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.