9

I’ll tell you the truth,
Don’t think I’m lying:
I have to run backwards
To keep from flying.
Old rhyme
AT the London Zoo, Vinnie Miner sits on a slatted bench watching the polar bears. Several of them are visible: one splashing lazily in the artificial rock-pool; one asleep on its side at the entrance of a stone cave, looking like a heap of damp yellowish-white fur rugs; and a third padding back and forth nearby, occasionally turning its heavy muzzle, on which the coarse hair has separated into spiky clumps, to give her an inquiring glance from its small glittering dark eyes.
Though she lives only a few blocks from the Zoo, this is the first time Vinnie has visited it all year, and she’s only here now because some American cousins insisted on coming. These cousins, who are frantically “doing London” in three days, have already gone on to the National Gallery. Vinnie lingers here partly from the sense that, having paid several pounds to enter the Zoo, she might as well get her money’s worth, and partly because it’s a fine day and her project is ahead of schedule. All her London data has been collected; she has read most of the relevant background material, and she has traveled to Oxford, Kent, Hampshire, and Norfolk to talk with experts in children’s literature and folklore.
It isn’t in Vinnie’s nature to be wildly euphoric, but today she is at the peak of her own emotional curve, even off the graph. She is happier than she has been in months—maybe even in years. Everyone and everything looks good to her: the animals, the other visitors, the graceful new-leafed trees and the damp, shining lawns of Regent’s Park. Even her cousins, whom she usually thinks of as boring, today seem only forgivably naive. She hasn’t had a visit from Fido—or even thought of him—for days. For all she knows, he has followed Chuck to Wiltshire.
As she sits alone on her bench, Vinnie not only feels happy but curiously free. She is far from Corinth University, and from the duties and constraints of the role of Spinster Professor. The demanding and defining voices of her colleagues and students and friends are stilled. Moreover, English literature, to which in early childhood she had given her deepest trust, and which for half a century has suggested what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become, has suddenly fallen silent. Now, at last, all those books have no instructions for her, no demands—because she is just too old.
In the world of classic British fiction, the one Vinnie knows best, almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty—as was true of the real world when the novel was invented. The few older people—especially women—who are allowed into a story are usually cast as relatives; and Vinnie is no one’s mother, daughter, or sister. People over fifty who aren’t relatives are pushed into minor parts, character parts, and are usually portrayed as comic, pathetic, or disagreeable. Occasionally one will appear in the role of tutor or guide to some young protagonist, but more often than not their advice and example are bad; their histories a warning rather than a model.
In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom.
Even today there are disproportionately few older characters in fiction. The conventions hold, and the contemporary novelist, like an up-to-date fruit-grower, reconstructs the natural landscape, removing most of the aging trees to leave room for young saplings that haven’t yet been grafted or put down deep roots. Vinnie has accepted the convention; she has tried for years to accustom herself to the idea that the rest of her life will be a mere epilogue to what was never, it has to be admitted, a very exciting novel.
But the self, whatever its age, is subject to the usual laws of optics. However peripheral we may be in the lives of others, each of us is always a central point round which the entire world whirls in radiating perspective. And this world, Vinnie thinks now, is not English literature. It is full of people over fifty who will be around and in fairly good shape for the next quarter-century: plenty of time for adventure and change, even for heroism and transformation.
Why, after all, should Vinnie become a minor character in her own life? Why shouldn’t she imagine herself as an explorer standing on the edge of some landscape as yet unmapped by literature: interested, even excited—ready to be surprised?
Today the Zoo, her immediate landscape, is at its best. An early-afternoon shower has sluiced the dust from the still-shiny leaves and the mica-flecked paths, and has lent the air a scented freshness. It has also given Vinnie a chance to wear her new raincoat: dramatic, full-cut, of shimmery silvery-blue waterproofed silk—the sort of coat she could never have afforded to buy, and in fact hasn’t bought. In it she feels taller and better-looking, almost proud of herself.
She is proud of London too today. She rejoices in its natural and architectural beauty, the safety and cleanliness of its streets, the charm and variety of its shops; in its cultural sophistication—the educated, ironic tone of its press, its appreciation of historical tradition, its deference toward maturity, its tolerance of, even delight in, eccentricity.
Today, events that at another time would have infuriated or depressed her seem mere annoyances. The arrival in this morning’s post of the current issue of the Atlantic, containing a letter in praise of L. D. Zimmern’s article, hardly rippled her mood. Poor stupid Zimmern, imprisoned in ugly, dirty New York and in his own sulky spitefulness. Vinnie imagines this spitefulness as a deep cold muddy rock-pool like the one in the polar bears’ enclosure. She visualizes L. D. Zimmern as sunk in it up to his (in her imagination) pudgy chin, unable to climb out. Whenever he attempts to clamber up its slippery sides, the largest polar bear—who has now hauled himself out of the water and is lying dripping on the rocks beside the pool—places a heavy paw like a sopping-wet floor mop on his head and shoves him back down again.
Since she feels so good, and it is such a nice warm day, Vinnie refrains from actually drowning Professor Zimmern in her fantasy. It would be bad publicity for the London Zoo, such a death. Besides, it might be upsetting for the bear—and perhaps even dangerous, if the keeper discovered that his prize Thalarctos maritimus was a man-killer. She rather likes this particular bear. It is true that his movements are slow and rather clumsy and his coarse yellow-white fur coat none too clean; and he doesn’t look awfully intellectual. But he is satisfyingly large, and he has a humorous, sly, agreeable expression. To tell the truth, he is a little like Chuck Mumpson. She saw exactly that look on Chuck’s face when they were shopping in Harrods last week, just before he left for Wiltshire.
This expedition was the final move in Vinnie’s campaign to improve Chuck’s appearance, both for his sake and for her own. If she was to go about London with him—and evidently she was—she was determined that he shouldn’t look like a cartoon American Packaged Tourist, Western Division, especially since he really wasn’t one any longer. She didn’t try to alter his cowboy costume. That, she realized, would be almost impossible; and besides it was if anything a social advantage here. But she did gradually manage to persuade Chuck not to carry around so many maps and guide-books, and to leave his cameras and light meters at the hotel—suggesting that she could guide him, and that his constant picture-taking interfered with conversation.
Getting rid of his deplorable plastic raincoat was harder. There was no point in telling Chuck how ugly it was, she finally realized. His aesthetic sense was poorly developed; he judged even art almost wholly by its meaning rather than its looks. (Probably this was just as well for her, Vinnie thought, since it meant that her appearance had little importance for him; his appreciation of her was tactile rather than visual.)
Vinnie therefore tried a moral and connotative approach: she spoke disparagingly of the raincoat, associating it with ignorant tourists, with traveling salesmen, and with the shower curtains of cheap motels. But even when—in a fit of exasperation—she compared the garment to a male prophylactic, Chuck remained unmoved.
“Aw, come on, Vinnie,” he said, grinning. “Nothing wrong with it that I can see. Sure, maybe it’s not beautiful; but it keeps the water out real fine. Besides, it’s just about brand-new.”
“Really,” she remarked, implying doubt.
“Yeh; I bought it specially for the trip. It comes in this little plastic case, made outa the same stuff as the coat, see? You can fold the whole thing up and put it in your pocket. Great for traveling. You oughta get yourself one.”
Observing his expression of satisfaction, Vinnie had despaired. Her only hope—a faint one, considering the English climate—was that when she and Chuck went anywhere together it wouldn’t rain.
Two days later, however, Chuck came to lunch at her flat; and when he departed considerably later, with an even more satisfied expression, he left his raincoat behind. Vinnie found it lying on the carpet in a corner of the sitting room, looking like a large very dead fish. She picked it up with distaste, observing how the greenish-gray plastic managed to feel stiff and slimy at the same time. How could Chuck, who is really quite an attractive man, wear such a thing? And where could she put it until she saw him again? Certainly not in her hall closet—a mere doorless alcove—where it would be visible to anyone who came to the flat.
She lugged the dead fish into the bedroom, opened her too-small wardrobe, and shoved her clothes aside. The pretty pale dresses and skirts and blouses, all of soft, natural fibers, seemed to flinch away from the vulgar plastic companion she offered them. She put out her hand to pull them back. Then, on a sudden impulse, she dragged the coat off its hanger. She carried it back down the hall by the scruff of its neck, opened the door of her flat and then the front door, and descended the steps to the yard. There she lifted the metal lid of a trashcan and wadded the raincoat down inside beneath a green plastic bag of garbage and a stack of wet newspapers.
That’s where you belong, she told the dead fish. And if Chuck asks, I’ll say I never saw you, and he’ll assume he left you somewhere else.
As it turned out, however, Chuck did not assume this. Nor was he convinced by Vinnie’s protestations of ignorance.
“Naw. I know I left my raincoat at your place Thursday. I bet you hid it.”
“Of course I didn’t,” she said easily, smiling. “Why on earth would I do that?”
“On account of you can’t stand the thing.” Chuck grinned.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’s probably somewhere back at your hotel.”
“Come on, Vinnie. I left it right here, day before yesterday.” His grin widened. “You hid my raincoat; I can see it in your eyes. You can’t fool an old con like me.”
“Really, I didn’t.” Confronted with Chuck’s steady, smiling gaze, Vinnie’s voice faltered. “Not that I wouldn’t have liked to.”
“Uh-huh.” He glanced into the hall closet, then walked on into Vinnie’s bedroom and yanked open the door of the wardrobe.
“Really, Chuck,” she exclaimed, following him. “You can see it isn’t here.”
“Maybe.” He looked behind her bedroom door; then he pulled out the drawers of her chest, glanced in, and banged them shut again. “Okay, honey. A joke is a joke. Hand it over now, and I promise I won’t wear it to the theater tonight.”
“It’s not here any more. I mean, it never was.”
A loud guffaw burst from Chuck. “You swiped my raincoat,” he said. “That really beats all. A nice sweet lady professor like you. And where is it now?”
“Honestly, I didn’t—” But Vinnie was unable to sustain the pretense. “The dustmen took it away yesterday,” she said weakly. “And good riddance.”
“Great. And what am I supposed to do next time it rains?”
“Well-uh.” Vinnie realized she was flushing. “I’ll buy you another one.”
“Okay; sure.” Chuck began laughing again. “You can just do that.”
“But not the same kind,” she insisted.
“Any kind you like.” Chuck gave a final whoop of laughter, then folded Vinnie in a generous hug.
As she accepted and then, relaxing, returned Chuck’s embrace, Vinnie said to herself that of course he wasn’t serious. He would, she hoped, take her advice on the purchase of a new raincoat. But he would hardly expect her to pay for it—or at least, to be fair, he wouldn’t expect her to pay more than the cost of the dead fish.
These were still her assumptions the following day in Harrods, when Chuck removed the very expensive trenchcoat she’d said she liked best and told the sales clerk that it would do fine.
“Shall I wrap it for you, sir?”
“No thanks, sir,” Chuck returned. “I’ll wear it. And the lady will pay,” he added. Then he stood there calmly, grinning, while Vinnie helplessly allowed nearly a hundred pounds to be charged to her Barclaycard, wondering meanwhile what on earth the man must think. That Chuck’s some sort of kept man, perhaps, she decided, signing the receipt as if under a bad spell. Or perhaps that I’m his bossy, money-managing wife. She hardly knew which would be worse.
But she couldn’t get up her nerve to protest; after all, she’d brought this on herself. Besides, if you added up all the lunches and dinners and theater tickets Chuck had bought her, she was probably still ahead. Nevertheless she felt tricked, cheated; she remembered that Chuck Mumpson was a former juvenile delinquent—an old con, as he put it.
“Wal, thanks a lot,” he said—to her or to the sales clerk? It was ambiguous—offering Vinnie his arm, which she pretended not to see. She was struggling to frame a graceful request for at least partial repayment, a tactful way of saying that it was all a good joke, of course, wasn’t it, but now . . . But no words came to her.
“I’m real glad we came here,” said Chuck as they waited for the elevator. “This is a damn good-looking coat, huh?”
“Yes,” Vinnie agreed helplessly.
“And you’re a real good sport, too.” Chuck grinned; it was at this moment that, clad in his new pale-tan Burberry, that he most resembled the polar bear. “The way you signed that receipt! Not a squeak out of you!”
“No,” Vinnie squeaked, smiling uncomfortably.
“Okay, we’re quits. Now I’ll buy you one.’”
“Me? But I don’t need a raincoat.”
“Sure you do.”
She protested, but Chuck was determined. “You want to make me feel like a creep, a moocher, a traveling salesman, is that it?”
“No, of course not,” Vinnie said; and the result was the coat she’s wearing now, with its romantic gathered hood and designer label—the most beautiful garment she’s owned in years.
Vinnie’s raincoat isn’t the only surprising thing Chuck has given her. He has turned out to be wonderful in bed; so wonderful that Vinnie had broken her promise to herself and allowed—no, rather welcomed—him back once, twice, three times—almost every day until he left for Wiltshire again. And to think that if it hadn’t been for Posy Billings’ watercress-and-avocado soup, she might never have known . . .
Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York state lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill-concealed, embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept—even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that really no woman in her right mind would take such a chance—except that when you do take such a chance you’re usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally) the prize is so tremendous.
In over forty years Vinnie has held a lot of losing tickets. But when she’s with Chuck she feels like one of those lottery winners who are occasionally pictured in the newspapers grinning dizzily, astounded at their own luck. She has had this experience before, but she never expected to have it again. Even though it has happened four times, she hardly believes it.
Her disbelief, Vinnie realizes, is the consequence not only of English literature but of contemporary culture. The media convention is that people like Chuck and Vinnie—especially Vinnie—don’t enjoy sex very much or experience it very often. This convention may date from an earlier era, when most women were physically worn out, if not dead, at fifty. Or it may reflect the distaste many people seem to feel for the idea of their parents as lovers. Superego figures are supposed to be dignified and disembodied; above all that.
Of course, elderly couples can now and then be seen hugging or kissing in a friendly manner. The public regards this indulgently, as visitors to the Zoo do the two damp-stained polar bears across the way from Vinnie, who are now nuzzling each other with a playful, clumsy affection. Anything more serious on their part, however, and most spectators would sidle off embarrassed, dragging their children with them, though perhaps with a prurient backward glance. To imagine these bears—or Chuck and Vinnie—really going at it would cause mental discomfort. In books, plays, films, advertisements, only the young and beautiful are portrayed as making love. That the relatively old and plain do so too, often with passion, is a well-kept secret.
Now that Chuck has been gone nearly a week, Vinnie misses him acutely. She misses the way he strokes her back and behind, remembering all the right places; the slow, delicious way he licks her breasts, first one and then the other; the size, shape, and color of his most private part, and its amazing motility—it can, uniquely in Vinnie’s experience, nod or shake its head in reply to a question. Remembering all this, and more, as she sits on the bench, she wants him back so much that it is acutely painful. On the other hand, his presence creates a difficult social dilemma.
For the sake of her London reputation, Vinnie believes, she would do best to remain, or at least seem, romantically uninvolved. In Edwin’s set—among people like Rosemary Radley and Posy Billings—occasional love affairs are forgiven. But her social world overlaps Edwin’s only slightly. Most of her English friends are rather old-fashioned in their views: even if they approved of Chuck, they would look askance at adultery. In their opinion, casual affairs are perhaps all very well for actors, students, secretaries, and people like that; but a woman of Vinnie’s age and professional reputation, if not celibate, ought to be married—or at least permanently living with another respectable educated person.
Vinnie has no regrets about having taken Chuck into her bed—much the reverse—but she doesn’t want anyone to find out that he’s been there. Unfortunately, since they became lovers Chuck’s public manner toward her has altered. He has developed a way of looking at her, a way of taking her arm, that—agreeable though they may be—are a dead giveaway, or would certainly have become so if he had stayed in London much longer. When he returns next weekend the public danger as well as the private pleasure will be renewed. Vinnie can hardly ask him to behave more formally toward her when other people are around: that would involve uncomfortable explanations of her motives, or even more uncomfortable lies. And to prevent him from meeting anyone she knows will be inconvenient—maybe impossible. At the same time, she can’t go around explaining to all her acquaintances that in spite of appearances, she isn’t sleeping with Chuck Mumpson, especially when it is no longer true.
Vinnie rises from her bench and walks on, as if her contemplation of the bear who looks so much like Chuck might in itself incriminate her, should some acquaintance appear. To be suspected of having a lover would be difficult enough, she thinks; to be suspected of sleeping with what, from the British point of view, is practically a polar bear, would be worse. It isn’t that her British friends dislike Chuck. They like him: they find him amusingly original; they are vastly entertained by his American simplicity and vulgarity.
The problem is that if her friends find out that Vinnie is mixed up with Chuck, they will begin to mix her up with him, to redefine her. This mental process isn’t typically British, of course, but universal. In certain cases the confusion of identities affects the lovers themselves: transported by passion, they believe that their souls have merged, or were always identical. As an American friend of hers once put it at a high point of their brief relationship, crossing the town park in Saratoga Springs: “Sometimes I think we’re the same person.” “Oh, I know,” Vinnie had replied, equally deluded. (She hasn’t been affected by any such hallucination in this case—rather the reverse: when she is with Chuck she feels more than usually small, intellectual, and timid.)
Even more often, outsiders conflate the couple, and credit them with each other’s characteristics. If a radical takes up with a conservative, both will be perceived as more moderate politically, regardless of whether their views have in fact altered. The man or woman who becomes involved with a much younger person seems younger, the latter more mature.
Vinnie doesn’t want her London friends to confuse her with Chuck, to think of her as after all rather simple, vulgar, and amusing—a typical American. She wants them to accept her, to take her for granted. She wants to be, believes she has been considered up to now, one of them. Subject, not object; observer, not observed, she thinks, stopping by the wildfowl enclosure, which resembles a gigantic wire-mesh mosquito net held up here and there by long aluminum poles. She is content, and more than content, to be one of the smaller, less noticeable brownish birds she can see swimming or wading among the rustling marsh grasses beyond the netting, looking busy, pleased with themselves, and totally at home. She has no ambition—rather a horror—of resembling one of the outsize, peculiarly colored and feathered exotic waterfowl at whom a knot of cockneys are now pointing and giggling.
The brilliant birds, and their audience, remind Vinnie of Daphne Vane, and of the publisher’s party that is being given in less than an hour to launch her largely ghost-written memoirs. If Vinnie is to attend it in more appropriate dress and with clean hair, she must hurry. Luckily the party’s in Mayfair, and easily accessible by the 74 or Zoo bus, which stops outside her front door.
Daphne’s party, in an elegant converted Georgian house, is well under way when Vinnie arrives. For the first half-hour she experiences it as lively and thronged; then it begins to seem noisy and crowded. Stand-up events are always hard on her because of her height: most conversations take place a foot above her head, and when she wants to move she feels like a child trying to make its way to a familiar face through a mob of unseeing adults, all heavy rumps and sharp elbows. And today many of the faces that at first seem familiar turn out not to be acquaintances, but only actors she has seen at some time on stage or television—and, like most actors, uninterested in meeting anyone not in their own profession.
“Having a good time?” inquires an actual acquaintance, William Just, looking down at her.
“Oh yes. Well, perhaps not especially. The publisher’s party isn’t quite my favorite social occasion.”
“It isn’t a social occasion at all,” William says, reaching for a plate of hot hors d’oeuvres and offering some to Vinnie. “Almost everyone here was invited for some ulterior purpose, as usual. They’re connected with the firm, or with some paper, or they’re in the theater—though I hear Nigel’s very disappointed because so few of our leading dramatis personae have shown up. I’m meant to get Daphne’s book discussed on the BBC, and you’re supposed to tell everyone in America how thrilling it is.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Vinnie cannot think of anything clever to say. Her head has begun to ache and her stomach to complain of the strong punch and the spicy canapés. She says goodbye to William and starts to move toward the door, stopping to greet the few people she knows. One of these, as might be expected, is Rosemary Radley.
“Lovely, isn’t it all?” Though elegantly dressed and perfectly—if rather over-elaborately—made up, Rosemary seems somehow scatty and distracted, perhaps a bit tipsy.
“Oh yes.” Vinnie remembers that there’s something she’s supposed to tell Rosemary—what? Yes: she’s promised to explain that Fred Turner really loves her and is going back to America against his true desire. The commission is uncomfortable, and this crowded room hardly the place to carry it out. Besides, what’s the point? In Vinnie’s opinion, the breakup of their affair isn’t surprising; it was inappropriate from the start. Of course Rosemary is beautiful, and her life no doubt very glamorous, if you like that sort of thing. But she’s much too complicated for someone like Fred, and probably bad for him as well: frivolous, egotistic, temperamental, and full of expensive false values. To reconcile them—even if anyone could, which seems very unlikely—hardly seems desirable.
Buf fate, perversely, provides Vinnie with the opportunity to carry out her promise. As she collects her coat, Rosemary reappears and asks if she needs a lift; she is going to a dinner party in Gloucester Crescent, and can easily drop Vinnie off. Feeling ashamed of her recent thoughts, Vinnie hesitates; but her increasing headache and the knowledge that the 74 bus becomes rare, almost extinct, as soon as the Zoo closes, change her mind.
Though it is always hard to find a cab in Mayfair at that hour, Rosemary spies one. Sprinting a little unsteadily down Upper Grosvenor Street in her high-heeled silver sandals, with her long pink cape billowing behind, she beats out two men in bowler hats who have already hailed the taxi. They begin to expostulate, but Rosemary, dazzling them with her smile, pulls open the door and waves Vinnie on. Once inside, however, she and her cape collapse into the corner with a sigh like a pricked balloon.
“Stupid party,” she announces in her sweet, well-modulated voice. “Imbecile dons, think they know everything about the theater because they once read a play.”
Vinnie, who has recognized no dons beside herself at the party, and wonders if this comment is meant maliciously, makes no comment.
“Disgusting drink,” Rosemary continues. “Nothing to eat, either.”
“Oh, no,” Vinnie corrects her. “There was quite a lot of food.”
“Really? No one offered me any.” She laughs musically. “Pigging it all for themselves, most likely.”
Unsure whether this is an accusation, Vinnie again says nothing. Rosemary too is silent, sulking within her silk cocoon.
Traffic is heavy; the taxi jerks forward and halts along South Audley Street; jerks and halts. At this rate it will take hours to reach Regent’s Park Road; whereas if Vinnie were to get out now and walk to Bond Street Tube Station—But before she can solidify this intention Rosemary turns to her and begins to complain of what she calls “your friend Fred”—thus simultaneously denying that she is Fred’s friend and assigning responsibility for him to Vinnie.
“I’m not a complete simpleton,” she declares. “I know your friend Fred doesn’t really have to go back to that silly old college this summer.”
Annoyed, but bowing to fate, Vinnie assures Rosemary that he does; she begins to explain why. Rosemary listens with an ill grace, tapping her silver-sandaled toe on the floor of the cab and gazing away out the window.
“Oh, come on, Vinnie,” she interrupts. “I don’t need to hear all that drivel again. I know there’s more to it; he’s going back to that stupid wife of his, isn’t he?’”
Vinnie assures her that as far as she knows Fred isn’t going back to his wife, all that is long over. “It’s you he cares for,” she adds, noticing that her headache is worse and wishing she could get out of the taxi. “He thinks you’re a wonderful woman.”
“Oh he does, does he.” Rosemary’s voice has thickened and coarsened oddly; if they hadn’t been alone Vinnie would have looked round to see who else was speaking.
“Yes, he told me so. And I believe him,” she adds.
“I suppose you might,” Rosemary says, again in her characteristic upper-class drawl. “But you don’t know much about men, Vinnie. They’re liars, the lot of them.”
Vinnie glances nervously at the back of the taxi-driver’s head; then she sits forward and tugs the glass panel shut.
“Listen, sweetie, when they’re making up excuses to leave you, men always start telling everyone you’re a wonderful woman.” Rosemary’s accent continues to alternate disconcertingly between refined and vulgar, as if she were trying out for some inappropriate low-comedy role but was unable to sustain the illusion. “That’s what they always say, the bastards. It’s a kind of omen.”
“It’s not an excuse, really. You’ve got to understand . . .” With increasing weariness Vinnie begins to explain the tenure system in American universities.
“You’re wastin’ your breath, dearie,” Rosemary interrupts. “I don’t give a fart for all that. All I know is he’s sneakin’ out on me,” she says in her low-comedy voice—a voice Vinnie has heard before, but where?
“Fred isn’t sneaking—” she begins.
“1 need him, Vinnie,” Rosemary wails, pathetically ladylike again, with a half sob. “You tell him to forget his silly job. If he doesn’t come back and stay with me, I’ll be all alone again. You don’t know what that’s like for me.” She leans toward Vinnie as she speaks—breathes toward her; and Vinnie realizes what she should have realized sooner: that Rosemary isn’t merely tipsy, but quite drunk.
Annoyed, she tries to calm her, speaking slowly and firmly as she would to an anxious class. “Of course you’re not alone. You have so many friends, so many beaux, I’m quite sure—”
“That’s what you think, my dear. You think a lot of men want to sleep with me. I used to think that myself.” Her voice alters. “Bloody little fool that I was. Men don’t want to sleep with me, they want to have slept with me. They want to be able to tell their mates, ‘Oh, Lady Rosemary Radley, the television star? Yes, I do know her. In fact, I knew her very well, at one time.’ “Rosemary has slipped into a third voice: tenor, smarmily insinuating.
“That’s how they all are, the bastards,” she continues, her accent shifting again. “Except for Freddy. Freddy knew I was an actress, but it didn’t mean fuck-all to him. He’d never even heard of Tallyho Castle before he met me. I thought all you Americans were mad about British TV, but he didn’t even own a set, for Christ’s sake. He never even saw the show, he loved me anyhow.” Rosemary is sobbing now, her face distorted in a way it never becomes when she weeps on camera. “But he’s a bastard like the rest of them.”
The taxi is in Oxford Street now, snarled in a skein of other vehicles. From either side their drivers and passengers, with the covert but avid interest of the British in personal disaster, regard the drunken and weeping woman from whom they are separated by only a sheet of glass.
“He keeps on phoning my service, but I don’t dare see him or talk to him. I bloody couldn’t take it, Vinnie, unless I knew he was coming back for good, I—” Rosemary breaks off, perceiving that she has an audience.
“Yah!” she screams suddenly, turning with an ugly face and a coarse gesture to the nearest spectator, a portly well-dressed man in an adjoining taxi. He flinches visibly, then turns away with an unconvincing attempt at casualness.
Rosemary laughs wickedly, almost hysterically. Then she flings herself across the cab and repeats the performance at Vinnie’s open window, horrifying a young woman at the wheel of a Mini. “Yah, you nosy bitch! Why don’t you mind your own business!” She flops back into her seat, grinning. The pale silk cocoon of her cape has been sloughed off by all this activity, and lies crumpled on the seat beneath her; and what has emerged from it, Vinnie thinks, is not a butterfly.
The light changes, the taxi jolts ahead. Rosemary turns to her and says in a light sweet voice, “Next time you happen to see Mr. Frederick Turner—”
“Er-yes?”
“You might be kind enough to give him a message from me. Would you do that?” Her manner has become exaggeratedly gracious, almost caressing.
“Yes, of course,” Vinnie agrees, bewildered and even a little frightened by these rapid histrionic changes.
“I’d like for you to tell him, mm—Please tell him, would he be kind enough to stop telephoning me, and writing to me”—her voice alters again—”and just bloody well go screw himself.”
“Now really, Rosemary. You don’t mean—”
“Now really, Vinnie. That’s exactly what I do mean,” Rosemary interrupts, caricaturing Vinnie’s intonation and accent. “I’ve had it with all you fuckin’ Americans,” she goes on in the other voice, the coarse cockney Vinnie has heard somewhere. “Why don’t you stay home where you belong? Nobody wants you comin’ over here, messin’ up our country.” She waves at the souvenir shops and hamburger bars with which this portion of Oxford Street is disfigured. The loose, excessive gesture and grimace are those of a low-comedy stage character—of a music-hall charlady, say—of Mrs. Harris. Yes. That’s where Vinnie has heard this voice before: once or twice on the phone when she called Rosemary, and often at parties when Rosemary, telling some story, had imitated Mrs. Harris.
“It wasn’t me,” she starts to protest, with a strained laugh, trying to treat Rosemary’s performance as a joke—which after all it must be. “I certainly never wanted—”
“Of course not,” Rosemary interrupts smoothly. “Tell me something, Vinnie. How old are you?”
“Uh, I’m fifty-four,” replies Vinnie, who makes a point of answering this question accurately.
“Imagine that.” Rosemary smiles sweetly. “I would never have guessed it.”
“Thank you.” She is pleased in spite of herself, and somewhat mollified, “It’s just because I’m small, really.”
“You know what’s so wonderful about you, Vinnie?”
“Er—no.” Vinnie smiles expectantly.
“I’ll tell you what’s so wonderful about you.” It is Mrs. Harris’ voice again, speaking through the pink sweet-pea lips of Rosemary Radley. “You’re fifty-four years old, and you look sixty, and you don’t know fuck-all about life.”
The taxi has, with many stops and starts, negotiated the turn into Portman Square, and is halted next to a bed of yellow parrot tulips. Seizing the opportunity, Vinnie mumbles something about having to be home by seven-thirty, shoves the door open, and flees.
Not looking back, she makes her way hazardously through the traffic toward the 74 bus stop, walking too fast and breathing painfully hard, but congratulating herself on having had the nerve to get out of Rosemary’s taxi and escape from her drunken insults. Messing up our country. Fifty-four, and you look sixty. Standing on the curb, she shivers with rage and pain. She shouldn’t have sat there and taken it, she should have said—But Vinnie can’t think what she should have said. And after all, what’s the point of arguing with a drunk?
Of course Vinnie has never liked Rosemary, and probably Rosemary doesn’t like her. It’s not as if they’d ever been friends. Vinnie’s real friends don’t like Rosemary very much either, except for Edwin, and even he admits that she is self-indulgent and erratic, though he excuses it because she’s an artist, an actress—as if that were any excuse, Vinnie thinks, with another spasm of fury.
She’s always thought there was something unpleasant about the art of acting, Vinnie remembers as she reaches the bus stop; something unnatural, really, in the ability of certain persons to assume at will a completely alien voice and manner. She has felt this often at the theater, where she is never really comfortable, however entertained or moved she may be. The mimicry of other living beings is a nasty business; the more successful the imitation, the more there is essentially something horrible and uncanny in it.
Uncanny; literally so, because it overturns our belief in the uniqueness of the individual, Vinnie decides as she stands waiting for the bus in a queue of half-a-dozen women of varied ages and walks of life, any one of whom Rosemary might presumably if she chose become, as she had a few minutes ago become Vinnie Miner. Again she hears what was supposed to be her own voice coming out of Rosemary’s mouth: “Now really, Vinnie—” Does she always sound like that, so pert, nasal, and schoolmistressy? Of course no one likes his own voice; she remembers embarrassing moments with her tape recorder. Then she wonders whether Mrs. Harris has ever heard Rosemary’s impersonation of Mrs. Harris. Somehow she doubts it—a woman of her sort wouldn’t stand for that; she would fly into a rage, she would curse out Rosemary or maybe even smack her, the way Vinnie would have liked to.
Histrionic talent such as Rosemary’s has other dangers besides the hostility of those who are mimicked, Vinnie thinks, breathing more normally now. It’s possible to play a part once too often; actors can be typecast, so that they have to go on being silly ingenues or strong-silent detectives for years. Sometimes they become so identified with a role that it gradually usurps their own shallower and less defined personalities—in private as well as in the public eye.
Edwin was right, she tells herself as the tall red bus approaches. He saw what was happening before he left for Japan: he said that Mrs. Harris was a bad influence. And now, from imitating her as a parlor trick, Rosemary has progressed to the point where, when her own rather weak ego is blurred by alcohol, the strong but disagreeable personality of her charlady takes over and says things Rosemary herself would never say, or probably even think. Because surely she doesn’t think that Vinnie is personally messing up London and knows fuck-all about life.
Yes, that’s an interesting theory, and a nice, reassuring one, Vinnie says to herself as the 74 bus grinds north toward Regent’s Park. But isn’t it more likely that Rosemary, however drunk, meant what she said? That her jealous rage at Fred spilled over onto Vinnie, and the real truth came out? But what she really thinks of Vinnie—what all her friends—maybe everyone in London—think of Vinnie couldn’t be properly expressed by anyone as sweet and charming and refined as Lady Rosemary Radley. To say it she had to become, and because she is an actress could become, a coarse, ill-tempered, vindictive person like Mrs. Harris.
When she reaches her flat, Vinnie’s impulse is to go to bed and hide. But she resists it; she isn’t really tired or ill, just angry and miserable and headachy. She doesn’t feel up to going out again, even just up the road to Limonia to have supper with her cousins. She distrusts the world: people she has never done any harm to—or (as in the case of L. D. Zimmern) even met—are walking around in it wishing her ill. She decides to telephone her cousins and excuse herself. But before she can find the number of their hotel, her phone rings.
“Hi, honey, this is Chuck.”
“Oh, hello. How is everything in Wiltshire?”
“Great. I’ve got a heap to tell you. You remember that picture of the grotto with the Hermit of South Leigh that Colonel and Lady Jenkins showed me when I first came down here?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Wal, I’ve been trying to get ahold of a copy, and this guy in Bath just came up with one. Not the whole book, just that etching, but it’s hand-colored and in great condition.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“And yesterday we found a stone on the dig with real interesting carvings; Mike thinks—” Chuck expounds; Vinnie, holding the phone with one hand and her headache with the other, listens, making appropriate noises. “So it looks like—Hey, Vinnie. Are you feeling all right?”
“Oh yes, thanks,” she lies.
“You sound kinda low.”
“Well. Perhaps a little. A rather upsetting thing happened this afternoon.” Though she hasn’t meant to, Vinnie finds herself relating her encounter with Rosemary, omitting only the characterization of her own appearance.
“Weird,” is Chuck’s comment. “Sounds to me like she’s having some kinda crackup.”
“I don’t know. It could easily have been deliberate. After all, Rosemary’s an actress. Probably she just doesn’t like Americans. And I expect she never did like me very much.” In spite of herself, Vinnie’s voice wavers.
“Aw, baby. It’s rough to be cursed out like that. I wish I was there; I’d make you feel better.”
“I’m all right, really. It’s just that it upset me, the way she kept changing voices.”
“Yeh, I get what you mean. Myrna used to do something like that. She’d be screaming at me or the kids, or maybe the help, practically out of control. Then the phone would ring, and she’d answer it sweet and smooth as soft ice cream, talking to some client or one of her lady-friends. Just as easy as switching channels. It used to spook me.”
“I can understand that. You wonder which one is real.”
“Yeh. Wal, no. I never wondered that.” Chuck laughs harshly. “Listen, honey. Maybe what you need is to get out of London for awhile. I mean, you don’t hafta be back home till late August, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Wal, I was thinking. There’s a lotta folklore down here in Wiltshire. All these books and manuscripts and stuff in the historical society, I was looking at some of them the other day. And there’s schools here of course, and kids. There oughta be lots of rhymes you could collect. I was thinking, maybe you could come down and stay with me for the summer. There’s plenty of room for you to work here. I’d really like that.”
“Oh, Chuck,” Vinnie says. “That’s kind of you, but—”
“Don’t decide now. Think about it awhile. Okay?”
“Okay,” Vinnie repeats.
Of course she can’t spend the whole summer in Wiltshire, she tells herself after she has hung up; she doesn’t want to leave the London Library and all her friends. But a short visit—several visits, even—that might be possible. And that way she could see Chuck every day, and every night, without anyone in London knowing about it. Yes, why not?
While she wasn’t watching it, Vinnie’s headache has dissolved. She feels able to go out to dinner after all.