ll want to lure Mrs. Harris away, even though they call themselves my friends. You musn’t tell anyone anything about her, even what her days are; promise me, darling.” Fred, thinking it unnecessary, had nevertheless promised. Now he sees that Rosemary was right. More than one of her guests, when she is out of hearing, make pointed inquiries: How much does Mrs. Harris ask? Does she have a free day? Fred replies truthfully to both questions that he doesn’t know. An elderly actress called Daphne Vane, who had starred with Rosemary in Tallyho Castle until her pathetic on-screen death from pneumonia last season, is especially persistent.

“I’d really like so much to meet Mrs. Harris,” Daphne murmurs in the wistful, breathy manner that made her a romantic heroine of the stage and screen half a century ago. “She sounds like the genuine article, and one comes across that so seldom now. I had so much hoped that she would be at the party—helping, you know.” She glances round the room, making great play with her famous feathery eyelashes.

“She’s not here,” Fred tells Daphne. “Rosemary didn’t ask her to serve; she says Mrs. Harris isn’t very presentable.”

“No? Well, one can’t have everything, can one? But perhaps she’s below in the kitchen?” Fred shakes his head; if he had nodded, he suspects, nothing would have prevented the unworldly, ethereal-looking Daphne from scooting down the back stairs to the basement. “Do you know what her days are?”

“I’m not sure, no.”

“What a pity.” Daphne gives him the sweet, condescending smile she might give some village idiot; then, without seeming to move, she floats-off into another conversation.

In fact Fred knows very well that Mrs. Harris comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, since he can’t visit Rosemary then—and, after one attempt, she won’t come to his flat. Though he did all he could to make the place attractive, his love hardly spent five minutes there. Drawing her pale fur coat more closely about her, she declared it “absolutely freezing” and “frightfully unromantic,” and declined even to sit on the sofa bed where Fred had pictured her lying half naked.

Efficient as she is, Mrs. Harris has her defects. She can’t bear to have anybody “underfoot” while she cleans. She also refuses to answer the phone and take messages, claiming that it puts her off her work. Occasionally she will snatch up the receiver, shout “Nobody ‘ome!” and bang it down again; more often she just lets it ring. Some of Rosemary’s friends view this as another sign of dangerous battiness; Fred’s own suspicion is that Mrs. Harris is more or less illiterate. That would help to explain why such a hard-working and reliable woman hasn’t been able to find a better-paying job.

In support of the battiness theory, however, it has to be said that Mrs. Harris also won’t answer the door. Last Tuesday afternoon, when Fred discovered that he was free that evening after all, because the Vogelers’ baby had a cold, and he wasn’t able to reach Rosemary on her private line or get a message through her answering service, he decided to go to the house. He knocked, rang, and called out her name; but though he could hear muffled noises within, nobody came. Finally he scribbled a note on the back of an envelope.

As he pushed back the letter-flap, Fred was aware of motion inside the house. He stooped to the newly polished brass slot, and got his first glimpse of Mrs. Harris at the other end of the darkened hall, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees: a shapeless middle-aged woman in a shapeless cotton skirt and cardigan, her hair tied up in a red kerchief. At the sound of the note falling and skidding on the marble tiles, she swiveled her head round, scowling—or maybe her expression had long ago set into a mask of suspicious ill-temper.

“Hello!” Fred called. “I’ve left a note for Lady Rosemary—could you give it to her, please?” Mrs. Harris didn’t answer, but turned her back and resumed scrubbing.

Though she won’t speak to callers, Mrs. Harris does talk freely to her employer, and at length. Her conversation isn’t the burden Rosemary feared, but a source of entertainment. Mrs. Harris’ doings and remarks—maybe somewhat edited or heightened—are now regularly relayed by Rosemary to all her friends. Mrs. Harris believes that looking at the full moon through glass makes you loony, unless it’s over your left shoulder. She eats Marmite and golden-syrup sandwiches to build up her blood. She goes to the greyhound track and bets on dogs with names that begin with S for Speed or W for Win. “Them races are fixed, see, everybody knows that,” she has confided to Rosemary. “But there’s clues.”

Mrs. Harris’ specialty, however, is gnomic, usually sour pronouncements on current events and famous persons. She dislikes all politicians and most members of the royal family, though she remains loyal to “Princess Margaret Rose” in spite of the scandals about her love life. “Misguided she was, is all, misguided and betrayed by that midget.” Fred can hear Rosemary repeating this latest mot even now, mimicking her charlady’s voice—rough and cockney, with a hint of boozy sentiment—and indicating with a broad gesture the supposed height of Lord Snowdon.

Fred has even found himself telling Mrs. Harris stories to friends like the Vogelers. In spite of her ill-temper, she has been gradually assimilated into his image of England. Most American visitors—like, say, Vinnie Miner—are attracted mainly to the antique, the picturesque, and the noble aspects of Britain. Fred’s love is wider-ranging: essentially it comprehends whatever has been hymned in song or told in story. In his present high mood he embraces even what he might deplore in America. Slag heaps remind him of Lawrence, pawnshops of Gissing; the pylons that deface the Sussex hills suggest Auden, the sooty slums of South London, Doris Lessing. In his mouth, canned plum pudding tastes of Dickens; to his ear, every overweight literary man sounds a little like Dr. Johnson. Seen through these Rosemary-tinted glasses, Mrs. Harris is a character out of eighteenth-century literature: a figure from the subplot of some robust comedy illustrated by Hogarth or Rowlandson. Fred not only appreciates her eccentricities, he takes a proprietary pride in them. After all, if it hadn’t been for him she’d never have been hired.

The doorbell sounds again. Fred goes to answer it and sees that Joe and Debby Vogeler have arrived, and that they have brought with them—against his instructions—their baby.

“The sitter never showed up,” Debby says in an aggrieved voice as soon as Fred opens the door, as if this were somehow his fault. “So we had to bring Jakie.”

“He’s been very good all the way here,” Joe says in a more conciliatory tone. “He’s been sleeping mostly.” The baby is suspended against Debby’s bosom in a sort of scruffy blue canvas hammock, with his fat legs sticking out on both sides and his bald head lolling against her neck. Debby is got up to match in a washed-out denim jacket, a long ruffled denim skirt, and clogs, as if she were about to appear on Prairie Home Companion. Joe wears his usual shabby-academic costume: thick spectacles, worn cord jacket, pilled and sagging gray turtleneck jersey, scuffed loafers. Though Fred is used to seeing the Vogelers in clothes like these, his friends strike him as deliberately and even aggressively ill-dressed for the occasion. In one respect, however, they are improved: the fine weather has restored their health, and for the first time none of them has an obvious cold.

“Come on in; great to see you,” he says, trying to sound enthusiastic. “You can put the baby upstairs, in one of the spare bedrooms. I’ll show you—”

“Certainly not.” Debby wraps her arms protectively around Jakie.

“That wouldn’t be right,” Joe explains, looking at Fred as if his suggestion could only issue from an almost criminal ignorance. “I mean, suppose he was to wake up alone in a strange room? It could be a serious trauma.”

“Well, okay.” For days Fred has been looking forward to the meeting between his old friends and his new love. Now it is with a sense of foreboding that he leads the Vogelers across the drawing room to where Rosemary stands in the bay window beside a flowering orange tree; like it, she is a fragrant spring vision in pale-green many-pleated glistening silk.

“Oh, how nice!” she cries, putting out her soft white ringed hand. “And you’ve hiked here all the way from North London, isn’t that amazing.” To Fred this appears a pointed reference to their footwear; but Joe and Debby smile, even grin, charmed already.

“Yeh, and we brought our baby,” Debby says, half belligerent, half apologetic.

“Oh yes, I see you did.” Rosemary laughs lightly, managing somehow to convey that it would have been politer not to mention this. “But Fred, darling, you haven’t got your friends anything to drink.”

“Sorry.” Fred goes to order a gin-and-tonic for Debby and—since there’s no beer—Scotch-and-water for Joe. Most of the guests, as is usual at warm-weather London parties, are drinking white wine.

On his way back across the room, Edwin Francis stops him. “If you have a moment, Fred,” he says, gesturing with a cream cracker overloaded with pâté, “I’d like to speak to you.”

“Sure, just a sec.” Partly because he doesn’t much like Edwin, Fred is always careful to be agreeable to him. Having delivered the Vogelers’ drinks and introduced them to other guests (Rosemary has drifted away), he follows Edwin into the hall.

“It’s about Mrs. Harris.” As if casually, Edwin steps onto the bottom tread of the gracefully curving stairs. He is still shorter than Fred, but the difference is now less pronounced.

“Yes?” Fred thinks that Edwin too—whom Rosemary loves and trusts—wants to swipe her cleaning lady.

“I’m becoming a bit concerned about her. She sounds, how shall I put it, such a dominant personality. So suspicious of everyone and everything. And possibly somewhat unbalanced as well. I’m really quite worried about her effect on Rosemary; she seems to be falling more and more under Mrs. Harris’ influence, if you see what I mean.” Edwin frowns, increasing his resemblance to a plump, solemn child. “Repeating all her ignorant reactionary opinions, well, you know.”

“Mm.” Fred is familiar with this complaint. Some of Rosemary’s friends have put it to him more strongly. “Rosemary’s far too impressed with that woman,” they complain. “Believes everything she says.”

“You know, for a certain sort of actor it’s an advantage to have a rather indefinite sense of self. It makes it much easier to get into various parts. But it can be a problem, too.”

“Oh?” Fred says, expressing doubt. He has no idea what Edwin is waffling on about; Rosemary obviously has a very definite, and wonderful, self. Her ability to mimic Mrs. Harris doesn’t preclude this.

“I mean, a joke’s a joke, right?”

Fred, without enthusiasm, agrees that a joke is a joke.

“But that sort of thing can go too far. What worries me is, I’m off to Japan to lecture next week, I’ll be away over a month, and if anything should happen—I mean, with Nadia in Italy and me in Japan and Erin due to go to the States for that film, and poor Posy immured in Oxfordshire with those boring little girls—Well, I won’t really feel comfortable unless I know someone’s looking out for our Rosemary. So it had better be you.”

“Um,” says Fred, who greatly dislikes the phrase “our Rosemary” and the idea of sharing his love with Edwin—or for that matter with anyone.

“Promise now. Because she’s very delicately balanced, you know. She can get a bit frantic—into rather a difficult state—sometimes.”

Repressing his annoyance, Fred nods. He has never seen Rosemary “frantic” or in a state; also, he doesn’t agree with Edwin that Mrs. Harris is imposing her opinions on her employer. On the contrary, he’s begun lately to suspect that Rosemary is imposing her opinions on—or rather, attributing them to—Mrs. Harris. It’s not just that the lines are too good; they also have a way of echoing Rosemary’s less harmonious opinions. For instance, she is rather bored by the ballet; Mrs. Harris, according to her, describes it as “all them faggots jumping and ‘opping.” Rosemary despises the current government; Mrs. Harris thinks they are a lot of bloody crooks.

Also, more and more often, Mrs. Harris gives Rosemary reasons for doing what she wants to do anyhow—or not doing what she doesn’t want to do. Recently a late-night variety show was organized in aid of a famous old East London theater. Rosemary declined to participate, not because it would be inconvenient, unprofitable, and exhausting, but because, she claimed, Mrs. Harris had told her that “them people in ‘ackney got no use for fancy stage acting, they’d rather watch the telly.” What they really wanted was a kiddies’ playground—her niece who lived out that way knew all about it. Anyhow, Mrs. Harris—as reported by Rosemary—said, the whole thing was a sell. “Most of the cash those types take in’ll stay in their own pockets, always does with them charity things.” At a lunch party last week Rosemary’s friend Erin protested these statements, and tried, with considerable patience and charm, to make her reconsider. She refused to listen. “Please, darling, don’t tell me any more nonsense,” she cried, giving her silvery laugh and spearing a profiterole with the silver tines of her fork (she adores what she calls “wicked desserts”). “You don’t know the least thing about Hackney, and neither do I. But I know Mrs. Harris is right about it; she’s always right.”

Feeling annoyed at Edwin, Fred leaves him and returns to the party. He sees at once that the Vogelers are not mixing, but standing by themselves in a corner trying to soothe Jakie, who has begun to make a whimpering squeaking noise, like a stuck drawer.

“Let me take him now, it’s my turn,” Joe says, checking his watch. With Fred’s help, the surprisingly heavy baby and his canvas sling are transferred to his father’s back, where the whimpering and squeaking resume. “Maybe if he had a cracker or something.”

“Sure.” Fred finds a plate of canapés and scrapes the caviar off one.

“Great. There you are now, ducky.” Jakie reaches for the cracker and stuffs it clumsily into his mouth, shedding crumbs over Joe’s jacket.

Asleep and slumped against Debby’s chest, Jakie was relatively inconspicuous. Now, because of his father’s greater height and his own wakefulness, he is a visible presence in the room—and a rather grotesque one, Fred thinks; from the front Joe seems to have two heads and four arms. Something has got to be done about the Vogelers. He remembers his mother’s rule that you musn’t allow anyone at a party to stand alone talking to the people they came with; you must try to separate them.

Taking the easiest first, he leads Debby away and presents her to a woman novelist as “an American feminist.” (It doesn’t much matter what you say when you make introductions, his mother has also advised him, but you’ve got to say something, to provide a conversational opening.) Then, to avoid parading his two-headed, four-armed, crumb-littered friend across the drawing room, Fred introduces Joe to a drama critic, TV personality, and notorious bore who is leaning against the mantelpiece nearby, under the pretense that Joe is a visiting American anxious to know what shows to see in London. All right, that should do it, he thinks, and goes off in search of Rosemary and a drink.

But the Vogelers remain on Fred’s conscience, and he keeps checking to see how they are doing. Twenty minutes later Debby seems to be circulating, but Joe is still trapped in the same spot talking—or rather listening—to the same man. He is clearly not engrossed; in a gesture Fred remembers well from graduate school, he has pushed his spectacles up onto his head. Aloft or his untidy mouse-brown hair, they suggest another pair of eyes fixed upon higher and more philosophical objects of contemplation.

Altogether, in his shabby clothes, with Jakie wiggling on his back, Joe is an incongruous figure at Rosemary’s party. He looks especially out of place in front of the white marble fireplace, with its curved mantel crowded with framed photographs, engraved invitations, objets d’art, and tall vases of hothouse flowers doubled into a profusion of bloom by the big gilt-framed rococo mirror. The baby is awake and restless, waving his small fat arms about, grabbing at the air or at his father’s hair.

As Fred prepares to go to Joe’s rescue there is a movement in the crowd. Joe steps back to let one of the caterer’s men pass, and Jakie’s clutching baby hand finds a silver vase full of tall white iris and candy-hued freesia. Fred waves, shouts a warning, but this serves only to startle Joe and alert the other guests, many of whom glance up in time to see the vase totter, tip, and fall, sending a torrent of water and foliage over the famous drama critic. As in a thunderstorm, the associated sound effects follow a second or two later: loud curses, shocked exclamations, and infantile howling.

“Sorry? Darling, it was wonderful. It made my party.” Rosemary’s elaborately piled hairdo has slipped from its moorings, her lipstick has been kissed away by departing friends, and there is a smudge of mascara below her left eye. Fred finds it sentimentally piquant, like the symbolic tear drawn on the cheek of a mime.

“Oh, the expression on Oswald’s face!” A ripple of laughter. “The way his nasty shiny red hair came unstuck from the crown of his head and hung down in strings; of course one always suspected he must be combing it forward into those silly bangs to disguise a bald patch. And there’s no damage done at all, really.” Rosemary surveys the drawing-room. The caterers have removed all the glasses and china, and rearranged the furniture; nothing remains of the party but an irregular damp patch on the pale-beige carpet and a few scattered flower petals. “Perfect.” She sinks onto a low cream-colored sofa heaped with silk tapestry cushions.

“I thought you were furious.” Fred laughs too, recalling Rosemary’s startled outcry, her repeated loud apologies and expressions of shock and concern, her demand that he fetch more and more towels to wipe Oswald off—But of course, she’s an actress.

“Darling, never for a moment.” She rests her tumbled pale-gold floss of hair against the back of the sofa and holds out her arms. “Ahh. That’s lovely.”

“Lovely,” Fred repeats. A wave of euphoria lifts him. He has never, he thinks, been happier than he is at this moment.

“Really, darling.” Rosemary disengages herself from a second long kiss. “It was one of the nicest moments of my life. When I think of what Oswald said when I was in As You Like It—that was years ago, of course, but I still positively shudder whenever I remember it. And the awful things he’s written about poor old Lou over the years. And even Daphne, if you can imagine. He was so beastly clever about her being too old for romantic parts once that she almost left the stage. It was wonderful for all of us to see him looking so ridiculous.” She begins to laugh again. “And what a silly vulgar fuss he made, far worse than the baby.” Another freshet of giggles. “And the best thing was, almost everyone saw it.”

“Yeh, they sure did.” The commotion caused by Rosemary’s solicitude takes on another meaning. “You took care of that.” Fred runs his hands down his love’s back, feeling the deep lace border of her chemise below the gauzy dress, the rounded convexities below that, marveling again that anyone so slight, soft, and silky could have so much purpose and will. In a few moments, he decides, he will get up and lower the lights.

“Well, naturally,” Rosemary agrees. She smiles slyly, charmingly. “But I had help. What a wonderful baby! But you mustn’t invite it again, darling, once is enough.”

“I didn’t invite the baby. I told Joe and Debby not to bring him. Honestly.”

“I believe you. Honestly.” Rosemary mimics Fred’s intonation, then gives him a butterfly kiss. “One can’t trust these hippies, they’ll do anything.”

Not wanting to break the mood, Fred refrains from explaining that the Vogelers are not hippies. He kisses Rosemary; she laughs softly and presses him closer. “Or say anything,” she adds; a little puckered frown appears between the feathery golden arches of her brows. “Your friend Joe, for instance”—her intonation subtly but definitely conveys that Joe is not and never will be her friend—”your friend Joe says that you’re going back to the States next month. I told him he was quite mistaken, that you’ll be here till the autumn at least.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Fred says reluctantly. “I’ve got to start teaching summer school at Corinth June twenty-fourth. I told you about that,” he adds, uncomfortably aware that he hasn’t mentioned it lately, or even wanted to think about it.

“Oh, nonsense,” Rosemary purrs. “You never said a word. Anyhow, you can’t leave then, we’ve got far too many lovely things to do. There’s Michael’s play opening, and I’m getting tickets for Glyndebourne. And then in July we start shooting the outdoor scenes for next season’s Tallyho Castle in Ireland—you’ll adore that. We always have such a good time: we stay at this perfectly delicious inn run by two of the most amusing old characters. They do marvelous meals: fresh salmon sometimes, and real Irish soda bread and scones. And of course it usually rains half the time, and then we’re free all day long.”

“It sounds great,” Fred says. “I wish I could come. But if I canceled out of summer school they’d be really pissed.”

“Who cares?” Rosemary ruffles his hair. “Let them rage.”

“I can’t. Everyone in the department would think I was irresponsible. It’d count against me in the tenure vote, I know it would.”

“Oh, darling.” Rosemary’s voice softens. “You’re worrying about nothing. That’s not the way it goes in the world. If you’re good, they’ll always want you. Look at Daphne: she’s absolutely impossible in so many ways, but directors are still falling all over themselves to cast her.”

“It’s not like that in academia,” Fred says. “Not in America, anyway. And anyhow, I’m not a star.”

Rosemary does not contradict him. Instead she sits up away from Fred, with her fair, fine hair tumbling over her face. “You’re not really going back to the States next month,” she says, with a half lazy, half threatening whispery intonation like the sound of his grandfather stropping a razor.

“I have to. But it’s not because I want—”

“You’re tired of me.”

“No, never—”

“You’ve been planning to leave me all along.” The blade is almost sharp now.

“No! Well, yeh, but I told you—”

“It was only an act with you, the entire time.” Her voice slashes at him.

“No—”

“Everything you’ve said to me, all those pretty speeches—” A half sob.

“No! I love you, oh, Jesus, Rosemary—” Fred pulls her back to him with force. “Don’t talk like that.” He rocks her against him, feeling again how soft she is, how feathery and fragile.

“Then you mustn’t frighten me.”

“No, no,” he says, kissing her face and neck through the light, fallen curls.

“And you’re not really going away next month, are you?” she whispers presently. “Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Fred whispers back, wondering what the hell he can possibly tell his department if he doesn’t. Rosemary’s crinkled pale-green silk dress has been pushed down over her creamy shoulders; his hands are on her naked breasts. “Oh, darling—”

But she twists sideways, wrenches away. “You think I’m a little fool, don’t you,” she says, her voice shaking in a way Fred has never heard before. “You think I’m a—what is it you said of your cousin, an easy pushover.”

“No—”

“And when you walk out on me next month and go back to America, you think that will be easy too.”

“Jesus God. I don’t want to go back to America. But anyhow, it’s not forever. Next summer—” Fred reaches for Rosemary again, but as he does she stands up abruptly, causing him to lose his balance and flop across the white silky cushions of the sofa.

“Very well,” she says, in a tremulous version of what Edwin Francis calls “her Lady Emma voice.” Fred has heard this voice before, but not often, and only directed to recalcitrant taxi drivers or waiters. “In that case I’m afraid I must ask you to leave my house now.” She walks gracefully to the front door, and opens it.

“Rosemary, wait.” Fred hastens after her.

“Out.” Though she speaks through a tangled curtain of pale hair, and with one lovely breast still half exposed, her tone is chilly and formal. “Out, please.” She points the way at a downward angle, as if speaking to a dog or cat.

Years of training in good manners now work to Fred’s disadvantage. Without consciously willing it, he steps across the threshold.

“Listen to me a moment, damn it—” he begins, but she slams the door on him.

“Wait! This is crazy, Rosemary,” he shouts at the glossy lavender paint, the brass dolphin knocker. “I love you, you know that. I’ve never been so happy in my life . . . Hey, Rosemary. Rosemary!” There is no answer.