In Britain, Vinnie has observed, most lecturers feel an obligation to entertain their listeners and to avoid jargon; it is therefore usually safe to attend any public talk if the topic seems interesting. Maria Jones, however, is too nervous to think of her audience, and is made almost inaudible by shyness; and Dr. Smithers is too self-satisfied. He has, as he puts it, “studied extensively in the United States,” and delivers his platitudes with a bland transatlantic pompousness. Like some American educators, he insists upon speaking of The Child as a sort of abstract metaphorical figure—one of those Virtues or Graces represented in stone on public monuments. Smithers’ abstract Child is full of Needs that are in danger of being “unmet” and of Creative Potential that must be “developed” if “he-or-she” is to become a “full human being.” Vinnie has always especially detested the latter phrase; this evening it has an ironic ring—seeming inevitably to refer to Smithers’ own physique, which is of a rotundity rare in Britain. In Vinnie’s own country, according to statistics (borne out by her own observation) one out of three men over thirty is overweight. Here most remain trim; but those few who do become fat, as if by some law of averages, often becomes excessively so. In the same way, those British minds that allow themselves to be filled with jargon swell to sideshow proportions.

Warming to his subject, exceeding his allotted twelve minutes, Smithers declares that The Child’s “moral awareness” must be awakened by “responsible literature.” The frictions and stresses of Our Contemporary World press hard upon The Child; he-or-she (Smithers, no doubt aware that the majority of his audience is female, has used this awkward pronoun throughout his talk) must be able to look to literature for guidance.

Vinnie yawns angrily. There is no Child, she wants to shout at Smithers, there are only children, each one different, unique, as we here in this room are unique—perhaps more so, for we are all in the same profession and have been sanded down over time by the frictions of your nasty Contemporary World.

How much nicer and less boring it would be if we were all still children, Vinnie thinks. Then, as she often does on boring public occasions, she relieves her restlessness by imagining the weight of years lifted suddenly from everyone in the room. The older members of the audience, like herself, become children of ten or twelve; the undergraduates mere babies. Whatever their new age, all those present, upon finding themselves transformed, share a single thought: Why am I sitting here on this chair listening to this nonsense? At their table, the speakers and the moderator look at each other with surprise. Smithers, who is now a fat, earnest boy of six, drops his notes to the floor. Vinnie’s friend Margaret—already at nine a sensible, kind, observant little girl—leans over to comfort Maria Jones, who is now only about three years old, but already painfully anxious in public. Margaret wipes Maria’s brimming tears and helps her to climb down from the platform. In the audience the baby students toddle about, playing house under overturned chairs, scribbling on the walls with pencil and chalk, building and demolishing textbook towers with shrieks of mirth.

It would be only just if some minor, humorous god, perhaps The Child Him-Herself, were to work such a metamorphosis, Vinnie thinks. The very idea of making children’s literature into a scholarly discipline, of forcing all that’s most imaginative and free in what Smithers calls Our Cultural Heritage into a grid of solemn pedantry, pompous platitude, and dubious textual analysis—psychological, sociological, moral, linguistic, structural—such a process invites divine retribution.

Though it has given her a livelihood and a reputation, not to mention these happy months in London, Vinnie has a bad conscience about her profession. The success of children’s literature as a field of study—her own success—has an unpleasant side to it. At times she feels as if she were employed in enclosing what was once open heath or common. First she helped to build a barbed-wire fence about the field; then she helped to pull apart the wild flowers that grow there in order to examine them scientifically. Ordinarily she comforts herself with the thought that her own touch is so light and respectful as to do little harm, but when she has to sit by and watch people like Maria Jones and Dr. Smithers dissecting the Queen Anne’s lace and wrenching the pink campion up by its roots, she feels contaminated by association.

Smithers now figuratively spreads out his collection of dead flowers, pours a final slow molasses-jug full of clichés over them, and sits down looking self-satisfied. The discussion period begins; earnest persons rise and in assorted accents direct self-promoting speeches disguised as questions to the panel members. Vinnie yawns behind her hand; then she unobtrusively opens the latest New York Review of Books, bought at Dillon’s on her way to the symposium. She smiles at one of the caricatures; then she receives an unpleasant shock. On the facing page, in a prominent position, is the announcement of a collection of essays entitled Unpopular Opinions, by L. D. Zimmern, whom she hasn’t thought of for weeks.

She is startled too by the accompanying photograph, which doesn’t at all resemble the figure in her imagination, the victim of polar bears and the Great Plague. Zimmern is older than she has pictured him, thin and angular rather than heavy, and not bald—indeed, he has more hair than necessary, including a short dark pointed beard. His semi-smile is ironic, verging on scornful or pained.

But it doesn’t matter what Zimmern actually looks like. What matters is that he is about to publish, probably already has published, a book that is almost certain to contain his awful Atlantic article. This disgusting book, available both in hard cover and in paperback, is at this very moment in bookshops all over the United States, lying in wait for anyone who might come in. It will be—or has already been—widely reviewed; it will be—or has been—purchased by every large public and university library in the country. Presently it will be catalogued, and shelved, and borrowed, and read. It will shove its sneering way even into Elledge Library at Corinth. Later, probably, there will be an English edition, and possibly—especially if he is one of those awful post-structuralists—a French edition, a German edition . . . The hideous possibilities are endless.

Vinnie feels a sour, burning pain beneath her ribs, the gift of L. D. Zimmern. To relieve it she tries to picture him as a child among the instant children here: an unpopular child, scorned and persecuted by the others. But the scene won’t come clear. She can transport Zimmern to London University mentally, but she is unable to make him young. Persistently fixed in sour middle age, he stands by the deserted speakers’ table glancing round condescendingly at the roomful of riotous children, including or especially Vinnie.

And even if she could imagine another suitably sticky end for Zimmern, she thinks, what’s the point? This violent fantasizing is unhealthy; also useless. There is no way Vinnie can actually revenge herself; no forum for her except magazines like Children’s Literature that Zimmern and his colleagues will never see. She can’t even complain to her friends any longer, not after so many months—it would make her seem neurotic, obsessed.

Besides, Vinnie is reluctant to relate her troubles at any time. She believes that talking about what’s gone wrong in one’s life is dangerous; that it sets up a magnetic force field which repels good luck and attracts bad. If she persists in her complaints, all the slings and arrows and screws and nails and needles of outrageous fortune that are lurking about will home in on her. Most of her friends will be driven away, repelled by her negative charge. But Vinnie won’t be alone. Like most people, she has some acquaintances who are naturally magnetized by the unhappiness of others. These will be attracted by her misfortunes, and will cluster round, covering her with a prickly black fuzz of condescending pity like iron filings.

The one person Vinnie could safely complain to is Chuck Mumpson. He is outside the operations of the magnetic system, and nothing printed in any book can alter his view of her, for it does not depend on her professional reputation or the opinions of others. To Chuck, L. D. Zimmern is a no-account sorehead that nobody in their right mind would pay any attention to. “Who gives a hoot in hell what some creep says in a magazine?” as he once put it. Vinnie finds this ignorance of the ways of the academic world both wonderfully restful and very frustrating, just as she does many things about Chuck. It is this ambivalence, no doubt, that keeps her from fixing a date for her visit to Wiltshire.

Chuck has, for instance, an intellectual resilience she hadn’t suspected earlier. By now, for instance, he has not only managed to reconcile himself to the fact that the Hermit of South Leigh was an illiterate farm laborer, but to take as much pride in him as if he had been a learned earl. When she remarked on this, he generously attributed his change of heart to her. “The way you love me—it makes everything that happens okay,” he said. Vinnie opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. “I don’t think I love you,” she had been about to say. But she’s never said she did, and probably Chuck only meant “the way you make love to me.”

That she can accept; can affirm. Physical pleasure of the sort she’s known with Chuck does improve the entire world; it becomes a humming, spinning top in which all the discordant colors are blurred and whirled into a harmony that spirals out from that center. When she is away from him the spin slackens; the top totters, lurches, falls, showing its ugly pattern. Lying alone in bed under only a flowered sheet, these warm short nights of late June when darkness seems merely to blow over the city and the sky begins to flush with light at three-thirty A.M., she longs physically for Chuck. But then morning comes; the telephone gives its characteristic excited double ring, higher-pitched and more rapid than in America. June is a highly social season in London, and Vinnie’s appointment book keeps filling itself up with interesting parties, leaving no room for a trip to Wiltshire.

Besides, if/when she does go, what will it be like staying with Chuck, in his house? It’s ages since Vinnie shared a place with a man—or with anyone. And after all, it is partly by choice that she hasn’t done so. In the score of years since her marriage ended she probably could have found a housemate if she’d wanted one—if not a lover, then some good friend.

“Don’t you ever feel frightened living alone? Don’t you ever get lonely?” say Vinnie’s friends—or rather, her acquaintances, for any friend who asks these questions is instantly, though sometimes only temporarily, demoted to an acquaintance. “Oh no,” Vinnie always replies, concealing her irritation. Of course she feels frightened, of course she gets lonely—how stupid can they be? Obviously she only puts up with it because for her the alternative is worse.

Sometimes, in spite of her disclaimers, her acquaintances go on to suggest that it really isn’t safe for a small aging single woman to live alone, that she ought to get herself a large unfriendly dog. But Vinnie, who dislikes dogs and is unwilling to conform to the stereotype of the lonely old maid, has always refused to do so. Fido has remained her only companion. It has occurred to her that she treats him much as the traditional spinster does her pets: until two months ago he went almost everywhere with her, and was alternately indulged and scolded.

The truth is that Vinnie isn’t temperamentally suited to a shared life. The last time Chuck was in London, nice as that was (she recalls a particular moment when they were lying moving together on her sitting-room carpet, looking up through the bay window at a sky full of green moving leaves), even then she sometimes felt—how to put it?—crowded, invaded. Chuck is too large, too noisy; he takes up too much room in her flat, in her bed, in her life.

And it isn’t only Chuck who makes her feel this way. Whenever she stays with friends, however fond she is of them, she is uncomfortable. So many things about sharing a house bother her: for instance, the unending necessity for politeness, both positive and negative. The Please and Thank You and Excuse Me and Would You Mind If; the daylong restraint of the natural impulse to yawn, to sigh, to scratch her head or pass wind or take off her shoes. Then, there is the sense of being constantly, even if benevolently, observed, making it impossible to do anything odd or impulsive—go for a walk in the rain before breakfast, for instance, or get up at two A.M. to make herself a cup of cocoa and read Trollope—without provoking anxious inquiry. “Vinnie? What are you doing down there? Are you all right?”

And then there is the noise and clutter that’s involved in having someone else always around, walking from room to room, opening and shutting doors, turning on the radio, the television, the record player, the stove, and the shower. Having to negotiate with this someone before you did the simplest thing: having to agree with them about when and where and what to eat, when to sleep, when to bathe, what film to see, where to go on holiday, whom to invite to dinner. Having to ask permission, as it were, to see her friends or hang a picture or buy a plant; having to inform someone every single damn time she felt like taking any action whatsoever.

It had been that way with her husband almost from the start. And even with Chuck, who is wonderfully easygoing, sharing a flat was like playing a permanent game of Grandmother’s Steps. “I think I’m going to have a bath now and go to bed.” “Okay, honey.” “I’m going up to the shops now.” “Okay, honey.” And if you didn’t remember to ask permission before you did anything: “Hey, honey, where were you? You just disappeared—I was kinda worried.” (Go back: you forgot to say “May I?”) And of course the whole thing was reciprocal, so that when whoever you were living with wanted to go to the store, take a bath, move a piece of furniture, or any of a hundred other things, you had to listen to them asking you for your permission.

And then finally, after you had begun to tolerate living like this, because you’d begun loving the other person—after you’d learned even to like it, maybe, and depend on it—they walked out on you. No thanks, Vinnie thinks.

The trouble is, it’s too late to say No thanks. She will go to Wiltshire soon because she wants to go there; she won’t be able to stop herself, because somehow by accident Chuck Mumpson, an unemployed sanitary engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has got into her life in such a way that she cares about him and depends on him to a degree she would be embarrassed to admit to her London friends, and even more to her American ones.

And when she goes down to Wiltshire it will be worse. There is a terrible danger that she will become wholly entangled, caught. Vinnie imagines the English countryside in June—in itself a seduction. Then she imagines walking with Chuck between flowering hedgerows, lying beside him in some grassy flower-strewn glade in the woods . . . All her caution and reservations will give way; she will be lost. She will feel more and more for him, and the more she feels the worse it will be when he comes to his senses later.

Vinnie knows, she has taught herself to know in over thirty years of loss and disappointment, that no man will ever really care for her. It is her belief, almost in an odd way her pride, that she has never been loved in the serious sense of the word. Her husband had once said he loved her, of course, but events soon proved this a delusion. The few other men who claimed to do so had made the assertion when carried away by desire, telling her then, and only then, what soon enough turned out to be a lie. Chuck, she admits, has said it on other occasions—out of politeness, she had told herself, or out of some antiquated code of Wild Western honor that made it necessary for him to believe he loved in order to justify what was, after all, adultery. He has even praised her looks (“Everything about you, it’s so kinda little and neat; you make most of the women back in Tulsa look like plow horses.”)

Perhaps at the moment Chuck does think he loves her, because she was nice to him when he was in a state of despair; because she took him in and scolded him and cheered him up—just as she had done with her former husband years ago. But once his confidence has been fully restored, he—like her husband—will look at Vinnie again and see her for what she is, a small, selfish, unattractive, aging woman. He will turn away to someone younger and prettier and nicer, and nothing will remain of his love for Vinnie except a kind of tired guilty gratitude.

Vinnie knows all this—and yet she also knows that she cannot prevent herself from going to Wiltshire. All she can do, and that not for very long, is put it off. She can accept invitations in London. She can remind herself of Chuck’s faults; she can cast a cold eye on her own passion, telling herself that he isn’t even her type physically: he’s too large-boned, beefy, and freckled; his hair is too thin, his features too blunt. True, all true—but no use: she wants him still.

After the symposium, and the reception that follows it, which is well supplied with wine and with literary conversation, Vinnie returns to her flat in a superficially improved but essentially down mood, brooding about Unpopular Opinions and her helplessness in the face of L. D. Zimmern’s persecution. She has a strong impulse to telephone Chuck in the country; but it’s almost eleven, and he will surely be asleep, for the archaeologists keep early hours. As she looks indecisively at the telephone, it rings. It isn’t Chuck on the line, however, but a young strong female American voice, with a tremor of urgency.

“This is Ruth March,” it announces, as if Vinnie ought to recognize the name, which she doesn’t. “I’m calling from New York. I’m trying to get in touch with Fred Turner; I have his number in London, but it’s been disconnected. I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I have to reach him, it’s really important.”

“Really,” Vinnie repeats flatly, annoyed at the voice for not being Chuck’s. “Are you one of his students?”

“No, uh,” Ruth March stutters, then declares, “I’m his wife. I met you at an English Department party in Corinth.”

“Oh yes.” A vague image appears in Vinnie’s mind, the image of a tall, dark, annoyingly handsome young woman in a black jersey. Not for the first time, she thinks that the feminist practice of keeping one’s unmarried name, though politically admirable, has social disadvantages. “Well, I wish I could help you, but I think he’s about to leave for New York anyhow—tomorrow, I believe.”

“I know he’s coming back tomorrow. But the thing is, I won’t be in Corinth then, I have to fly to New Mexico about a job there. I was away before, on a photo assignment, so I didn’t get the telegram he sent me, so I couldn’t call him, otherwise I would have.” Fred’s estranged wife is beginning to sound almost out of breath. “I want to get hold of him now, so we can meet in New York, because I’ll be there tomorrow night.”

“Yes,” Vinnie says neutrally.

“I thought maybe you might know where he is.”

“Well.” As a matter of fact Vinnie does know where Fred is now. When she saw him the day before yesterday at the British Museum he told her that he was going to have dinner with Joe and Debby Vogeler on his last night in London, and then go with them to watch the Druids perform their midsummer solstice rites on Parliament Hill. “Yes; I think he’s with some friends, people named Vogeler.”

“Oh yeh. I know who you mean. Do you have their number?”

“I think I have it somewhere. Hang on just a moment.” Vinnie runs into the sitting room, thinking again how stupid it was of her landlord to have the telephone installed in the bedroom. “Here . . . no, sorry. Wait a sec.” Embarrassing moments pass as she shuffles through scraps of memo paper and cards from mini-cab companies, increasing Ruth March’s transatlantic telephone bill. “Well, I’m sure I can find it if I have time to look,” she says eventually, “I tell you what; when I locate the number I’ll phone and give Fred your message.”

“Oh, would you? That’s wonderful.” Ruth releases a grateful sigh. “If you could just please ask him to call me in New York, as soon as he gets into Kennedy.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I’ll be at my father’s place. I think he has the number, but anyhow it’s in the book: L. D. Zimmern, on West Twelfth Street.”

“L. D. Zimmern?” Vinnie repeats slowly.

“Uh huh. Maybe you know him? He’s a professor.”

“I think I’ve heard of him, yes,” Vinnie says.

“And hey. When you speak to Fred, you could tell him, if you wouldn’t mind—”

Stunned by what she has just learnt, Vinnie is silent. Ruth March takes this for assent.

“Tell him I love him. Okay?”

“Okay,” Vinnie replies mechanically.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. You’re a real sport.”

As soon as she hangs up, Vinnie begins searching for the Vogelers’ phone number. At the same time, rather distractedly, she wonders why Fred’s wife is not named Ruth Zimmern or Ruth Turner. Maybe she’s been married before. The idea in the forefront of her mind, however, is that her wish has been granted. Her generic and specific enemy has been, in a manner of speaking, delivered into her hands; the sins of the father can be visited upon the daughter, a young, beautiful, and loved woman. Without the slightest effort Vinnie can prevent Ruth and Fred from having a reconciliation—for surely that is what it would be—in New York. And her subconscious seems eager to cooperate, for the Vogelers’ phone number refuses to surface. Vinnie is positive that she has it somewhere, written on the back of a British Museum call slip; but this slip, in league with her worser nature, has concealed itself completely. Yet her better nature, which doesn’t believe in the law of genealogical justice—what harm has Ruth March ever done her?—continues to search.

Of course it doesn’t really make any difference, she thinks, giving up at last. If Fred doesn’t meet his wife in New York tomorrow they’ll get back together eventually. She will phone him from New York tomorrow, or from New Mexico, or wherever she is going.

Or maybe she won’t phone him, because she’ll believe that he got her message and deliberately ignored it. She’ll be hurt, angry. She’ll take that job she mentioned and move to the opposite corner of the United States and that will be the end of their marriage.

Well, too bad—or maybe not so bad after all. Since she is L. D. Zimmern’s daughter, Ruth may very well take after him. She may be spiteful, inconsiderate, destructive; the sort of wife Fred or any man is well rid of—just as her first husband, if he exists, was well rid of her. Probably it’s her fault that her marriage broke up in the first place; nobody could say that Fred was hard to get on with. Anyhow, Vinnie can’t do anything for her. She hasn’t got the Vogelers’ phone number, and she doesn’t know anyone who might.

The trouble is, she does know where Fred is, or at least where he soon will be: on the highest part of Hampstead Heath with the Druids. But she certainly can’t go out at this time of night and look for him there. Nobody would expect her to do that. Let events take their course. Vinnie turns off the sitting-room lights and begins to prepare for bed.

No, most people Vinnie knows certainly wouldn’t expect her to go to Hampstead Heath. But one person would, she thinks as she sits on the side of her bed with one shoe off and one on. Chuck Mumpson would take it for granted that she’d go, without even stopping to consider the great inconvenience and even possible peril of such an excursion. And when he hears that she hadn’t delivered Ruth March’s message, he will stare at her in a surprised unhappy way, as he did once when she said she’d never met a dog she liked. She can see exactly how his face will look, and hear his voice. “You mean you didn’t even try?” it says. “Aw hell, Vinnie.”

Vinnie returns to the sitting room and turns on the lights. She unfolds her bus and Underground maps and opens her A to Z. Getting to Parliament Hill, as she suspected, would be a real chore. The London Transport Authority has made it easy for her to shop at Selfridges, consult a doctor in Harley Street, or see friends in Kensington; but it hadn’t conceived that she or any well-bred resident of Regent’s Park would ever wish to visit Gospel Oak, and little provision has been made for such a journey. She’ll have to walk all the way to Camden Town Station, take a bus or the Underground to Hampstead, and then tramp another mile or more across the Heath. And after she finds Fred—if she finds him, which is unlikely—it will be too late to return by the same route; she’ll have to pay for a taxi home.

She refolds her maps, thinking how expensive and tiring and difficult, if not dangerous and impossible, it would be to find Fred Turner on Parliament Hill at midnight; how easy and satisfying it will be to stay home and cause lasting pain and grief to a close relative of L. D. Zimmern. As for Chuck, he needn’t ever know. But at the same time she finds herself putting her shoes back on; taking her passport, bank card, and all but five pounds and some change out of her wallet as a precaution against pickpockets and muggers; and getting her new raincoat out of the closet—for though it is a warm summer night it may be cool and windy up on the Heath.

Even at past eleven Regent’s Park Road is familiar and reassuring, with only a few respectable-looking people walking dogs, or on their respectable way home. But as Vinnie crosses the intersection and starts down the Parkway toward the center of Camden Town her breath comes tighter. It is the worst time of night now, just after the pubs close; and numbers of the homeless unemployed men who hang about Camden Town have been released onto the street in a drunken and confused and possibly violent condition. She sets her mouth and walks faster, turning her head away as she passes each moldy figure or group of figures, ignoring remarks that may or may not be directed to her; once crossing the street to avoid two especially dubious-looking individuals lounging in a dark doorway, thinking that each step she hammers onto the pavement with her size 5 heels is another step further away from comfort and safety.

When Vinnie reaches the town center, rather out of breath, there are no buses at the stop, and no one waiting for them. She scurries into the station, though it hardly seems much of a refuge. It is a disagreeable place at any time of day, with a cold blast of air always rising from below and the loud, loose, continuous death rattle of the antique wooden escalator. Three scruffy young men shove their way onto the moving stairs ahead of Vinnie, glancing at her in an unfriendly, possibly threatening way. Utterly against her better judgment, she steps on behind them. At the bottom, however, without a backward glance, they disappear down a corridor.

Vinnie takes the opposite tunnel, descends the stairs, and waits for the train to Hampstead. How horrid the dark holes at each end of the platform are: they suggest that something huge and nasty is about to come rushing out of them, heading for her. A stupid thing to think, almost mad. Is it perhaps some vestigial folk-memory trace, some lingering Jungian subconscious dread of caverns and giant slimy serpents?

What does finally come out of the cavern, of course, is a train: ordinarily no danger but a kind of sanctuary. The London Underground is usually in all respects the opposite of the New York subway: well lit, warm, relatively clean, and full of harmless passengers. The car Vinnie enters, however, is less reassuring. It is almost empty, littered with old newspapers, and dimmed by some fault in its electrical system. Well, she has only three stops to go; fifteen minutes at the most.

But after Belsize Park, as sometimes happens on the Northern Line, the train slows, shudders convulsively, and grinds to a halt. The engine dies; the lights blink and dim further. There are only two other passengers in the car, both male, sitting alone at the other end across from each other. One, younger, stares angrily at the floor; the other, older, seems half drunk or half asleep or both.

In the sudden silence another Jungian monster can be heard far off, roaring through distant tunnels. Vinnie stares at her own smudged reflection in the opposite window, and then at the notice above it, which recommends a poison for blackbeetles. As the minutes pass, she begins to feel that time has stopped; that she will never reach Hampstead or anywhere else, that she will sit on this seat forever.

If it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, she wouldn’t be here. If he had never existed, he wouldn’t have had a quarreling inconsiderate daughter for Fred Turner to marry. Fred would have married some other much nicer girl, who would not have quarreled with him, who would have come with him to London. He would never have had an affair with Rosemary Radley, and Rosemary would never have insulted Vinnie in a taxi.

It is Zimmern who should be here now, imprisoned in time on an almost empty half-lit train. Vinnie imagines him sitting across from her under the advertisement for blackbeetles, looking rather like a blackbeetle himself. She imagines how as the minutes lengthen toward hours the insects so graphically depicted above Zimmern’s head will begin to crawl out of the poster and down the window frame toward him, how they will crawl in procession onto his shoulders and arms and neck and head; how he will try to brush them off, but it will do no good, for more of them will come out of the picture, and more and more. Zimmern cries out for help, but Vinnie only sits looking steadily at him, watching what happens to him, willing it to happen . . .

The lights blink brighter; the image of L. D. Zimmem fades and vanishes. The engine gives a drunken hiccup and begins to hum. Finally, with a jolt, the train starts off.

Hampstead, when Vinnie reaches it, is at first unthreatening. A blurred haze of interlocking street lights hangs over the High Street, which is well populated with harmless-looking pedestrians, and here and there an illuminated shop window. But the side streets are empty and silent. Now and then she hears the echo on the pavement of some other late walker’s tread, and occasionally a car rushes past her. At East Heath Road she halts, gazing at the path opposite, which disappears between overhanging heavy trees into acres of windy darkness. Really, to venture onto the Heath at this hour would be plain stupidity, just asking for it. The only sensible thing is to turn around and go home now, while the Underground is still running.

Impelled by this idea, Vinnie starts back down Well Walk. “I tried,” she says in her mind to Chuck Mumpson, “But the Heath was pitch-black, and I really didn’t want to get myself mugged.” “Aw, come on, Vinnie,” his voice replies. “You got this far, you can do it. You just gotta have a little gumption.”

All right, damn it, she says to him, turning round again. But as she crosses the road and starts onto the Heath her heart begins to pound warningly. A hazy, pale, nearly full moon is just clearing the trees, and the sky is a strange fluorescent smoke-red. In the fitful night breeze every stooping bush, every overhanging tree is a moving presence; and there are other, worse presences: voices and figures. Vinnie keeps stupidly walking on, feeling more and more frightened and angry at herself for having come, swerving away from every blowing leaf or strolling couple, thinking how insane it is for her to be wandering across Hampstead Heath in the middle of the night on this wild-goose chase. Who knows if she can find the goose Fred Turner on Parliament Hill, among the drifters and tramps and thieves that may be—probably certainly are—prowling about there in the dark? Who knows if she can even find Parliament Hill?

And whether or not she is robbed and injured on this foolish excursion, Vinnie realizes, there is a more certain, though more intellectual danger: the danger that her vision of London will be injured, even destroyed. So often she has boasted to her American friends that this is a benign and nonviolent city, in which her flat may be burgled when she is away, perhaps (not that this has ever happened), but she herself will never be attacked or threatened; a city where even a small woman in her fifties can go out alone at night in perfect safety. If she really believes this, why is her pulse so fast, her breathing so tight? What if it isn’t true, never has been true? How long is it since she was last alone in an unfamiliar part of London at midnight?

It is not only L. D. Zimmern’s fault that she is here, but Chuck Mumpson’s. If it weren’t for Chuck, she would be safe at home now, probably already asleep. And if she is attacked and murdered tonight on Hampstead Heath, he won’t even know what she was doing there; no one will. Vinnie almost wishes she hadn’t ever met Chuck Mumpson, or even heard of him. But it is too late for that now, So she walks on, as fast as possible, across the shadowy grassy common, under the watery moon.

Awful scenarios flicker before him of Rosemary/Mrs. Harris staggering round her house in a drunken, schizophrenic state, or dead of a broken neck at the foot of her graceful curving (but slippery) staircase. Also of her quite happy and well, laughing with friends at a dinner party, relating what a clever trick she’d played on boring old Fred: pretending to be her own charlady, pretending to be drunk. It had been so easy to fool him, she says: he was like that silly rude clerk who wouldn’t charge her groceries, and then complained about not being able to recognize Lady Emma Tally in jeans and a sweater. Maybe he’ll never know which scenario is right, or what really happened to him yesterday. He still hasn’t been able to reach Rosemary or any of her friends, and in twelve hours he’ll be on a plane to New York.

Fred is also brooding about his uncompleted book on John Gay. The directness and brilliant energy of Gay’s work, to which he had been so strongly attracted, now seem to him a façade. The more he studies the texts, the more ambiguity and darkness they reveal. It strikes him now with greater force than before that everyone in The Beggar’s Opera is dishonest; even Lucy, its heroine. Its hero, the highwayman Macheath, named after the common on which Fred now stands, is nothing more than an urban mugger on horseback, and cheerfully false to all his women. London in Gay’s time was filthy, violent, corrupt—and it hasn’t changed all that much. The streets are still dirty, the newspapers are full of crime and deception—in low-rent districts, mostly, but is it basically any better elsewhere? Who in this town gives a shit about anything except using one another and getting ahead?

Fred also compares himself, unfavorably, with Captain Macheath. The women in his life hate rather than love him; and if he is presently to perish it will not be like Macheath for what he has done, but for what he has failed to do: specifically, for his failure to write and publish a scholarly work.

Apart from their anxiety about Jakie, the Vogelers’ mood is cheerful. In the last few weeks—ever since the weather became really warm—their view of England has altered. They still don’t care much for London; but a trip to East Anglia, where their Canadian friends have been lent a cottage, has given them a passion for the English countryside. “It’s like being back in the nineteenth century, really,” Debby enthuses. “Everybody in the village is so friendly, not like here in London, and they’re all such perfect characters.”

Next month, Joe tells Fred, they and the Canadians are planning to rent a boat and cruise on the canals. “It’s too damn bad you have to leave tomorrow, otherwise you could come along. It’s going to be great.”

“Yeh, it sounds like fun,” Fred says, thinking to himself that being confined for a week on a canal boat with the Vogelers and their friends, not to mention Jakie, isn’t his idea of great. While their opinion of contemporary England has improved, his has worsened. Everywhere about him now he sees all that they used to complain of: the meaningless imitation and preservation of the past, the smug hypocrisy, the petty regulations, the self-conscious pretense of refinement and virtue. London especially—like Rosemary—seems to him alternately false and mad. He wishes it were already tomorrow evening and he were back home where he belongs, though Christ knows nothing much awaits him there. Roo never answered his telegram; she’s probably off him for good.

Joe and Debby suck in their breath, and Fred, awed in spite of himself, thinks a kind of prayer at the Druids and whatever supernatural powers they may be in touch with—in much the same spirit in which, as a child, he used to wish on a white horse and a load of hay. Make everything come out right, he whispers silently.

But as the Druids draw nearer, the illusion, like so many of Fred’s illusions about England, wavers and is shattered. At close hand these figures are undeniably modern, middle-class, and middle-aged or worse. Under their loose monkish hoods are long smooth pink-and-white English faces of the kind Fred used to see every day at the British Museum; they wear solemn self-conscious expressions and, in many cases, glintingly anachronistic spectacles. And beneath their long robes is an assortment of leather and plastic sandals, only a few pairs of which could pass even on stage as Early British.

The Vogelers don’t seem to be disturbed by these incongruities, or even to notice them. “Hey, this is great,” Joe says as the procession continues past them and forms into a straggly circle before the clump of trees that crowns Parliament Hill.

“Really pretty impressive,” Debby agrees; and in an almost reverent whisper she points out that many—in fact more than half—of the celebrants are female. Druidism is a gender-neutral faith; she read that in the Guardian.

Joe isn’t so sure. Maybe that’s the way it is now, he whispers back, but weren’t all the original Druids men?

Whatever the truth of the matter, Fred thinks as the Vogelers continue to debate the point sotto voce, these modern London Druids are patently phony and amateurish. The elbowy gestures with which their leader flourishes his ceremonial sword are awkward and unconvincing, and so are those of the two bespectacled women waving leafy branches toward the four points of the compass. The fragments of liturgy blown toward Fred on the night wind suggest an Edwardian rather than an Anglo-Saxon religious service; the manner of delivery reminds him of college productions of Greek drama. There’s something almost mad about them too, he thinks, as the Druids raise their lanterns aloft in semi-unison, chanting a hymn to what sounds like The Great Circle of Being in thin well-educated voices, and incidentally revealing a large number of anachronistic wristwatches and trouser legs.

Fred turns away, disgusted with this mummery, and with all the phoniness that surrounds him as far as his eye can see, from Bloomsbury to Notting Hill, from the lights of Highgate in the north to Chelsea in the south, and further.

As he stares toward Hampstead Village he sees another, even stupider-looking Druid climbing the path, coming from the wrong direction and obviously late for the show. At the crest of the hill she halts, peering anxiously about at the crowd of spectators; then she trudges on, wavering this way and that as if uncertain whether or not to approach her fellow-worshipers. Her welcome seems doubtful to Fred, for she is not only late but ill-equipped. She has forgotten her lantern; and small as she is her hooded robe is far too short; it doesn’t reach the ground by almost a foot, and exposes a pair of modern pumps.

Yes, Fred thinks as the foolish figure drifts nearer, this is what England, with her great history and traditions—political, social, cultural—has become; this is what Britannia, that vigorous, ancient, and noble goddess, has shrunk to: a nervous elderly little imitation Druid—

No. Wait a second. That isn’t a Druid, or even an Englishwoman. It is Vinnie Miner.

Though tired, Fred is in a far better frame of mind than he was last night. He knows now that Roo is waiting for him in New York; and he has managed to pass on his anxiety about Rosemary first to Vinnie Miner and then, with her help, to Edwin Francis, who is back from Japan and staying in Sussex with his mother.

“Oh dear,” Edwin said when Fred called early this morning and related his story. “I thought she must be away; she didn’t answer the phone. I was afraid of something like this. Well, I’ve nearly finished breakfast; I’ll take the first train in and go straight to Rosemary’s from Victoria.”

“All right. I’ll meet you there.”

“I don’t see the point of that. Besides, I thought you just told me you were leaving for the States this morning.”

“I can make it. My plane isn’t until noon.”

“Well—”

“I want to.”

“If you insist,” Edwin says with a sigh. “But promise me you won’t try to get into the house until I come.”

Restless now with waiting, Fred rises, crosses the street to the park in the center of the square, and scans the front of the house, both hoping and fearing that Rosemary will come out of it before Edwin arrives. The place looks deserted; all the shutters are closed and the stoop is littered with throwaway papers and advertising brochures. It’s hard to believe there’s anyone inside—let alone the woman he saw the day before yesterday. Or thought he saw. Was that really Rosemary, or was it only Mrs. Harris after all? What if his identification of the two was a delusion, a mental abberation caused by frustrated desire?

“Oh, there you are,” Edwin Francis says, getting out of a taxi; he looks white and anxious. “Did you try the bell? No? Good. Well, oh dear, let’s see now. I think perhaps you should go down the street a bit; it might upset her, seeing you suddenly.”

“I—All right,” Fred agrees.

He retreats, and from a middle distance watches Edwin ring and wait, then beckon him back.

“It’s rather worrying,” he says.

“Yeh.” Fred realizes that for Edwin, as for many Englishmen, the word “rather” is an intensifier.

“I think I’d better see if I can find the spare key.” He turns to one of the stone urns by the steps and begins to poke about in the earth under the ivy and white geraniums with a broken twig. “Yes, here we are.” Edwin takes out a large linen handkerchief of the sort Fred’s grandfather used to carry, and wipes the key and his small neat hands.

“I think you’d better wait,” he says, holding the door only slightly open. “Let me see what the situation is first.”

“No, I want—”

“Back in a moment.” Before Fred can protest Edwin slips into the hall and shuts the door behind him.

Fred sits down again on the steps beside his luggage. There is no sound from the house; all he can hear are the ordinary noises of a London summer morning: the wind shuffling the leaves in the square, the high voices of children playing, the lazy chirp of birds, and traffic on the King’s Road. The well-kept Victorian terrace houses, enameled in eggshell colors, glow in the warm sunlight; it is hard to believe that there is anything unpleasant behind their façades.

The door opens; he clambers quickly to his feet. “What—? How—?”

“Well, she’s there,” says Edwin. In the few minutes he has been inside something has happened to his face; he looks less worried and more angry. “She’s all right—physically that is. But she’s rather confused. She’s not quite awake yet, of course. And the house is in a dreadful state. Dreadful.” He gives a little shudder.

“Let me—” Fred tried to push past into the hall, but Edwin holds onto the door.

“I really don’t think you’d better come in. It will only upset Rosemary.”

“I want to see her.”

“What for?”

“For Christ’s sake. To know that she’s all right—To tell her I’m sorry about the other day—” Fred is younger, stronger, and much larger than Edwin Francis; if he chose, he thinks, he could easily get past him.

“I don’t see the point of that. She’s in no condition to have visitors, believe me.”

“But I want to do something. I don’t have to leave for”—Fred checks his watch—”twenty minutes.”

“I think you’ve done quite enough already,” Edwin says with a spiteful emphasis; then, registering Fred’s expression, he adds: “I expect it’s going to be all right, you know. I’m going to phone now and ask the doctor to come round, just to be sure.”

“I want to see her, damn it.” Fred puts a hand on Edwin’s shoulder and starts to shove him aside.

“Really, you make me rather cross,” Edwin says, not budging. “I’ll tell you what, though. If you’re prepared to stay in London and make Rosemary your life’s work, very well; I won’t stop you. Otherwise, anything you do is simply going to make it harder for her.”

“Just for a few minutes—” Fred realizes that in order to get past Edwin he will have to use force, perhaps even violence.

“You want to remind her that you’re leaving and make her feel worse, is that it?”

“No, I . . .” Feeling accused, Fred drops his arm and steps back. “I only want to see her, that’s all. I love her, you know.”

“Don’t be selfish.” Edwin begins to close the door. “It won’t do either of you the least good. Anyhow, the person you think you love isn’t Rosemary.”

Fred hesitates, wrenched between the desire to see her again and the fear that Edwin may be right; that he may do harm. He looks round as if for help or advice, but the street is empty.

“You go on home now, Freddy,” Edwin says. “And really, I think the best thing you can do is to forget Rosemary as fast as you can. Well, have a nice trip. And please don’t write,” he adds, shutting the door in Fred’s face.

Along with his boarding pass Fred has received a brochure listing what travelers are allowed to import into the United States. He crushes and discards it. He is too broke to buy any duty-free goods; besides, he is already weighted down with all he has acquired in England over the past six months. Physically, this isn’t much: a few books, the cashmere scarf Rosemary gave him, a stack of notes on John Gay and his times. His mental baggage is bulkier: he is carrying home a heavy weariness and disillusion with London, with Gay, and with life in general and himself in particular.

In the past Fred has thought of himself as a decent, intelligent person. Now it occurs to him that maybe he’s not so unlike Captain Macheath after all. His work, like all scholarship emptied of will and inspiration, has over the past months degenerated into a kind of petty highway robbery: a patching together of ideas and facts stolen from other people’s books.

And his love life is no better. Like Macheath’s, it follows one of the classic literary patterns of the eighteenth century, in which a man meets and seduces an innocent woman, then abandons her. Sometimes he merely “trifles with her affections”; at other times he rapes her. There are many possible endings to the story. The woman may fall into a decline and die, give birth to a live or dead baby, go on the streets, become a nun, etc. The man may go on to other victims, be exposed in time by a well-wisher, meet a violent and well-deserved end, or repent and return—either too late, or in time to marry his former sweetheart and be forgiven.

In these terms, Fred thinks, you could say that he had seduced both Roo and Rosemary and then deserted them when they needed him most—just as Macheath deserted Polly and Lucy. He hadn’t ever thought of it this way, of course. Because Roo was, in her own phrase, “a liberated woman,” because Rosemary was rich and famous, he had assumed he could do them no damage. Well, if he’s learned one thing this year, it’s that everyone is vulnerable, no matter how strong and independent they look.

Roo had wanted very badly to come to England, but he had made it impossible by quarreling with her. When she wrote in May she must have hoped that he’d ask her to join him here at once; instead he let her letter lie on his desk unanswered for weeks. He had encouraged Rosemary to love him unconditionally, while intending to love her only as long as it was convenient for him . . . Well, he had been caught there. Some part of him will probably always love her—even if, as Edwin put it, the Rosemary he loves doesn’t exist.

A notice flops on overhead announcing the boarding of Fred’s flight. Gathering his things, he follows the other passengers out into the corridor to the moving walkway that will carry them to the gate. As he stands on it, watching the same colored posters of scenic Britain that he saw six months ago—or ones much like them—move slowly backward past him, Fred feels worse about himself than he has ever felt in his adult life.

But he is, after all, a young, well-educated, good-looking American, an assistant professor in a major university; and he is on his way home to a beautiful woman who loves him. Slowly his natural optimism begins to reassert itself. He thinks that after all The Beggar’s Opera doesn’t dispense strict poetic justice. Gay steps into his play in the third act, like a god intervening in human affairs, to give it a happy ending. He interrupts the hanging of Macheath and reunites him with Polly, as Fred will soon be reunited with Roo.

Did Gay do this only to please the audience, as he claims? Or did it satisfy his own natural affection for his characters? Did he know, from experience or the intuition of genius, that there is after all hope—not for everyone, maybe, but for the most fortunate and energetic among us?

Fred’s spirits improve. He ceases to stand like a lump on the moving rubber sidewalk, and begins to walk forward along it. The colored views of Britain stream backward twice as fast as before, and he has the sensation of striding toward his future with a supernatural speed and confidence.