Vinnie’s cold is an embarrassment to her as well as an irritation. She has always declared and believed that she never gets ill in England—that the viruses and headaches that afflict her in Corinth cannot follow her across the Atlantic to what she feels is her ecologically correct habitat. What is she to say now?

Even worse, she suspects a psychological source for her affliction, though she doesn’t believe in such things. She was perfectly well until last week, when she heard that her grant wasn’t going to be extended for another six months. It wasn’t this news that made her ill—she hadn’t really counted on more support—but a letter in the same mail from an acquaintance in New York: a well-known scholar, one of the judges who had awarded Vinnie her original grant. This woman now wanted to dissociate herself from the recent decision. “I really tried,” she wrote, punctuating her words with a heavy black underline. “But I simply couldn’t convince them. I’m afraid it wasn’t any help that Lennie Zimmern is on the committee this year—and by the way, I should tell you that lots of people consider his remarks about you in the Atlantic most unfair.”

In other words, Vinnie thinks, unwinding another length of scratchy paper and blowing her small inflamed nose, if it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, I might have had another six months in London. Paranoid ideas, like little invisible bats, unhook themselves from behind the tops of the drawn shutters and flitter about the darkened bedroom, occasionally landing on something with a squashy plop. Why is she being persecuted this way by Professor Zimmern, who doesn’t even know her? What has he got against her?

In the view of Chuck Mumpson, there is no use looking for a personal motive. Chuck’s views are known to Vinnie because, feeling that she had to talk to somebody, she had selected him as the least likely among her acquaintances to gossip, to judge, or to pity her. Two days ago, over the phone to Wiltshire, she gave him a slightly scaled-down version of Zimmern’s continuing persecution, speaking of herself as merely “very annoyed” and of Zimmern as “malicious.”

“I d’know, Chuck said. “It doesn’t hafta have been malicious, necessarily. Those things happen sometimes kinda by accident. You know how it is: a guy wants to make a point, so he hasta pick an example. He doesn’t always think how there’s a person and a career behind what he’s attacking. Anybody can do that kinda thing. I’ve done it myself, when I was younger. There was this superintendent once at a waste treatment plant in East Texas that wasn’t testing right; I’ll never forget his face. I didn’t have it in for him, no way. I didn’t even know he existed, so to speak, but I about ruined his life. It could be that way with your professor.”

“You may be right,” Vinnie said into the telephone—her usual response to statements she prefers not to challenge. And of course it’s possible that Zimmern has nothing against her personally. His prejudice, rooted no doubt in an unhappy and deprived childhood, may be against childhood itself; or against women in academia, or against folklore, or some combination of all these. But that doesn’t exonerate him. Like all offenders, he must be judged by his actions. And condemned. And punished.

If the world were just, Professor Zimmern and not Professor Miner would now have this cold, this headache, this stuffed-up nose, raw throat, honking cough, and general sense of ill-being. Vinnie imagines him afflicted with all her symptoms, only more so if possible, lying in bed at this very moment under a heavy matted mound of blankets (she denies him her down comforter; they are uncommon in the States anyhow). He is in his New York apartment, which she locates in one of those sooty cavernous stone buildings near to and owned by Columbia University. (Actually, L. D. Zimmern lives on the second floor of a brownstone in the West Village.) He has been ill off and on for weeks, Vinnie imagines—for months—ever since he wrote that revolting article. Since he spoke and voted against renewing Vinnie’s grant, his symptoms have been unremitting.

Zimmern doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to get worse. His cold will turn into bronchitis, his bronchitis into viral pneumonia. Soon he will find himself in one of those huge cold impersonal New York hospitals, at the mercy of impatient anonymous doctors, overworked nurses, and sullen, underpaid, non-English-speaking aides, many of them addicted to drugs. Zimmern will lie in a-semi-private room, not getting any better, and his friends, if he has any friends, will grow tired of visiting him. Vinnie can see this room clearly: its dirty window with a view of stained brick walls; its two high stiff white beds, the other one occupied by a coughing, snoring, incontinent, and smelly elderly man; its TV set, always turned to a game show. She can see Zimmern in his washed-out seersucker hospital gown, weakly pushing aside a frayed months-old copy of Time magazine, reaching for the plastic cup on the bedtray and sucking up stale lukewarm New York water through a plastic caterpillar straw.

No one has been to see Vinnie in her illness either, mainly because she hasn’t encouraged anyone to come. Whenever she’s depressed or under the weather her instinct is always to conceal herself until the skies clear. Even a very young and pretty woman is less charming with a bad cold, and Vinnie knows from the bathroom mirror that she looks plainer than ever now; her disposition, too, is at its worst. And though her acquaintance in London is extensive, it is largely composed of what she thinks of as fair-weather friends (with the exception perhaps of Edwin Francis, but Edwin is now in Japan). Fond as she is of them, she has the belief—or delusion—that their reciprocal fondness is the result of their natural sweetness of temper and general good will rather than of profound affection; she fears to test it under adverse conditions. If her friends weren’t put off by seeing her as she is this morning, they would probably pity her; and though she sometimes feels sorry for herself, Vinnie hates to be pitied by others, even in her own imagination.

When this danger begins to threaten, her usual resource is to dwell on the misfortunes of others and actively pity them. If she had caught this cold when the weather was consistent with it, early last month, she could have profitably contemplated the tribulations of Chuck Mumpson: his unemployment, his lack of inner resources, his third-rate education, his depression, his loneliness, his dislike of London, and the discovery that his wise and noble English ancestor was really an illiterate pauper. A few weeks later, and she could have added his deprived childhood and his delinquent adolescence.

As near as Vinnie can make out, Chuck and his too many brothers and sisters grew up in a kind of rural slum, with an overworked and frequently drunken mother. “She wasn’t a bad woman,” Chuck explained, forking up an overload of Wheeler’s sole véronique and parslied potatoes (his table manners leave something to be desired). “Only she wasn’t home much to keep an eye on us. And when things weren’t going too good for her she got pissed, and then she slammed us around.”

Unsupervised, half neglected, Chuck and his siblings began to get into trouble as soon as they hit puberty. “I ran with a rough crowd for a while. By ninth grade we were cutting school pretty regular to hang out in pool rooms and go joy-riding.”

“What’s that?” Vinnie asked, marveling at the inappropriateness of Chuck and his history to the old-fashioned British elegance of Wheeler’s.

“Aw, you know. You find some car with the keys left in, or you jump start it, and a bunch of you go for a ride. Take the heap out onto the highway and see what it’ll do; maybe pick up some girls and drag to the next town. Then when you think the cops might be onto you, or the gas runs out, you shuck it. Or sometimes we’d borrow a couple of horses instead.

“When we got tired of that, we started breaking into empty houses. For the thrill mostly; but if you saw something you wanted, you took it. I used to go for the cameras Then one time the house wasn’t empty; we had to run for it. Afterward nobody wanted to admit he was chicken, so we started talking big, how next time we would bring a gun, and if anybody gave us trouble we would fucking blow him away. One of the guys, he knew where his dad kept a pistol. Wal, we were lucky. Before we could get shot up, or hurt somebody, the law caught up with us. Most of the guys got probation, but they took a look at my family and sent me to a home for bad boys.”

“Hell, no, that didn’t reform me.” Chuck continued with his story later, as he and Vinnie sat in the stalls at Covent Garden waiting for Fidelio to begin. “Are you kidding? You ever seen one of those places? . . . Naw, what stopped me was the war. I got drafted, and went to the Pacific with an engineer’s unit. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have gone on the way I was going; maybe ended up like my dad. Only after the war, killing a guy didn’t look so cute anymore. It was bad enough when it was some Jap that would’ve got you first if he could. You get home, you hear some old buddy talking, how he went into this all-night gas station maybe, with a gun, and there was this guy. He didn’t intend him any harm, but he thought he heard a noise in the back room, he panicked. Pretty soon the guy’s laying there dead, and your buddy took the rest of his life away, for what? For maybe a couple hundred dollars. That wasn’t for me, y’know?”

“I see what you mean.” Vinnie looked around the great opera house, with its multiplication of shaded lamps and crimson velvet, its festooned golden tiers of balcony—and then, with a sense of the collision of worlds, back at Chuck in his plastic raincoat and leather string tie. “So you went straight,” she remarked.

“I guess you could say that.” Chuck laughed awkwardly. “Anyways, after I was discharged I didn’t hang around home for too long. I had the G.I. Bill, and the tests said I was smart enough for engineering college, so I thought, hell, why not.”

“Why not,” Vinnie echoed, marveling at the long fuse of chance that had blasted this unhappy jobless ex-delinquent from rural Oklahoma into the seat next to hers at Covent Garden. She felt a rush of condescending pity, and congratulated herself on her good luck in being born to educated, affectionate, sober, and solvent parents.

Somewhat to Vinnie’s embarrassment, Chuck insisted on paying for everything they did together, and thanking her for it as well. From the start he has had a wrong idea of her as helpful and kindly—a misconception born on the flight to London, when all she was really trying to do was protect herself from having to talk to him, and confirmed when she made a few simple suggestions about genealogical research. “You think I’m a nice person, but I’m not,” she occasionally wants to say, but refrains.

Apart from his misunderstanding of her character and motives, Vinnie decided presently, Chuck wasn’t really stupid so much as badly educated—hardly educated at all in her sense of the word. But at least he was willing to learn. Since he’d read practically nothing, she decided to start him at the beginning, with the classics of children’s literature: Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, Tolkien, White. She bought him the books to ensure that he had decent editions, and to make some sort of return for the dinner and theater tickets he kept buying her.

Going with Chuck to the best current plays, films, concerts, and exhibitions, Vinnie of course risked meeting some of her London acquaintances. And indeed, on only their third excursion—to the National Theatre—they ran into Rosemary Radley. Vinnie quailed inwardly as she introduced Chuck, and took him off as soon as was reasonably polite. His subsequent comment was predictable: “A Lady, is she? Wal, anyhow, I got to meet one real aristocrat over here. Handsome gal, too.”

But Vinnie was astonished when at a lunch party a few days later Rosemary, without any appearance of irony, regretted that she had rushed her “amusing cowboy friend” away so fast, and declared that she positively must bring him to her house the following week. Vinnie said she would try, at first resolving not to. She might not think all that much of Chuck, but she wasn’t going to take him to a Chelsea party to be laughed at. But then, Chuck probably wouldn’t notice if someone like Rosemary was laughing at him; and if she was showing him London, shouldn’t he see more than just its tourist attractions?

So again Vinnie broke her rule about not mixing English and American acquaintances: she took Chuck to Rosemary’s party, hoping that it would be large and various enough to muffle his impact somewhat. To her surprise, his Western costume and Western drawl were an instantaneous hit. Though he explained that he hadn’t worked on a ranch since he was a kid, the British clustered round him, inquiring in sentences bristling with invisible quotation marks how exactly one went about roping and branding cattle, and whether there were still many Red Indians on the range. “I adore your Mr. Mumpson,” Daphne Vane, the actress, said to Vinnie. “He’s definitely the real thing, isn’t he?” And Posy Billings, pronouncing Chuck “awfully amusing,” declared that he and Vinnie must come to stay with her soon in Oxfordshire. Vinnie realized that over here Chuck wasn’t a banal regional type, but original, even exotic—just as, for instance, a Scots sanitation engineer in a kilt would be in New York.

Chuck’s London season was brief, however. Ten days after Rosemary’s party he decided to return to Wiltshire, largely because of something Edwin Francis had said. Instead of sympathizing with Chuck’s disappointment over Old Mumpson, Edwin had congratulated him. “Fascinating! A real Hardy character, he sounds. You’re so lucky; most of my forebears are dreary beyond words, all lawyers and parsons. You must find out more.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Chuck told Vinnie later. “I figure Mr. Francis has a point. I oughta learn all I can about the old guy. After all, he was family, whatever else he was.”

So, leaving most of his possessions with Vinnie, Chuck departed. She gave him a book for the train journey and packed him a lunch—well, why not? He’d certainly bought her enough meals in the last few weeks, and British Rail food is famously dreadful. Besides, by now—at least in Chuck’s view—they are friends. Many of Vinnie’s acquaintances, she is irritatingly aware, suspect that they are also lovers, in spite or even because of her perfectly truthful statements to the contrary.

In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never made love with an Englishman. Of course her previous visits have been brief, a few weeks at the most. This time, however, she had rather hoped for an adventure; and she had, as always on these trips, recast her fantasies to feature British intellectuals rather than American ones. Not of course that she really expected a romantic interlude with any of these well-known dons, critics, folklorists, or writers. But she certainly hadn’t come all the way to London to make it with a sunbelt polyester American left behind by a two-week guided tour, an unemployed sanitary engineer who wears a transparent plastic raincoat and cowboy boots and had never heard of Harold Pinter, Henry Purcell, or William Blake until he was fifty-seven years old and she told him about them. To be suspected unjustly of such a connection causes Vinnie much social discomfort—and also, it must be admitted, a certain amount of irrational pique. Of course she’d turn Chuck down if he made a move, but why hasn’t he done so? Either because he foresees her response—unlikely, since he isn’t the intuitive type—or because, though he likes her, he finds her unattractive.

The whole situation was beginning to make Vinnie cross and uncomfortable, and she was therefore positively glad to see Chuck leave London. She quite enjoyed imagining him traveling down on the train to Bristol, where he would pick up his rental car: a large red-faced American in a cowboy hat and a fringed leather jacket, eating her excellent ham sandwiches and, to the surprise of the other first-class passengers, reading Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales. But now that he’s gone, though Vinnie doesn’t much like to admit it, she misses him. She almost looks forward to the frequent phone calls in which he reports on his research and thanks her for sending on his mail. Most of this seems to be concerned with business: as far as she can tell there has been almost nothing from his wife or his children. Nevertheless, on the phone Chuck sounds in reasonable spirits, sometimes almost cheerful.

Since Chuck is no longer a useful object of pity, Vinnie, lying in bed with her nasty cold, considers pitying Fred Turner. Certainly he seemed miserable enough the last time she saw him.

She was crossing the wet cobbled forecourt after a sudden spatter of rain when she saw Fred sitting under the portico eating a sandwich. Her first thought was that as a single man on a fairly generous study leave he should have no need for such economies. Either he didn’t want to wrench himself away from his research for more than a few minutes, or—more likely—the purchase of theater tickets, flowers, and expensive meals for Rosemary Radley had greatly depleted his bank account.

Fred’s handsome countenance wore a melancholy, ill-fed expression which brightened only slightly when he saw Vinnie. He invited her to join him on the slatted bench, but agreed only dully with her praise of the day, though the scene before them resembled a British Air travel poster: whipped-cream clouds sailed overhead, the trees were sprinkled with a shiny confetti of new leaves, and the courtyard steamed and glinted with rainbow fragments of light.

“Oh, I’m okay,” he replied to her query, in tones that suggested the reverse. “Maybe you know, Rosemary and I aren’t seeing each other any more.”

“Yes, I heard that.” Vinnie refrained from adding that so had all her London friends, not to mention Private Eye. “I understand she was upset because you have to go back and teach so soon.”

“That’s about it. But she thinks—she acts like I’ve betrayed her or something.” Fred crumpled and uncrumpled his damp paper bag, banging his fist into it in an angry way. “She thinks it’d be easy for me to stay here if I wanted. Damn it, you know that’s not true.”

Vinnie assented emphatically. In case he might be thinking of some such move, she pointed out that his sudden and unexcused withdrawal from the Summer School faculty would annoy and inconvenience a great many people at Corinth University; she began to list these people by name and title.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Fred interrupted. “I explained all that to her. Rosemary’s a wonderful woman, but she just doesn’t listen. When she doesn’t like what you’re saying she just fucking doesn’t listen, excuse me.”

“That’s all right.”

“Christ, I’d stay here if I could. I love her, and I love London,” he exclaimed, shedding crumbs of peanut-butter sandwich. “I don’t know what more I can say.”

“No,” Vinnie agreed, sympathizing with one of Fred’s passions. “It’s always so hard to leave. I know.”

“But why is she being so goddamned unreasonable? We were going to have such a great time together this month, we had tickets to Glyndebourne . . . I never said I was going to be in England forever, or anything like that. I didn’t lie to her. I told her a long time ago I had to go back in June—hell, I know I did.” Fred shook his head while running one hand through his wavy dark hair, a gesture both of puzzlement and of self-reassurance For the first time, Vinnie saw in him what she had often seen in Rosemary Radley: the assumption of very good-looking persons that as they pass through life they are entitled to take—and to leave—whatever they choose when they choose. In both of them it was the stronger for being largely—in Fred’s case perhaps wholly—unconscious.

“Maybe she’ll get over it.”

“Yeh. Maybe,” he replied in a dead, unconvinced voice, frowning at the pigeons that had begun to gather. “Right now she won’t see me, or talk to me on the phone, or anything. Oh, okay.” He dropped a crust from the bag onto the pavement; the fat gray birds jostled and pecked. “She’d better get over it fast; I’ll only be around another three weeks.”

“I certainly hope she does,” Vinnie said, though in fact it mattered nothing to her.

“Me, too.” A kind of geological tremor passed over the stormy, handsome landscape of Fred’s face. “Listen, Vinnie,” he added, controlling the threatened volcanic erruption. “You know Rosemary pretty well.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, anyhow. You see her all the time. I was wondering . . . Maybe if you were to talk to her.”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“You could explain about summer school; how I can’t just walk out on it.” Fred scattered the rest of his half-eaten sandwich, causing a further invasion of pigeons, dozens of them it seemed, flapping and swooping from all directions.

“I really don’t think I could do that.” To protect her stockings, Vinnie kicked a particularly intrusive lavender-gray bird away with the side of her shoe.

“She’d listen to you, I bet. All right, get lost! There isn’t any more, for Christ’s sake.” He stood up, lifting a loaded briefcase. “Please, Vinnie.”

Vinnie rose too, and retreated several steps from the crowd of pigeons. She looked at Fred Turner standing on the porch of the British Museum, waiting for her answer in a clutter of equally demanding and unreasonable iridescent birds, with his tall athletic figure thrown off-balance by overloaded feelings and an overloaded briefcase. At that moment she realized that he had enrolled himself in the class of persons (usually but not always ex-students) who take it for granted that Vinnie will write them recommendations, give them letters of introduction to colleagues abroad, read their books and articles, and take an interest in their personal and professional happiness. Typically, the fulfillment of any such request does not discharge the obligation, but rather recharges it, just as the use of an automobile recharges its battery. The academic relation of protéger to protégé is a closed electrical circuit not subject to the law of entropy; often it sends out sparks until death.

For Vinnie, one of the advantages of being in England is that she can escape most of these parasites (though a few, of course, have pursued her by mail). Now here is Fred, who has elected himself her protégé simply because they are in the same department, and in the same foreign city, and she is a quarter-century older. And also probably because, quite without having intended it, she is in a sense responsible for his present situation. She was on the department committee that granted him a study leave, and she had invited him to the party at which he met Rosemary Radley.

Sighing, Vinnie told Fred that if the opportunity arose she would try to talk to Rosemary. She had little expectation of succeeding in this assignment, and privately wished that she might have no chance to carry it out. Since she became ill the next day, that wish was granted, though not in a very pleasant manner. But as Vinnie has often noted, both in folklore and in real life, that is the way with most wishes.

Whereas Vinnie is alone, and will probably always be alone. When she is ill, as now, there will never be anyone to listen sympathetically to her symptoms and bring her fresh-squeezed orange juice without being repelled by her appearance or smearing her with condescending pity like glaucous gooseberry jam. She is fifty-four years old; she is going to get older. And as she gets older she will be ill more often and for longer periods of time, and no one will really care very much.

Fido, or Self-Pity, who has been half dozing beside Vinnie for nearly three days, thumps his feathery tail on the comforter, but she shoves him away. Though she has a perfect right to be sorry for herself now, she knows how perilous it is to overindulge it. To go on feeding and petting Fido, even to acknowledge his existence too often, will fatally encourage him. He will begin to grow larger, swelling from the breadth and height of a beagle to that of a retriever—a sheepdog—a Saint Bernard. If she doesn’t watch out, one day Vinnie will be followed everywhere by an invisible dirty-white dog the size of a cow. Though other people won’t be able to visualize him as she does, they will be subliminally aware of his presence. Next to him she will look shrunken and pathetic, like someone who has accepted for all time the role of Pitiable Person.

“Go away,” Vinnie says to Fido in a half whisper. “This is just a bad cold, it’ll be gone soon. Get off my bed. Get out of my flat. Go find Mr. Mumpson, why don’t you?” she adds suddenly aloud, visualizing Chuck alone in the depths of the country, without friends, searching among faded dusty records for his illiterate ancestors.

In her mind, Fido considers the suggestion. He raises his head, then his chest, from the comforter, and sniffs the air. Then he slides off the bed and makes for the door, without even looking back.

Encouraged, Vinnie pushes away the covers and stands up dizzily. She stumbles into the kitchen, pours a glass of orange juice, and drops a black-cherry-flavored Redoxon tablet into it. Though an agnostic, she has faith in the power of Vitamin C; like most believers, she worships her god more devoutly when things go ill. Now she downs the fizzy, acid-magenta beverage and returns to bed, blows her nose again, pulls her sleep-mask down and the comforter up, and sinks into a snuffly, headachy slumber.

“Vinnie? This is Chuck, in Wiltshire. How’re you doing?”

“Oh, all right.”

“Sounds like you have a cold.”

“Well, I do, actually.”

“Aw, that’s tough. How bad is it? I’m coming up to London this afternoon, I was hoping we could have supper.”

“I don’t know. I’ve been in bed since day before yesterday. I’m feeling fairly awful, and I look a wreck.” Vinnie feels no hesitation in telling Chuck this. He isn’t important in London or in her life, so it doesn’t matter what he thinks. “God knows how I’ll be tonight.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that. Tell you what. You stay in bed now and keep good and warm, okay?”

“Okay.” It is years since anyone has told Vinnie to stay in bed and keep good and warm.

“I’ll phone you when I get in, about seven-thirty. Then, if you’re up to it, I can bring something over for us both to eat.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Vinnie has a mental picture of her cupboard and refrigerator, now more or less bare except for three quarts of cold soup. “But you certainly don’t have to. This flat is probably teeming with germs.”

“Aw, I’m not scared. I’m tough.” Chuck guffaws.

“Well . . . All right.”

Vinnie hangs up, flops back into bed, and returns to oblivion.

Chuck himself, naturally, is not aware of any incongruity. “Nice place you have here,” he says, looking toward the bow window, which frames a sweep of London back garden, brilliantly and variously gold and green in the declining sun. “Nice view. Real pretty flowers.” He gestures at a teapot overflowing with overblown yellow roses.

“Thank you.” Vinnie smiles uneasily, aware that her roses were not bought at a shop, but instead removed at dusk two days ago from various nearby front gardens. This petty theft, her first in nearly three months, occurred the day after she heard the story of L. D. Zimmern and her grant renewal, and—like her cold—may be related to it. “Let me take that shopping bag,” she says, changing the subject.

“Naw. You sit right there and rest. I’ll manage.”

In spite of her doubts, Chuck does manage, warming and serving the supper with skill and dispatch. In her present low mood Vinnie finds his clumsy concern soothing, his plodding conversation almost restful. He had a real productive trip to South Leigh this time, Chuck tells her, putting away two-thirds of the Indian dinner and most of the beer as he talks. “Y’know, this research, it’s not like business. Sometimes you do a hell of a sight better if you don’t try to zero in on a problem. You start looking for one thing, you come across something else important by accident.”

“Serendipity,” Vinnie says.

“What?”

She explains.

“Yeh, that’s what I said. I didn’t know there was a word for it.” Clearly, he feels not much is gained by this knowledge. “Anyways, I was kind of browsing around in the library down there, y’know?”

“Mm.” Vinnie imagines Chuck as a large cow—no, a bull—roaming the stacks of a provincial library, munching on a page here and there.

“Y’know they have these parish records, who lived in a place, who was christened, and married, and buried there. If you go into the churchyard, you can see some of the names on stones. All those names, and every goddamn one of them was a person. They got born, and were babies; and then they were kids, they learned their lessons and played games. Then they grew up and plowed and milked and cut the hay and ate dinner and drank the local beer at the Cock and Hen; and they fell in love and got married and had children and were sick and well and lived and died. And while all that stuff was going on, Tulsa was just a piece of prairie with buffalo ranging over it, and maybe a few Indians. All these people living down there in South Leigh, and everywhere else in this country, for hundreds and hundreds of years, way back to prehistoric times, and now nobody remembers them any more. They’re as extinct as the buffalo. It kinda bowls me over.”

“Yes.” In Vinnie’s mind, too, shadowy generations rise up; it is what she often feels about England, that every acre of it, every street and building, is thronged with ghosts.

“Wal, so I got to thinking about my ancestor, that I was so ashamed of. I found out some more about him, not much. He was in the parish register for South Leigh, born 1731, died 1801 aged seventy: ‘Charles Mumpson, known as Old Mumpson.’ Kind of a honorary title. Seventy doesn’t sound real old to us, but back in those days most folks didn’t live so long. The doctors didn’t really know anything—Wal, they don’t know all that much now either, if you ask me.”

“No,” Vinnie agrees.

“Reaching three score and ten, it was a kind of achievement then, ‘specially for a working man.” Chuck takes another swig of beer. “He must of had a strong constitution.”

“That’s true,” Vinnie says, considering the muscular breadth and bulk of Old Mumpson’s descendant.

“Anyhow, what I figure, when Old Mumpson was about my age he probably got past farm work, nobody would hire him any more. His wife had died years back, and his two sons had moved away, maybe gone to America—anyways there isn’t any record of them marrying or dying in the county. Wal, there probably wasn’t much old Mumpson knew how to do besides farming. So he took this hermit job, instead of going on public assistance. The way I figure it, I oughta be proud of him, ‘stead of ashamed, y’know?”

“I see what you mean,” Vinnie says, unconvinced, but reluctant to damage Chuch’s reconstruction.

“And then this Oxford University professor I told you about, this guy that’s in charge of the dig—Mike Gilson his name is. Mike said to me, ‘Y’know, you don’t have to conclude that Old Mumpson was stupid just because he couldn’t read and write. It could be that he never had any education; a lot of country folk were illiterate back then.’ It could be he really was a kind of local wise man, Mike said, and that’s why they hired him. Maybe people did come from everywhere round to ask his advice.”

“Yes, of course that’s possible,” Vinnie says, wishing she had thought of this comforting argument herself weeks ago.

“There’s a hell of a lot of learning that isn’t in books.”

“You may be right.” In Vinnie’s opinion, the extent of this unpublished learning is less than is generally claimed.

“Anyways, what I wanted to tell you, it’s about Mike partly. I’ve been spending a lot of time out on the dig, like I told you, taking pictures for him. Then Mike has these aerial photos of the area, from the government. You can find out a lot from those things if you know what to look for: ground water and drainage channels, and old foundations and boundary lines and roads—stuff he hadn’t noticed, some of it. It helps if you know some geology. Wal, a couple of days ago Mike said, why didn’t I stay on for the summer, join his crew. He can’t pay me anything, account of I’m not a British citizen, but he’s got this big house not too far from the dig rented for the summer, and there’s a real nice furnished apartment empty in what used to be one of the tenant cottages. Mike said I could have that for free, and I could eat with them in the main house whenever I wanted.”

“Really?” Vinnie sits forward. “And are you going to accept?”

“Yeh; I think so.” Chuck grins. “Hell, I got nothing better to do. And it’s nice down there in the country now. Wildflowers everywhere, and so green. Besides, I kinda dig the dig.” He laughs at his own pun. “And Mike and his crew, I like their attitude. They work damn hard, but they aren’t frantic about it. Mike, sometimes he’ll just take the afternoon off to think, go for a long walk. And the students too. Course they don’t have to worry about production quotas, or showing a profit. In business you can’t ever stand still that way. If you’re not getting ahead every goddamn minute you feel as if you’re sliding back.”

“Like the Red Queen.”

“Yeh?” Chuck blinks at her. “What queen was that?”

“In Through the Looking-Class.”

“Oh, yeh? I never read that. You think I should?”

“Well.” Vinnie has omitted Alice in Wonderland and its sequel from Chuck’s reading list, thinking that they would annoy and baffle him as they do many of her students. But if he is to spend the summer with an Oxford don, perhaps he should prepare himself. “Yes, probably you should.” She sighs, anticipating the explications that will be necessary if Chuck Mumpson is to read Alice properly: Victorian education, Victorian social history, Victorian poetry and parody, chess, developmental psychology, Darwinism—

“Okay, if you think so. Hey, Vinnie. How are you feeling?”

“Better, thanks.”

“That’s great. Y’know, I could go for a cup of coffee, if you have one around.”

“No, but I could make some,” Vinnie says, thinking that it is typical of men to believe that all women have a cup of coffee concealed about them somewhere.

“Great.” Chuck follows her into the narrow kitchen, getting in her way while she fills the electric kettle and makes coffee for him and rose-hip tea (high in Vitamin C) for herself.

“Thanks, that’s swell. You got any milk?”

“I’m not sure—I might.” Vinnie opens her miniature fridge, which rests on the counter and is of a size that in America would be thought fit only for a student dormitory room. At the moment it is almost totally filled by three quarts of avocado-and-watercress soup made by her from Posy Billings’ recipe in Harper’s/Queen and intended for a luncheon party tomorrow that she will have to cancel if she doesn’t feel any better.

In order to look for the milk, Vinnie lifts out the bowl of soup and turns to set it on the counter. At the same moment Chuck turns toward Vinnie. There is a collision: the stainless-steel bowl is knocked out of her hands and slides to the floor; she and Chuck are drenched with cold green soup and hot black coffee.

“Aw, fuck! Excuse me.”

“Oh, damn it!”

“I didn’t see—Jesus. Sorry. Here, lemme—” Chuck grabs a dishtowel and begins wiping coffee and soup off the front of Vinnie.

“That’s all right,” she says, swallowing with difficulty her irritation and the phrase You oaf. “My fault too.” Seizing a damp sponge, she starts to mop up Chuck. Luckily she is wearing a relatively soup-proof dress: an olive-green, densely flowered Laura Ashley cotton; Chuck’s synthetic yellow cowboy shirt and tan Western-cut slacks are much more vulnerable. Because he is so tall, most of the spill is on his pants. As Vinnie moves the sponge over them she suddenly becomes aware that they contain an unmistakable and even impressive bulge—and, simultaneously, that Chuck is to all intents and purposes stroking her breasts with a red checked linen dishtowel.

“Thanks, that’s enough,” she says, backing away from him as far as possible in the tiny kitchen.

“Vinnie—”

“Really, I think we’d better just try to soak the stains out, and the sooner the better. Why don’t you just go into the bathroom and take your things off. Put them in the tub, and turn on some lukewarm water, not hot.”

“Okay. If you say so.”

Vinnie picks up the broken shards of coffee cup and begins to mop the kitchen floor, then stops, retreats to the bedroom, pulls off her sticky wet dress, and changes into a skirt and shirt. Her mind is full of nervous confusion. Three quarts of soup gone, what can she serve at lunch tomorrow instead? There’s no doubt what was going on in Chuck’s mind and body—is there? Or was she mistaken? Should she go out tomorrow morning and buy some pâté? Anyhow, she reacted quite fast—fast enough? At least she got him out of the way— Or a pound of shrimps perhaps, from Camden Lock market— Yes, but not very far out of the way. He is in her bathroom now, with almost nothing on and his clothes floating in her tub (she can hear the water running). Maybe the soup stains will come out, if not the coffee, but what the hell is Chuck going to wear instead? She should have sent him back to his hotel, but now it’s too late, he can’t go anywhere in sopping wet clothes. Her head is muddled by too many aspirin, and she didn’t think ahead. If he only had a decent raincoat instead of that awful transparent plastic thing—she gives it a nasty look as it hangs in the hall—then he could wear that while his clothes dried, or even go home in it.

“Hey, Vinnie! Have you got a bathrobe or something?”

Well, now Chuck has thought of this problem too. She’ll have to find him something to put on, he can’t stay in her bathroom all night; and as soon as he comes out he’s going to make a pass at her. Or maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was just a nervous reaction. Maybe she imagined it. Vinnie begins opening cupboards and drawers, all of which contain only female garments in sizes six and eight.

“Vinnie?”

“Coming.” In desperation she goes into her study and drags the spread off the daybed. “Here You can put this round you for now, it’s all I’ve got.” She shoves through the bathroom door a rough bundle of brown homespun with a geometrical border pattern and fringe. Not waiting for any possible objection, she returns to the kitchen floor, which is still splashed and smeared with green soup.

“Aw, what a mess. Lemme help you.”

“No, thanks.” Vinnie, on hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water and the same sponge she used on Chuck, glances up. Scrolled leather boots, thick naked muscled legs furred with pale-red hair, fringed homespun bedspread which, draped round his bulk, looks smaller than before. She stands up.

“You have some kinda green plant stuff in your hair.” Chuck picks it out and presents it to her.

“Watercress.” Vinnie throws it away. “It was watercress-and-avocado soup. I’d better go put my dress to soak, excuse me.”

“Sure.”

In the bathroom she shakes out her sticky Laura Ashley and lays it in the tub, then checks the mirror to make sure there is no more soup in her hair. How awful I look, how old, gray, unattractive, she thinks. Of course he’s not going to make a pass. As she leaves she glances again into the tub, where her dress and Chuck’s shirt and slacks lie wetly together in embarrassing proximity. She runs in lukewarm water to give them more room, causing the garments to turn and slosh about in a promiscuous embrace. Come on, get ahold of yourself, she thinks, and returns to the kitchen where, surprisingly, Chuck has just finished mopping the floor

“I didn’t expect—thank you,” she says, noting that the bedspread has managed to transform Chuck from a fake cowboy to a fake Indian. “Would you like another cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.” He gives her a brief smile, a longer stare. Vinnie, uneasy, returns neither.

“Well then,” she begins, “maybe you’d like—”

“Y’know what I’d like?” Before she can answer, the imitation Indian grabs Vinnie by both shoulders and kisses her full on the mouth.

“Mm! No!” she protests, but after the fact.

“Aw, Vinnie. If you knew how long I’ve been wanting to do that. Ever since that day we had tea. But I didn’t have the, I don’t know, the nerve. I was too goddamn low.” He hugs her again, warmly rather than hotly—perhaps he only feels especially friendly?

“Please, let’s take it easy,” she says. “And let’s get out of the kitchen, before something else spills.”

“Okay.” Chuck stands aside, then follows her into the sitting room. But they are hardly there before he moves closer again, crowding Vinnie against the wall under a watercolor of New College. This time his intention is evidently more than friendly. Vinnie feels the flutter of satisfaction that has always, for her, followed any expression of sexual interest: I may be plain, but I’m not after all hopelessly plain, it says. Then she catches her breath, tries to collect herself. But it is the first time since she left America that anyone has done more than shake her hand or kiss her on the cheek, and Chuck’s embrace is close, strong, deeply and alarmingly comforting. A flush of warmth spreads through her, an impulse to relax, to forget who she is, where she is—.

“No, no,” she tries to say. “You’re making a mistake, I really don’t want this—” But the words are hardly more than a murmur. Push him away, she commands herself; but her body refuses—though one hand, with great difficulty, manages to keep their lower torsos separated a vital inch or two.

It is Chuck who first pulls back. “Vinnie. Hold on a minute.” He removes his large warm hand from within her shirt, breathing hard. “God, this is great. But there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” He drags the bedspread back round his shoulders. “Let’s sit down a minute, okay?”

“Okay,” she echoes shakily.

“What it is, is—” Chuck, who has lowered himself to the sofa, halts. “Oh hell.”

“Go on,” she prompts, taking a chair across from him and beginning to regain control. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“You can’t. How could you?” He sounds angry, perhaps frightened.

“Because I’ve heard it before.” Vinnie’s voice is almost steady now. She glances at Chuck, thinking how ridiculous he looks: a comic oversized pink-faced Red Indian, incongruous among the English furniture and flowered chintz. “You’re going to tell me that you’re awfully fond of me, but you want to be honest, and I should realize that your marriage is very important to you and you really love your wife.”

“The hell I am. I don’t love Myrna—I hate her, or pretty near. My marriage is as dead as a skunk.” Chuck looks dark. “What I hafta say, it’s a lot worse than that.” He clutches at the bedspread, clears his throat. “Uh, you remember I told you I was in an accident back in Tulsa, smashed up my car.”

“Yes,” Vinnie says, wondering if Chuck is about to confess some incapacitating and shameful sexual disability.

“Wal, it wasn’t just my car I smashed up. There was this kid in a VW. It was out on the Muskogee Turnpike, about two A.M. I was tearing along, doing near eighty I guess, in my usual midnight funk, and suddenly there was this old VW pulling out from the access road right in front of me, weaving like a drunken chicken. I still keep seeing it. It was this sixteen-year-old kid, half out of his mind on amphetamines. I tried to stop, but my reaction time wasn’t fast enough, I was too goddamn pissed.”

“So what happened?” she asks finally.

“So I killed him. That’s what happened.” Chuck throws a panicky, searching look toward Vinnie; then, as if afraid of reading her expression, he transfers his gaze to the floor.

“You know those little old foreign cars, they don’t have a hope in hell in a crash,” he informs the carpet. “That beetle crumpled up like a broil-in bag. The Pontiac wasn’t in such great shape either, but I got out of it somehow. I had a cracked knee, and my head was bleeding, only I didn’t notice it then. But the kid—He was stuck inside the VW with the wheel shaft through him, screaming. I couldn’t do anything for him—I couldn’t even get the door open.” He looks up at Vinnie again.

“So there we were,” he goes on. “It was dark all around, black as hell. One of my headlights was still working, and I could see a slice of the road, with ripped-off pieces of metal thrown around, and a lot of smashed glass, looked like crushed ice.

“By the time the cops got there I was kinda incoherent. I had point twelve percent of alcohol in my blood, and I tried to fight them when they wanted me to get into the patrol car; I had some idea I had to stay with the kid. So naturally they took me in. Resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer, and driving while intoxicated, and exceeding the speed limit, and failure to exercise proper caution . . . And then the kid’s parents decided to sue me for manslaughter. I wanted to plead guilty; the way I felt, I didn’t care too much what happened to me any more. Myrna thought I was nuts. If I didn’t have any self-respect, she said, at least I might have the decency to think of her and the children, of their standing in the community.”

“And did you?”

“Yeh. In the end. I let her get me an expensive lawyer, and he won the case for us. I had the right of way, see, and the kid was on drugs, that’s a lot worse than booze in Tulsa. Except if I hadn’t been so damn bombed I would have seen him in time, easy.”

“I’m sorry,” Vinnie says. “What an awful thing to happen.”

“I can’t fucking get it out of my mind. At least I couldn’t. It’s been better lately. For a long time I felt like I oughta die too, to make it up to the kid and his parents. That’s what it was mostly. Not so much losing my job like I told you. Whenever I get in a car, even sometimes just crossing the street, I think about it. I keep taking chances, to see if I’ll cash in; and if I make it, maybe I’m forgiven. I know that’s sort of crazy.”

“Of course it’s crazy,” Vinnie says decidedly. “It wouldn’t do that boy or his parents the least bit of good for you to be killed in an accident.”

“‘An eye for an eye—’”

“‘Makes the whole world blind,’” she finishes.

“Yeh—I see what you mean.” Chuck grins suddenly. “That’s a smart proverb. I never heard it before.”

“Gandhi.”

“What? Oh, yeh, that Indian.” Chuck ceases to smile. “Anyways.” He shifts uncomfortably on the sofa, causing it to creak in protest. “I thought you oughta know. I mean, in case you might not want to have anything more to do with me.”

An excuse to draw back has been handed to Vinnie on a platter, but she hesitates. It would be hateful and hurtful to reject Chuck because of what had happened to him on the Muskogee Turnpike. Indeed, now she looks at the platter again, what is on it seems more like a watertight excuse for going ahead.

“Don’t be silly,” she says nervously. “It was a terrible accident, that’s all.”

“Aw, Vinnie.” Chuck lunges toward her, so precipitately that he leaves most of the bedspread behind, and folds her in a warm half-naked hug. “I shoulda known you’d say that. You’re a good woman.”

Vinnie does not smile. No one has ever said this to her before, and she knows it to be false: she is not, in Chuck’s presumed sense of the word, or any sense of it, a good woman. She is not particularly generous, brave, or affectionate; she steals roses from other people’s gardens and enjoys imagining nasty deaths for her enemies. Of course, in her own opinion, she is quite justified in being like this, considering how the world and its inhabitants have treated her; and she has positive qualities as well: intelligence, tact, taste . . .

“You’ve been so great to me all along,” Chuck continues. “Hell, you saved my life, just about.” He begins kissing her face, breaking off at intervals to speak. “Y’know, if I hadn’t met you, I probably never woulda thought of looking for my ancestors . . . Or found South Leigh. That time we had tea, I was about ready to give up. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have found Old Mumpson, or met Mike or anything. I woulda managed to get myself killed by now, probably. Or else, a damn sight worse, I’d be back in Tulsa.”

“Wait,” Vinnie tries to say between kisses, in which somehow she has begun to join. “I’m not sure I want . . .” But her voice now entirely refuses to function; and her body—rebellious, greedy—presses itself against Chuck’s. Now, now it cries; more, more. Very well, she says to it. Very well, if you insist. Just this once. After all, no one will ever have to know.