Or not exactly wondering: rather guessing, almost knowing that his silence must be deliberate. It has turned out just as she feared, just as it always does for her. Chuck’s affections have cooled; he has realized as many others have before him—notably her former husband—that he had mistaken gratitude for love. Possibly he has also met someone else, someone younger, prettier . . . Why should he think any more of Vinnie, who isn’t even around, who when they last spoke on the phone declined again to set a date for her visit to him?

Until that moment their conversation had been as easy and intimate as ever. Chuck was interested to hear about Roo’s telephone call and Vinnie’s midnight excursion to Hampstead Heath. “You’re a good woman,” he said during her story, and again at its end; and for the first time Vinnie almost believed him. She isn’t a good woman; but perhaps she has done one good thing.

As for Chuck himself, he seemed to be in high (too high?) spirits. Work on the dig was going great, he told her, and so was his genealogical research. “I’ve found a lotta Mumpsons now. All of them related some way, I guess, if you go back far enough. One of Mike’s students, he was saying maybe that’s why I feel so good down here. Said it could be a genetic memory, didja ever hear of that?”

“I know the theory, yes.”

“Sure, it sounds kinda crazy. But y’know, Vinnie, I really like this place. I could stay here forever, that’s how I feel sometimes. I even got the idea of buying myself a house. Nothing fancy, no castles. But there’s a lotta nice property for sale round here. Going for practically nothing, too, compared to what it’d be in Tulsa.”

The people in the local historical society had been a big help, Chuck said. One of them had even suggested that Chuck’s family might have been descendants of an aristocratic follower of William the Conqueror called De Mompesson—of which the name “Mumpson” may be a plebeian contraction. Most of Chuck’s recorded forebears, however, from what Vinnie can gather, were like Old Mumpson: illiterate or near-illiterate farm laborers. One such family, he recently learned, may have lived in the cottage where he is now staying.

“That really got to me,” Chuck said. “Last night I was looking at the furniture in my room—it’s real old, like most of the stuff here—and I was lying there wondering if maybe one of my ancestors slept in that same room. Maybe even in that same bed. And then this morning when I was out on the site—Mike was rushed because of the rain coming on, so I was lending a hand—it came to me, maybe Old Mumpson or one of his relatives dug in that same field. Maybe he even turned over that same shovelful of earth. It makes you think.”

“Yes.”

“Y’know I’ve been planning to go over to Somerset, to track down those De Mompessons. But what’s kinda weird, I almost hope I don’t find them. I don’t know if I want some Frenchy lord for an ancestor. All the same, I figure I’ll drive over there tomorrow if it’s raining like it is now. They say it’s going to keep up. Unless you might be coming down, of course.”

“No,” Vinnie said. “I don’t think so, not this weekend.”

“Okay.” Chuck gave a sigh—of disappointment, she had thought then. Now she wonders if it wasn’t also a sigh of exasperation, even of rejection. “Wal then. Maybe I’ll give you a call day after tomorrow, let you know what I find.”

Presumably Chuck is still away in Somerset, which must mean that he’s found more relatives, possibly even some aristocratic ones. But in that case, why hasn’t he called to tell her all about it? Because he’s angry at her, or tired of her, and/or because he’s met somebody he likes better. Well, she might have foreseen it. As the old rhyme puts it,

Vinnie imagines the long sitting room of a large expensive country house, far away in the southwest of England in a town she has never seen. There, at this very moment, Chuck Mumpson is having tea with newly discovered English cousins named De Mompesson, who have a rose garden and hunters. Charmed by his American naïveté and bluntness of speech, they are plying him with watercress sandwiches, walnut cake, raspberries, and heavy cream.

Beside the chintz-covered armchair in which Chuck sits, an invisible dirty-white dog yawns and lifts his head. He directs a discouraged look at Chuck; then, slowly, he rises to his feet, gives himself a shake, and pads across the peach-colored Aubusson carpet toward the door. Fido is abandoning Chuck, who no longer has any need of him; he is on his way home to Vinnie.

Well, there’s no point in brooding about it. When the rates go down at six she’ll phone again. Meanwhile she might as well get back to her own less fancy tea and to the piece she promised to the Sunday Times a month ago.

“Professor Miner?” The voice isn’t Chuck’s, but female, American, nervous, very young. Vinnie classifies it generically as that of a B-minus student, perhaps one of her own B-minus students.

“This is she.”

“You’re Professor Miner?”

“Yes,” Vinnie says impatiently, wondering if perhaps this call, like the one last week, relates to Fred Turner. But the flat, anxious tone of voice suggests not so much a lovelorn condition as some serious touristic crisis: stolen luggage, acute illness, or the like.

“My name is Barbie Mumpson. I’m in England, in a place called Frome.”

“Oh, yes?” Vinnie recognizes the names of Chuck’s daughter and of a large town not far from South Leigh.

“I’m calling you because of this picture—I mean because of my father”—Barbie’s voice wavers.

“Yes,” Vinnie prompts. An awful unfocused uneasiness has come over her. “You’re visiting your father in South Leigh?”

“Yeh—No—Oh gee, excuse me. I guess maybe—Oh, I’m so stupid—” To Vinnie, everything seems to be falling apart: Barbie Mumpson’s grasp of the English language has failed, and the room is full of darkness. “I thought maybe Professor Gilson told you. Dad, uh—Dad passed on last Friday.”

“Oh, my God.”

“See, that’s why I’m here.” Barbie goes on talking, but only a phrase here and there gets through to Vinnie. “So the next day . . . couldn’t get a seat on the plane till . . . Mom decided.”

“I’m so sorry,” she finally manages to say.

“Thanks. I’m sorry to have to tell you.” Barbie’s voice has become even more wavery; Vinnie can hear her clearing her throat at the other end of the line. “Anyhow, why I was calling,” she says finally. “There’s this old antique picture Dad had, and Professor Gilson says he wanted you to have it if anything happened to him—I mean Dad did. He was planning to give it to you anyhow, because you helped him so much with the research on his family, Professor Gilson says. So the thing is, I’ll be in London day after tomorrow, on my way home. I thought maybe I could bring you the picture then. If it was convenient.”

“Yes. Of course,” Vinnie hears herself reply.

“When should I come?”

“I don’t know.” She feels incapable of making any plans, almost of speech. “When would you like to come?”

“I d’know. Anytime. I’m free all day.”

“All right.” With what feels like a major effort Vinnie gathers her wits. “Why don’t you come about four. Come to tea.” From a distance, she hears her own voice, sounding horribly normal, giving Barbie Mumpson her address and directions.

He’d said he wanted her to have some picture if anything happened to him. Because he knew something was going to happen? Because he was planning it? Or was it some awful premonition? But his daughter hadn’t said it was an accident. She’d said nothing about what happened, only that he’d “passed on.” Would she have said that if it were an accident? Because if it was an accident, or rather, not a real accident—Vinnie’s head has begun to ache horribly—it would mean Chuck didn’t want to live, that he wanted to pass on. Stupid euphemism, what you’d say of someone who’d stopped for a moment on the street to speak to you, and then—

A choking, sinking feeling comes over Vinnie, as if the rain outside were pouring into her flat and rising up the walls of her bedroom. But all the euphemisms are stupid. Passed on, passed away, kicked the bucket, gone over to the Other Side—as if Chuck had committed a foul or switched teams in some awful children’s game.

What he has done is died; he’s dead. He’s been dead—what did Barbie say—since last Friday. All these days she’s been calling him, all the days he hasn’t been calling her . . .

That’s why he didn’t call, Vinnie thinks. It wasn’t that he was tired of me. Joy and relief flash across her mind, followed by a greater pain than before, like the beam of a lighthouse that on a dark night first pierces the gloom, and then illuminates a frightful shipwreck. Chuck wasn’t tired of her; he was dead, is dead. There is nothing left of him but his awful family, one member of which is coming to tea the day after tomorrow. And until she gets here, Vinnie will know nothing.

“Oh gee, thanks,” she says as Vinnie relieves her of these burdens. “I’m so dumb about these things.”

“Let me.” Vinnie half closes the umbrella and sets it to dry in a corner.

“I never had an umbrella before, really. I just bought this one last week, and for days I couldn’t get it open. Now I mostly can’t get it shut. I’ll figure it out some day, hopefully.”

Barbie is large and fair and healthy looking; she has a deep tan and wears an ill-fitting wrinkled pink polo shirt with a crocodile crawling across the left breast above the heart. She is also somewhat overweight, and older than her high, childish voice had suggested on the phone—perhaps in her mid-twenties.

“Please,” Vinnie says. “Come in and sit down.”

Out of some private sense of congruity, she has provided for Barbie the lavish country-house tea she had only the day before yesterday—weeks ago, it seems now—imagined the mythical De Mompessons serving to Chuck. His daughter’s appetite, like his, is good; her manners less so. She shovels in the raspberries and cream almost greedily, pronouncing them “really yummy.”

“And what do you think of England?” asks Vinnie, who feels it would be both awkward and impolitic to move at once to her real concern.

“Aw, I don’t know.” Barbie wipes cream from a square, slightly cleft chin—a disturbing feminine version of Chuck’s. “It’s not much of a country, is it?”

Repressing her reaction, Vinnie merely shrugs.

“Kinda poky and backward, you know?”

“Some people think that.” Vinnie realizes that Barbie not only has Chuck’s large, blunt, regular features and squared-off jaw (more attractive on a man than on a young woman), but his habit of blinking slowly at the end of a question.

“I mean, everything’s so small and kinda worn-out looking.”

“I suppose it might seem so, compared to Tulsa.” Vinnie allows Barbie to run on, to run down her beloved adopted country in the usual stupid tourist way. You are rightly named, she thinks, silently christening her guest The Barbarian.

“And it’s so awful wet.”

“Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t want to start an argument; she is pacing herself, waiting for the moment when she can politely ask the question that has been repeating itself in her mind and interfering with her sleep for forty-eight hours.

“How did it happen?” she bursts out finally.

“Pardon?” The Barbarian lowers a fistful of cake, shedding crumbs. “Oh, Dad. It was his heart. He was in this town hall, see, over in the next county. He went there to look at some old records, you know.”

“Yes, he mentioned he might do that.”

“Well, it was a real hot day, and the office was on the top floor. There wasn’t any elevator; you had to walk up three long flights to get to it. Anyhow, even before the librarian could bring Dad the book he wanted, while he was just standing there by the desk waiting, he just kinda collapsed.” Barbie chews and swallows audibly, rubs one fist into her left eye, then reaches for another watercress sandwich. Crocodile tears, Vinnie thinks. “Anyhow, by the time the ambulance came and they got him to the hospital he had passed.”

“I see.” Vinnie lets out a long sigh. “It was a heart attack.”

“Yeh. That’s what the doctor said.”

What they call natural causes, Vinnie thinks. Not a deliberate or half-deliberate act, not his fault—not her fault. Maybe. But if it weren’t for her, Chuck wouldn’t have died in a provincial English records office; he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. (“If it hadn’t been for you”—she hears his voice again—“I never woulda thought of looking for my ancestor.”) But what does it matter whether he died because of her, or in spite of her? Either way he is dead. He will never enter this room again, never sit where his stupid daughter is sitting now, smiling stupidly at her.

With great difficulty, Vinnie remembers her manners and focuses again on Barbie. “That’s awful,” she says. “An awful shock for you.” She frowns, recognizing that her remark is as much of a cliché as The Barbarian’s.

“Uh, well.” Barbie chews and swallows. “I mean, naturally it was, but in a way we were sorta prepared for it. Dad had been alerted, after all.”

“Alerted?”

“Oh, yeh. He’d had a couple of what d’you call them, episodes, already. The doctor in Tulsa told him he oughta take it real easy: he was s’posed to give up alcohol and cigarettes and avoid exertion as much as possible. Even then there was always some risk. I mean, he could’ve gone anytime. Maybe he didn’t mention that to you, I guess.” She blinks slowly.

“No, he didn’t mention it,” Vinnie says. Images of Chuck drinking and smoking appear in her mind, followed by one of him engaged in a particular kind of exertion.

“He shouldn’t have climbed all those stairs in that dumb old town hall,” Barbie says. “But that was how Dad was, y’know. When he got some project in his head, he had to finish it.

“Like I remember once when we were kids, I said I wished we had a treehouse,” she goes on. “And Dad got interested, and started drawing plans, and the next Saturday he was up in our big catalpa tree all day building it. Gary and me were helping him, and he made Consuelo—she was our cook then—bring out sandwiches for all of us so we wouldn’t have to stop working for lunch. By the time we got done it was nearly dark, and we had a picnic up there, we had . . . pink . . . lemonade . . . Excuse me.” She snuffles back tears.

“That’s all right.” Vinnie passes Barbie another napkin, since she seems to have lost her own.

“Thanks . . . It’s just . . .” She blows her nose loudly on the hand-hemmed linen. “I’m okay now. I haven’t been crying much. Just at first when Mom got the cable, and on the plane. And then with the cremains.”

“Cremains?” Vinnie repeats, baffled.

“Yeh. Ashes, I guess you could call them. See, Mom decided to have Dad cremated over here. Well, like she said, there wasn’t anything else to do, really. Professor Gilson arranged it: he was wonderful. He didn’t know Dad had passed till Mom phoned him, but then he got in touch with the hospital, and him and his students took care of everything. They found me a place to stay and met me at the train; they were just great, honestly. They really thought a lot of Dad. I’m so stupid, I didn’t know what to do about anything, but they helped me, like, finalize everything: pay the bills, and sort out Dad’s stuff, decide what to send home, and what to give away.”

“That’s good,” Vinnie says, trying to prevent herself from imagining the process.

“They took care of everything, really. Except for the cremains. That was kinda weird and awful, y’know. Professor Gilson had them saved for me. I thought they’d be in a big heavy silver urn or something, but it wasn’t anything like that.” Barbie snuffles, stops.

“Nothing like that,” Vinnie prompts.

“Naw. They were in a, I don’t know, a kinda waxed cardboard carton like you get with store-packed ice cream, about that size. Inside it was a plastic bag full of this kinda pale gritty gray stuff. I couldn’t believe that was all that was left of Dad, just a coupla pounds of what looked like health-food soy mix.” Barbie snuffles again, swallows.

“Then I didn’t know what to do with it,” she continues. “I didn’t know if it was legal to take cremains on a plane. I mean, suppose there was a customs inspection? I couldn’t see putting that carton in the suitcase with my clothes anyhow, y’know?” She begins to tear up again. “Sorry. I’m so stupid.”

Barbie’s continual assertion of her lack of intelligence has begun to annoy Vinnie. Stop telling me how stupid you are, she wants to say. You graduated from the University of Oklahoma, you can’t be all that stupid.

“That’s all right,” she says instead. “I think you’ve done very well, considering everything.” Almost against her will, she reclassifies The Barbarian as an innocent peasant—the victim rather than the accomplice of that Visigoth realtor her mother, who is no doubt responsible for Barbie’s low opinion of her own intelligence.

“Anyhow, when I phoned home next, Mom said not to bother,” Barbie resumes presently. “She said what I should do was scatter the cremains somewhere. So Professor Gilson drove me out in the country to a place he said Dad had liked. It was nothing special. Just this little field, on the side of a hill, that one of Dad’s ancestors owned once. It wasn’t a bad place really: kinda quiet. And Professor Gilson said hopefully it’ll never be built over; it’s too out-of-the way, and the land is too steep.

“So I climbed over the fence by these wooden steps they have here, what did he call them?”

“A stile?” Vinnie suggests.

“Yeh. That’s right. Anyhow, I got over it. And I walked up the field a ways, and sorta dumped the cremains out into the long grass and flowers. I guess I shoulda scattered them around more, but I was crying too much, and I couldn’t put my hand into the bag. It seemed kinda rude, y’know?”

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

“Poor old Dad.” His daughter sighs and reaches for the last watercress sandwich. “Mom was right. It was pathetic really, his chasing around the country looking for ancestors.”

“1 don’t see that,” Vinnie says a little snappishly. “Why shouldn’t your father have been interested in his genealogy? A great many people are.”

“Sure, I know. But they’ve mostly got someone worthwhile in their family tree. Like Mom: her side of the family is real distinguished. She’s a D.A.R., and she’s descended from a whole lot of judges and generals. Hiram Fudd, the senator, y’know, he was her great-uncle.”

“Really,” Vinnie remarks. In her mind a catalpa tree appears, with monkeys dressed as judges and generals and senators sitting in the treehouse and on the nearby branches.

“I guess Dad thought if he went back far enough he might find somebody he could be proud of too. Professor Gilson told me he was looking for months, all over the country; but all he ever came up with was a lot of farm workers and a blacksmith and this old hermit . . . At least I guess that’s what he was doing down there, besides helping Professor Gilson out sometimes. Mom wondered if maybe he’d got involved with . . . uh, you know, a woman.” Barbie blinks at Vinnie, but inquiringly rather than suspiciously. It is clear that in her mind Professor Miner is not “a woman” and probably never has been one. “I mean, do you think there coulda been anything like that?”

“I have no idea,” Vinnie says frostily, thanking heaven for the existence of British Telecom. Because of it, there will be no incriminating and distressing letters from her for Barbie or her mother to find later among Chuck’s effects. And she too has nothing of Chuck’s, not even a note—only a few of his winter clothes.

“I sorta don’t believe it. Dad wasn’t like that. He was a very loyal person, y’know.” Barbie blinks.

“Mm.” Vinnie glances involuntarily in the direction of the hall closet, where she seems to see Chuck’s sheepskin-lined winter coat glowing with a guilty fluorescence. “More tea?” She holds up the pot, aware that tea is all she can offer now: Barbie, in spite or perhaps because of her grief, has eaten all the watercress sandwiches and walnut cake.

Chuck’s daughter shakes her head, causing her long sun-bleached hair to flop about. “No, thanks very much. I guess I oughta be going.” She gets up clumsily.

“Well, thanks for everything, Professor Miner,” she says, moving into the hall. “It was real nice to meet you. Oh, hey. I almost forgot to give you Dad’s picture. Boy, am I stupid. Here.”

“Thank you.” Vinnie places the portfolio on the hall table and unties the worn black cotton tapes.

“Oh,” she gasps, drawing her breath in as she lifts a creased sheet of tissue to reveal a large hand-colored eighteenth-century engraving of a forest scene with a grotto and a waterfall. A figure dressed in rags and bits of fur and leather stands before the grotto, leaning on a staff. “Your father told me about this picture. It’s his ancestor, The Hermit of South Leigh; ‘Old Mumpson’ they called him.”

“Yeh; that’s what Professor Gilson said.”

“You don’t want it yourself,” Vinnie says rather than asks, hoping for the answer No.

“I d’know.” Barbie looks larger and more helpless than before. “I guess not.”

“Or perhaps your brother might like it,” says Vinnie, realizing at the same time that Old Mumpson, in spite of his honorary title, looks no older than Chuck and a good deal like him (if Chuck had grown an untidy beard), and also that she wants the picture so badly it frightens her.

“Aw, no.” Barbie almost recoils. “Greg? You gotta be kidding. That guy looks like some kinda hippie weirdo; Greg wouldn’t have him in the house. Anyways, Dad said if anything happened to him, Professor Gilson was s’posed to give the picture to you.” She smiles awkwardly. “You could throw it out, I guess, if you want to.”

“Of course not,” Vinnie says, taking hold of the portfolio as if it might be snatched from her. “1 like it very much.” She looks from the engraving to Barbie, who is standing there dumbly.

“You must have had rather a hard time of it these last few days,” Vinnie says, suddenly realizing this. “It’s too bad your mother or your brother wasn’t able to come to England with you.” Or instead of you, she adds silently to herself. Because surely either one of them would have been able to manage things better, and not had to lay it all on Professor Gilson. But perhaps that was the point: Barbie had been sent because she was helpless.

“Uh, well. Mom woulda come, only she was closing an important sale, a big condo deal she’s been putting together for months. And Greg’s always awful busy. Besides, his wife’s expecting a baby next month.”

“So they sent you.” Vinnie manages to keep most of her disaproval out of her voice.

“Yeh, well. Somebody had to come, y’know.” Barbie blinks. “I don’t have a family, or much of a job, so I was kinda disposable.”

“I see.” Vinnie has an image of those shelves in her Camden Town supermarket that hold “disposables”—paper plates and napkins, plastic cups and spoons, aluminum-foil pie tins and the like: made to be used on unimportant occasions and then discarded. A strong dislike for Barbie’s living relatives comes over her. “Well, you’ll be able to go home now.”

“Yeh. Well, un, no. I’ve got to stay another couple days in London. Mom decided we’d better plan on ten days. Anyhow it costs a lot less that way, on the charter. I have a free hotel and everything.”

“Not a very nice hotel, I should imagine,” says Vinnie.

“Uh, no. It’s not specially nice. It’s called the Majestic, but it’s kinda yucky really. How did you know?”

“Because they always are. And what are you planning to do while you’re here?”

“I d’know. I haven’t thought, really. Look at some tourist attractions, I guess. I’ve never been to England before.”

“I see.” The thought comes to Vinnie that she ought to do something about Barbie; that it’s what Chuck would have wanted. She tries to remember some of the things he’d told her about his daughter, but all she can recall is that Barbie’s keen on animals. There’s the Zoo, of course—But the idea of another visit to the Zoo—where only a few weeks ago she was so happy watching the polar bear that looked like Chuck—upsets and depresses Vinnie so much that she can’t bring herself even to mention it.

“Well, so long, then,” Barbie says awkwardly. “Oh, thanks.” She accepts the ugly umbrella, which Vinnie has closed for her since it is no longer raining. “Thanks for everything, Professor Miner. Have a nice day.”

She begins mechanically to clear away the tea things, thinking of Chuck—that all the time she knew him he had been ill, and had known he was ill. That’s why he’d told Professor Gilson he wanted her to have the picture of Old Mumpson “if anything happened to him.” He knew something might happen to him; all these months he had been living under a kind of death sentence, but failing to take any of the precautions that might have commuted it. He didn’t put much faith in doctors; he had said that to her more than once, the stupid, unlucky . . . Vinnie has to put down the plate she is rinsing and catch her breath. She is shaken by pity for Chuck, living on the edge of a cliff all this time, and knowing it—and shaken by fury at him for deliberately walking so near the edge, for not taking decent care of himself.

And of her too, she thinks suddenly. Because he could very well have died right here in this flat, with a glass of whisky dropping from one big freckled hand and a smoldering cigarette falling from the other as he pitched heavily, fatally, onto her carpet.

Or worse. Vinnie stares out the window, letting water splash unheeded over the rim of the sink. He could have died in her bed, on top of her. She recalls vividly how red Chuck’s face got—with passion, she had thought; how he gasped at the climax—she had thought, with pleasure. Why did he keep taking that chance? How could he do that to her? Is that why he never told her he was ill, fearing, and perhaps rightly, that if she’d known she might never had let him . . . All those times . . .

Miserable, furious, even frightened—though the danger, of course, is past—without knowing exactly what she is doing, Vinnie turns off the faucet and, holding the colander she has been washing, walks back through the flat into her bedroom. She stands staring at the double bed, now smoothly covered by its brown-and-white flowered comforter, so often before stirred into a whirlpool of sheets. The last time Chuck was here, she suddenly recalls, he hardly smoked at all. He was trying to give it up, he had told her. And he hadn’t drunk anything to speak of either: only one glass of soda with a little white wine. He must have decided to live, he must have wanted to live—

But if Chuck really wanted to live, why did he go on making such passionate love to her? Wasn’t that just plain stupid?

No, Vinnie thinks. Not stupid on his terms, because that was one of the things he had wanted to live for. He loved me, she thinks. It was true all the time. What a horrible bad joke, that after fifty-four years she should have been loved by someone like Chuck, who on top of everything else that’s wrong with him is dead and scattered on the side of a hill somewhere in Wiltshire: If she’d believed him; if she’d known; if she’d said—

A wave of confused memory and feeling churns up inside her; still clutching the wet colander in one hand, she falls onto the bed, weeping.

“Really?” Vinnie echoes.

“I saw her two days ago, just before she left for Ireland, and she was in top form. But I don’t mind telling you, it was a near thing.”

“Really,” she says, with quite another intonation.

“Now this mustn’t go any further.” He pours them both more Blanc de Blanc, then looks hard at Vinnie. “I wouldn’t say anything even to you, but I want you to understand the situation, so you’ll see how important it is for us to be very very discreet.”

“Yes, of course,” Vinnie says, becoming a little impatient.

“You see, there have been, mm, other episodes in the past . . . Well, nothing quite like this, but Rosemary often gets . . . well, a bit odd when she isn’t working steadily.”

“Oh?”

“It’s no joke, really, you know, always having to be a lady. Or a gentleman, if it comes to that. The best of us—and I do believe, in a way, that Rosemary is one of the best—might find it a strain.”

“Yes,” Vinnie agrees. “It must have been rather difficult for you,” she prompts, since Edwin remains silent.

“Well. Initially. Then . . . Well, as it happens, there’s this extremely gifted doctor—Rosemary’s seen him before, actually. He was tremendously helpful. Luckily, she has a complete amnesia for most of the worst period.”

“Really.”

“Yes. You know, drink does that sometimes. She doesn’t remember Fred’s coming round to the house at all, for instance.”

“I suppose that’s just as well.”

“Oh, I think so. A mercy, the doctor said. But you mustn’t say anything about any of that to anyone. Seriously. Promise.”

“Of course, I promise,” Vinnie says. The British hush-hush attitude towards psychotherapy is something that, in spite of her Anglophilia, she has never quite understood. Eccentricity, even eccentricity of a sort that would be designated “sick” in America, is admired over here. Men who dress up like Indian chieftains and hold pow-wows, women who keep fifty Siamese cats in royal splendor, are written up admiringly in the newspapers. But ordinary neurosis is denied and concealed. If you consult a psychologist, it is something to be hidden from everyone while it is going on and forgotten as soon as possible afterward.

If Rosemary were an American actress, Vinnie thinks, she would already be in therapy, and would refer with easy familiarity to “my analyst” on every possible occasion. She might very well give interviews about her problems with drinking. And her split personality—if in fact it was really split, and not just an act—would be discussed on talk shows and celebrated in People magazine.

“And you mustn’t say anything to Fred, either. Let him think it was all theatrics. Have you heard from Fred, by the way?”

“Yes, I had a letter—well, a note. He wanted to tell me that he and his wife have reconstructed their marriage, as he put it.”

“Really.” Edwin rises and begins to clear the garden table. “And is that a good thing?”

“Who knows? Fred seems to think it is.” Vinnie sighs; she has a deep distrust of marriage, which in her observation has an almost irresistible tendency to turn friends and lovers into relatives, if not into foes.

“It’s just as well really that he couldn’t get in touch with Posy,” Edwin says a little later, returning from the basement kitchen with a plate of fruit and another of macaroons. “She would have coped magnificently, of course, but she’s not as discreet as she might be . . . Please, help yourself. I especially recommend the apricots.

“I had my suspicions about Mrs. Harris all along, you know,” he continues. “She simply sounded too good to be true.”

“Yes, I thought Rosemary was improving the story sometimes,” Vinnie says. “Or do you mean—do you think there never was any Mrs. Harris?”

“I do, rather. It’s hard to imagine Rosemary doing her own housework, though. I expect she just went on hiring those part-time people—only rather more of them, perhaps, so that Fred would stop complaining of how the place looked.”

“But Fred saw Mrs. Harris at least once. He told me so.”

“Yes, well . . . You know, Rosemary’s always been annoyed that she’s so narrowly typecast. She’s convinced she could play working-class characters, for instance, only no one will ever let her.”

“But she was scrubbing the hall floor, Fred said. I can’t believe—”

“You have to remember her training. She always gets tremendously into her parts. Almost carried away, sometimes. When she’s taping Tallyho Castle, for instance, she starts to have this frightfully gracious lady-of-the-manor manner. I can easily imagine her washing a floor just to get the feel of it.”

“Ye-es.” Vinnie is aware that Edwin is skillfully rationalizing and diminishing what would otherwise seem highly neurotic or even psychotic behavior. “But I think there must have been someone like Mrs. Harris for a while,” she insists. “Even if that wasn’t her real name. I spoke to what I thought was Mrs. Harris on the telephone twice at least. She’d have to be an awfully gifted actress.”

“Oh, she’s gifted,” Edwin agrees, carefully skinning a ripe peach with one of his ivory-handled Victorian fruit knives. “She can imitate just about anyone. You should hear her do your cowboy friend, Chuck what’s-his-name. How is what’s-his-name, by the way?” he adds, changing the subject with his customary deftness. “Is he still digging for ancestors down in Wiltshire?”

“Yes—no,” Vinnie replies uncomfortably. Though she has been at Edwin’s for nearly two hours, and spoken to him earlier on the phone, she hasn’t dared to mention Chuck. She knows it will be nearly impossible for her to tell the story without falling apart as she has been falling apart at intervals for the past ten days. But she plunges in, beginning with Barbie’s telephone call.

“So the wife and the son couldn’t make it to England,” Edwin remarks presently.

“No. Of course, it’s just a convention that when someone dies you have to hurry to the fatal spot. It doesn’t actually do them any good.”

“I suppose not. Still, it does give one a certain opinion of Chuck’s relatives.”

“It does.” Vinnie continues with her story. Several times she hears a tell-tale wobble in her voice, but Edwin seems to notice nothing.

“So there’s some corner of an English field that is forever Tulsa,” he says finally, smiling.

“Yes.” Vinnie strangles the cry that rises in her.

“Poor old Chuck. Rather awful to go out like that, so unprepared and sudden and far from home.”

“I don’t know,” Vinnie says, lowering her head and pretending to be spitting out a grape-seed to conceal her face. “Some people might prefer it. No fuss, you know. 1 think I’d rather have it that way myself.” She imagines herself dead, and her ashes scattered like Chuck’s over a hillside field that’s she’s never seen and never will see. A longing comes over her to look upon that place; to visit the grotto where Old Mumpson lived, the cottage in which Chuck and his ancestors slept; to talk to Professor Gilson and his students about Chuck. And she could do all this . . . Nothing prevents her from doing it except a sense of the hopeless ridiculousness of such an excursion.

“Not me.” Edwin helps himself to the last of the macaroons, of which he has already had more than his fair share. “When I die, I want it to be in my own bed, with flattering interviews in the papers and tearful farewell visits from all my friends and admirers. I want to be prepared for it, not just hit over the head.”

“Well, Chuck should have been prepared,” Vinnie says. “The doctor told him not to drink or smoke; he told him to be careful, his daughter said, but he wouldn’t listen. Climbing three flights of stairs on such a hot day! It really makes me furious. And he probably had a cigarette and a drink in some pub before that. So stupid of him.” Realizing that she has spoken with more feeling than is appropriate, Vinnie gives a false laugh.

“Poor old Chuck,” Edwin says again. “He was quite a character, wasn’t he? Do you remember . . .”

Yes, Vinnie thinks as Edwin relates his anecdote; for her London friends Chuck Mumpson was a character, a comic type—not a real person. And she, who had known him better and should have known better, had put off going to him in Wiltshire not only because she was afraid to trust herself to any man, but because she didn’t want to be associated with him in their minds or even in her own. It was as if, in her blind Anglophilia, she had even taken on what are said to be the characteristic English weaknesses of timidity and snobbishness—neither of them, in fact, particularly characteristic of those English she knows best.

“Still,” Edwin concludes, “I did rather like him, didn’t you?”

“No,” Vinnie is extremely surprised to hear herself say. “I didn’t ‘rather like Chuck,’ if you want to know. I loved him.”

“Really.” Edwin moves his chair back from the table, and incidentally away from the force of Vinnie’s statement and perhaps its content.

It’s true, Vinnie thinks. Chuck had loved her, and—she says this to herself with surprise and difficulty—she had loved him. “Yes.” She meets his stare, his insulting slight smile.

“Well, we did all rather wonder sometimes,” he says at last. “But I never really thought you—” He recollects his manners and breaks off. “I do understand,” he says in another tone, consoling and sympathetic. “These things happen. As I know all too well, you can love someone you don’t admire—love them passionately, even. Of course that’s not very nice for either of you.” A cloudy, fixed look comes over his small neat features; he stares past Vinnie and the orderly little courtyard with its clean white gravel and clipped roses, into the part of his life that she has always preferred to know nothing of.

“But I did admire Chuck,” Vinnie says, realizing the truth of this as she speaks.

“Really. Well, no doubt he was admirable, in his own way. One of nature’s noblemen.”

“I—” Vinnie begins, and chokes herself off. The patronizing phrase enrages her, but she doesn’t trust herself to speak without screaming or crying. And after all, what right has she to scream at Edwin for thinking as she had thought for months?

“Well,” he says, splashing the last of the wine into their balloon glasses. “We mustn’t judge everyone by our own silly standards. I suppose we ought to learn that at our mother’s knee.”

“I suppose so,” says Vinnie, thinking that she did not learn it then, and that if she had, her whole life might have been different. “How is your mother, by the way?” she adds, hoping to divert Edwin.

“Oh, very well, thank you. Her arthritis is much better—one good effect of this frightful heat.”

“That’s nice.” To Vinnie the day is only pleasantly warm, but she is used to the British intolerance of temperatures over seventy-five degrees.

“If she stays well, I’m thinking of giving a little luncheon for her next week; I hope you’ll be able to come.”

“I’m not sure,” Vinnie says. “I may be going down to the country this weekend, and if I do I won’t be back until next month.”

“Oh dear. Really?”

“I’m afraid so,” says Vinnie, who is as surprised by her declaration as Edwin is.

“And when are you leaving for the States?”

“On the twentieth, I think it is.”

“Oh, Vinnie. You can’t possibly. That’s very naughty of you.”

“I know. But you see I’ve got to get ready for my fall term.”

“Come on, now. That’s ages away.”

“Not in America it isn’t.” Vinnie sighs, thinking of her university’s academic calendar, revised recently to save on fuel bills. Classes now start before Labor Day, and by August 24 known and unknown advisees will be fidgeting in her office.

“Besides, you’ve only just come.”

“Silly.” She smiles. “I’ve been here since February.”

“Well, good. Anyhow, I think of you as living here always. Why don’t you?”

“I certainly would if I could.” Vinnie sighs again, well aware that she cannot possibly afford to quit her job and move to London.

“Never mind. I’ll make the most of you now. Let’s have some coffee. And I’ve got a rather shameless strawberry mousse; I hope you have room for it.”

The taxi turns into the Park, and Vinnie gazes out the open window at the smooth green lawns, the nannies with their carriages, the gamboling children and dogs, the strollers, the joggers, the couples sitting together on the grass: all these fortunate people who live in London, who will still be here when she is alone and exiled in Corinth. Even Chuck, in his own way, will be here forever. The cold nauseous ache of past and coming loss squeezes her heart, and she shivers in the heat.

As they swing east into the Bayswater Road she leans back against the seat, feeling tipsy, tired, and low. She thinks again how inconsiderate and wrong it was of Death to come for Chuck just when he had begun to want to live. Then she thinks how inconsiderate and wrong it was of her not to have agreed to visit him in Wiltshire that last weekend. Chuck wouldn’t have gone to look for the De Mompessons then, or climbed those stairs in the Town Hall.

And even if he had gone there some time later, it mightn’t have been so hot that day; or she might have been with him and made him ascend more slowly (she could have saved his dignity by pretending that it was she who needed to stop awhile on each floor to catch her breath). Then he would be alive now.

If only he had told her that he was ill . . . If only she had gone to stay with him, made sure he didn’t drink too much, encouraged him not to smoke, to see a doctor regularly . . . He might have lived many years; and she might have lived with him, here in England. She might have resigned her job and given all her time to research and writing (“Money is no problem”). She would have kept the flat, so that they’d have a place in town as well as the old house in the country Chuck had talked about buying, with a flower garden, raspberry and currant bushes, an asparagus bed . . .

Why does she keep having this stupid fantasy? It’s not what she wants at all, not what would ever have worked, even if Chuck were alive. It’s not her nature, not her fate to be loved, to live with anyone, her fate is to be always single, unloved, alone—

Well, not completely alone. From the corner of the taxi comes a snuffle and whine inaudible to anyone in the world but Vinnie Miner. She recognizes it at once: Fido has returned from Wiltshire. Slowly he becomes visible to her inner eye: considerably smaller than ever before, only about the size of a Welsh terrier now; dusty, travel-worn, and not quite sure of his welcome.

“Go away,” Vinnie says silently. “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not a bit sorry for myself. I’m a well-known scholar; I have lots of friends on both sides of the Atlantic; I’ve just spent five very interesting months in London and finished an important book on playground rhymes.” But even to her the list seems painfully incomplete.

The taxi pulls up in front of Vinnie’s house; she gets out, followed at some distance by a small invisible dog, and pays the driver. As she turns to enter her gate, she sees Fido standing by the wall, pale and shadowy in the summer sunlight, looking up at her with anxious devotion and wagging his feathery white tail.

“Well, all right,” she says to him. “Come along, then.”