Foreign Affairs

8

FOR the first day or so after Rosemary’s party, Fred doesn’t take their quarrel very seriously. Her temper is always volatile, and she’s been briefly unreasonable before. Once, for instance, she broke a date because she disliked the way her hair had been done: it looked, she said, like some demented mouse’s nest, and she couldn’t bear for him to see it. But she made the disappointment up to him, and more, when they next met. Fred smiled, remembering.

When forty-eight hours have passed and Rosemary still hasn’t answered her private telephone or responded to the messages he left with her service, Fred begins to feel uneasy. Then he remembers that she is working: she has a guest role in a historical television series that’s filming this week. He makes some phone inquiries, starting with Rosemary’s agent, who seems to know nothing of any quarrel (a good sign, Fred thinks), and discovers that they are shooting an outdoor scene early the following morning within walking distance of his flat.

Now full of hope, he rises at eight, gulps some coffee and a piece of half-scorched gritty toast (he has never mastered the British open grill), and hastens toward Holland Park. Early as it is, the square where they are shooting and the streets leading into it are choked with cars and vans and what the British call lorries. Part of the road has been cordoned off; a policeman stands by the barrier in the relaxed posture of one who has drawn an easy assignment; passersby have begun to gather.

Though the sky is heavy with gray, lumpy clouds, a simmering golden light bathes the façade of one tall, elegant brick house and the courtyard and pavement before it. This artificial sunshine emanates from two banks of fluorescent tubes on poles-miniature versions of those he’s seen at night baseball games. The building glows not only with light but with fresh paint: glossy white on the pillars and trim, glossy black on the ironwork. The railings and woodwork of the two neighboring houses have also been freshly painted-but only on the sides visible to the camera: the backs of the pillars, for instance, are dull and cracked. At the other end of the square two men with a ladder are taking down a metal sign reading COOMARASWAMY FOODS and replacing it with a wooden one inscribed CHEMIST in shaded Victorian capitals.

Fred’s good looks, his American accent, and his modestly confident manner make it easy for him to talk his way past the barrier. He negotiates a section of pavement jammed with people and equipment and crawling with electrical snakes-yellow, black, poison-green-and accosts an anxious-looking young woman with a clipboard.

“Oh, yes, Rosemary Radley’s on location,” she tells him. “She’s inside the house there, but you can’t speak to her now”-she snatches at Fred’s arm to prevent him-”we’re going to start shooting in a couple of minutes.”

This, as usual in the film business, turns out to be overoptimistic. More than a quarter of an hour passes while Fred leans against the side of a van marked Lee Electrics, watching the scene. A man in a blue smock is wiring white plastic flowers onto the standard rosebushes that flank the front walk of the golden house; two other men are doing something to the lights. A group of actors in Edwardian costume stands by the curb chatting: an old woman in black with a basket, a younger woman twirling a ruffled white parasol, a man in tweeds and a hat, a nanny pushing an empty wicker pram. Many of the crew members also seem to be merely waiting about, though now and then there are outbreaks of activity and shouting. A short plump man resembling an untidy beaver, with an unraveling brown sweater and unraveled gray hair-much the shabbiest and least attractive of the company-seems always to be the focus of these confusions. Fred puts him down as an incompetent technician-some union-protected booby-and blames the continuing delay on him, then realizes he is the director.

At length the tumult focuses to a point and stops. The door of the golden house opens; a dignified elderly man in Edwardian morning dress steps out, then a beautiful woman in gray and pink, her flaxen hair piled high and floating an immense hat of pink feathers and veiling like a nesting flamingo: Rosemary. The man speaks to her; she replies at length, smiling sweetly up at him. Fred can hear nothing of what they are saying because of traffic noise at the bottom of the square and the shouted instructions of the director. This strikes him as weird; then he notices that there are no microphones in sight The scene is being photographed, but not recorded-presumably that will be done later, in some studio.

Now Rosemary and her companion descend the marble steps, speaking and laughing animatedly, or appearing to do so. The camera is rolled back; on the sidewalk the nanny begins to push the pram away downhill, the young couple to stroll in the other direction. The beaver raises both hands, shouting “Cut! Hold it!” Two women and a man in coveralls rush toward Rosemary and the elderly actor and swarm over them, adjusting their clothes, smoothing their hair, powdering their faces. His love and her companion stand there passively, receiving the attention with no more concern than two store-window dummies. The beaver consults with the man operating the camera, then with several others. Finally he gives a signal; Rosemary, who hasn’t even glanced in Fred’s direction, returns to the house.

Over the next forty minutes this series of events is repeated many times, with only minor variations. Rosemary and the elderly actor exchange sides as they descend the steps; they walk faster, and then slower; the flamingo-pink hat is tilted at a different angle; a dangling branch above the railings is lopped off by a man with a saw and a ladder; the nanny is instructed to walk away more rapidly; the lights are moved again. At other times Fred, unfamiliar with the language of television production, can’t figure out what change has been made. Twice the actors get as far as the front gate and are accosted by the shabby woman in black, causing Rosemary to look concerned, smile graciously, and make an inaudible but earnest appeal to her companion.

As he watches, Fred is overwhelmed again by his love’s beauty and charm, which seem almost supernatural in the supernatural sunlight, and then by her cheerful endurance. Each time she emerges from the house she smiles with the same soft brilliance, trips down the steps with the same easy grace, laughs at the actor’s inaudible joke with the same perfect spontaneity. He understands for the first time that Rosemary is more than a beautiful creation of nature, a lily of the field; he sees that acting for television is hard, boring, skilled work, and admires her even more than before.

At the same time, many details of Rosemary’s performance make him uncomfortable. Her way of tilting her head and placing three fingers on the actor’s sleeve in half-serious, half-childish appeal, for instance. Until now, he has thought of this gesture as natural, impulsive, private-not a stage mannerism. Is this why Rosemary has never arranged for him to see Tallyho Castle on video tape, though the project has so often been discussed?

Finally a halt is called in the shooting. The pram is abandoned in the middle of the street: electricians and carpenters (Rosemary would call them “sparks” and “chippies”) lean against their equipment and pop open cans of soda; coffee in plastic cups is distributed. At last she emerges from the house again, without her hat. Fred hurries toward her, avoiding the tangle of cables as well as he can, once almost falling.

“Freddy!” Her face lights with pleasure, exactly as it has just done over and over again on camera. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you phone me? No-mustn’t touch-I’m plastered with makeup.” She gives him a quick hug, averting her face, which in close-up has an unnaturally flawless pasty surface, like the freshly painted house.

“I did, but all I got was the answering service. And you never called me back.”

“Oh, nonsense, darling. There wasn’t any message.”

“I called four or five times at least; and I left my name every time,” Fred insists.

“Really? Those stupid girls; I expect they’re jealous. Trying to ruin my love-life.” Rosemary giggles.

“I can’t believe-I mean, why the hell should they want to do that?”

“Who knows?” Rosemary shrugs. “People are so peculiar sometimes.” She reaches up to ruffle his dark curls. “Not like you. That’s what I adore about you, Freddy darling-you’re so reasonable. Come into the dressing-room. I’ve got to sit down; this corset is murder.”

She leads the way to a bus parked further up the street with its doors open. Within, most of the seats have been removed; the space is filled with mirrors, clothes-racks, and folding metal chairs and tables.

“Oh, darling.” She hugs him again, more closely, then sits, gives a quick, searching look into a glass, and swivels round. “I’m so happy to see you; I’ve got wonderful news. Pandora Box has invited us to her tower in Wales for the last week of June, it’s the most glorious place, and George owns the fishing rights on the river now-do you like to fish?”

“Yes-but I won’t be here at the end of June, you know.”

“Oh, Freddy, please. Don’t start that again.” She pivots back to the mirror and begins to smooth stray wisps of silken hair into the white-gold billows above.

“I can’t help it, damn it. I have to go back and teach. Besides, I’m broke. I can’t afford to stay here any longer even if I could.”

“Oh, Freddy,” Rosemary repeats, but in a very different manner, soft and surprised, leaning over the back of the folding chair toward him and extending round white arms delicately veiled in gray lace. “You mustn’t worry about that, pet. If that’s all it is, I can easily help you out. I’m quite flush now from residuals, and this thing we’re shooting here-it’s a bore, but it does pay rather well.”

“I can’t live off you,” Fred says, his voice thickening.

“I’m not offering to keep you, silly. I haven’t come to that, I hope.” Rosemary laughs lightly, but there is an edge of impatience in her voice. “I’m only offering to lend you something.”

“I can’t take money from you. It would ruin everything.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be a ninny. It wouldn’t be very much. And you could save something by moving out of that nasty overpriced flat and staying with me for a bit, if you liked. And then once we’re in Ireland, everything’s practically gratis. Besides, I might ask Al if he couldn’t get you into the show as an extra. That’d be rather a lark, don’t you think?”

“Well…” says Fred, noticing that Rosemary seems to have adopted the slang of the Victorian age along with its fashions.

“You wouldn’t have to say anything,” she assures him. “Well, of course you couldn’t anyhow, because of your Yankee accent.”

Fred smiles. Though impossible from a practical point of view, the fantasy of appearing in a British television drama with Rosemary is agreeable.

“But you could be a silent brooding undergardener, or a gypsy tramp, or something like that. And you’d be paid a bit too, of course. I’d insist on that.”

“No,” Fred says with force. He scowls, unconsciously acting the insulting role assigned to him by his love’s imagination. “That’d be as bad as taking money from you. Worse.”

Rosemary’s fair, finely penciled eyebrows approach each other in a tiny but somehow threatening frown. She stands up gracefully, smoothing the lacy tiers of her skirt. “Really, you’re being awfully stupid,” she says, gazing down at Fred. “You think you’re in some historical drama; it’s you who ought to be in costume. You want to make both of us perfectly miserable, all because of some Victorian moral principle, that a man can’t borrow money from a woman.”

“Not from one he loves, no,” says Fred stubbornly.

“I don’t understand what’s happening.” Her musical voice quavers, and so does her small round chin above the high frilled collar. “What do you want from me? Oh, damn.” Tearing a tissue from a cardboard box, she blots eyes shiny with moisture. “You’re ruining my makeup.”

Fred rises to embrace her. Avoiding the creamy plastered face and the soot-streaked eyes, he kisses the fine floss of hair behind her ear, the soft neck veiled with lace, the white ringed hand that holds the damp tissue. “Nothing. Everything. I just want us to go on loving each other. That’s all.”

“For four weeks.”

“Yes,” he says, distracted by the contrasting stiffness and softness of Rosemary’s body: the heavy, slippery watered silk and frail net and lace; the feel of corseting underneath and soft yielding flesh beneath that; he presses her harder to him.

“You little shit,” says Rosemary in coarse, unfamiliar tones, using a word he has never heard or expected to hear from her. “Take your bloody hands off me.” Jolted, he steps back.

“I should have listened to Mrs. Harris,” she goes on in a voice that is her own, but charged with fury. “She warned me not to trust you.” She is facing him now, her great fringed eyes narrowed. “‘He’s a Yankee skip-jack,’ she told me a long time ago. ‘He’s a low-life deceiver of women.’”

“Rosemary, darling-”

“Excuse me, please. I have to get my makeup repaired.” With a swish of her satin fishtail skirt, Rosemary is out the door and tripping down the street.

Fred stands a moment, stunned; then he races after her. “Rosemary, please-”

Rosemary halts. She looks round coldly at him, then calls to one of the attendant policemen. “Oh, officer!”

“Yes, Miss?” He approaches, smiling.

“Could you move this man away, please?” She indicates Fred with a toss of her head. “He’s bothering me.”

“Right you are, Miss.”

“Thank you.” She gives him a smile made more dazzling by the sooty dampness of her great blue-gray eyes, and trips off.

“All right, you don’t have to shove me, I’m going,” Fred says, shaking the policeman’s hand from his arm. He picks his way through the electrical snakes, round the barricade, and past a large crowd of spectators. Then he turns and looks back over their heads to the house bathed in brazen unnatural light. In its front courtyard a man with a bucket and brush is methodically painting the plastic roses a brilliant, glamorous crimson.

Even after this scene Fred isn’t wholly discouraged. He has never in his life been rejected by any girl or woman he seriously cared for, and he is almost as certain of Rosemary’s feelings as he is of his own. Hadn’t she been crying at the idea of parting from him?

Not that he takes her tears all that seriously. He has seen his love weep before: at a sad film, or for the death of some actor she barely knew; and then, half an hour later, he has seen her dissolved in laughter at some scandal about the same actor relayed by a friend. The theatrical temperament, he suspects, enjoys emotional scenes and tangles of misunderstanding, just as it later enjoys their untangling. The climate of their affair had always been, not stormy, but dramatically various, as changeable as the English spring weather-sunshine succeeding showers with a breezy, careless rapidity.

But as the days pass and he still can’t reach Rosemary, Fred becomes more and more tense and desperate. From one hour to the next his mood changes. He is enraged at Rosemary and never wants to see her again; he wants to see her, but only to tell her off, to let her know how angry he is; he wants to break into her house, to force his love upon her; he wants to plead with her: Hasn’t she shut him out long enough? There are so few weeks left; it is perverse and wasteful of her to squander them this way.

Also, for the first time, he seriously asks himself if he should do as Rosemary demands. Should he cable or telephone to the Summer School office in Corinth and say that he won’t be able to teach this year-maybe say he is ill? Isn’t two months in England with Rosemary worth it-worth angering his senior colleagues and risking his promotion? But if he doesn’t teach this summer, what the hell is he going to live on? He’s practically broke now, and if he stays on he’ll be-there’s no getting round it-living on Rosemary, in her house; letting her buy his meals and, when they go to Wales or to Ireland, his train and plane tickets. He will be what is called a kept man-a man who is maintained, enclosed, as one might house and feed and cage an expensive pet. And hadn’t Rosemary, when they last met, called him “pet”? No, no, never.

If he could only find the key to Rosemary’s house that she once gave him, he would go there and wait for her to come home. But the damn thing is lost; he must have left it behind the day of the party. Without it, he does what he can: he phones again and again; he even goes to the house in Chelsea, but nobody is ever home, except, once, Mrs. Harris, who won’t let him in or take a message, only shouts through the locked door something that sounds like “bugger off!” Is Rosemary staying somewhere else? Has she left town? He tries her agent, but now the man is coolly and smoothly uncommunicative. He is awfully sorry, he says, but he has no idea where Rosemary might be-two evident lies.

Rosemary’s friends are more agreeable, but just as unhelpful. And their agreeableness, Fred realizes now, is and always was generic rather than specific. In the past, because he was Rosemary’s current boyfriend, they had inquired about his work and solicited his opinions on matters cultural, political, and domestic. Now they have dropped him-though in all cases with the gentlest and most casual motion, as if brushing a crumb to the floor. They all have charming manners; when he telephones they are uniformly pleasant, but rather vague and always “awfully busy.” Some seem to have difficulty remembering who he is (“Oh yes, Fred Turner. How nice to hear from you”). Though he isn’t leaving for several weeks, they wish him a pleasant journey back to “the States” as if he were just about to step onto a plane. His questions about Rosemary are passed over as if unheard, or met with what he is beginning to recognize as the classic waffling manner of the British upper classes when confronted with the insignificant unpleasant. (“Goodness, I haven’t the faintest-wasn’t she going to the Auvergne or somewhere like that?”) Rosemary’s closest friends, who might have been more helpful, and with whom he could have been more direct, are unavailable. Posy lives out of town, and he doesn’t have her (unlisted) number; Erin, Nadia, and Edwin are abroad.

His colleague and fellow-citizen Vinnie Miner is also of no use. When he saw her last week at the British Museum she promised to speak to Rosemary for him, promised to explain that Fred didn’t want to leave London, that he loves her-Nothing has come of that commission, if she carried it out, which he doubts. And even if she did, Fred thinks, she probably didn’t make much of a job of it. If Vinnie ever in her life experienced real romantic love, let alone sexual passion, she has probably forgotten it.

Whereas he, Fred, is-shit, he might as well admit it-emotionally and physically obsessed. All he can think of, day and night both, is Rosemary. He tries to work at home, he goes to the BM, but he can’t concentrate, can’t read, can’t take notes, can’t write. And this although he has, for the first time in months, all the time in the world: long empty days and nights.

Again, just as he did last winter, he has taken to wandering about London. But now he knows that the city exists; that a rich, complex, intense life goes on within its walls, behind its shuttered and curtained windows. Everywhere he passes houses, restaurants, office buildings, shops, and blocks of flats where he has been with Rosemary; the streets themselves shimmer with the almost visible ghosts of his love affair. In this keyed-up state he often thinks he sees Rosemary herself at a distance: going into Selfridge’s, or in the intermission crowd at a theater; he spots her pale-gold halo of hair and light tripping walk three blocks away down Holland Park Road or getting out of a taxi in Mayfair. His heart pounds; he races, dodging traffic and shoving aside pedestrians, toward what always turns out to be some stranger.

Today Fred is in a part of London where he has little hope of coming upon Rosemary. He is walking along the Regent’s Canal above Camden Lock on a glowing June day with Joe and Debby Vogeler. Their progress is slow, since Joe is pushing the baby, and the old towpath is thronged with Sunday strollers. By the time Fred gets back to his flat and his typewriter most of the working day will be gone. On the other hand, if he’d stayed home he probably wouldn’t have accomplished damn-all either. His mind cannot focus on the eighteenth century; it is focused too hard on the late twentieth, and specifically on the moment less than twenty-four hours from now when he will be face to face with Rosemary for the first time in a fortnight, and she will have to listen to him.

Joe and Debby are also preoccupied, though in their case more vocally. What obsesses them is their baby’s intellectual development, or rather his lack of it. Jakie is already sixteen months old, for God’s sake, and he hasn’t started to talk-hasn’t said a single damn word, though many kids his age or even younger (examples are cited) are already dauntingly verbal. Their anxiety, it occurs to Fred, is clearly a function of what some modern critics would call an over-valorization of language; it hardly matters to them that Jakie is, as he points out now, a healthy, strong, active child.

“If he’d just start to speak, he’d be so much more like a real person,” Debby explains. “I mean, sure, I know he’s healthy, and he’s kind of sweet sometimes, but he’s not exactly human, you know what I mean?”

“It’s so damn frustrating not being able to communicate with him,” says Joe. “Not to know all the things he must be thinking and experiencing. Our own kid. You can’t help wondering, when he starts speaking, what is he going to say to us?”

“You could be disappointed,” Fred remarks. “My father told me once that when I was a baby he used to look at me, having deep Wordsworthian thoughts about childhood, and wondering what message from the realms of glory I would bring down to him. Then finally I learnt to talk, and I said my first sentence, and it was, ‘Freddy want cookie.’”

“How old were you when you said that?” asks Debby, failing to get the point.

“I haven’t any idea.” Fred sighs.

“Most children don’t start putting sentences together until they’re about two,” Joe says. “But they can usually produce single words a lot sooner. Ordinarily. Jakie babbles a lot, but nothing comes of it. I mean, what do you think?”

“He looks okay to me,” says Fred, who has no experience of babies. Maybe there is something wrong with Jakie; how the hell should he know? He has a hard time considering the subject, or any subject; he scarcely sees the picturesque scene through which he is walking: on the one hand a bank of long grass and wild flowering weeds, on the other the brightly painted barges and the tall horse chestnuts in the gardens on the opposite shore, which have begun to scatter their clusters of bloom onto the canal, transforming it into a floating carpet of cream and pink stars. London is visible to him now only in painful flashes of memory; most of the time he moves in a city of clouded gloomy shapes and noises.

Almost the only people Fred has seen anything of since Rosemary’s party are the Vogelers, and he has seen more of them than he wants to, mostly because he hasn’t the energy to invent excuses. Joe and Debby’s opinion of London has improved with the good weather, but not much. Sure, the place looks better, Joe admits, but Jesus Christ, it ought to be warmer than this by June. Back home they’d have been swimming for months, Debby says. And you might as well forget about trying to get a decent tan.

The Vogelers’ views are shared by several friends they have made here-two Canadian historians, met in the British Museum lunchroom, and another couple, relatives of the first, from Australia. All four of them agree with Joe and Debby about the inadequacy of British food, the lukewarmness of British beer, the chilliness of the natives, and the disappointing smallness of every national monument and tourist attraction.

They also have an explanation. Andy (the Australian) outlined it to Fred last week in a pub in Hampstead. The trouble with Britain today, he claimed, is that for three hundred years its boldest and most energetic, independent, and hardy citizens left the fucking place and went to the colonies-under which term he includes the U.S., right? The ones who stayed behind, by a process of natural selection, became progressively more timid, inert, slavish, and sickly. Hell, just look around you, Andy said. The British are poor pale sad bastards now, the dregs of a once noble stock.

Sure, Andy admitted, Australia was settled by convicts-but wait a moment, mate, just ask yourself how they got to be convicts in the first place. What they really were was working-class blokes who wouldn’t accept the class system shit, who weren’t going to rot their fucking asses off slaving for pennies and live on charity porridge when they got too old to work. They had imagination and guts; they took risks, they made a grab for a fair share of what was going. Moll Flanders, not Oliver Twist.

Essentially the attitude of all these colonials-now including the Vogelers-toward Britain is that of successful people toward parents they have outgrown. They admire England’s history and traditions; they feel a sentimental fondness for its landscape and architecture; but, Christ, they’d never want to come back and live here.

The experience of what Fred considers the real, inner London that Joe and Debby had at Rosemary’s party hasn’t affected their views. Most of the people they met there seemed to them “kind of phony-baloney,” and they are still smarting from the reaction of certain guests to their baby’s presence and behavior. Debby, in particular, seems to Fred to be nursing her grudge as if it were some ugly, fretful child-Jakie himself, maybe, on a bad afternoon. Fred’s admission now that he and Rosemary have quarreled, and his account of his last meeting with her, only confirm their prejudice.

“That’s how the English are, especially the middle-class types,” Joe informs Fred as they turn back down the towpath toward Camden Lock. “You never really know where you are with them.”

“Perfidious Albion,” suggests Fred, who half agrees with Joe and half pities his ignorance.

“Yeh, okay.” Joe declines to register the irony. “I don’t deny that they can be damn pleasant if they want. I can understand how you felt about Rosemary Radley; I was kind of bowled over by her myself at first. But your mind-set and hers are light-years apart.”

“Mf.” Fred makes a noise of discomfort. Not for the first time, he wonders why it is that married couples feel perfectly free to analyze the affairs of their unmarried friends; whereas if he were to make some comment on Joe and Debby’s relationship they would be righteously pissed-off.

“I absolutely agree,” his wife says. “Oh, what is it now?” She squats to confront Jakie, who has begun fretting and squirming in the stroller; it is one of his bad afternoons.

“It looks like he wants to get out,” Fred suggests.

“He always wants to get out. Well, all right, silly.” Debby disentangles the baby and sets him on uncertain feet-he has only been walking for a few months. “Okay, wait a second. Jesus.” She straightens out the striped ticking overalls and cap that make Jakie look like a dwarf railway engineer, and takes a firm grip on his small puffy hand.

“You’ve got to reexamine your priorities,” Joe instructs Fred, as they continue, now at a toddler’s pace, along the towpath, pushing the empty stroller.

Silently, Fred declines to do this.

“That’s right,” Debby says. “I mean, after all, there was never any future in it. Just for one thing, Rosemary Radley’s much too old for you.”

“I don’t see that,” Fred says with an edge in his voice. “You’re older than Joe, aren’t you?”

“I’m fifteen months older; that hardly signifies,” Debby returns, not very pleasantly.

“All right. So Rosemary’s thirty-seven. What the hell difference does that make, if we love each other?” says Fred, wishing he had never confided in the Vogelers or maybe even met them.

“Rosemary’s not thirty-seven,” Debby says. “No way. She’s about forty-four, or maybe forty-five.”

“Oh, come on. She is not.” He laughs angrily.

“I read it in the Sunday Times .”

“So what; that doesn’t make it true,” Fred says, recalling how often his love had complained of the disgusting lies printed about her and other actors. “Screw them.”

“All right, don’t believe it.” Debby’s tone combines annoyance and condescension. “No, no Jakie! You don’t really want that.” She stoops and pries from her baby’s fingers a half-squashed rubber ball with a cracked and faded Union Jack pattern. “Nasty, dirty thing. Joe, would you hold onto him a moment?” Debby transfers the struggling baby’s hand to his father, then hurls the ball away up the weedy slope. Jakie stares after it, then lets out a surprised howl.

“Look, Jakie, look!” his father cries, trying to distract him. “See the, uh, boat.” He points to a painted dinghy moored on the farther shore. “Oh, hell.”

The squashed rubber ball has reemerged from the weeds; it bounces across the path ahead of them and into the sliding frog-green water of the canal, where it joins a flotilla of debris that includes a plastic bleach bottle, half an orange, and bits of waterlogged wood and straw. “No, Jakie!” He holds the straining, screaming child back. “Bad germs. All gone now.”

“You don’t want that dirty old ball,” Debby insists-an obvious lie, Fred thinks. “Stop that right now!” The baby, in a paroxysm of frustrated desire, is kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs; his face is distorted into a red gargoyle mask.

“Oh, shit,” Joe sighs. “Come on now, Jakie. Up you go.” He hoists the struggling, howling gnome to his shoulder. “A-one, a-two.” Joe begins to bounce his son in what Fred supposes is meant to be a soothing manner, at the same time striding rapidly down the towpath, followed by Debby and the stroller. “A-one, a-two. That’s-a-baby.”

“Listen, I’m sorry if what I said annoyed you,” Debby remarks, as they outdistance the floating ball and Jakie’s screams diminish to a fretful gurgle.

“That’s all right,” says Fred, feeling magnanimously sorry for the Vogelers, parents of a retarded infant troll.

“It’s just like, I don’t like to see you so down over something like this.”

“Like okay,” Fred says. “It’ll pass,” he adds, thinking that with luck he and his love will be together again by this time tomorrow.

“Sure it will,” Joe tells him. “Rosemary Radley’s not what you really want anyhow.”

“Once you’re back in America, I bet you’ll read the whole experience a lot differently,” says his wife.

“Mh,” Fred mutters; it has just occurred to him that to the Vogelers his passion for Rosemary is more or less exactly equivalent to Jakie’s passion for an old rubber ball.

“That’s right,” Debby agrees. “You need a woman with some real intellectual substance. That’s what I’ve always thought,” she continues, mistaking Fred’s silence for receptivity. “Someone you can really communicate with on your own level. Share your ideas with.”

“Right,” Joe puts in. “For instance, somebody like Carissa.”

“Carissa wouldn’t ever have behaved in such a flighty, irrational way. You always know exactly where you are with Carissa. She’s really up front; I remember once when she-”

“Look, Debby,” Fred interrupts, halting and turning to face her. “Do me a favor: quit mentioning Carissa to me. Carissa is not the point.”

“But she is the point,” says Joe. “Oh, all right,” he concedes, registering Fred’s expression. “If that’s the way you feel.”

“That’s the way I feel, God damn it,” Fred says. It occurs to him that he and the Vogelers are on the verge of a real quarrel-maybe of a break in their seven-year friendship. But in his present mood he doesn’t give a shit.

All of them are stopped on the towpath now, facing one another. But the slippery greenish water still pours by, bearing its flotsam and jetsam. Jakie, gazing over his father’s shoulder, sees his lost prize approaching and begins to babble excitedly. “Oooh! Oo-ah-um! Ba-boo-ball!”

“Ball!” Joe cries. “He said ‘ball,’ Debby!”

“I heard him!” Debby’s cross, set face breaks into a delighted grin. “Jakie, darling. Say it again. Say ‘ball.’”

“Boo-uh-aw! Bah-aw. Ball!” The baby strains toward his object of desire as it floats by, surrounded by waterlogged crap.

“He said ‘ball,’” his mother declares with triumph.

“His first word.” His father’s voice trembles.

“Ball,” Debby breathes. “Did you hear that, Fred? He said ‘ball.’” But she and Joe hardly wait for an answer; forgetting Fred, they gaze at their son with relief and awe, then clasp him in a double embrace and cover him with happy kisses.

Fred’s confrontation with Rosemary the next day has been planned without her knowledge or consent. A listing in the Sunday papers had informed him that she was appearing on a radio program featuring the newly published memoirs of her friend Daphne Vane, and he had determined to be there. After a morning of trying (without success) to work on his book, he checks the time and the address again and sets out.

The studio, when he finds it, is discouraging-not the sort of place anyone would choose for a lovers’ meeting. Fred would have preferred the BBC building in Portland Place, where he once went with Rosemary: a comic temple of art deco design with a golden sunburst over the door and a bank of gilded elevators. Behind them was a warren of corridors down which eccentric-looking persons hurried with White Rabbit expressions. The sound rooms were cosy burrows furnished with battered soft leather chairs and historical-looking microphones and switchboards; the Battle of Britain still seemed to reverberate in the smoky air.

This commercial station is cold and anonymous and ultra-contemporary; its glass-fronted lobby is decorated in Madison Avenue minimalism. A dozen or so teenagers slump on plastic divans, chewing gum and jiggling their knees to the pounding beat of rock music.

“I’m here to meet Rosemary Radley,” Fred shouts through the din at a sexy young receptionist with magenta lips and greasy-green iridescent eyelids. “She’s going to be on the Lively Arts program at four.”

“What name, please?”

Fred pronounces it, thinking a second later that maybe he should have claimed to be somebody else.

“Just a sec, baby; see what I can do.” She gives him an openly admiring look and a glossy ripe-plum smile, and lifts a red telephone. “They’re trying to locate her.” She smiles at Fred again. “You from America?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought so. That’s my dream, to go to the States.” She listens to the phone again, her smile tightening from plum to prune; finally she shakes her head.

“Tell her it’s important. Very important.”

The receptionist gives him a different sort of look, equally admiring but less respectful; Fred realizes that she has reclassified him from VIP to groupie. She speaks again into the shiny red phone.

“Sorry. Nothing doing,” she says finally. “I’d let you in, but they’d give me hell.”

“I’ll wait till the program’s over.” Fred makes for a cube covered in shiny black imitation leather. As he sits on its edge, waiting, other visitors approach the desk; after checking by phone the receptionist presses a buzzer, allowing them to pass through the quilted, metal-studded imitation-leather doors behind her. The rock music continues, then blares to a crescendo, inspiring some of the lounging teenagers to rise and dance with hysterical, jerky motions.

The music crashes to a halt and is followed by a string of deafening commercials. The teenagers swarm toward the rear of the lobby, some of them holding out what look like autograph books.

“Don’t miss this amazing opportunity! Call NOW!… Stay tuned now for The Lively Arts.” There is a surge of mood-music.

“Welcome again to The Lively Arts.” A different voice, fluty and confiding. “I am your host, Dennis Wither. This afternoon we have a real treat in store: we’re going to be talking to Dame Daphne Vane, whose autobiography, Vane Pursuits: A Life in the Theatre , has just been published by Heinemann. Dame Daphne is here in the studio, and with her is Lady Rosemary Radley, star of the prizewinning television series Tallyho Castle …”

The punk teenagers look grossed-out at this news; some groan, one pantomimes nausea. Fred gives him a hostile look. He knows that Rosemary’s show, popular as it is, has detractors. Some highbrow liberals, for instance, consider its picture of village life sentimental and snobbish. But these idle, loud-mouth kids, pretending to vomit at Rosemary’s name-He’d like to murder them.

“We’ll be back in a moment.” While an idiotic musical plug for shampoo (“Dreamier-lovelier!”) reverberates round the lobby, a skinny man in a nail-studded white leather coverall pushes his way out through the doors behind the reception desk, followed by two fatter men in cheap suits. The teenagers converge on him with shrill cries.

The celebrity, whoever he is, moves on across the lobby, smiling tensely. He stops to sign a few autographs, then breaks for the street doors and a waiting limousine, while the fat men run interference. I might as well be back in New York already, Fred thinks, watching this scene with distaste.

Suddenly Rosemary’s beautiful trilling laugh, electronically magnified to three times life size, fills the room. Fred’s heart flops like a fish.

“Thank you, Dennis darling, and I think it’s quite marvelous to be here.” Her sweet, clear, perfectly modulated upper-class voice echoes from one wall to another, as if an invisible Rosemary Radley sixteen feet tall were floating in the air above his head.

Fred sits listening, becoming more and more angry. Rosemary’s praise of Daphne’s autobiography is fervent but, he knows, false-she has already described it to him as “a silly picture book” and made fun of Daphne for being too tight to hire a really good ghostwriter. Now she announces to anyone tuned to this station in Greater London-or, for all he knows, anywhere in Britain-that she “was absolutely bowled over” by Daphne’s “wonderful charm and wit.” How can she tell such lies? How can she chatter on like that, laugh like that, exchange trivial theatrical reminiscences with Daphne and those other fools? Obviously she isn’t in the same kind of pain he is. She really doesn’t give a fuck; she’s forgotten he exists. Well, as soon as the show is over he’ll remind her.

The closing theme begins; Fred approaches the padded doors. Five minutes pass, but Rosemary doesn’t appear, nor do any of the other people who were on the program with her.

“Hey!” The receptionist calls to him through a renewed blast of popular music. “Hey, you.”

“Yeh?” Fred looks round.

“You still waiting for Rosemary Radley?”

“Yes.”

“You’re wasting your time. The talent doesn’t use this way out, ’less they want to see their fans or something.”

“Thank you.” Fred approaches her desk, leans on it with both elbows, and projects as much sexual charm as he can manage in his present mood. “What way out do they use?”

“Round the back, by the parking lot. But they’re probably all gone by now.” She lowers her slime-green, thick-lashed eyelids, leans toward him. “Anyhow, what does a hunk like you want with a bag that age?”

“I-” Fred suppresses the impulse to defend his love; there’s no time to lose. “Excuse me.” He runs across the lobby, shoves open a thick glass door, and circles the block. Behind the studio building he finds another entrance, but the glass doors here refuse to open.

His heart thumping, he stands beside a stack of empty packing cases watching for Rosemary to come out-with Daphne and those other fools probably, he realizes. But he won’t bother about them, he’ll pull her away, he’ll say… Slowly, as Fred rehearses his prepared speech, time leaks out of the air; slowly he realizes that Rosemary has left without waiting for him.

Furious with blocked impulse, Fred curses aloud. “Goddamned bitch,” he cries to the empty parking lot, and much more. He says to himself that Rosemary is cold-hearted, cruel; that all her words and gestures-some rise to consciousness, but he shoves them down again-were false, theatrical. The Lively Arts, he thinks: so lively, so arty… Ah, fuck it. He kicks the side of a damp-stained packing case several times, stoving it in.

Maybe he should have used more lively art himself. He should have lied to Rosemary, told her that he’d resigned his summer-school job, enjoyed himself for the next four weeks, and then got on the plane-been the Yankee skip-jack Mrs. Harris claimed he was.

But he couldn’t have kept up the act; he’s no thespian. Anyhow the whole idea of it makes him sick. It wouldn’t have been love any longer, it would have been calculation, exploitation. Rosemary could have managed that maybe, if she’d wanted…

And now a smog of suspicion and jealousy descends on Fred, as if the saturated smoky-purple clouds that hang over the parking lot had suddenly descended, blotting out London. Maybe Rosemary was faking all along. Maybe she staged that quarrel with him after her party deliberately; maybe she’d just met or renewed a connection with someone she likes better. Maybe even now she is in the arms of this man, whispering to him in her soft voice, giving her intimate trilling laugh. Again the idea that he has fallen into a Henry James novel occurs to Fred; but now he casts Rosemary in a different role, as one of James’ beautiful, worldly, corrupt European villainesses.

What if it was all false, everything she’d ever said to him, everything he’d believed about her? What if, even, Debby was right, and Rosemary is really years older than she’d said? She doesn’t even look thirty-seven, but Nico had claimed that she’d had more than one face-lift, that all actresses did as a matter of course. Fred had assumed this was just fag spitefulness. But suppose it’s true, what difference does it make? Whatever her age, isn’t she still Rosemary, whom he loves? Who doesn’t love him, probably, who may never have loved him, who won’t even speak to him now; who lied to him, maybe, the whole fucking time.

What an asshole he is, standing here among the rubbish, like some lovelorn groupie waiting at the stage door for a star who isn’t even there. Fred scowls at the smashed packing case, at the debris blown against the wall: scraps of soiled paper and foil, an empty beer can, a length of twisted red yarn of the sort Roo used to tie round her hair.

And suddenly, for the first time in weeks, he sees Roo clearly in his mind. She is sitting naked on the edge of their unmade bed in the apartment in Corinth, her round tanned arms raised to gather the heavy weight of her dark chestnut hair. Then she separates it into three parts and, with an unconscious half smile of concentration, begins to plait them in and out to form a single thick, shining cable like the hawser of some sea-going ship. As the glossy rope lengthens, she pulls it forward and braids on till only about six inches of loose hair remain. Then she stretches a rubber band three times round the end of the plait, and over that a twist of scarlet wool. Finally, with a toss of her head, she flips the finished braid and its soft tail of coppery filaments back over her bare brown shoulder.

Fred feels a rush of longing; he thinks that, whatever her faults, Roo is incapable of calculated theatrical falsity. The seas will all go dry and the rocks melt with the sun, to quote one of her favorite folksongs, before he will ever hear her voice announcing that it is quite marvelous to be in some fucking radio station.

Next he feels a rush of guilt, remembering Roo’s letter, which is still lying desolate and unanswered on top of a pile of unread scholarly books in his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He’ll write her now, Fred thinks as he turns his back on the studio and starts home. This afternoon.

But the mails are slow; it will take ten days for a letter to reach Roo. Maybe he should phone; the hell with the cost. But after such a long silence-over four weeks since she wrote, he remembers with a groan-Roo could be furious with him again; she has a right to be. She could hang up on him, scream at him. Or there could be somebody with her when he calls, some other guy. She has a right to that too, damn it. No. He’ll send a telegram.