Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

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.