Fred, however, sees little of this. His mood is gray, flat, icy, and bitter as a brackish winter pond. In less than two days he will be gone from London, without having finished his research, seen Rosemary again, or heard from Roo. More than two weeks have passed since he cabled an answer to his wife’s letter: but though his message included the words LOVE and CALL COLLECT, there has been no answer. He had waited too damn long, or Roo never wanted him back in the first place.

As for his work, it is in a dead funk. He goes through the motions of scholarship, reading primary and secondary sources, copying down quotations from Gay’s work and from eighteenth-century critical essays, contemporary records, and true-crime narratives, patching them together somehow into a kind of whole, but it is all false and forced. Everything Fred puts into his two battered canvas suitcases reminds him of failure, of waste. Stacks of notes—skimpy and disordered compared to what they should have been—half-empty notebooks, blank three-by-five-inch index cards. Unanswered letters, including one from his mother and two from students asking for recommendations which should have been dealt with weeks ago. A favorite snapshot of Roo at fourteen with a pet rabbit, taken by her with her first time-release camera; the innocent warmth of her smile, the openness, the trust, wrenches his heart: this Roo has never loved him or any man, never been hurt by him—A great lump rises in Fred’s chest; he turns the photograph face down, sets his jaw, goes on with his packing.

Paper, envelopes, manila folders, all unused, mutely accusing. Programs for plays, operas, and concerts he’d attended with Rosemary—why the hell is he still saving these? Fred shoves them in the overloaded wastebasket. The long handwoven tan cashmere scarf that Rosemary gave him for his birthday, winding it round and round his neck with her own hands. A square of pocket mirror with the mauve-pink imprint of her mouth on it, commemorating their first kiss. They had just finished lunch at La Girondelle in the Fulham Road, and Rosemary was renewing her lipstick. Fred, suddenly realizing that they were about to part, leaned over the table toward her, saying something impulsive, passionate. She glanced up, smiling slowly and wonderfully, then blotted her open mouth on the glass to avoid smudging his. How charming, how thoughtful, he had marveled. Later he had put his hand on her wrist to stop her from returning the bit of mirror to her handbag, claiming it as a souvenir. Now it has another meaning: before she kissed him, Rosemary had kissed herself.

Stop thinking about it, Fred tells himself. It’s over, for Christ’s sake; he’s leaving London the day after tomorrow and he will probably never see Rosemary Radley again. Also, as he realized this morning when he emptied his closet, he will never see again his Ragg sweater from L. L. Bean, his blue chambray workshirt, his Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, and his spare toothbrush and razor, all of which he left at Rosemary’s before the day of her party.

But he can’t stop thinking about it. Angry as he is at Rosemary, he hasn’t been able to forget her. Several times in the last two weeks, against his better judgment, and giving himself the lame excuse that he just wants to pick up his sweater, shirt, etc., he has dialed her number. Most of the time it rings on and on, unanswered, though once Mrs. Harris picked it up, growled out, “Nobody home,” and slammed down the receiver. He also tried the answering service, where a falsely refined female voice always informed him that Lady Rosemary was “out of town.” A warble of amused condescension the last time he called suggested to Fred that the female voice knew all about him; that as soon as he hung up she would turn to other females and say: “Guess who just phoned Lady R again, the moron; when will he smarten up?” Though he left his name, Rosemary never called back.

Suppose he were to leave the message that he wasn’t going back to America, would Rosemary call him then? Yes, maybe, Fred thought. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for. Or maybe not. It has occurred to him that in a way their love affair has reenacted Anglo-American history. Rosemary may have loved him, but she has the colonial mentality; she would do anything for him but grant him independence. When he demanded that, it was war.

Partly in order to stop himself from telephoning Rosemary again and leaving this self-destructive message, Fred has just had his phone cut off. His other, more rational motive was to save money. As it is, he’s going home dead broke, and in debt on both sides of the Atlantic.

He shuffles through a pile of letters from relatives and friends, consigning most to the wastebasket. Among them is a postcard from Roberto Frank in Buffalo. The reverse of the card is a painting from the Albright-Knox Gallery by Sir Joshua Reynolds: Cupid as Link Boy, 1774—selected because of Fred’s interest in the period, he had assumed. Now he looks at the picture more closely.

Ostensibly, it is a half-length portrait of one of those urchins who for a small fee used to light travelers through the streets of eighteenth-century London at night. This Cupid is no plump, laughing, naked babe: he is slight, shabbily dressed in contemporary costume, and seems about nine or ten. He is good-looking—indeed, he rather resembles Fred himself at that age—but quite obviously a dark angel. He has small black bat wings, and holds his long smoldering dark torch in a phallic position, braced against his crotch; a spurt of flame and stained smoke rises from it into the sooty air. Cupid, however, looks away from the torch over his shoulder and down to the left, with a brooding, sorrowful expression—regret for what he has done to so many humans, maybe. Behind him, sketchily indicated, is a London street along which an ill-matched couple can be seen walking away: the man tall and stick-thin, the woman grossly fat, like Jack Sprat and his wife.

Yes, Fred thinks: this is the little dark god who has scorched him—he can feel the wound blistered and smoldering still—twice mismatched, to two beautiful angry impossible women he can’t get out of his mind. To be unhappily in love with one woman is bad enough, but to be longing after two alternately is laughable. Roberto certainly would laugh.

Smarten up, he tells himself. Forget about them. Get on with your damn packing. He yanks out the jammed top drawer of the desk angrily, causing it to tilt downward and scatter its contents onto the floor: pencils, paper clips, old bus maps, pamphlets about tourist attractions. Among the avalanche of debris something falls with a heavier, more metallic sound. Fred bends to look and recognizes the keys to Rosemary’s house in Chelsea, which he thought he’d lost weeks ago.

The house is empty now, probably. He could go there this afternoon and reclaim his possessions, which he doesn’t want to lose—especially the book, which is annotated, and his Ragg sweater. Rosemary will never even know he’s been there, or miss anything. Her books are many and disordered, and her closet, being outside Mrs. Harris’ theater of operations, is always in chaos. Okay, let’s go. He jams the drawer back into the desk, and its former contents into the wastebasket, and sets out. At Notting Hill Gate, too impatient to walk, he descends into the tube station.

As he stands in South Kensington Underground Station, still hesitating, a sign pointing the way TO MUSEUMS reminds Fred that he has been in London for five months without visiting the Victoria and Albert, so highly recommended by everyone as a repository of eighteenth-century furniture and artifacts. He decides to stop there first while he makes up his mind. If he doesn’t go on to Rosemary’s, at least he will have done something professionally useful.

Five minutes later he has passed from the warm sunny afternoon into the cool, cavernous galleries and halls of the V and A. They are almost deserted, maybe because of the weather outside. Thousands of decorative art objects lie unregarded in a shadowy gloom, through which here and there a dusty band of sunshine slants down from the tall Victorian Gothic windows to spotlight a carved medieval chest or a Georgian silver teapot. No such light strikes into Fred’s psyche: it remains uniformly clouded and chill. Everything before him is handsome, highly finished, the best of its kind; but he is unmoved. These great rooms full of national treasures don’t seem to him rich and complex and historic, but overcrowded, overdecorated—collections of too many expensive old things. He has, as Rosemary and her friends would have put it, gone off England. London especially oppresses him; it seems so crowded with architecture and furniture and tradition that there is no room to move. The city is weighted down with ghosts, haunted by its long history just as he is haunted by his short one: by the history of his affair with Rosemary and by her own past history.

These last weeks in London Fred has felt as lonely and shut out of life as he did his first month here. He has hardly spoken to any of the natives, except as a tourist might; he hasn’t seen a single one of the many people he met through Rosemary. Or, to be more accurate, he hasn’t seen them in the flesh. In the media they are everywhere: explaining the human body and international law on television; appearing in plays and films; giving their opinions about cultural events on the radio; being interviewed by newspapers; answering difficult questions with charm and erudition on quiz shows and current affairs programs. Whenever Fred opens a magazine one of them is telling him what to think about Constable or how best to cook asparagus or support nuclear disarmament. And if they aren’t quoted, they are referred to—most disagreeably, by an item in Private Eye noting that “Lady Rosily Raddled,” as it habitually calls her, has “dissolved her Yankee connection,” and making reference to a long list of other melted connections, some of them involving men Fred has met several times but never imagined that Rosemary had once slept with.

Of course he hadn’t thought that she had no past, Fred tells himself as he wanders disconsolate down a long gallery of late-Renaissance furnishings toward a looming pillared structure described on a placard as The Great Bed of Ware and said to have housed up to a dozen sleepers a night. But to be referred to in print as just one of a series—Fred clenches his teeth and focuses again on the Great Bed, associating it in his mind with Rosemary and her lovers. There is room here between these twisted columns for all those mentioned or hinted at in Private Eye, and more. And no doubt there were more. He’s only the most recent—by now, maybe not even that. Against his will he sees Rosemary, in her pale satin nightgown scattered with lace butterflies, sporting in the Great Bed with a dozen shadowy naked male figures. The legs, the arms, the cocks, the backsides—her tumbled pale-gold hair—the stained and tumbled bedclothes—the rebound of springs, the smell of sex . . .

To shake off this hallucination, Fred moves nearer and puts his hand on the unwrinkled brocade coverlet, receiving a shock: the Great Bed of Ware is as hard as stone.

But why should he be surprised? Functionally speaking this is no longer a bed. No one will ever sleep or fuck in it again. No one will sit in these high-backed oak chairs: their stringy crimson velvet seats, now faded to pink, are protected from contemporary rear ends by tarnished gilt cords. The engraved goblets in the glass cases will never again hold water or wine; the pewter plates will never be heaped with the roast beef of Old England.

Art museums are better. Paintings and sculptures continue to serve the purpose for which they were made: to be gazed at and admired, to interpret and shape the world. They live on, immortal, but all this sluff is functionally dead; no, worse, fixed in a kind of living death, like his passion for Rosemary Radley. There’s something futile, something hideous, about this immense Victorian junkshop full of expensive household things: all these chairs and dishes and cloths and knives and clocks, so many of them, too many of them, preserved forever in frozen uselessness, just as his passion for Rosemary and his love for Roo are uselessly preserved.

A revulsion from the thousands of undead objects that surround him on all sides seizes Fred, and he starts to walk, then to run toward the staircase and the exit. Outside the vast cocoa-colored mausoleum he takes deep breaths of a living air that smells of auto exhaust and cut grass. Okay, what shall he do now? Is it safe to rescue his clothes from Rosemary’s house, or should he abandon them to a V and A zombie existence?

If Rosemary were only in London—If only he’d found the damn key when she was still around—Yes, then he could have gone to the house whether she’d invited him or not, let himself in, and told her and showed her that he loved her, sworn he wasn’t tired of her. How could he be tired of Rosemary, for Christ’s sake?

If only he’d gone there sooner after their quarrel . . . Or, two weeks ago at the radio station, if only he’d been bolder, if he’d pushed his way into the studios behind some of those other people, found Rosemary, made her listen to him—Why has he become so slow, so cautious, so respectful of rules and conventions and public opinion; why has he become so—yes, that’s it—so goddamn English?

Look at him now: nearly thirty years old, nearly six arid a half feet tall, a professor at a major American university, standing dumbly in front of the V and A shifting from one foot to the other, too fucking chicken to go and get his own goddamn sweater back. For Christ’s sake, stop acting like some British twit, he tells himself, and begins to stride south toward Chelsea.

Fighting down the sensation, fixing his mind on the image of a gray sweater, Fred climbs the steps and rings the bell; he hears the two familiar musical notes of the chime within, but nothing more.

“Rosemary!” he calls finally. “Rosemary! Are you there?”

Silence. After ringing the bell again, and waiting a few more minutes, he puts his key in the lock.

The house, as he had expected, is darkened and silent. He shuts the door behind him, and forestalls the shrill clamor of Rosemary’s burglar alarm by clicking the switch under the gilt-legged hall table as he has so often done at her request.

The shutters are closed in the long drawing room, but even in this light its total disorder is evident. Newspapers and cushions are strewn on the floor, plates and glasses on the tables. Evidently Mrs. Harris too is away on holiday. He searches round for his book, but can’t see it anywhere; maybe it’s upstairs.

As Fred starts for the hall he hears noises below: a thump and a scuffling of feet. He halts, holding his breath, listening. Has Rosemary lent the house to someone? Have burglars got in in spite of the alarm system? His first impulse is to turn and run, abandoning his possessions, but this strikes him as cowardly and twit-like. Instead he looks round for a weapon, then grabs a tight-rolled black umbrella from the Chinese urn by the hall table. The poker would be more effective; but if it’s not burglars the umbrella will pass as part of his getup. That it’s a sunny afternoon won’t matter: in London many men carry such umbrellas in all weathers, as Gay and his contemporaries carried canes.

Clutching the bamboo handle so tightly that his knuckles whiten, Fred descends the dark, twisting backstairs. In the basement kitchen a greeny half-dusk seeps through the net of ivy that shrouds the barred window. A woman—Mrs. Harris, he recognizes her by her headscarf, and the mop and bucket leaning against the sink—is sitting in a rocker at the far end of the long room. In front of her is a glass and a nearly empty bottle of what looks like Rosemary’s gin.

“So it’s you,” says Mrs. Harris in a drunken, hostile cockney, hardly raising her head to look at him. Though Fred has seen her only once before, and then only briefly, he is aware of her appearance as greatly altered for the worse. Her shoes are off, and shreds of hair hang thickly over her face. “I thought you were off to the States.”

“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”

“Y’are, are you?” Her voice is slurred, shaky. “Then what the bloody ’ell are you doin’ ’ere?’”

“I’ve come to pick up some clothes I left,” Fred explains, repressing his irritation. “I heard noises, so I came down to see what was going on.”

“Oh, yeh,” Mrs. Harris sneers.

“Yeh.” He is not going to be intimidated by a drunken charwoman.

“Creepin’ into the ’ouse behind my back. I oughta call the p’lice.” She grins tipsily.

Fred doesn’t believe for a moment that Mrs. Harris will call the police, but it occurs to him that she will certainly report his visit to Rosemary, no doubt with disagreeable embellishments. “And what are you doing here?” he asks, taking the offensive.

Mrs. Harris stares at him through the gloom in a boozy, fixed way. “You tell me, Professor Know-All,” she says finally.

Fred flinches. “Professor Know-All” was one of Rosemary’s private nicknames for him, used half fondly, half mockingly when he brought forth some item of general information. Where has Mrs. Harris heard it? Either Rosemary has told her, or Mrs. Harris has listened in on their phone calls.

“Lady Rosemary’s still away, isn’t she?” Fred asks. A desperate hope has come to him that his love may have returned, or be about to return before he leaves London. Maybe Mrs. Harris has been told to come in and prepare the house for her. Some preparation! But he tries to speak pleasantly, or at least neutrally. “Is she coming back soon?”

For a long moment Mrs. Harris does not answer. Finally she shrugs. “Could be.” Either she doesn’t know, or—more likely—she has been told, or chooses, not to say.

“I wondered if you were expecting her today.” No answer. “Or tomorrow, maybe.” No answer. “Well, I guess I’ll go and get my things.”

“Right. Clear out all your bloody mess, and good riddance,” Mrs. Harris growls, reaching for the gin bottle.

Fred climbs back up to the hall, thinking that when Rosemary does get home she is in for a shock, unless Mrs. Harris manages to pull herself together first. Somebody, not him, should warn her—should tell her what her perfect charlady has been doing in her absence.

He returns the defensive umbrella to the urn and ascends the graceful white curve of the stairs to Rosemary’s bedroom. It is much brighter here: one tall shutter of the bay window has been folded back, and a broad band of gold-dusted sunlight fans across what he has always thought the most beautiful room in this beautiful house: high-ceilinged, elegantly proportioned, lavishly mirrored. The walls are painted a subtle shade of rosy cream, the woodwork and the flowery plasterwork and fireplace are white; the furniture is white-and-gilt French provincial. Right now, however, the place is one hell of a mess. Drawers hang open, spilling their contents; a lamp lies fallen; the pillows and bedclothes of the four-poster have been dragged to the floor, and the dressing table is a confusion of overturned bottles and broken glass from which a stale sticky-sweet odor rises.

Fred feels a sinking of despair and guilt and longing at this mute testimony to Rosemary’s state of mind when she left London; then fury at Mrs. Harris. It is really disgusting of her not to have cleaned up, not to have spared Rosemary—and all right, himself—such a sight. This is followed by a second spasm of guilt as it occurs to him that it was he who had persuaded Rosemary to hire Mrs. Harris. In a way he is responsible for the state the house is in, and for the drunken slut sitting in the darkened basement. Well, nothing can be done about that now.

He glances into the mirrored, peach-tiled bathroom, but it is so littered and foul—the toilet, for instance, is full of turds—that he decides to forget his razor and toothbrush. Has Mrs. Harris—disgusting idea—been treating the place as her own, pawing over Rosemary’s things, using her bathroom, maybe even sleeping off a drunken stupor in her white-and-gold four-poster bed?

That would explain the disorder, and more logically. When he last saw Rosemary—when he heard her voice in the radio station, rather—she wasn’t in an emotionally disturbed state, but very much in control. Perfectly happy, in fact. He hears her light, melodious voice again: “Thank you, Dennis, and I think it’s quite marvelous to be here.” She doesn’t care about him any more; maybe she never cared.

With a kind of shudder Fred picks his way across the debris-strewn pastel-flowered Chinese carpet and opens the walk-in closet. Yes; there is his sweater, sagging from a clothes hook at the back. He throws it over his arm and looks round for the shirt, but all he can see is Rosemary’s clothes, hanging empty on all sides: her long pink cape, her forget-me-not-blue quilted robe, her gauzy blouses, and her rows of high-heeled sandals like the cages of delicate birds. Many of these garments flutter in his mind with some intimate memory. There is the trailing pale-gray evening dress printed with the blurred shadows of leaves; he remembers how he had caressed a cobwebby fold of it secretly between his fingers all through Così fan tutte; there is the apple-green silk voile she wore at her party, which whispered so caressingly as she moved.

Fred feels weak and exhausted, as if he had been running a marathon or playing squash for an hour. He leans against the frame of the closet door and tries to breathe normally. But it is no use; the balloon that has been in his chest ever since he got to Cheyne Square begins to deflate with a wet whinnying sound. Weeping, he knocks his head rhythmically against the door jamb to provide a counterirritant. And as he does so, he becomes aware of another, less evenly rhythmical noise from below: the noise of Mrs. Harris staggering up the stairs, banging into the wall as she comes. The way it sounds, she is so drunk she can hardly walk.

He retreats into the dimness of the closet, hoping she isn’t headed this way or won’t see him; but no such luck. She pauses in the hall, breathing audibly, then stumbles into the bedroom and leans for support on the chest of drawers.

“Missing your sweetie, are you?” she says. Fred realizes that even from the back his posture must be so eloquent of misery that a drunken charwoman can read it. Not trusting himself to look at her, let alone reply—and what would be the point anyhow?—he begins sliding Rosemary’s clothes along the rod, searching for his blue workshirt and hoping that Mrs. Harris will go away.

Instead she lurches across the room toward him, catching her foot in the bedspread and only saving herself by grabbing the bedpost with both hands; then she lurches on into the closet behind Fred.

“Don’t do that now, lovey,” she says. “Let’s make hay.”

Fred stiffens. “Making hay” was his and Rosemary’s most private code phrase. On bright days like this one the westering sun would shine into this room and onto the canopied bed. Rosemary loved to lie in it, to feel it warming and coloring her white skin. “Come on, darling. Let’s make hay while the sun shines,” she had said to him once, laughing softly. A few days later he had bought her a print of Breughel’s The Haymakers, and she had tacked it on the pale-flowered wallpaper above the night stand; it is still there. He knows now for sure that Mrs. Harris has been spying on them, sneaking round and listening at doors and/or on the kitchen extension. Sick, sickening. He turns away, giving up on his book and his shirt, wanting now only to get the hell out of here.

“Excuse me, please,” he says angrily.

But Mrs. Harris doesn’t move aside. Instead she stumbles even closer. Her dirty face, what little Fred can see of it under the peroxided hair, is smeared with what looks like a mixture of soot and lipstick; he can smell her unwashed odor and her foul breath. She puts out her hand, and the soiled flowered wrapper she is wearing falls open it; beneath it is incongruously white, voluptuous naked flesh.

“Oh, darling!” she whispers in a drunken, wheezing imitation of Rosemary’s voice. She grabs Fred’s arm; she sags toward him and begins to rub her body against his.

“Quit that!” he cries. He tries to push Mrs. Harris away gently, but she is unexpectedly strong. “Let go of me, you dirty old cow!”

The charwoman’s grip slackens. He shoves her aside with such force that she falls onto the closet floor among Rosemary’s shoes, giving a kind of startled animal howl.

Fred doesn’t stay to see whether Mrs. Harris is hurt, or to help her up. Clutching his sweater, not looking back, he flees from the room and down the curving staircase two steps at a time, and slams out of the house.

Once in the street he keeps walking, at first not choosing any direction. But as he strides on, putting block after block between himself and Cheyne Square, his shock and disgust gradually moderate into embarrassment. He turns south toward the river, reaches the Embankment, and crosses the road. There he stops, leaning on the stone parapet, with the wide calm panorama of the Thames before him. The tide is almost full, and the houseboats moored upriver along the near bank rock rhythmically on its swell. To his left is the Meccano-set rococo of the Albert Bridge, with the high-summer green of Battersea Park beyond; to his right the solid Romanesque brickwork of Battersea Bridge. Slowly, the flow and pale shine of the water, the steady churning of a string of barges headed downstream, the passage of flocked clouds overhead in the glowing sky, begin to calm him.

He will never be able to dream sentimentally about Rosemary’s bedroom again, Fred thinks; but hell, maybe that’s for the best. Who wants to be haunted by some goddamn room? He admits to himself that he hadn’t gone back only for his things, but in the stupid vain hope of seeing Rosemary again. In spite of everything he isn’t over her. Maybe he only got what he deserved. His job now is to forget Rosemary, who has obviously forgotten him and is enjoying herself in some luxurious country place.

In a calmer state of mind, Fred leaves the river and heads home. He has more packing to do, and in a couple of hours he is having supper and going to a late film with two old friends who have just arrived in England for the summer.

Over crepes and Beaujolais at Obelix, around the corner from his flat, Fred recommends to his friends a number of London sights, restaurants, and cultural events, without revealing his disillusion with the place. (Why discourage them, after all? They’re only here for a few weeks.) He also relates a censored version of the scene that afternoon with Mrs. Harris. He doesn’t say, for instance, that he had a key to the house; and Rosemary is transformed into “some people I know who are out of town.” Stripped of these aspects, his experience that afternoon begins to seem almost comic, in a rough way—a scene from Smollett, or maybe a cartoon by Rowlandson. It becomes a jocular tale, a kind of jest or fabliau, and is a riotous success with Tom and Paula.

“Great story,” Tom pronounces. “It would only happen to you.”

It is true that over the years Fred has received other unwelcome—though less comically revolting—offers of this sort. Girls and women he has hardly looked at and never would look at have sometimes, there’s no denying it, thrown themselves at him, or at least in his general direction, causing him acute embarrassment. His male friends have often been less than sympathetic. Hell, they sometimes say, they wouldn’t complain if girls were falling all over them—not realizing what it’s really like to be heavily fallen upon by some woman you don’t want, even if some other guy does.

Physical attraction is a mystery, Fred muses as he watches the lamplight playing on his wall through the leaves outside. It makes a pattern like that of the dress Rosemary wore to Così fan tutte, which folded itself closely round and floated loose below her apple-blossom breasts, that he will never see or touch or kiss again.

Why is it that something which makes a beautiful woman like Rosemary more beautiful—for instance, large soft white breasts—makes a slattern like Mrs. Harris even more disgusting? Mrs. Harris’s breasts aren’t really any heavier than Rosemary’s, he thinks, allowing himself to visualize the scene in the closet for the first time; they are about the same size. They have the same kind of big strawberry-pink nipples, and there was even the same sort of pale-brown mark on the left one, like an ostrich feather—

No. Lying between the sheets, Fred shudders from head to toe. No, he must have imagined it.

But the memory is photographically clear. Mrs. Harris has Rosemary’s breasts. She is about the same size as Rosemary; she has almost the same color hair. She seems to be living in Rosemary’s house, drinking Rosemary’s gin, sleeping in Rosemary’s bed.

Of course her voice and accent were completely different. But Rosemary’s an actress; she’s often imitated Mrs. Harris. Oh, Jesus Christ. Fred sits up in the darkened room with his mouth hanging open as if he were seeing some foul ghost.

But hold on a minute. He’s met Mrs. Harris before, he would’ve noticed—Yeh, but he only met her for a moment, one evening when he’d got to the house too early. Mrs. Harris had opened the door a crack and, hardly looking at him, grumbled that Lady Rosemary wasn’t home yet. She wouldn’t even let him in to wait; he had to go to the pub round the corner.

She wouldn’t let him in—she wouldn’t ever let anyone in when she was working there—not because she couldn’t stand people underfoot, like Rosemary said, but because they might recognize her—because she was—Because the drunken harridan whom he called a filthy old cow and knocked onto the bedroom floor this afternoon was his false true love, the star of stage and screen, Lady Rosemary Radley.

Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ. Though he is unconscious of having got out of bed, Fred now finds himself standing naked in a patch of blurred moonlight, pounding his fist against the wall. He stops only because he hears steps overhead; the repeated reverberating thud has woken another tenant—or worse, his landlord.

Maybe there was a Mrs. Harris once. And then she left, only Rosemary didn’t tell anybody, and she kept on answering the phone in Mrs. Harris’ voice. Or maybe there never was any Mrs. Harris; maybe Rosemary was cleaning the house herself the whole goddamn time.

How could he have been so dumb and deaf and blind this afternoon? Why hadn’t he known?

Because Rosemary had fixed in his head the idea of herself as beautiful and graceful and refined and aristocratically English, and anyone who wasn’t that, even if they were living in her house and sleeping in her bed and speaking with her voice, wasn’t Rosemary. So when she decided she didn’t want to see him or talk to him all she had to do was put on Mrs. Harris’s clothes and Mrs. Harris’s accent. That was what she’d done today. And she’d deliberately mocked him by using their private lovers’ language; she’d destroyed everything they’d ever had together.

And maybe that’s how it had been the whole goddamn time, Fred thinks, staring out the open window into the windy half darkness. Because if Rosemary had ever really loved him, she wouldn’t have pulled a trick like that. All these months he’s loved somebody who was as much a theatrical construct as Lady Emma Tally. She’d been putting him on the whole goddamn time, pretending to be Lady Rosemary when she wanted him and pretending to be Mrs. Harris when she didn’t—and God knows who she really was.

Well, now he’s got the message. She doesn’t want to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her either. Even if she were to welcome him back passionately, to be again the Rosemary he’d loved, he wouldn’t believe it. He’d always be looking and listening for clues that she was only acting a part.

Fred flings himself onto his bed, where he lies for a long time staring at the play of nervous shadows on the paint-clogged Victorian plaster garlands of the ceiling. At last, despairing of sleep, he gets up. He pulls on some clothes, turns on the lights, and starts cleaning the fridge and the kitchen cupboards, throwing out most of the food and saving the rest for the Vogelers, with whom he will be having a final supper this coming evening. A bottle with an inch or two of Scotch remaining in it doesn’t seem worth lugging to Hampstead, so Fred pours it into a glass, adds lukewarm tap water, and drinks as he works.

As he clears the cupboard over the sink, he stops dead with a package of McVitie’s Cream Crackers in his hand, suddenly remembering Rosemary’s party, and Edwin Francis standing on the stairs eating one of these crackers overloaded with pâté, and confiding in his nervous nice-old-lady manner that he was worried about Mrs. Harris’s effect on Rosemary. He hears Edwin saying: “She can get a bit frantic . . . She can get into rather a state sometimes.”

Suppose Rosemary hadn’t been playing Mrs. Harris as a joke, out of rage and spite when she saw Fred, whom she thought she’d got rid of, walk into her kitchen. Because she couldn’t have expected him. Whether he’d been there or not she would have been sitting drinking in the basement in Mrs. Harris’s clothes.

Suppose she wasn’t just acting; suppose she was “in a state,” whatever that means. What if Fred isn’t the only one who doesn’t know who Rosemary is? What if she doesn’t know either? What if she is a disturbed person, and there’s something really wrong with her?

Maybe Rosemary has started to drink at other times before this; maybe she’s become “frantic”—had some kind of breakdown—in the past, maybe more than once. Is that what Edwin was hinting? Was he trying to warn Fred?

No. More likely Edwin was asking for his help, just as he’d claimed, twittering that he wouldn’t feel comfortable unless Fred promised to “look out for our Rosemary.” Fred hadn’t paid any attention; he hadn’t looked out for their Rosemary. He hadn’t been able to, because an hour or two later she’d thrown him out of her house. Anyhow, he hadn’t thought she needed to be looked after.

But maybe she needs it now, he tells himself as he stands in the kitchen holding the box of crackers. If she’s on a binge or having a nervous breakdown or both, somebody ought to be taking care of her. The trouble is, who?

By three A.M. he has finished the Scotch, two leftover beers, and most of a bottle of souring white wine. He is drunk in Notting Hill Gate, and Rosemary is drunk or mad in Chelsea It’s all too goddamn much for him. He wants to go home to America; he wants to see Roo again. Only by now she probably doesn’t want to see him, he thinks, falling back onto the bed without bothering to take off his clothes, and dizzily spiraling into unconsciousness.