Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

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-”