Foreign Affairs (22 page)

“What an old dear Lou is,” Rosemary had added, after reading this passage aloud to Fred. “Of course, I rang up directly to congratulate him. Really, I told him, he should have had the part long ago, he’s a marvelous actor, a real genius. And there’s no need to go on a diet, I said, why on earth shouldn’t Lear be fat? He probably was fat, and his riotous knights too, from eating and drinking so much and using up all Goneril’s provisions. You don’t hear about them working or exercising, do you? I said to him, ‘Lou darling, you’re quite wrong, you musn’t try to take off a single ounce; you know your voice is always better after a good meal.’ I only wish I could say the same, but it’s just the reverse for me. As soon as I start working again I’ll have to starve myself, look at all this flesh.” Rosemary lifted the edge of a kimono embroidered with blue and gray chrysanthemums to reveal a pink, deliciously rounded thigh and hip. “No, Freddy darling, I didn’t mean . . . Oh, dearest . . . Ahhh . . .”

Thinking of this moment again, and the moments that followed it, Fred rises from the bench and, as if drawn by a magnetic force, strides toward Chelsea.

Even before most of the guests have arrived it’s clear that Rosemary’s party is a success. The weather is fine, the house looks great: the window boxes and the stone urns by the steps have been scoured clean and overflow with white geraniums and satiny ivy; through the open French doors the back garden is a haze of green. Inside, too, everything glows—at least everything that’s visible to guests: Fred, looking for a place to put some coats, opens the door to Rosemary’s bedroom, then slams it hastily on chaos. Evidently Mrs. Harris was so busy downstairs that she didn’t have time for anything else.

Descending the stairs again, Fred looks down into a scene that resembles a commercial for some luxury product: the perfectly elegant party. The double drawing room is a dazzle of flowers and light and stylishly dressed people. Many of Rosemary’s friends are good-looking, many are well known, and some are both. There are only a few who rather spoil the effect, who would never have been cast if this were in fact a commercial. For instance, little Vinnie Miner, who is wearing one of what Rosemary calls “her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle costumes”—all starched white cotton and fuzzy pale-brown wool like the fur of some small animal. Fred recalls with amazement how formidable she had seemed to him only a few months ago. Already he has absorbed the view of Rosemary and her friends, that Vinnie, though clever and likeable, is a bit of a comic turn, with her passion for Morris dancing and children’s books and everything British that is quaint and out-of-date.

“Vinnie, hello. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.” Vinnie tilts her head up to look at Fred. “What a big party, I didn’t realize. And how are you? How is your book on Gay coming along?”

“Oh, very well, thanks,” Fred lies.

“That’s good. How nice the house looks! It’s really amazing. I suppose it’s all due to Mrs. Harris?”

“Well, more or less.”

“Excuse me, please, ma’am. ‘Scuse me.” Behind him Fred hears for the first time in his life an American accent: loud, flat, nasal. Is that how he sounds to everyone here, every damn time he opens his mouth? “Here you are, Vinnie.” A large balding man in late middle age, got up like an American country-and-western singer in cowboy boots and a suede jacket with fringe, hands her a glass. “One dry sherry, honey, like you ordered.”

“Oh, thank you,” Vinnie says. “Chuck, this is Fred Turner, from my department in Corinth. Chuck Mumpson.”

“Wal, howdy.” Chuck extends a broad, fleshy red hand.

“How do you do,” Fred replies guardedly. His immediate thought is that Chuck’s accent and costume, so exaggerated and inappropriate to this party, are assumed—and maybe his name as well. This is not an American, but one of Rosemary’s theatrical friends amusing himself by taking on a role—something he has learnt that actors occasionally do when they have been too long between engagements.

“Heard a lot about you.” Chuck grins.

Fred asks himself what this man, whoever he is, has heard. Probably that he is Rosemary’s lover. “I haven’t heard anything about you,” he says, consciously listening to his own voice for the first time since adolescence. The pronunciation is similar, he decides, but the tune different. In fact, over the past few months Fred has taken on, not a British accent, but a British intonation and vocabulary. Almost unconsciously, he has begun to imitate the characteristic melody of British speech, with its raised final notes; consciously, so as to be understood, he now uses terms like
lift, lorry
, and
loo
instead of
elevator, truck
, and
bathroom
.

“Chuck’s from Oklahoma,” Vinnie says.

“Oh, yeh?” There is still an edge of doubt in Fred’s voice—though it seems unlikely that Vinnie would conspire in some actor’s impersonation. “I’ve never been there, but I saw the movie.”

“Haw-haw.” Chuck gives a genuine, or very plausible, western guffaw. “Wal, it isn’t much like the movie, not any more.”

“No, I guess not.” This uncomfortable conversation is interrupted by the arrival of more guests, and more behind these. Soon the long high-ceilinged room is thronged. The twin chandeliers, their prisms newly polished, scatter light and echo the tinkle and splash of liquids poured into crystal, of high-pitched laughter and exclamation.

The miracle wrought by Rosemary’s new cleaning lady does not pass unnoticed. All her friends compliment her on it, including some who had speculated earlier that maybe Mrs. Harris wasn’t as wonderful as Rosemary and Fred made out. Neither of them might know whether a house had been properly cleaned, some suggested; others said that Mrs. Harris sounded too good to be true. Now that the evidence is before them they take another line.

“Perhaps it’s a bit too perfectly cared for,” Fred overhears one guest remark. “One almost feels one’s in some National Trust property.”

“Yes, exactly,” agrees her companion. “I expect Mrs. Harris is one of those types who have an absolute obsession with cleanliness. People like that, of course they’re a little bit crazy,” continues this friend, whose own flat could have used a visit from Mrs. Harris. “Rosemary had better be careful she isn’t murdered in her bed one day.”

This sort of spite on the part of Rosemary’s friends is a new development. In the past, envy of her prettiness, fame, high spirits, charm, and income—television, even British television, pays well—has always been tempered by compassion for her disorderly living conditions and her history of romantic disaster. Though widely courted, she always seemed to end up with the least stable and attractive of her many suitors. Moreover, the men she chose were usually married, and presently they either returned to their wives or, worse, left both the wife and Rosemary for some other woman. Thus, however pretty and successful she might be, her friends have been able to love and worry about Rosemary, her acquaintances to like and pity her. But now that she has a perfect house in Chelsea and a handsome, apparently unattached young lover, many of them cannot forgive her.

Besides making ominous predictions, some of the guests tonight try to pump Fred about Mrs. Harris. As Rosemary had remarked, it isn’t easy to find a good English-speaking charlady in London. “You wait and see,” she told Fred. “There’ll be plenty of people who’ll want to lure Mrs. Harris away, even though they call themselves my friends. You musn’t tell anyone anything about her, even what her days are; promise me, darling.” Fred, thinking it unnecessary, had nevertheless promised. Now he sees that Rosemary was right. More than one of her guests, when she is out of hearing, make pointed inquiries: How much does Mrs. Harris ask? Does she have a free day? Fred replies truthfully to both questions that he doesn’t know. An elderly actress called Daphne Vane, who had starred with Rosemary in
Tallyho Castle
until her pathetic on-screen death from pneumonia last season, is especially persistent.

“I’d really like so much to meet Mrs. Harris,” Daphne murmurs in the wistful, breathy manner that made her a romantic heroine of the stage and screen half a century ago. “She sounds like the genuine article, and one comes across that so seldom now. I had so much hoped that she would be at the party—helping, you know.” She glances round the room, making great play with her famous feathery eyelashes.

“She’s not here,” Fred tells Daphne. “Rosemary didn’t ask her to serve; she says Mrs. Harris isn’t very presentable.”

“No? Well, one can’t have everything, can one? But perhaps she’s below in the kitchen?” Fred shakes his head; if he had nodded, he suspects, nothing would have prevented the unworldly, ethereal-looking Daphne from scooting down the back stairs to the basement. “Do you know what her days are?”

“I’m not sure, no.”

“What a pity.” Daphne gives him the sweet, condescending smile she might give some village idiot; then, without seeming to move, she floats-off into another conversation.

In fact Fred knows very well that Mrs. Harris comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, since he can’t visit Rosemary then—and, after one attempt, she won’t come to his flat. Though he did all he could to make the place attractive, his love hardly spent five minutes there. Drawing her pale fur coat more closely about her, she declared it “absolutely freezing” and “frightfully unromantic,” and declined even to sit on the sofa bed where Fred had pictured her lying half naked.

Efficient as she is, Mrs. Harris has her defects. She can’t bear to have anybody “underfoot” while she cleans. She also refuses to answer the phone and take messages, claiming that it puts her off her work. Occasionally she will snatch up the receiver, shout “Nobody ‘ome!” and bang it down again; more often she just lets it ring. Some of Rosemary’s friends view this as another sign of dangerous battiness; Fred’s own suspicion is that Mrs. Harris is more or less illiterate. That would help to explain why such a hard-working and reliable woman hasn’t been able to find a better-paying job.

In support of the battiness theory, however, it has to be said that Mrs. Harris also won’t answer the door. Last Tuesday afternoon, when Fred discovered that he was free that evening after all, because the Vogelers’ baby had a cold, and he wasn’t able to reach Rosemary on her private line or get a message through her answering service, he decided to go to the house. He knocked, rang, and called out her name; but though he could hear muffled noises within, nobody came. Finally he scribbled a note on the back of an envelope.

As he pushed back the letter-flap, Fred was aware of motion inside the house. He stooped to the newly polished brass slot, and got his first glimpse of Mrs. Harris at the other end of the darkened hall, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees: a shapeless middle-aged woman in a shapeless cotton skirt and cardigan, her hair tied up in a red kerchief. At the sound of the note falling and skidding on the marble tiles, she swiveled her head round, scowling—or maybe her expression had long ago set into a mask of suspicious ill-temper.

“Hello!” Fred called. “I’ve left a note for Lady Rosemary—could you give it to her, please?” Mrs. Harris didn’t answer, but turned her back and resumed scrubbing.

Though she won’t speak to callers, Mrs. Harris does talk freely to her employer, and at length. Her conversation isn’t the burden Rosemary feared, but a source of entertainment. Mrs. Harris’ doings and remarks—maybe somewhat edited or heightened—are now regularly relayed by Rosemary to all her friends. Mrs. Harris believes that looking at the full moon through glass makes you loony, unless it’s over your left shoulder. She eats Marmite and golden-syrup sandwiches to build up her blood. She goes to the greyhound track and bets on dogs with names that begin with S for Speed or W for Win. “Them races are fixed, see, everybody knows that,” she has confided to Rosemary. “But there’s clues.”

Mrs. Harris’ specialty, however, is gnomic, usually sour pronouncements on current events and famous persons. She dislikes all politicians and most members of the royal family, though she remains loyal to “Princess Margaret Rose” in spite of the scandals about her love life. “Misguided she was, is all, misguided and betrayed by that midget.” Fred can hear Rosemary repeating this latest
mot
even now, mimicking her charlady’s voice—rough and cockney, with a hint of boozy sentiment—and indicating with a broad gesture the supposed height of Lord Snowdon.

Fred has even found himself telling Mrs. Harris stories to friends like the Vogelers. In spite of her ill-temper, she has been gradually assimilated into his image of England. Most American visitors—like, say, Vinnie Miner—are attracted mainly to the antique, the picturesque, and the noble aspects of Britain. Fred’s love is wider-ranging: essentially it comprehends whatever has been hymned in song or told in story. In his present high mood he embraces even what he might deplore in America. Slag heaps remind him of Lawrence, pawnshops of Gissing; the pylons that deface the Sussex hills suggest Auden, the sooty slums of South London, Doris Lessing. In his mouth, canned plum pudding tastes of Dickens; to his ear, every overweight literary man sounds a little like Dr. Johnson. Seen through these Rosemary-tinted glasses, Mrs. Harris is a character out of eighteenth-century literature: a figure from the subplot of some robust comedy illustrated by Hogarth or Rowlandson. Fred not only appreciates her eccentricities, he takes a proprietary pride in them. After all, if it hadn’t been for him she’d never have been hired.

The doorbell sounds again. Fred goes to answer it and sees that Joe and Debby Vogeler have arrived, and that they have brought with them—against his instructions—their baby.

“The sitter never showed up,” Debby says in an aggrieved voice as soon as Fred opens the door, as if this were somehow his fault. “So we had to bring Jakie.”

“He’s been very good all the way here,” Joe says in a more conciliatory tone. “He’s been sleeping mostly.” The baby is suspended against Debby’s bosom in a sort of scruffy blue canvas hammock, with his fat legs sticking out on both sides and his bald head lolling against her neck. Debby is got up to match in a washed-out denim jacket, a long ruffled denim skirt, and clogs, as if she were about to appear on
Prairie Home Companion.
Joe wears his usual shabby-academic costume: thick spectacles, worn cord jacket, pilled and sagging gray turtleneck jersey, scuffed loafers. Though Fred is used to seeing the Vogelers in clothes like these, his friends strike him as deliberately and even aggressively ill-dressed for the occasion. In one respect, however, they are improved: the fine weather has restored their health, and for the first time none of them has an obvious cold.