Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

What strikes Vinnie about them now isn’t so much the way Fred is looking at Rosemary-she’s seen plenty of people stare at Rosemary like that, including some who don’t much like her-but rather Rosemary’s unwavering concentration on Fred.

Like many actors, Rosemary usually broadcasts rather than receives impressions. She also seems unable as a rule to fix her attention on anyone or anything for more than a few moments; perhaps this helps to explain why she hasn’t ever had any real success on stage. Television, on the other hand, is shot in tiny segments: it doesn’t require an extended and developed performance, only a concentrated brief intensity of expression, something Rosemary is certainly capable of-even famous for-in private life.

Her normal modus operandi is to leap charmingly and distractingly from subject to subject, mood to mood, and person to person, often so quickly that the outlines of her conversation and even of her appearance seem to blur; one is left with an impression of sparkle and flutter. Her clothes produce the same effect. Rosemary never follows current fashion, but has developed a style of her own. Everything she wears shimmers and billows and dangles; she seems not so much dressed as loosely draped in flimsy, flowery, lacy stuffs: veils and scarves and floating gauzy blouses and trailing skirts and fringed silk shawls. Her hair too is continually in flux: tinted and streaked in varying shades from pale gold to bisque, it alternately gathers itself up in soft coils, falls in flossy clouds about her shoulders, or extends wayward tendrils and curls in all directions.

Tonight, though, Rosemary seems unusually tranquil. Light but serene blonde waves lie on her brow; her ropes of blue and silver beads and her long chiffon dress printed with shadowy azure flowers fall undisturbed toward the floor; her gaze is steady on Fred. Vinnie has to speak twice before either of them notices her.

“Oh, uh-Vinnie, hello.” Fred rises smoothly, but stumbles over her first name, which she has recently invited him to use. “I’m glad you’re here. I need support; Rosemary’s being very stubborn. You’ll tell her I’m right.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. Vinnie will agree with me. Now, sit down.” With a flutter of sleeve and a tinkle of silver-gilt bangles Rosemary smooths the banquette beside her.

Their dispute turns out to concern-or have as its pretext-the question of whether Rosemary should hire a cleaning lady. Even before Vinnie hears their arguments she’s on Fred’s side. Rosemary’s Chelsea house is famous for its disorder, its elegant slovenliness; every time Vinnie’s been there it has been cluttered with things that need mending, scrubbing, dusting, polishing, emptying, and throwing away. But Rosemary claims to be perfectly satisfied with her present method of housekeeping, which is to let everything go until she can’t stand it and then ask an agency called Help Yourself to send someone over for a day.

“I can’t bear housecleaning,” she tells Vinnie. “It always reminds me of my mother’s two spinster aunts in Bath, where I was sent to stay as a child during the war-mean, obsessive old things. All their staff had left except this elderly battle-axe Mrs. McGowan, but they insisted on keeping that great ugly barn of a house up. Always cleaning, they were, working their fingers to the bone.” Rosemary extends and flexes her soft ringed hands. “They were fearfully cross with me because I was so careless and untidy. ‘You’re a most inconsiderate child,’ Aunt Isabel used to tell me”-Rosemary assumes an unfamiliar voice, thin and nasal-‘“You can’t expect Mrs. McGowan to pick up after you, she has other things to do. If you don’t change your ways before you’re grown, no self-respecting servant will ever want to work for you.’

“Well, I made up my mind right then. I said to them, ‘I don’t want my room picked up. I like it the way it is.’ Oh, they were shocked. My Aunt Etty said”-another voice, lower and wearier-” ‘No man’ll stay in a house that looks the way your room does now.’ Little she knew.” Rosemary giggles provocatively

Besides, she goes on, charladies always get so dreadfully familiar, trying to involve you in their awful pathetic lives. “You Americans-” She made a face at Vinnie and Fred. “You haven’t any idea what household help is like nowadays in this country. You think if I phone an agency they’ll send me a dear old family retainer out of Upstairs, Downstairs .”

“No-” begins Vinnie, who has never tried to find a cleaning lady in London, because she can’t afford one.

“What I’ll get instead”-Rosemary rushes on-“is some miserable immigrant who speaks only Pakistani or Portuguese and is terrified of electricity. Or else some awful slut who can’t find a proper job in a shop or a factory because she’s too stupid and ill-tempered. And then twice a week I’ll have to hear all about her backache and her constipation and her drunken husband and her delinquent children and her squabbles with the Council over her flat.” Rosemary slides into stage Cockney-“and ’er dawg’s worms and ’er cat’s fleas and ’er budgie’s molt, ooh, the pore dear, ’e’s losin’ ‘is feathers somethin’ awful and won’t touch ‘is bloody birdseed.”

Fred awards the performance a grin of appreciation, then goes on to criticize the script. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” he tells Vinnie. “You can still find a good cleaning lady if you go to the right agency; Posy Billings gave me the name of one when we were there last weekend. If the woman talks too much, well, Rosemary can just leave the house. She can’t do that with Help Yourself, because they send somebody different every time, right?”

“Mm,” Vinnie assents; but what she is thinking is that Fred Turner has received after only a few weeks’ acquaintance what she will probably never receive: an invitation to Posy Billings’ house in Oxfordshire.

“Those people from Help Yourself, see, they’re out-of-work actors and singers and dancers, most of them,” he explains. “They don’t know anything about how to clean a house. When I come over they’re usually just standing holding a dust rag like it was some prop in a play they didn’t understand, or they’re pushing the vacuum back and forth over the same place in the carpet, talking about the theater and trying to persuade Rosemary to get them a part in Tallyho Castle .”

“Not always.” Rosemary protests, with a soft giggle.

“And if she goes out,” he continues, “if she doesn’t watch them every minute, the people from Help Yourself help themselves to her whisky and her pâté and her opera records and sometimes even her clothes. They smear her windows with detergent and ruin her parquet with soap and hot water and tear up her silk scarves for dust rags.”

As Fred relates these disasters, Vinnie is struck not only by his grasp of the details of housekeeping but by his familiarity with Rosemary’s domestic circumstances. Evidently he’s not actually living with her now, but Vinnie wonders if he might be planning to move in, especially if conditions improve. She thinks of the remark of Rosemary’s aunt, that no man would stay in her niece’s house because of its disorder. As Rosemary implied, her aunt had been wrong: many men have stayed in her house. On the other hand, none has done so for very long.

Before Vinnie can pronounce any judgment in the dispute, the bell rings for the second act. Just as well, she thinks as she climbs the stairs to the balcony, jostled aside by larger and heavier persons. It’s always a mistake for an outsider to venture an opinion in arguments of this sort, which are often largely a sort of amorous play. At least for Rosemary the quarrel seemed no more than a pretext for dramatic monologue and affectionate banter. At times she’d even taken the other side, adding weight to Fred’s case by telling how she once came home to find a youth from Help Yourself soaking in pink bubbles in her tub. “And he wasn’t even attractive! He was rather pudgy, and soapy and apologetic, and later I found he’d used up all my Vitabath.”