Foreign Affairs

4

IN the hard-lit, almost empty lobby of a small theater in Hammersmith Fred Turner is waiting for Rosemary Radley, who is late as usual. Each time the doors fling open and let in some meaningless person and a gust of damp March evening, he sighs, like a gardener who sees his flowers blowing away in a storm; for each minute that passes is one less alone with her.

Maybe Rosemary won’t come at all-that has happened more than once before, though not lately, and still wouldn’t surprise Fred. What still surprises him is that he should be here in this theater waiting for her, and in this mood of high-charged expectation. A month ago all of London for him was like the empty county fairgrounds outside his home town on some cold evening-a sour, dim expanse of cropped stubble and stones. Now, because of Rosemary Radley, it has been transformed into a kind of circus of light; and Fred, as if he were a small child again, stands wide-eyed just within the entrance of the main tent, wondering how he came there and what to do with the sparkling pink spindle of cotton candy he holds in his hand.

Rationally, of course, his being there can be explained as a result of the interest in eighteenth-century drama that brought him to London in the first place, and later gave him something to talk to Rosemary about. (As it turns out, she is remarkably knowledgeable about theatrical history and stage tradition, and has herself appeared in The Beggar’s Opera in repertory.) More fancifully his presence can be explained as the reward of virtue-specifically of the eighteenth-century virtues of civility and boldness.

It was civility, for instance, that made Fred stay on at Professor Virginia Miner’s party last month after he had eaten and drunk as much as seemed polite, though nobody he had met interested him or seemed interested in him. As a result he was still there when Rosemary Radley arrived, fashionably and characteristically late.

He saw her first standing near the entrance beside a pot of pink hyacinths: like them in full bloom, and delicately pretty with what he recognized as a typical English prettiness. She had the sort of looks celebrated in eighteenth-century painting: the round face, roguish eye, small pouting mouth, dimpled chin, creamy-white skin flushed with pink, and tumbling flaxen curls. As soon as he could, Fred crossed the room to observe this phenomenon at closer range, and by persistently standing alongside it eventually managed to be introduced to “Lady Rosemary Radley” (though not by Professor Miner, who knows as Fred now does too that it is not done to use the title socially-just as one wouldn’t properly introduce someone as Mr. or Miss).

“Oh, how do you do.” Fred, who had never met a member of the British aristocracy, gazed at Rosemary with what he now realizes must have appeared a rude intensity-though, as Rosemary said later, she’s used to being stared at; after all she’s an actress. He felt like some traveler who for years has read-of the existence of snow leopards or poltergeists, but never expected to be this near to one.

“An American! I do love Americans,” Rosemary exclaimed, with the light amused laugh that he was presently to know so well.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Fred replied, a little too late, for already she had turned to greet someone else. For the rest of the party he hovered near her, sometimes trying to claim her attention, more often just gazing and listening with the same kind of baffled fascination he felt last month at the RSC production of Two Gentlemen of Verona .

It was only after he was back in his cold empty flat that Fred realized he wanted very much to see Rosemary Radley again, whereas he did not at all want to see another performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona; and realized simultaneously that he had no means or encouragement to do so. True, Rosemary Radley had been briefly charming to him; but she had been charming to everyone. She had asked him where he was living; that was a good sign, he had thought, not having yet learnt that in England such inquiries don’t precede or hint at an invitation, but rather serve to determine social class; they are the equivalent of the American question “What do you do?”

But where was Rosemary Radley living? Her name wasn’t in the phone book, and phoning to ask Vinnie Miner point-blank would be awkward and probably unproductive; if someone has an unlisted number, their friends are probably expected not to give it out. Fred felt balked and depressed. Then he remembered that Rosemary had said she was going tomorrow to the preview of a new play; she had even suggested that he (and, it must be admitted, everyone else who was listening at the time) should see this play.

Because of his financial circumstances Fred had decided not to see any contemporary theater while he was in London. Now he broke this resolution, replacing his supper with a piece of stale bread and a can of chicken noodle soup in order to stay within his budget; his paychecks from Corinth had begun to clear, but when transformed into pounds they were pathetically small. At this point he did not think of himself as romantically interested in Rosemary Radley. The pursuit of her acquaintance appeared to him only as a distraction from his gloom, or at the best as a challenge, undertaken in the same spirit that makes other Americans expend energy and ingenuity to view some art collection or local ceremony that is out of bounds to most tourists.

Though Fred got to the theater early and waited by the entrance until the last possible moment before bounding up the stairs to his balcony seat, Rosemary Radley didn’t appear. He watched the play-a witty highbrow farce-distractedly, feeling stupid, desolate, and hungry. But as he descended the stairs during intermission, restless rather than hopeful, he saw Rosemary below him in the lobby. She was dressed more elaborately than she had been the day before: her pale-gold hair piled high, her creamy rounded breasts half exposed, nestled in pale-green silky ruffles like some exotic fruit in a Mayfair greengrocer’s. As Fred looked down at her she suddenly seemed not only aristocratic and authentically English, but radiantly sexual and desirable.

As might have been expected, Rosemary wasn’t alone, but surrounded by friends-among whom was the playwright himself, a tall elegant man in a rumpled trenchcoat. For the first but not the last time it occurred to Fred that Lady Rosemary Radley probably had many famous and/or titled admirers, and that his chances were therefore slim. Another man might have despaired and retreated to the balcony. But Fred’s romantic history had made him an optimist; loneliness and gloom made him bold. Hell, why not make the effort? What had he to lose?

As it turned out, the courtship of Rosemary Radley demanded not only boldness but stubborn persistence of a sort new to Fred. In the past, girls and women had more or less fallen into his lap, sometimes even literally-bouncing onto his knees with giggles and squeals at parties or in the back of cars. That had been pleasant and convenient, but not very exciting. Now he knew for the first time the joys of the chase; he breathed the heady animal scent of the hotly pursued quarry. Though always charming, Rosemary was completely undependable. Often she would arrive half an hour or more late, or would ring up to explain that she had to meet him at some other, usually inconvenient time; must bring along a friend; or simply couldn’t manage to come at all. Her eager, breathless apologies, her murmurs of regret and distress, always seemed genuine-but of course she was an actress. Money was another problem: Fred couldn’t afford to take Rosemary to expensive restaurants or to buy her the flowers that she loved. He did both these things, greatly to the detriment of his bank account; but he can’t keep doing them much longer if he wants to eat.

Weeks passed in this way without his making any significant progress. Rosemary had to be courted in the old-fashioned manner, and over a length of time that most of Fred’s friends back home would have found irrational. Roberto Frank, for instance, would have roared with disbelief if he knew that it had taken Fred nearly two weeks to get to first base with Rosemary and that after over a month he still hasn’t scored. Yeh, well, he isn’t in Convers playing sandlot baseball now, Fred says to the imaginary grinning figure of Roberto. This is England; this is the real thing.

Though he was often frustrated, Fred didn’t become discouraged; instead the principle of cognitive dissonance began to operate: the very difficulty of the undertaking ensured its value. Since he had gone through so much for Rosemary Radley, she must be worth the effort; his feelings must be serious. And indeed, the more he saw of her the more entrancing, the more attractive she seemed.

Part of Rosemary’s attraction, Fred realizes, is her being in every way the opposite of his wife. She is small, soft, and fair; Roo large, sturdy, and dark. She is sophisticated, witty; Roo-relatively-naive and serious, even a little humorless by London standards. In manner and speech Rosemary is graceful, melodious; Roo by comparison clumsy and loud-in fact, coarse. Just as, compared with England, America is large, naive, noisy, crude, etc.

As he persisted in the chase, and slowly began to gain on his quarry, other national-and possibly class-differences appeared. Fred’s courtship of Roo could hardly be called a pursuit, since she was galloping just as fast in his direction. They circled each other, snuffling; then rushed together just as the horses they had ridden that first memorable afternoon might have done. What had happened in the abandoned orchard on the hill wasn’t a seduction, it was a collision of two strong, sweaty, eager young bodies, rolling and panting in the long grass and weeds.

The images Rosemary suggests are not animal but floral. Recalling their first meeting, Fred imagines her as a pot of hyacinths, or some other more exotic flowering plant: fragile, fine-leaved, of some species that quivers and folds up tight at any clumsy touch or cold breeze, but if tended gently and patiently, opens at last into full glorious bloom. And in fact, only two days ago, after six weeks of trial and error, Fred’s efforts were almost wholly rewarded: the last soft, creamy, many-layered pink-and-white petals unfurled, revealing the delicate calyx. Tonight, if all goes well, he will have his desire.

As he paces impatiently in the theater lobby, thinking of Rosemary and of Roo, Fred understands for the first time the power of what at Yale is referred to as retrospective influence. Just as Wordsworth forever altered our reading of Milton, so Rosemary Radley has altered his reading of Ruth March. In his mind he sees Rosemary standing on a height that is probably the city of London. In one hand she holds a powerful arc lamp of the sort used in the theater, and from it a cone of white light streams back across time and space three years and more to Corinth, New York.

In this light, Fred’s memory of Roo under the apple trees, with the imprint of twigs on her sweaty brown back and butt and bits of dried grass in her thick untidy chestnut hair, seems crudely staged, garishly colored, hardly civilized. Roo’s rapid and enthusiastic sexual surrender-which he once believed a warranty of passion and sincerity-seems unfeminine, almost uncouth. Compared with Rosemary’s delicate lingering butterfly kisses, Roo’s embraces had a greedy animal urgency that should, Fred thinks now, have warned him of her lack of control, of the exhibition-to make a sour pun-that was to come.

Before Fred had known Roo a fortnight she had not only made love with him many times but had lost all sense of modesty-if in fact she ever had any. She told him everything she thought or felt-including details of previous love affairs he could have done without. She showed him everything: from the first she slept naked beside him, or when it was very cold in a sexless red-flannel nightshirt that tended to bunch up under her arms. She walked about her (later their) Collegetown apartment naked at all times of day, not always remembering to lower the blinds. In his presence she blew her nose, picked her teeth, cut her toenails, washed her cunt, and even, if she was in the midst of an interesting conversation (and to Roo most conversations were interesting) used the toilet. Because he was in love with her, Fred had repressed his embarrassment, even denigrated it. He had defined himself as an uptight preppie, and Roo’s behavior as natural and free.

For Rosemary, on the other hand, to yield sexually is not to give up her privacy. Instinctively she surrounds herself with the intimate mystery that preserves romance. She prefers dimmed lights: two tall white candles on the dressing table, or a silk-shaded lamp. She bathes and dresses alone; Fred has never yet seen her completely naked. Psychologically too she doesn’t overexpose herself: she is silent about her own history and doesn’t demand to learn Fred’s. It is only from a phrase dropped here and there that he guesses, for instance, that Rosemary’s childhood, though luxurious, was unhappy and disrupted as the result of her parents’ frequent changes of partners and residences.

Now and then, it’s true, Rosemary carries a good thing too far. Though he doesn’t want to invade her physical reserve or her reticence about the past, Fred wishes he could see further into her mind. She is whimsical, impulsive, contradictory: when he tries to speak to her about something serious, he often feels-or is made to feel-like some intrusive insect trying to burrow its way into a prize hothouse rose and finally giving up, dizzied by fragrance and baffled by the continual flurry of pale petals.

It is nearly seven o’clock now. The lobby has filled with people and is beginning to empty in the direction of the auditorium. Fred has been waiting for forty minutes, and Rosemary still isn’t here. He is also very hungry; but even if she does arrive there won’t be time for the sandwiches they had planned to have before the play.

He has almost given up when a taxi door bursts open and Rosemary comes running, almost flying, into the theater, her pink wool cape blowing out behind her like some Rococo angel’s wings.

“Darling!” Out of breath-or perhaps only affecting to be so?-she puts a soft white hand on his arm and looks up from under feathery lashes. “You’ve got to forgive me, the taxi simply wouldn’t come.”

“Okay, I forgive you.” Fred smiles down at her, though not as readily as usual.

“Are you absolutely starving?”

“Not quite.”

“Don’t be cross. I’ve arranged for us to eat after the play with Erin. He knows a very good place near here, and I’ll buy you a lovely dinner to make up… Oh, Nadia! I didn’t know you were back; how was loony Los Angeles?”

“You mustn’t do that,” Fred says; but his words are lost. The resolution remains, however. He doesn’t want to waste his time alone with Rosemary sitting in a restaurant with some actor from the play they are about to see. Besides, she’s bought him too many expensive meals lately. When he protests she gives different excuses: the sale of a TV play she’s been in to Australia, a favorable interview in some women’s magazine, whatever.

“Rosemary, I want to say something,” he begins as soon as they are alone and making their way to their seats.

“Yes, darling…” She stops to wave and smile brilliantly at someone across the theater.

“I don’t want you to take me to dinner tonight.”

“Oh, Freddy.” She looks up at him, widening her fringed azure eyes. “You’re cross because I was so late, but I absolutely couldn’t help it, that wretched taxi service-”

“No, I’m not, I just-” An usher interrupts them; Fred buys two programs at tenpence each. Big spender, he thinks sourly, recalling that Rosemary has been given-or paid for?-their tickets.

“What it is,” he begins again as soon as they are seated, “is that I just don’t want you to buy me dinner. It’s not right.”

“Oh, don’t be silly: I already promised.” Rosemary’s eyes are focused past him, sweeping the rows for familiar faces. “Oh look, there’s Mimi, but who can that possibly be with her?”

“No. It bothers me.” Fred plows ahead. “I mean, what will Erin think? He’ll think I’m some kind of gigolo.”

“Of course he won’t, darling.” Rosemary focuses on Fred again. “It’s not like that in the theater. When you’re in work you treat. Everyone knows that.”

“Well, I’m not in the theater. So I’d like to pay for myself from now on.” Fred remembers that he has with him only eight pounds and some change, which according to his budget has to last till the end of this week. Soon he will be sitting, as he has often lately sat, behind a menu whose size is as inflated as its prices, searching for the cheapest item (usually a bowl of coarse raw greens of some kind), declaring falsely that he had a big lunch and isn’t all that hungry. “What I’d really like,” he goes on, leaning toward Rosemary to gain her attention, which is fluttering off again, “is for us to go somewhere tonight that I can afford, and then I can take you. I bet there must be some inexpensive places around here-”

“Oh yes, there’s lots of nasty cheap restaurants in Hammersmith,” Rosemary says. “And I’ve been to most of them. When Mum broke her ankle, and Daddy stopped my allowance, trying to starve me into leaving the rep and coming home to run the house, because he was too lazy to bother, I found out all about that. I’ve eaten all the fish fingers and macaroni cheese I ever want to eat in my life, darling.”

“All the same. I don’t think it’s fair that you should pay for me.”

“But you think it’s fair that I should have to eat in some disgusting caff-”

“I didn’t say that I wanted to go to a disgusting caff-”

“-where we’ll probably both be poisoned.” Rosemary’s exquisite mouth sets in a sweet-pea pout. Then, as the house lights soften, her pout softens into a smile. “Besides, you know we can’t do that to Erin, he’d think we were out of our minds, or that we absolutely detested his performance and wanted to punish him for it.” She gives a whispery giggle.

Fred doesn’t argue further, but for the rest of the evening he continues to feel uncomfortable: during the play and during the dinner that follows, where he orders a chef’s salad and also consumes four rolls, a third of Nadia’s beef bourguignonne, and half of Rosemary’s cherry cheesecake (“Don’t be silly, love, I simply can’t finish it”). What is he doing eating off other people’s plates in this expensive restaurant, in this expensive company?

“You’re still cross,” Rosemary says plaintively in the taxi afterward. “I can tell. You haven’t forgiven me for being so frightfully late tonight.”

“No I’m not; yes I have,” he protests.

“Really?” She leans toward him, resting her spun-gold curls against his shoulder.

“I always forgive you.” Fred eases his arm around Rosemary; how soft and yielding she is under the folds of wool! “I’m in love with you,” he says, imagining how he will soon demonstrate this.

“Oh-love,” she murmurs indulgently but rather dismissively, as if reminded of some childhood pastime: skipping rope, say, or hide-and-seek.

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Yes.” She raises her head slightly. “I suppose I do.”

“And? But?”

“And I love you… But it’s not that simple, you know.” Rosemary sighs. “When you’re my age-”

Fred sighs too, though silently. That he is just twenty-nine and Rosemary thirty-seven-though she hardly looks thirty-is in his opinion unimportant-in the context of their relationship, even meaningless. Of course he knows that women, perhaps especially actresses, worry about their age; but in Rosemary’s case it’s ridiculous. She is beautiful and he loves her; it’s not as if they were planning to get married and raise a family, for Christ’s sake. “What difference does that make?” he asks aloud.

Fred has been raised in an academic environment; he assumes that even difficult questions must be answered. Rosemary, after years in the theater and long experience of prying and hostile interviewers, assumes the reverse. Instead of replying, she yawns, covering the pink flower of her mouth with one fluttering hand. “Heavens, I’m exhausted! Classical drama does that to me sometimes. Is it dreadfully late?”

“No; half past eleven.” One possible cause of, or excuse for Rosemary’s constant tardiness is her refusal to wear a watch (“I can’t bear the idea that Time has me by the wrist, like some awful cross old governess”).

“Oh horrors, darling. I think I’d better go straight to bed.”

“Don’t do that,” Fred says, grasping her more firmly. “At least, not alone.”

“I’m afraid I must.” She sighs deeply, as if under some heavy invisible compulsion.

“But I was hoping-” Fred puts a hand on that part of the angel-wing cape that covers Rosemary’s breast.

“Now, love, don’t be tiresome. I’ll ring you tomorrow.”

So, quite casually, Rosemary canceled what was to have been the climax of their evening together. For the next eighteen hours Fred was in a bad state of mind. He called-or, in the British phrase, “rang”-several times, starting at ten A.M., but couldn’t get through her answering service. Either she was out, or she was angry with him. He tried to work, but-as often lately-not with any success; he needed a book that was in the BM, but didn’t want to leave the phone.

Finally, about six, Rosemary rang back. She was as affectionate as ever, “simply longing” to see him. She denied she’d been cross; wouldn’t even discuss it; welcomed him passionately at her front door an hour later.

Shadowy spring twilight in the library of an English country house often featured in magazines and color supplements, famous both for its architectural and decorative beauty and for the architectural and decorative beauty of its mistress, Penelope (Posy) Billings, and the financial acumen of her husband Sir James (Jimbo). The crimson velvet brocaded walls, buttery buttoned leather and mahogany sofas, gilt bindings, glass cases of curios, and antique varnished globes of the earth and heavens create a slightly campy late-Victorian effect. This is relieved by an orderly profusion of fresh spring flowers, and a table on which are arranged the latest papers and magazines, prominence being given to those of conservative views and to last month’s Harper’s/Queen , which includes a photograph of Lady Billings in her kitchen and her original recipe for cream-of-watercress-and-avocado soup, as part of a series on “Country-House Cuisine.”

On the walls are Victorian paintings in thickly flounced gold frames: two portraits of Posy’s distinguished military ancestors and one of a mournful prize sheep who strongly resembles George Eliot. All three pictures have been in her family for over a century. The Leighton above the marble chimneypiece, on the other hand, was bought for Posy by Jimbo as a wedding present just before prices skyrocketed, on a tip from one of her best friends-the fashionable decorator, Nadia Phillips. It shows a smooth-limbed statuesque Victorian blonde, much resembling Posy Billings and with the same tumbling masses of brassy hair. This figure is somewhat anachronistically half clad in pink and lavender draperies and is making eyes at a caged bird on a sun-drenched, petal-strewn marble terrace.

Now, six years later, Posy is beginning to be tired of the Leighton, the sheep, the curios, and the ancestors. She’d rather like to send them to the attics and put up something more contemporary. Indeed, she has been wondering lately if it wouldn’t be rather amusing to have the library redone, with Nadia Phillips’ help, in the style of the 1930s, with lots of deep sexy white sofas, stainless steel and lacquer tables, engraved mirrors, and funny art-deco cushions and lamps and vases.

At the moment Posy is not in the library, but having tea in the nursery with her two small daughters and the au pair . The only present occupant of the room is Fred Turner, who would be distressed to learn that its Victorian decor is doomed. As he stands between floor-length curtains of deep-fringed crimson plush, looking out over the lawn-where there is still light enough to see a host of airy daffodils crowding the circular flower bed beyond the gravel drive-he feels both euphoric and slightly unreal. What is he doing here in this perfect Victorian country house, in this misty English spring, instead of a century later in upstate New York where early April is still gray frozen winter? It’s as if, by some supernatural slippage between life and art, he has got into a Henry James novel like the one he watched on television two months ago with Joe and Debby Vogeler. How far away they and their carping complaints about London seem now! How secondhand and incomplete their view of England has turned out to be-as secondhand and incomplete as some TV adaptation of a classic novel.

In the last few weeks Fred has entered a world he had before only read of: a world of crowded, electric first nights, leisurely highbrow Sunday lunches in Hampstead and Holland Park; elegant international dinner parties in Connaught Square and Chester Row. He has been backstage at the BBC studios in Ealing, and at the offices of the Sunday Times , and has met a score of people who were once only names in magazines or on the syllabi of college courses. What is more amazing, some of these people now seem to consider him a friend, or at least a good acquaintance: they remember that he is writing on John Gay and inquire about the progress of his research; they speak to him in a casually intimate manner about their troubles with reviewers or indigestion. (Others, it’s true, forget his name from one party to the next-which is maybe to be expected.)

When he first started seeing Rosemary, Fred wondered why she knew so many celebrities. The answer turns out to be that she herself is a sort of celebrity, though he had never heard of her. As one of the stars of Tallyho Castle , a popular comedy-drama series about upper-class country life, she is familiar by sight to millions of British viewers, some of whom occasionally approach her in shops and restaurants or at the theater. (“Excuse me, but aren’t you Lady Emma Tally? Oh, I really do enjoy that program so much, and you’re one of my very favorite characters!”) As a result, she is better known by sight than some of her more famous but nontheatrical friends.

To Rosemary, Fred realizes now, her popular fame is both welcome and unsatisfying. He has seen how she begins to sparkle and glow when a fan appears, as if some inner lamp had been turned up to 200 watts. He has also heard her say, more than once, that she is tired to death of Lady Emma and of all the other nice ladies she has portrayed on television. What she really wants, she has confided to him, is to act “the great classic parts”-Hedda Gabler, Blanche DuBois, Lady Macbeth-in the theater before she is too old. “I could do them, Freddy, I know I could do them,” she had insisted. “I know what it is to feel murderous, coarse, full of hate.” (If she does, Fred thinks, it’s only by a magnificent leap of intuition.) “All that’s in me, Freddy, it is. You don’t believe me,” she added, turning to look directly at him.

Holding her close, he smiled, then shook his head.

“You don’t think I could act those parts.” A frown had appeared between her fair arched brows, as if some invisible evil spirit were cruelly pinching the skin.

“No, I do. Of course I do,” Fred assured her. “I know you’re good, everyone says so. I’m sure you could do anything you liked.”

But no director has ever been willing to cast Rosemary in such roles. When she is invited to appear on the stage-less often than she would like-it is always in light comedy: Shaw or Wilde or Sheridan or Ayckbourn.

The problem is, as Rosemary’s friend Edwin Francis explained to Fred, that she just doesn’t look like a tragedy queen. Her voice is too high and sweet, and she doesn’t project that kind of dark energy. “Can you see Rosemary as Lady Macbeth? Now really: ‘Infirm of purpoth! Give me the daggerth.’” Edwin imitated Rosemary’s voice, with the slight charming lisp that she affects as Lady Emma. “Nobody would believe for a moment that she’d been involved in a murder; they’d think she wanted to cut the cake at a charity fête.”

Though he doesn’t like the way Edwin sometimes makes fun of Rosemary, Fred has to admit that he can’t imagine her as Lady Macbeth, or as full of coarse murderous hate, even for dramatic purposes. Her wish to play violent and tragic parts is one of the things about her that still puzzles him.

Something else he would like to understand about Rosemary is why her pretty house in Chelsea is always such a goddamn mess. At first glance the long double sitting room looks very elegant, though a little faded. But soon, especially in the daytime, you notice that the bay windows are smeared and fly-specked, the sills grainy with soot, the gilt moldings of the pictures chipped, the striped gray satin upholstery blotched and worn, the mahogany table-tops branded with rings and burns. Everywhere there are rumpled newspapers, sticky glasses, muddied coffee cups, full ashtrays, empty cigarette packages, and discarded clothing. Below in the kitchen and in the bedroom upstairs it is worse: the closets are jammed with rubbish, and the bathrooms not always clean. How Rosemary can emerge from all that disorder looking so fresh and beautiful is a mystery-and how she can stand to live in it another one.

Of course Rosemary probably doesn’t know how to do housework, Fred thinks, and he wouldn’t want her to have to learn. But she could certainly hire somebody. Her friends agree with him. What she needs, Posy Billings explained earlier this afternoon when she was showing Fred around her own perfectly kept grounds, is a “daily”-some strong reliable woman who will come in every morning to clean and shop and do the laundry and make lunch, so that Rosemary won’t have to go out to a restaurant. If only Fred could persuade her to hire someone like that-Posy knows of a very reliable agency in London-he would be doing a tremendous good deed.

“Okay,” Fred said as they stood in front of a long perennial border covered by a mulch of clean shredded bark, from which neat clumps of crocus and grape hyacinths emerged. “Okay, I’ll try.”

It won’t be easy, though, he thinks now, imagining Rosemary as he had left her a quarter of an hour ago, lying upstairs in what Posy calls the Pink Room. Its oversize bed has a carved and gilded headboard padded in flowered satin, and a matching quilted spread is drawn up in loose folds to Rosemary’s breasts. She is wearing a nightgown of delicate ivory silk with semitransparent lace insets in the shape of butterflies scattered over it; her white-gold hair falls in fine tendrils across pale-pink scalloped sheets. The pink-silk-shaded bedside lamp casts a blush over her creamy skin, and over the rococo furniture painted in pink and silver, the French fashion plates on the walls, and the silver vase of narcissus on the dressing-table. It also illuminates a confusion of spilt powders and creams on this dressing-table and a shipwreck of discarded clothes on the Aubusson carpet.

No, it won’t be easy to change Rosemary’s ways. She hates talking about “boring practical things” and isn’t capable of concentrating on any subject for long. She is-and for Fred it’s part of her charm-a creature of sudden, random impulse. He sees her as a rare beautiful lacy butterfly like those which decorate her nightgown, fluttering and hovering, dancing near and then away, difficult to catch hold of for more than a moment.

Her present withdrawal, however, is not idiosyncratic. Going to bed when it isn’t bedtime-or at least saying that you are going to bed-is, Fred has discovered, a habitual and respectable social strategem among the British. To declare fatigue without obvious cause isn’t, as in America, to confess physical and/or emotional weakness. Instead, “having a bit of a rest” or “lying down for a while” provides a polite excuse for social withdrawal-one that is more effective here than it would be at home, since even here married people usually have separate bedrooms. And the English, at least those Fred has met lately, seem to need and want more solitude than Americans do. Now, for instance, at six in the evening, all Lady Billings’ other guests are-as far as he knows-shut up alone in their rooms. After he left Rosemary, Fred tried to stay in his, but restlessness and claustrophobia brought him downstairs again. If it weren’t drizzling and nearly dark, he would have gone out into the gardens.

There are three weekend guests at Posy’s besides Fred and Rosemary. One is Edwin Francis, the editor and critic, who is almost effusively affectionate to Rosemary and Posy, but speaks to Fred as if he were interviewing him on television, with a pretense of respectful attention that often seems designed to provoke humor at his expense. (“So it was generally known that Mr. Reagan had appeared in a film in which his co-star was a chimpanzee? Yet you say that many members of your college voted for him. How do you explain this?” “Your current project then, I assume it is much influenced by the French school of demolition, excuse me, deconstruction.”)

Edwin has brought with him a very young man called Nico, who according to Rosemary is his current “particular friend.” Rosemary and Posy approve of Nico; they regard him as a great improvement on Edwin’s previous particular friends, most of whom Posy says she has “simply refused to have in the house.” Compared with these persons Nico is well educated, fluent in English, and “really quite presentable.” He is a Greek Cypriot: slight, smooth-skinned, with abundant dark glossy curls and pronounced artistic and political opinions. His ambition is to work in British-or even better, American-television or cinema, eventually as a director. At lunch today he expressed an interest in Fred’s views that was evidently more sincere than Edwin’s, though less disinterested. (“You have very original ideas on the cinema, Fred, I think very exciting. I suppose that you know many people in the American film industry, or in the American theater, perhaps, that you have discussed these theories with?… No, none at all? That is a pity. I would like so much sometime the chance to talk with American film makers.”) Though Nico is still polite to Fred, it is clear that he now regards him as professionally useless.

The final houseguest is William Just, who is a sort of cousin of Posy’s and is referred to by her and Rosemary as Just William. In appearance he is middle-aged and nondescript, with rumpled-looking tweedy clothes and an air of vague detachment. Just William does something at the BBC and is unusually well informed on current events; he also seems to be acquainted with everyone Posy, Rosemary, Edwin, and even Nico know in London. His manner is mild and self-effacing; Fred assumes he has been invited partly out of family obligation (he is no longer married, and probably lonely) and partly because he might be able to get Nico a job at the BBC.

Fred finds Edwin and Nico interesting as types, and William for his behind-the-scenes political knowledge. He is sorry, though, that he won’t get to meet Posy’s husband, Jimbo Billings. According to the newspapers, Billings is a shrewd and aggressive character who deals in high-risk investments, and knows many world leaders; a large, imposing-looking man (his photograph is prominent on the sitting-room mantelpiece). At the moment, however, he is in the Near East on business.

Nico is even more disappointed that he will not meet Jimbo Billings. “Yes, I wish the chance to tell him many things, what I think of his government, and of his policies,” he said belligerently to Fred when they were all out for a walk after lunch. “There is much that he could do for my country, for my friends there, if he would.” But Posy’s husband has no connection with the British government, Fred protested, he is only a businessman. “Only, that is a lie,” Nico said, slashing at Posy’s newly leafed box hedges with a willow switch he had broken off beside the ornamental lake. “He has much influence, more than many politicians here, believe me, but in my country he uses it for evil.”

As the landscape outside darkens, Fred turns away from the window and takes up one of the four daily newspapers that since lunchtime have been refolded by some unseen hand and neatly ranged on the polished mahogany table. Presently he is joined by Edwin and Nico, and then by Posy, Just William, and Rosemary. Drinks are served, followed by a five-course dinner (sorrel soup, spring lamb, watercress salad, lemon fool, fruit and cheese) and coffee in the long drawing-room. Among the topics discussed are the Common Market, growing exotic bulbs indoors, the films and love life of Werner Fassbinder, the novels and love life of Edna O’Brien, various ways of cooking veal, a current mass murder case, the financial and staffing difficulties of the TLS , and hotels in Tortola and Crete. Fred tries to keep up his end of the conversation, but without much success; he has never grown bulbs, cooked veal, seen a film by Fassbinder, etc. He feels provincial and out of it, though Posy and William try to help by asking him about American customs of gardening and cooking and filmgoing. He is glad when Posy proposes that they all stop gossiping and play charades.

As it turns out, the British game of charades differs from the one Fred knows-though each, it occurs to him, is characteristic of its culture. In the American version every player has to act for his team-mates some popular proverb, or the title of a book, play, film, or song, provided by the opposite team; victory goes to the side whose members collectively do this the fastest. America, that is, rewards speed and individual achievement, and encourages frantic attempts to communicate with compatriots who literally or metaphorically don’t speak your language.

In the British version of charades-or at least in Posy’s version-there is no premium on speed and there are no winners. Each team chooses a single word and acts out its syllables in turn, with spoken dialogue that must include the relevant syllable. Though some trouble is taken to confuse the issue and make guessing harder, the game mainly seems to be an excuse for dressing up and behaving in ways that would otherwise be considered silly or shocking. It thus combines verbal ingenuity, in-group loyalty and cooperation, love of elaborate public performance, and private childishness-all traits that Fred has begun to associate with the British, or at least with Rosemary and her friends.

Before the charades can begin, nearly an hour is spent choosing the words and rummaging about in closets and trunks to outfit the players. Rosemary, Edwin, and Just William go first. They seem to have chosen their word (which turns out to be HORTICULTURE) partly for the opportunities it gives Edwin to wear Posy’s clothes-which, since she is a large woman and he a small man, fit pretty well. In the first scene (WHORE) he and Rosemary appear as streetwalkers, and William, with a cane and bowler, as their drunken client. Edwin is comically horrifying in a red fright wig, an orange-and-yellow flowered sundress stuffed with facial tissues, and high-heeled gold sandals. Fred is nearly as startled by Rosemary. She is not only vulgarly made up and loaded with costume jewelry, but wearing the lace butterfly nightgown in which, just a few hours ago… He wants to protest, but makes himself laugh along with the rest; after all, it’s only a game.

In the second scene (TIT) Edwin is a milkmaid (sunbonnet, pink checked pinafore) while Rosemary and William-with the help of a brown woolly blanket, two bone drinking horns, and a pink rubber balloon filled with water-represent the front and back halves of an uncooperative cow. For CULTURE Edwin wears one of Posy’s tweed suits, a tweed porkpie hat, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a string of pearls. With his neat, rather handsome features and his well-padded small frame he looks, Fred thinks, better and even more natural as a fortyish matron. He obviously enjoys his part, in which he tries to force a series of highbrow books and records on Rosemary and William, who represent two sulky semi-punk schoolchildren.

After much laughter and applause and another round of drinks, Posy, Nico, and Fred retire to the library to get into costume for the first syllable of their word (CATASTROPHE). Nico and Fred, now in shirtsleeves, are fitted with colorful sashes and black rubber boots (Posy calls them “Wellies”) and breadknife daggers. They represent pirates and will soon pretend to lash her (as a cabin boy) with an improvised clothesline CAT o’nine tails.

“What’s that noise outside? It sounds like a car.” In the white sailor-boy blouse she has just pulled on over her long pleated red silk dress, Posy runs to the window and pushes aside the heavy velvet curtain. “Oh, my God. It’s Jimbo. Quick, upstairs, everybody-and don’t forget your proper clothes.” She flings open the library doors and dashes across the hall to the drawing room.

“William, it’s Jimbo, get upstairs as fast as you can, he’s just putting the car away. All of you, come on.” Ignoring their questions and exclamations, Posy herds her guests up the crimson-carpeted staircase and along a hall lined with heavy gilt-framed eighteenth-century portraits.

“Now,” she declares, checking to make sure that none of them are visible from below through the banisters. “William, dearest, you go straight out by the back stairs and down to the boathouse, the key’s in the stone urn under the ivy. Look out when you pass the stables, in case Jimbo’s still there. Rosemary, and Edwin, oh Christ-” She takes in Rosemary’s naughty schoolgirl outfit and Edwin’s dowager tweeds. “All right, both of you; get dressed as fast as you can and then come down to the drawing room. I’m counting on you to keep Jimbo occupied for at least five minutes while I change the sheets and tidy up. Fred, and Nico, you’ve got to help too, darlings, this is a crisis. I want you to pack everything in William’s room into his bag, all his clothes and books, every single thing you find. If you’re not sure it’s his, put it in anyhow. Right, everyone? Let’s go.”

Fred hears a door opening below and steps in the hall, then a weary, peremptory male voice. “Hallo? Is anybody still up?”

“Jimbo!” Posy cries. She drags the sailorboy blouse over her head, stuffs it into an antique oak chest, and runs down the stairs. “Darling, how lovely! I didn’t expect you till Monday.”

“I sent a cable this morning from Ankara.”

“It never came. Never mind, darling. Did you drive all the way from Gatwick? You must be simply exhausted. Come into the drawing room and I’ll fix you a lovely strong whisky. I’ve got a few people here for the weekend, but most of them have gone to bed. Rosemary’s still up, though, I think, and Edwin Francis. I’ll go tell them you’re here in a moment, but first I want to know all about-” Her words fade.

“Remarkable,” Edwin says sotto voce, shaking his head under the tweed matron’s hat. “Did you ever see such natural authority, such military decision, such a grasp of strategic essentials? Hereditary, of course,” he adds. “The Army blood… Poor Posy, really, all those Empire-building genes wasted on this sad century. She should have lived a hundred years ago-”

“Edwin, do go on, before Jimbo sees you like that,” Rosemary whispers, giggling.

“-and been a man, of course. Very well. But I must say, I hope Jimbo has the sense to take her into partnership as soon as the babies are safely in school.”

“Okay, let’s get started,” Fred says to Nico a few moments later, lifting William’s worn leather Gladstone bag onto the bed. “I’ll do the closet, and you can empty the drawers.” He opens the wardrobe door and begins sliding clothes off hangers. “Lucky there isn’t much.”

But when he turns around with a load over his arm Nico is still standing in the middle of the Turkey carpet. In his open-necked white shirt and black rubber boots, with Posy’s red fringed scarf knotted around his waist, he looks as if he were playing pirates; his expression is theatrically stormy.

“Hey, let’s go,” Fred says.

“No,” Nico hisses through his teeth, in character.

“No?”

“I am not a servant.” Nico’s voice is barely under control. “I don’t pack the dirty clothes of people.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Fred rolls up some suprisingly elegant maroon silk pajamas and stuffs them into the bag. “Don’t be a wimp.”

Nico does not move. He looks insulted; probably he has never heard of a wimp and thinks it is something unspeakable. “Sorry,” Fred says. “Look, maybe you could just pile up those books and papers, all right?”

“All right,” Nico says sullenly.

“What I don’t understand,” Fred goes on, trying to ease the atmosphere in the room, “is why William has to get out of the way so fast. I can understand that maybe Sir James Billings wouldn’t want to meet a lot of strangers when he’s just got back from Turkey late at night. But he must be used to William; after all he’s Posy’s cousin.”

Nico snorts. “You are wrong, and also stupid,” he says, slinging Royal Charles and Betrayal onto the bed.

Fred decides not to notice the word stupid , which Nico has no doubt used as a riposte for wimp. “But he is her cousin; Posy said so when she introduced us before lunch,” he says, starting to pack up William’s leather toilet kit.

“Yes, her cousin, I suppose.” Nico’s tone is scornful. “They are all cousins here. And also her lover.”

“Aw, come on.” Fred thinks of Posy, so blond and queenly and tall, in her way as much the real thing as Rosemary. “I can’t believe that.” He imagines Posy naked, a luscious full-bodied late-Victorian nude, in sexual juxtaposition with the lanky, dim, fiftyish William, the relevant part of whom is somehow represented in his mind by the worn beaver shaving brush with dried white soap on it that he has just stowed away.

“No? Why not?”

“Well, I mean, he’s too old. And he’s not all that attractive either. I mean, hell, Posy’s a beautiful woman.”

“Who can calculate these things?” Nico tosses the Times untidily beside the books. “It’s a matter of opinions. Myself, I would not want to fuck with Lady Posy; you would not want to fuck with Cousin William.”

“No,” Fred agrees vehemently, reminded that Nico, in spite (or perhaps because) of his macho appearance, presumably fucks regularly with Edwin Francis.

“Also, sex, it is not always a matter of only desire, as you must know.” Nico allows a slight unpleasant pause. “Cousin William is not wealthy or famous, but he has many connections. With his help Posy is a feature in the magazines, on the television. Soon she introduces for him six programs about English gardens, for a nice payment. He does much for her.”

And if Cousin William would do as much for me, Nico seems to be saying, I might fuck with him. Or even worse: Rosemary is rich and famous, she does much for you. The conviction that Nico is a sly, second-rate, opportunistic person, a blot on the country-house scene, comes over Fred. “Maybe, but that doesn’t prove-”

“Also you see he stays in the room next to Lady Posy’s, the customary room of the husband.” With a mocking flourish Nico pulls open a paneled oak door, exposing a vertical slice of Posy’s blue-and-white sprigged and ruffled Laura Ashley bedroom.

“So?” Fred says, concealing his fear that Nico is right, but not his dislike.

“So convenient.” Nico smiles.

Fred does not smile. He goes on packing William’s clothes, faster than before. Though most of them are clean, they now feel disagreeable: the tightly rolled thin dark lisle socks, the slippery starched shirts with the name of a Belgravia laundry on the paper band. He does not like them; he does not like the paneled room with its deep tapestry-cushioned chairs and window seat, its distorting mullioned panes, its connecting door. An impulse to walk away comes to him, but his training in manners is strong, and he presses on.

“You’re saying that William had to get out of the house fast because if Posy’s husband saw him here, he’d think they were having an affair,” he says, trying to clarify it in his mind.

“Not think.” Nico’s expression is condescending. “He knows already that they fuck, since a long time.”

“Says who?”

“Edwin says it to me. They have an arrangement, he says.”

“You mean like an open marriage.” Fred begins to pull out the drawers below the wardrobe. They are empty and lined with glazed paper in an overcomplicated and disagreeable red paisley design.

“I don’t know what you call it,” says Nico. He has given up all pretense of helping and is lounging on the window seat. “Edwin says they well understand each other, and if Billings does not have to meet Cousin William he is content, why not? He has still the beautiful aristocratic wife, the pretty children, the rich country house-”

“Yeh, but-”

“He also has his freedom, naturally. His own amusements.”

“Oh, yeh? What amusements?”

“I don’t know.” Nico shrugs. “But Edwin says they are expensive ones, and not very nice.”

Without wanting to, Fred starts trying to imagine the sort of amusements that might be considered not very nice by Edwin Francis, a homosexual who likes to dress up in his hostess’s clothes; but he is interrupted.

“Well, how are you getting on?” Posy pauses in the doorway with an armful of scalloped yellow sheets. She is as beautiful and gracious as ever; but she looks different to Fred, somehow fleshy and loose.

“Almost done.” He bundles the Times into William’s bag and pulls the sides together.

Posy surveys the room, taking in Nico lazily prone on the window seat. “Very good,” she says to Fred. “Now, could you be a real sport, and take the bag down to the boathouse?”

“Yeh, sure.”

“I’ll show you the way; and then you can come back and have a drink and meet Jimbo. But you musn’t keep him up late, please, he’s had such a long trip. I know what; you might say you have to turn in early so you can get up and jog before breakfast. Jimbo will like that, he often runs himself; and it might not be a bad idea if you were to arrange to meet him tomorrow and go jogging together. Then we can make sure he doesn’t run in the wrong direction.” Posy smiles at him again, then clicks it off. “And you. Nico.” She gives him a chilly look. “I want you to go straight to bed. Don’t even think of having a shower tonight, or there won’t be enough hot water for Jimbo. You were in there for an hour this afternoon as it is. And please don’t come down for breakfast; Jimbo’s very grumpy at breakfast. I’ll send you up a tray.”

For a long moment Nico does not move. His handsome features have darkened and distorted as Posy spoke and are now set in an angry flush. But her aristocratic stare is too much for him; he rises slowly and moves toward the door.

“Thank you,” she says, gracious again. “All right now, Freddy darling, it’s this way.”

Posy leads him along the hall between two rows of ancestors: plump-jawed self-satisfied countenances in heavy curled wigs. The portraits are hung from near the ceiling in such a way that they tilt outward from the top, creating an oppressive effect.

“He’s such a nuisance sometimes, Nico,” she says. “He’s got all sorts of silly ideas about politics, and I’m simply not going to have him bothering poor Jimbo with them, especially not at breakfast. You know how excitable these Mediterranean types can be.” She opens the door to some back stairs, smiling at Fred, inviting him into the company of non-Mediterranean types who are not excitable and have no silly ideas. “So if you should see him trying to sneak downstairs tomorrow morning, I hope you’ll be a dear and head him off.”

“Well. I’ll try,” says Fred reluctantly.

“I knew I could count on you.” She stops at the bottom of the stairs and smiles up from under her golden mane, which from this angle looks almost too thick, too perfectly curled-almost like a wig. Maybe it is a wig; maybe underneath all that hair Posy Billings is bald or stubble-headed, as her eighteenth-century ancestors along the corridor probably were under their powdered headpieces.

“Here you are.” She swings open a door, admitting a gust of cold, dark air. “Now there’s the way down to the lake, where we were this afternoon, you remember?”

“I think so.”

“Very good.” As Edwin has remarked, there is an authoritarian, even a military tone to Posy’s manner. “Here’s a torch, but I don’t expect you’ll need it, it’s quite light out. You can almost see the boathouse from here, just past those big pines. And the rain’s cleared off nicely. A lovely night, really. Off you go, now.”

Fred starts down the path. It doesn’t seem like a lovely night to him. In the circle of light at his feet the gravel is loose and wet; when he points the torch upward he can see the two-hundred-year-old topiary hedges, dark and dripping, on either side. The fanciful shapes of pigeons, peacocks, owls, and urns seem distorted, almost sinister. In the sky above is a lopsided yellowish moon with a pale greasy ring around it, like a badly fried egg It is bright enough, however, for Fred to circumnavigate the pines and make out the boathouse, a crouching structure of pebblestone with a deep overhanging roof and its feet in inky water.

“Yes?” William opens the door a cautious crack. He is still wearing the baggy knickers and plaid kneesocks in which he portrayed an uncultured schoolboy, and has a rough hairy brown blanket, perhaps the one which earlier was part of the cow, round his shoulders. He looks guilty and disreputable, like some old crazed tramp caught hiding in the outbuildings of an estate. “What did you want?”

“I brought your things.” Fred decides that if he ever, God forbid, has an affair with a married woman, he won’t set foot in her house, not so much on pragmatic or moral grounds as on aesthetic ones.

“Oh, thank you very much.” William opens the door just enough to admit his bag. He doesn’t invite Fred to come in, and Fred doesn’t want to come in.

“Well, see you,” he says, turning away.

From the lake Posy’s house looks unnaturally tall and somehow misshapen; an effect perhaps of its elevation, the shadows and shrubberies that surround it, and the fried-egg moonlight. As Fred walks slowly back up the path past the giant dark vegetable birds and urns, he becomes conscious of a strong impulse not to reenter this house; to hike instead into the nearest village and find a bed for the night somewhere (at the pub, maybe?) and take an early train or bus into London in the morning.

But of course he can’t do that, it would be rude and crazy; and besides there’s Rosemary. He can’t leave her alone with two posturing queers and a bossy adulteress whose hair looks like a wig-though only an hour ago he thought it was all beautiful, the real thing.

James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier; or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James’ prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was just like now…

Because, after all, isn’t Rosemary the classic James heroine: beautiful, fine, delicate, fatally impulsive? She thinks of Posy and Edwin as her best friends; she is too generous to see them as they are, too lighthearted and trusting. She needs other, better friends-better in both senses-friends who will shield her from scenes like tonight’s-

Well, isn’t that what he’s here for, the sterling young American champion James himself might have provided? For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel, and again it is dizzying, exhilarating. He laughs out loud and plunges into the blackened shrubberies, toward the house.