Foreign Affairs (35 page)

“Rosemary!” he calls finally. “Rosemary! Are you there?”

Silence. After ringing the bell again, and waiting a few more minutes, he puts his key in the lock.

The house, as he had expected, is darkened and silent. He shuts the door behind him, and forestalls the shrill clamor of Rosemary’s burglar alarm by clicking the switch under the gilt-legged hall table as he has so often done at her request.

The shutters are closed in the long drawing room, but even in this light its total disorder is evident. Newspapers and cushions are strewn on the floor, plates and glasses on the tables. Evidently Mrs. Harris too is away on holiday. He searches round for his book, but can’t see it anywhere; maybe it’s upstairs.

As Fred starts for the hall he hears noises below: a thump and a scuffling of feet. He halts, holding his breath, listening. Has Rosemary lent the house to someone? Have burglars got in in spite of the alarm system? His first impulse is to turn and run, abandoning his possessions, but this strikes him as cowardly and twit-like. Instead he looks round for a weapon, then grabs a tight-rolled black umbrella from the Chinese urn by the hall table. The poker would be more effective; but if it’s not burglars the umbrella will pass as part of his getup. That it’s a sunny afternoon won’t matter: in London many men carry such umbrellas in all weathers, as Gay and his contemporaries carried canes.

Clutching the bamboo handle so tightly that his knuckles whiten, Fred descends the dark, twisting backstairs. In the basement kitchen a greeny half-dusk seeps through the net of ivy that shrouds the barred window. A woman—Mrs. Harris, he recognizes her by her headscarf, and the mop and bucket leaning against the sink—is sitting in a rocker at the far end of the long room. In front of her is a glass and a nearly empty bottle of what looks like Rosemary’s gin.

“So it’s you,” says Mrs. Harris in a drunken, hostile cockney, hardly raising her head to look at him. Though Fred has seen her only once before, and then only briefly, he is aware of her appearance as greatly altered for the worse. Her shoes are off, and shreds of hair hang thickly over her face. “I thought you were off to the States.”

“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”

“Y’are, are you?” Her voice is slurred, shaky. “Then what the bloody ’ell are you doin’ ’ere?’”

“I’ve come to pick up some clothes I left,” Fred explains, repressing his irritation. “I heard noises, so I came down to see what was going on.”

“Oh, yeh,” Mrs. Harris sneers.

“Yeh.” He is not going to be intimidated by a drunken charwoman.

“Creepin’ into the ’ouse behind my back. I oughta call the p’lice.” She grins tipsily.

Fred doesn’t believe for a moment that Mrs. Harris will call the police, but it occurs to him that she will certainly report his visit to Rosemary, no doubt with disagreeable embellishments. “And what are you doing here?” he asks, taking the offensive.

Mrs. Harris stares at him through the gloom in a boozy, fixed way. “You tell me, Professor Know-All,” she says finally.

Fred flinches. “Professor Know-All” was one of Rosemary’s private nicknames for him, used half fondly, half mockingly when he brought forth some item of general information. Where has Mrs. Harris heard it? Either Rosemary has told her, or Mrs. Harris has listened in on their phone calls.

“Lady Rosemary’s still away, isn’t she?” Fred asks. A desperate hope has come to him that his love may have returned, or be about to return before he leaves London. Maybe Mrs. Harris has been told to come in and prepare the house for her. Some preparation! But he tries to speak pleasantly, or at least neutrally. “Is she coming back soon?”

For a long moment Mrs. Harris does not answer. Finally she shrugs. “Could be.” Either she doesn’t know, or—more likely—she has been told, or chooses, not to say.

“I wondered if you were expecting her today.” No answer. “Or tomorrow, maybe.” No answer. “Well, I guess I’ll go and get my things.”

“Right. Clear out all your bloody mess, and good riddance,” Mrs. Harris growls, reaching for the gin bottle.

Fred climbs back up to the hall, thinking that when Rosemary does get home she is in for a shock, unless Mrs. Harris manages to pull herself together first. Somebody, not him, should warn her—should tell her what her perfect charlady has been doing in her absence.

He returns the defensive umbrella to the urn and ascends the graceful white curve of the stairs to Rosemary’s bedroom. It is much brighter here: one tall shutter of the bay window has been folded back, and a broad band of gold-dusted sunlight fans across what he has always thought the most beautiful room in this beautiful house: high-ceilinged, elegantly proportioned, lavishly mirrored. The walls are painted a subtle shade of rosy cream, the woodwork and the flowery plasterwork and fireplace are white; the furniture is white-and-gilt French provincial. Right now, however, the place is one hell of a mess. Drawers hang open, spilling their contents; a lamp lies fallen; the pillows and bedclothes of the four-poster have been dragged to the floor, and the dressing table is a confusion of overturned bottles and broken glass from which a stale sticky-sweet odor rises.

Fred feels a sinking of despair and guilt and longing at this mute testimony to Rosemary’s state of mind when she left London; then fury at Mrs. Harris. It is really disgusting of her not to have cleaned up, not to have spared Rosemary—and all right, himself—such a sight. This is followed by a second spasm of guilt as it occurs to him that it was he who had persuaded Rosemary to hire Mrs. Harris. In a way he is responsible for the state the house is in, and for the drunken slut sitting in the darkened basement. Well, nothing can be done about that now.

He glances into the mirrored, peach-tiled bathroom, but it is so littered and foul—the toilet, for instance, is full of turds—that he decides to forget his razor and toothbrush. Has Mrs. Harris—disgusting idea—been treating the place as her own, pawing over Rosemary’s things, using her bathroom, maybe even sleeping off a drunken stupor in her white-and-gold four-poster bed?

That would explain the disorder, and more logically. When he last saw Rosemary—when he heard her voice in the radio station, rather—she wasn’t in an emotionally disturbed state, but very much in control. Perfectly happy, in fact. He hears her light, melodious voice again: “Thank you, Dennis, and I think it’s quite marvelous to be here.” She doesn’t care about him any more; maybe she never cared.

With a kind of shudder Fred picks his way across the debris-strewn pastel-flowered Chinese carpet and opens the walk-in closet. Yes; there is his sweater, sagging from a clothes hook at the back. He throws it over his arm and looks round for the shirt, but all he can see is Rosemary’s clothes, hanging empty on all sides: her long pink cape, her forget-me-not-blue quilted robe, her gauzy blouses, and her rows of high-heeled sandals like the cages of delicate birds. Many of these garments flutter in his mind with some intimate memory. There is the trailing pale-gray evening dress printed with the blurred shadows of leaves; he remembers how he had caressed a cobwebby fold of it secretly between his fingers all through
Così fan tutte;
there is the apple-green silk voile she wore at her party, which whispered so caressingly as she moved.

Fred feels weak and exhausted, as if he had been running a marathon or playing squash for an hour. He leans against the frame of the closet door and tries to breathe normally. But it is no use; the balloon that has been in his chest ever since he got to Cheyne Square begins to deflate with a wet whinnying sound. Weeping, he knocks his head rhythmically against the door jamb to provide a counterirritant. And as he does so, he becomes aware of another, less evenly rhythmical noise from below: the noise of Mrs. Harris staggering up the stairs, banging into the wall as she comes. The way it sounds, she is so drunk she can hardly walk.

He retreats into the dimness of the closet, hoping she isn’t headed this way or won’t see him; but no such luck. She pauses in the hall, breathing audibly, then stumbles into the bedroom and leans for support on the chest of drawers.

“Missing your sweetie, are you?” she says. Fred realizes that even from the back his posture must be so eloquent of misery that a drunken charwoman can read it. Not trusting himself to look at her, let alone reply—and what would be the point anyhow?—he begins sliding Rosemary’s clothes along the rod, searching for his blue workshirt and hoping that Mrs. Harris will go away.

Instead she lurches across the room toward him, catching her foot in the bedspread and only saving herself by grabbing the bedpost with both hands; then she lurches on into the closet behind Fred.

“Don’t do that now, lovey,” she says. “Let’s make hay.”

Fred stiffens. “Making hay” was his and Rosemary’s most private code phrase. On bright days like this one the westering sun would shine into this room and onto the canopied bed. Rosemary loved to lie in it, to feel it warming and coloring her white skin. “Come on, darling. Let’s make hay while the sun shines,” she had said to him once, laughing softly. A few days later he had bought her a print of Breughel’s
The Haymakers
, and she had tacked it on the pale-flowered wallpaper above the night stand; it is still there. He knows now for sure that Mrs. Harris has been spying on them, sneaking round and listening at doors and/or on the kitchen extension. Sick, sickening. He turns away, giving up on his book and his shirt, wanting now only to get the hell out of here.

“Excuse me, please,” he says angrily.

But Mrs. Harris doesn’t move aside. Instead she stumbles even closer. Her dirty face, what little Fred can see of it under the peroxided hair, is smeared with what looks like a mixture of soot and lipstick; he can smell her unwashed odor and her foul breath. She puts out her hand, and the soiled flowered wrapper she is wearing falls open it; beneath it is incongruously white, voluptuous naked flesh.

“Oh, darling!” she whispers in a drunken, wheezing imitation of Rosemary’s voice. She grabs Fred’s arm; she sags toward him and begins to rub her body against his.

“Quit that!” he cries. He tries to push Mrs. Harris away gently, but she is unexpectedly strong. “Let go of me, you dirty old cow!”

The charwoman’s grip slackens. He shoves her aside with such force that she falls onto the closet floor among Rosemary’s shoes, giving a kind of startled animal howl.

Fred doesn’t stay to see whether Mrs. Harris is hurt, or to help her up. Clutching his sweater, not looking back, he flees from the room and down the curving staircase two steps at a time, and slams out of the house.

Once in the street he keeps walking, at first not choosing any direction. But as he strides on, putting block after block between himself and Cheyne Square, his shock and disgust gradually moderate into embarrassment. He turns south toward the river, reaches the Embankment, and crosses the road. There he stops, leaning on the stone parapet, with the wide calm panorama of the Thames before him. The tide is almost full, and the houseboats moored upriver along the near bank rock rhythmically on its swell. To his left is the Meccano-set rococo of the Albert Bridge, with the high-summer green of Battersea Park beyond; to his right the solid Romanesque brickwork of Battersea Bridge. Slowly, the flow and pale shine of the water, the steady churning of a string of barges headed downstream, the passage of flocked clouds overhead in the glowing sky, begin to calm him.

He will never be able to dream sentimentally about Rosemary’s bedroom again, Fred thinks; but hell, maybe that’s for the best. Who wants to be haunted by some goddamn room? He admits to himself that he hadn’t gone back only for his things, but in the stupid vain hope of seeing Rosemary again. In spite of everything he isn’t over her. Maybe he only got what he deserved. His job now is to forget Rosemary, who has obviously forgotten him and is enjoying herself in some luxurious country place.

In a calmer state of mind, Fred leaves the river and heads home. He has more packing to do, and in a couple of hours he is having supper and going to a late film with two old friends who have just arrived in England for the summer.

By the time Fred meets Tom and Paula his equilibrium is nearly restored, though he remains depressed. Their pleasure at the reunion and their eagerness for information about London raise his spirits somewhat. He is reminded that all American academics are not like the Vogelers (whom he has seen too much of lately) or like Vinnie Miner. A keen homesickness comes over him, a longing for American scenes and American voices, for people like Paula and Tom who say what they think without irony, who won’t ever pretend to like him and then drop him casually and graciously.

Over crepes and Beaujolais at Obelix, around the corner from his flat, Fred recommends to his friends a number of London sights, restaurants, and cultural events, without revealing his disillusion with the place. (Why discourage them, after all? They’re only here for a few weeks.) He also relates a censored version of the scene that afternoon with Mrs. Harris. He doesn’t say, for instance, that he had a key to the house; and Rosemary is transformed into “some people I know who are out of town.” Stripped of these aspects, his experience that afternoon begins to seem almost comic, in a rough way—a scene from Smollett, or maybe a cartoon by Rowlandson. It becomes a jocular tale, a kind of jest or fabliau, and is a riotous success with Tom and Paula.

“Great story,” Tom pronounces. “It would only happen to you.”

As he lies in bed much later that evening Fred recalls this comment, which at the time made him uncomfortable. But of course Tom, who has never heard of Rosemary, meant it as a kind of compliment. Because of Fred’s appearance, he was saying, it is comically appropriate that a drunken cockney charwoman should make obscene proposals to him.

It is true that over the years Fred has received other unwelcome—though less comically revolting—offers of this sort. Girls and women he has hardly looked at and never would look at have sometimes, there’s no denying it, thrown themselves at him, or at least in his general direction, causing him acute embarrassment. His male friends have often been less than sympathetic. Hell, they sometimes say, they wouldn’t complain if girls were falling all over them—not realizing what it’s really like to be heavily fallen upon by some woman you don’t want, even if some other guy does.