Foreign Affairs (26 page)

Perhaps Fred is somewhat pitiable at the moment, Vinnie thinks as she lies in bed with her lukewarm hot-water bottle, but he is not really the right sort of person for her to contemplate. In the long run, there is no reason to feel sorry for him. He is young, healthy, handsome, smart, well-educated, and—though Vinnie has no intention of ever telling him this—regarded in the English Department as a corner. Right now he feels sore and disoriented because Rosemary has thrown him over, but he will recover. Many other women will love him; his career will steadily advance; and unless he is struck by a car or a deadly disease or some other form of lightning his whole life will be irritatingly fortunate

Whereas Vinnie is alone, and will probably always be alone. When she is ill, as now, there will never be anyone to listen sympathetically to her symptoms and bring her fresh-squeezed orange juice without being repelled by her appearance or smearing her with condescending pity like glaucous gooseberry jam. She is fifty-four years old; she is going to get older. And as she gets older she will be ill more often and for longer periods of time, and no one will really care very much.

Fido, or Self-Pity, who has been half dozing beside Vinnie for nearly three days, thumps his feathery tail on the comforter, but she shoves him away. Though she has a perfect right to be sorry for herself now, she knows how perilous it is to overindulge it. To go on feeding and petting Fido, even to acknowledge his existence too often, will fatally encourage him. He will begin to grow larger, swelling from the breadth and height of a beagle to that of a retriever—a sheepdog—a Saint Bernard. If she doesn’t watch out, one day Vinnie will be followed everywhere by an invisible dirty-white dog the size of a cow. Though other people won’t be able to visualize him as she does, they will be subliminally aware of his presence. Next to him she will look shrunken and pathetic, like someone who has accepted for all time the role of Pitiable Person.

“Go away,” Vinnie says to Fido in a half whisper. “This is just a bad cold, it’ll be gone soon. Get off my bed. Get out of my flat. Go find Mr. Mumpson, why don’t you?” she adds suddenly aloud, visualizing Chuck alone in the depths of the country, without friends, searching among faded dusty records for his illiterate ancestors.

In her mind, Fido considers the suggestion. He raises his head, then his chest, from the comforter, and sniffs the air. Then he slides off the bed and makes for the door, without even looking back.

Encouraged, Vinnie pushes away the covers and stands up dizzily. She stumbles into the kitchen, pours a glass of orange juice, and drops a black-cherry-flavored Redoxon tablet into it. Though an agnostic, she has faith in the power of Vitamin C; like most believers, she worships her god more devoutly when things go ill. Now she downs the fizzy, acid-magenta beverage and returns to bed, blows her nose again, pulls her sleep-mask down and the comforter up, and sinks into a snuffly, headachy slumber.

About an hour later she is roused by the telephone.

“Vinnie? This is Chuck, in Wiltshire. How’re you doing?”

“Oh, all right.”

“Sounds like you have a cold.”

“Well, I do, actually.”

“Aw, that’s tough. How bad is it? I’m coming up to London this afternoon, I was hoping we could have supper.”

“I don’t know. I’ve been in bed since day before yesterday. I’m feeling fairly awful, and I look a wreck.” Vinnie feels no hesitation in telling Chuck this. He isn’t important in London or in her life, so it doesn’t matter what he thinks. “God knows how I’ll be tonight.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that. Tell you what. You stay in bed now and keep good and warm, okay?”

“Okay.” It is years since anyone has told Vinnie to stay in bed and keep good and warm.

“I’ll phone you when I get in, about seven-thirty. Then, if you’re up to it, I can bring something over for us both to eat.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Vinnie has a mental picture of her cupboard and refrigerator, now more or less bare except for three quarts of cold soup. “But you certainly don’t have to. This flat is probably teeming with germs.”

“Aw, I’m not scared. I’m tough.” Chuck guffaws.

“Well . . . All right.”

Vinnie hangs up, flops back into bed, and returns to oblivion.

By eight that evening, when Chuck arrives with beer and a complete Indian takeout supper, enough for at least four people, she feels considerably better. It is only the second time that he has been to her flat, and she is struck again by how out of place he looks there, how large and clumsy and Middle American.

Chuck himself, naturally, is not aware of any incongruity. “Nice place you have here,” he says, looking toward the bow window, which frames a sweep of London back garden, brilliantly and variously gold and green in the declining sun. “Nice view. Real pretty flowers.” He gestures at a teapot overflowing with overblown yellow roses.

“Thank you.” Vinnie smiles uneasily, aware that her roses were not bought at a shop, but instead removed at dusk two days ago from various nearby front gardens. This petty theft, her first in nearly three months, occurred the day after she heard the story of L. D. Zimmern and her grant renewal, and—like her cold—may be related to it. “Let me take that shopping bag,” she says, changing the subject.

“Naw. You sit right there and rest. I’ll manage.”

In spite of her doubts, Chuck does manage, warming and serving the supper with skill and dispatch. In her present low mood Vinnie finds his clumsy concern soothing, his plodding conversation almost restful. He had a real productive trip to South Leigh this time, Chuck tells her, putting away two-thirds of the Indian dinner and most of the beer as he talks. “Y’know, this research, it’s not like business. Sometimes you do a hell of a sight better if you don’t try to zero in on a problem. You start looking for one thing, you come across something else important by accident.”

“Serendipity,” Vinnie says.

“What?”

She explains.

“Yeh, that’s what I said. I didn’t know there was a word for it.” Clearly, he feels not much is gained by this knowledge. “Anyways, I was kind of browsing around in the library down there, y’know?”

“Mm.” Vinnie imagines Chuck as a large cow—no, a bull—roaming the stacks of a provincial library, munching on a page here and there.

“Y’know they have these parish records, who lived in a place, who was christened, and married, and buried there. If you go into the churchyard, you can see some of the names on stones. All those names, and every goddamn one of them was a person. They got born, and were babies; and then they were kids, they learned their lessons and played games. Then they grew up and plowed and milked and cut the hay and ate dinner and drank the local beer at the Cock and Hen; and they fell in love and got married and had children and were sick and well and lived and died. And while all that stuff was going on, Tulsa was just a piece of prairie with buffalo ranging over it, and maybe a few Indians. All these people living down there in South Leigh, and everywhere else in this country, for hundreds and hundreds of years, way back to prehistoric times, and now nobody remembers them any more. They’re as extinct as the buffalo. It kinda bowls me over.”

“Yes.” In Vinnie’s mind, too, shadowy generations rise up; it is what she often feels about England, that every acre of it, every street and building, is thronged with ghosts.

“Wal, so I got to thinking about my ancestor, that I was so ashamed of. I found out some more about him, not much. He was in the parish register for South Leigh, born 1731, died 1801 aged seventy: ‘Charles Mumpson, known as Old Mumpson.’ Kind of a honorary title. Seventy doesn’t sound real old to us, but back in those days most folks didn’t live so long. The doctors didn’t really know anything—Wal, they don’t know all that much now either, if you ask me.”

“No,” Vinnie agrees.

“Reaching three score and ten, it was a kind of achievement then, ‘specially for a working man.” Chuck takes another swig of beer. “He must of had a strong constitution.”

“That’s true,” Vinnie says, considering the muscular breadth and bulk of Old Mumpson’s descendant.

“Anyhow, what I figure, when Old Mumpson was about my age he probably got past farm work, nobody would hire him any more. His wife had died years back, and his two sons had moved away, maybe gone to America—anyways there isn’t any record of them marrying or dying in the county. Wal, there probably wasn’t much old Mumpson knew how to do besides farming. So he took this hermit job, instead of going on public assistance. The way I figure it, I oughta be proud of him, ‘stead of ashamed, y’know?”

“I see what you mean,” Vinnie says, unconvinced, but reluctant to damage Chuch’s reconstruction.

“And then this Oxford University professor I told you about, this guy that’s in charge of the dig—Mike Gilson his name is. Mike said to me, ‘Y’know, you don’t have to conclude that Old Mumpson was stupid just because he couldn’t read and write. It could be that he never had any education; a lot of country folk were illiterate back then.’ It could be he really was a kind of local wise man, Mike said, and that’s why they hired him. Maybe people did come from everywhere round to ask his advice.”

“Yes, of course that’s possible,” Vinnie says, wishing she had thought of this comforting argument herself weeks ago.

“There’s a hell of a lot of learning that isn’t in books.”

“You may be right.” In Vinnie’s opinion, the extent of this unpublished learning is less than is generally claimed.

“Anyways, what I wanted to tell you, it’s about Mike partly. I’ve been spending a lot of time out on the dig, like I told you, taking pictures for him. Then Mike has these aerial photos of the area, from the government. You can find out a lot from those things if you know what to look for: ground water and drainage channels, and old foundations and boundary lines and roads—stuff he hadn’t noticed, some of it. It helps if you know some geology. Wal, a couple of days ago Mike said, why didn’t I stay on for the summer, join his crew. He can’t pay me anything, account of I’m not a British citizen, but he’s got this big house not too far from the dig rented for the summer, and there’s a real nice furnished apartment empty in what used to be one of the tenant cottages. Mike said I could have that for free, and I could eat with them in the main house whenever I wanted.”

“Really?” Vinnie sits forward. “And are you going to accept?”

“Yeh; I think so.” Chuck grins. “Hell, I got nothing better to do. And it’s nice down there in the country now. Wildflowers everywhere, and so green. Besides, I kinda dig the dig.” He laughs at his own pun. “And Mike and his crew, I like their attitude. They work damn hard, but they aren’t frantic about it. Mike, sometimes he’ll just take the afternoon off to think, go for a long walk. And the students too. Course they don’t have to worry about production quotas, or showing a profit. In business you can’t ever stand still that way. If you’re not getting ahead every goddamn minute you feel as if you’re sliding back.”

“Like the Red Queen.”

“Yeh?” Chuck blinks at her. “What queen was that?”

“In
Through the Looking-Class
.”

“Oh, yeh? I never read that. You think I should?”

“Well.” Vinnie has omitted
Alice in Wonderland
and its sequel from Chuck’s reading list, thinking that they would annoy and baffle him as they do many of her students. But if he is to spend the summer with an Oxford don, perhaps he should prepare himself. “Yes, probably you should.” She sighs, anticipating the explications that will be necessary if Chuck Mumpson is to read
Alice
properly: Victorian education, Victorian social history, Victorian poetry and parody, chess, developmental psychology, Darwinism—

“Okay, if you think so. Hey, Vinnie. How are you feeling?”

“Better, thanks.”

“That’s great. Y’know, I could go for a cup of coffee, if you have one around.”

“No, but I could make some,” Vinnie says, thinking that it is typical of men to believe that all women have a cup of coffee concealed about them somewhere.

“Great.” Chuck follows her into the narrow kitchen, getting in her way while she fills the electric kettle and makes coffee for him and rose-hip tea (high in Vitamin C) for herself.

“Thanks, that’s swell. You got any milk?”

“I’m not sure—I might.” Vinnie opens her miniature fridge, which rests on the counter and is of a size that in America would be thought fit only for a student dormitory room. At the moment it is almost totally filled by three quarts of avocado-and-watercress soup made by her from Posy Billings’ recipe in
Harper’s/Queen
and intended for a luncheon party tomorrow that she will have to cancel if she doesn’t feel any better.

In order to look for the milk, Vinnie lifts out the bowl of soup and turns to set it on the counter. At the same moment Chuck turns toward Vinnie. There is a collision: the stainless-steel bowl is knocked out of her hands and slides to the floor; she and Chuck are drenched with cold green soup and hot black coffee.

“Aw, fuck! Excuse me.”

“Oh, damn it!”

“I didn’t see—Jesus. Sorry. Here, lemme—” Chuck grabs a dishtowel and begins wiping coffee and soup off the front of Vinnie.

“That’s all right,” she says, swallowing with difficulty her irritation and the phrase
You oaf.
“My fault too.” Seizing a damp sponge, she starts to mop up Chuck. Luckily she is wearing a relatively soup-proof dress: an olive-green, densely flowered Laura Ashley cotton; Chuck’s synthetic yellow cowboy shirt and tan Western-cut slacks are much more vulnerable. Because he is so tall, most of the spill is on his pants. As Vinnie moves the sponge over them she suddenly becomes aware that they contain an unmistakable and even impressive bulge—and, simultaneously, that Chuck is to all intents and purposes stroking her breasts with a red checked linen dishtowel.

“Thanks, that’s enough,” she says, backing away from him as far as possible in the tiny kitchen.