Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Professionally, Rosemary’s specialty is ladies: highborn women of every historical period from classical Greece to modern Britain. She doesn’t portray queens or empresses: she isn’t sufficiently regal or monumental for that. She is extraordinarily pretty rather than in any sense beautiful: pink-and-white-and-gold like a refined Boucher; her features are agreeable but small and unemphatic. What she mainly projects is elegance and breeding-comic, pathetic, or tragic according to the demands of the script-and a sweet, airy graciousness. She is frequently in work, since ladies are overrepresented in British television drama, and is often praised in reviews as one of the few actresses who is totally convincing as an aristocrat. It is sometimes mentioned that this is not suprising, since she is really Lady Rosemary Radley, her father having been an earl.

Rosemary’s private life is generally believed to be unsatisfactory. She has been married twice, both times briefly and unhappily and without issue; now she lives alone in a large beautiful untidy house in Chelsea. Of course some people say it is her own fault that she’s alone: that she is impossibly romantic, asks too much (or too little) of men, is unreasonably jealous, egotistical/a doormat; sexually insatiable/frigid; and so on-the usual things people say of any unmarried woman, as Vinnie well knows. In all this, Rosemary has Vinnie’s sympathy. But, somehow, not her trust.

It is Rosemary’s charm that Vinnie doesn’t trust: the silken flutter and flurry of her social manner; her assumption of a teasing, impulsive intimacy which yet holds its victim at arm’s length. For instance, when someone new comes within her range, Rosemary will often compliment that person extravagantly on some quality or attribute nobody else would have fixed on, or perhaps even noticed. She will declare that she adores some acquaintance, or a cousin, or her greengrocer or dentist, because they are so marvelous at arranging roses, or speak so slowly, or have such curly hair. She always makes this announcement with an air of wondering discovery to everyone who is within listening range, and without regard to whether its subject is sitting next to her or is miles away.

At a luncheon of Edwin’s once, for instance, she sang out during a pause in the hubbub that she really loved the way Vinnie’s friend Jane ate salad. It was no use asking what she meant by that, as Jane discovered. Even if you could get her attention again, which was never easy, Rosemary would only toss back the pale-gold waves of her hair and give her famous laugh-like sunlight sparkling on crystal, a besotted television reviewer had once written-and cry, “Oh, I can’t explain! It’s just-so-wonderful.” And if, as occasionally happened, someone else offered an interpretation, Rosemary would either ignore them or protest that it wasn’t that at all. She couldn’t bear to have her butterfly enthusiasms-or, possibly, her antipathies-analyzed, pinned down.

When they heard-or heard of-Rosemary’s paean to their unique qualities, most people were pleased, because it’s agreeable to be loved and adored, even casually; and because Rosemary was pretty and well known. Even if they didn’t have the least idea what she meant, there was something awfully attractive in the manner of its delivery. Indeed, some of those who hadn’t ever thus been complimented, like Vinnie, began to feel a little left out.

Others, however, were made uneasy. One can for instance picture Rosemary’s dentist alone in his surgery after his famous patient has left. He twists the magnifying mirror attached to his dental unit toward him and frowns into it. Is there really something unusually lovable about the way his hair curls behind his ears? Or is there, on the other hand, something odd about it, something ugly and bizarre? Had Lady Rosemary been laughing at him?

For days after Edwin’s party, Jane said, Rosemary’s encomium kept sliding into her mind and nagging at her. Finally one day she took a container of leftover salad out of her fridge and went and stood in front of the dining-room mirror, peeled back the plastic wrap, and watched herself eating the spicy oil-soaked lettuce leaves and soggy slices of tomato, trying to discover what was so damned adorable about it, or so different from the way most people ate salad. What on earth had Rosemary meant?

The truth was, Vinnie told her, Rosemary probably hadn’t meant anything. It was just nonsense off the top of her head, a way of focusing attention on herself or changing the topic of conversation, perhaps-a musical noise, that was all. Words don’t matter to actors as they do to a literary person. For them meaning is mainly in expression and gesture; the text is just the libretto, a line of empty glasses that the performer can fill with the golden or silver or bronze liquid of his or her voice. At drama schools, Vinnie has heard, they teach you to say “Please close the door” twenty different ways.

In any social network there are always some people who are as it were “friends” by social compulsion, though if the net fell apart they would seldom or never see each other. It is thus with Vinnie and Rosemary. Because of Edwin they meet fairly often, and always behave on these occasions as if they were perfectly delighted, but they don’t like each other very much. At least, Vinnie does not like Rosemary; and she senses that the feeling is mutual. But nothing can be done about it. Vinnie imagines their social network, or perhaps “web” is more like it-fine-spun, elaborately joined, strung across the rainy city from Fulham to Islington, anchored by isolated threads in Highgate and Wimbledon. She and Rosemary are points of intersection in the web, held there now by many silken twisted strands. If they were to break off cordial relations it would leave gaping sticky holes, distressing to everyone. And they are probably not the only two thus unwillingly joined, Vinnie thinks. Still, the web holds, and spreads its elastic, dew-spangled pattern over London: that is the important thing.

The fading light on the pages of her book tells Vinnie that it is time to leave if she wants to avoid the homebound crowds. Outside the London Library the air is cold, damp, with rain suspended in it rather than falling. Realizing that she is still hungry, and the cupboard in her flat bare of delicacies, she turns up Duke Street and into Fortnum and Mason’s. A clerk in formal morning dress, resembling an Edwardian banker, approaches her with discreet whispered offers of assistance, which she politely declines. No; really it would be foolish to buy anything here; the prices are ridiculous. As she stands debating before a Tower of Babel of international jams and jellies, a much louder voice, much less refined-in fact, blaringly mid-American-hails her.

“Wal, hey! Aren’t you, uh, Professor Miner?’

Vinnie turns. A very large man is grinning at her; he wears a semitransparent greenish plastic raincoat of the most repellent American sort, and locks of graying reddish-brown hair are plastered to his broad, damp red forehead.

“Metchoo on the plane last month. Chuck Mumpson.”

“Oh, yes,” she agrees without enthusiasm.

“How’s it going?” He blinks at her in the slow way she recalls from the flight.

It? Presumably, her work. Or life in general, perhaps? “Very well, thank you. How about you?”

“Oh, doing okay.” There is no enthusiasm in his voice. “Been shopping.” He holds up a damp-stained paper shopping bag. “Stuff for the folks at home, wouldn’t dare go back without it.” He laughs in a way that strikes Vinnie as nervous and unreal. Either it is in fact the case that Mr. Mumpson would be afraid to return to his “folks” without gifts, or, more likely, the remark is just an example of the debased and meaningless jesting common among half-literate middle Americans.