Foreign Affairs (21 page)

6

M
AY
in Kensington Gardens. The broad lawns are as velvet-smooth as the artificial turf of a football field, and ranked tulips sway on their stems like squads of colored birds. Above them brisk sudden breezes pass kites about a sky suffused with light. As Fred Turner crosses the park, one landscaped vista after another fans out before him, each complete with appropriate figures: strolling couples, children suspended from red and blue balloons, well-bred dogs on leash, and joggers in shorts and jerseys.

Fred is on his way across town to a drinks party (he has learnt not to say “cocktails”) at Rosemary Radley’s. Near the Round Pond he checks his watch, then sits down on a bench to wait a few minutes so that he won’t arrive too soon. He has offered to come early and help, but Rosemary wouldn’t hear of it. “No, Freddy darling. I want you just to enjoy yourself. You mustn’t get here a minute before six. The caterers will do everything—and Mrs. Harris, of course.”

For Fred has won their argument, and Rosemary has hired a cleaning lady. He hasn’t met her yet, but she sounds great. According to Rosemary she is a hard worker and very thorough: she gets right down on her hands and knees to wax the floors. What’s more, she doesn’t talk Rosemary’s ear off about her husband or her children or her pets: she has no children or pets, and she is long divorced from her drunken husband.

Insisting that she hire Mrs. Harris is one good thing Fred has done for Rosemary. She has done much more for him: she has transformed him from a depressed, disoriented visiting scholar to his normal confident self. His earlier anomie, Fred realizes now, was occupational. Psychologically speaking, tourists are disoriented, ghostly beings; they walk London’s streets and enter its buildings in a thin ectoplasmal form, like a double-exposed photograph. London isn’t real to them, and to Londoners they are equally unreal—pale, featureless, two-dimensional figures who clog up the traffic and block the view.

Before he met Rosemary, Fred didn’t really exist for anyone here except a few other academic ghosts. Nor did London really exist for him. He wasn’t so much living in Notting Hill Gate as camping out there so that he could walk every day to the British Museum and sit before a heap of damp-stained, crumbling leather-bound books and foxed pamphlets. Now the city is alive for him and he is alive in it. Everything pulses with meaning, with history and possibility, and Rosemary most of all. When he is with her he feels he holds all of England, the best of England, in his arms.

He has wholly recovered from the panic that seized him last month in Oxfordshire, when he was frightened by a few topiary birds and a too-vivid memory of the novels of Henry James into condemning an entire society. His distrust of Edwin and Nico remains—homosexuals have always made Fred uneasy, maybe because so many of them have propositioned him. But he feels fine about Posy Billings and William Just; he looks back on his moral indignation that night as priggish and provincial.

Among Rosemary’s long-married friends, he has found, arrangements like that of the Billings are common. More often than not, husbands and wives have agreed to allow each other a discreet sexual freedom, which their friends then take for granted. Everyone knows who Jack or Jill is “seeing” at the moment, but no one mentions it—except maybe to ask whether Jill would rather have her husband or her lover invited with her to some party. The couples remain amicable, sharing a house or houses, concerned for each other’s welfare and that of their children, giving dinners and celebrating holidays together. As Rosemary says, it’s a much more civilized way of coping with passionate impulse than the American system. One avoids open scandal, and also the tantrums of self-righteous possessive jealousy—which, as she points out, usually end in dreadful messy scenes, economically vindictive divorces, and the destruction of homes, children, reputations, and careers. Nor is there any of the frantic defensiveness and public display of the so-called open marriages that she’s seen among actors in the States (and Fred, now and then, among graduate students)—and which, as Rosemary remarks, never work anyhow. “It’s exactly like leaving all the doors and windows open in a house. You get nasty drafts, and very likely you’ll have burglars.”

The strain on Fred’s budget has also been eased—at least temporarily—by a loan from the Corinth University Credit Union, arranged by mail with some difficulty. With luck it will just about last until he leaves. He can go to restaurants with Rosemary now without always ordering salad; he can buy her the flowers she loves so much. If he has to skimp and save for the next year or so, hell, it’s worth it.

Only two things currently trouble Fred. One is the fact that his work on John Gay isn’t getting on too fast. When he was first in London, depression slowed him down; now euphoria does so. In comparison to the world outside its walls, the BM seems even more oppressive than before. He is irritated at having to show his pass on entry to the suspicious guard, who ought to know him by now; and he detests having his briefcase searched on departure. He is even more impatient when the volumes he wants turn out to be in the deposit library at Woolwich (two days’ wait) or in use by other readers (one to four days’ wait). And the less often he goes to the Bowel Movement the worse it gets, since books placed on temporary reserve by Fred or any other reader fail to rise again on the third day and are, with infinite slowness, returned to their dark tombs.

Though he knows this rule, several days more and more often intervene between Fred’s visits to the library, and more and more of the books he has been using have now disappeared somewhere within the system; the slips come back marked
NOT ON SHELF, DESTROYED BY BOMBING
, or—most infuriatingly of all—
OUT TO F. TURNER
. Meanwhile there is so much to do in London, so many plays and films and exhibitions to see with Rosemary, so many parties. The hell with it, Fred tells himself almost every day. He’ll learn a lot more about British theatrical history and tradition by listening to Rosemary and her friends than by sitting in a library—something that, Christ knows, there’ll be time enough for back in Corinth.

The other weight on Fred’s mind is heavier, though it consists not of a stack of books but of an airletter almost lighter than air. The letter is from his estranged wife Roo, and is her first in four months—though Fred has written her several times: asking her to forward his mail, returning her health insurance card, and inquiring for the address of a friend who’s supposed to be at the University of Sussex. Roo, as he might have expected, hasn’t forwarded the mail, acknowledged the card, or provided the address.

But now, like a tardy bluebird of peace returning late to a deserted ark after three times forty days and nights, this blue airletter has flapped its way across the ocean to him. In its beak it holds, no question about that, a fresh olive branch.

Here, four months late, is the letter Fred had imagined and desired so often during the dark emptiness of January and February—the letter he had so often fantasized finding on the scratched mahogany table in the front hall of his building, tearing open, laughing and shouting over, cabling or telephoning in response to. He had imagined changing the sheets on his bed, meeting Roo’s plane—

Faced with this evidence of Roo’s contrition and candor—he has never known her to tell a lie, even when it would have been socially convenient—Fred has to admit that he had accused her falsely. If Roo had had an affair he would have been the first to hear about it, from her. She was telling the truth when she said she never had anything to do with those two other cocks in the exhibit except to photograph them. More than likely they belonged to an old friend of hers from art school who is now working in New York, and his homosexual lover. In fact, she was guilty of nothing worse than bad taste.

But in Rosemary’s world bad taste is not nothing: it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual flaw. Fred remembers her saying only the other day, when discussing a mutual acquaintance with Posy: “I can understand how anyone might get carried away temporarily by Howie’s looks, and his talent, but what I really don’t see is how Mimi could possibly bring herself to move into that dreadful Kentish Town flat of his, with the plastic ferns and the bullfight posters.” “And those frightful gold-flocked shiny curtains, like cheap Christmas ribbon,” Posy agreed. “She must be out of her mind.” Their unspoken assumption was that anyone who would choose such a spuriously natural (the ferns), spuriously virile (the posters), and spuriously elegant environment must be false in other ways as well. And probably, Fred thinks now, recalling his own impressions of Howie, an ITV television executive, Rosemary and Posy are right.

Roo’s bad taste, of course, is of a different sort, crude rather than phony—some but not much better. Fred, like Mimi, had been carried away by looks and talent; that was what Rosemary would have said. Yeh, maybe. But however bad her taste, Roo is a person he used to care a lot for, and his wife. The least she deserves from him now is the truth. But how can he give her that? “Thanks for your letter, it was great to hear from you, but I’m in love with a beautiful English actress, have a good day.” Not wanting to write these sentences, or some mealy-mouthed equivalent of them, Fred has put off answering Roo’s letter for nearly two weeks. He doesn’t want to have to think about her now, nor does he want to think ahead to his return to Corinth. When they do meet he will apologize and explain; she will understand. Or maybe she won’t understand. It almost doesn’t matter; nothing matters now except his passion for Rosemary Radley.

Possession hasn’t decreased the intensity of Fred’s desire. If the excitement of the chase is over, it has been replaced by the knowledge that his triumph must be brief. Joe and Debby Vogeler, typically, take the pessimistic view. Wasn’t it really a mistake to get so involved emotionally, Debby wondered, when he knew he had to leave England next month? Since she hadn’t exactly framed this remark as a question, Fred didn’t have to answer it; but inwardly he swore a strong No. Not for the first time, he thought that the Vogelers’ world-view was as limited and narrow as the triangular house that had been allotted to them here, as if by the poetic justice of some supernatural real estate agent.

But then Joe and Debby don’t know Rosemary or Rosemary’s London. He had told them about Vinnie Miner’s party and others that had followed—how amazing Rosemary was, what interesting people she knew, how friendly most of them were. The Vogelers, however, remained sceptical.

“Sure, maybe they were cordial to you for a few minutes,” Debby said, as the three of them sat in the triangular house on a wet dark afternoon, among a clutter of Sunday papers and plastic toys. “They learn nice manners in their schools. But will you ever see any of them again? That’s what it’s really all about. When we were first here, Joe and I went to lunch with this elderly writer that his aunt knows, in Kensington, and everybody was very pleasant and said how they hoped to see us again, but nothing ever came of it.”

“It was Jakie.” Joe gestured at his son, who was sitting on the floor in a fuzzy white coverall stained with baby food, tearing up the
Observer Magazine.
“We shouldn’t have brought Jakie.”

“Jakie was perfectly good,” Debby protested. “He didn’t cry or anything. And he didn’t really hurt that old cat, he was just playing. I don’t know why they all got so excited.”

“They didn’t like him sitting on your lap at lunch, either,” Joe said.

“Well, too bad. What was I supposed to do with him? I bet they wouldn’t have liked it any better if Jakie had been crawling round the floor. Besides, he could have hurt himself on that lumpy antique furniture.”

They don’t understand, Fred thought then, resolving that he would arrange for Joe and Debby to meet Rosemary soon (and in the absence of Jakie). When they see her, or at least when they get to know her and her friends, he thinks now, sitting on the bench in Kensington Gardens, they’ll understand how great most of them are.

After all, even for him it had taken time. Now, though, the doubts he had had earlier—and in a weak moment hinted at to Joe and Debby—seem to him shameful, mean-spirited. It would have been cowardly to hold back from Rosemary because the more he cares for her now, the more he will miss her later. Nothing could be worse than having to say to himself for the rest of his life: “Rosemary Radley loved me, but I couldn’t really get into it because I didn’t like some of her friends—because she lived too expensively—because I knew I was leaving London in June and might not see her again for almost a year.”

If Joe and Debby couldn’t understand that yet, Rosemary and her world certainly would. Fred remembers an interview in the
Times
last week with a friend of Rosemary’s named Lou, in which he announced that he’d told his agent to turn down all television and film offers because he had a chance to play Lear for two weeks in Nottingham. “Where the theatre is doesn’t matter; the length of the run doesn’t matter,” he was quoted as declaring. “When you get a chance like that nothing else counts.”