Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

But Fred, underneath his light manner, is singing the basso part. He has a temperamental commitment to the idea of order, already demonstrated to Vinnie in meetings of the Corinth Library Committee. The dusty chaos of Rosemary’s house would surely seem to him a most unsuitable backdrop for their love duet. Also, no doubt, he doesn’t much care to have ambitious young actors chatting intimately with Rosemary, or sloshing about (however pudgily) in her bathtub.

Vinnie’s guess is that Rosemary will win the argument. She’s used to having her own way, and besides it’s her house, not to mention her country. But there is something in Fred’s manner that suggests he won’t give up easily. On the Library Committee this past autumn he was-though always polite-quite stubborn: willing to prolong a meeting well past five o’clock to gain his point. Vinnie had thought that this might be because he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment. On the other hand, perhaps stubbornness was part of Fred’s character-and as such possibly a cause rather than a result of his newly single state.

As she lies in bed later that evening, sinking into an agreeable unconsciousness, with Mozart’s tunes drifting vaguely through her head, Vinnie hears what is unmistakably the sound of her doorbell. Startled, she lifts her head from the pillow. Her first thought is of the habitués of the local municipal lodging-house-slovenly meat-faced men in soiled clothes who lounge on the benches by the railway underpass in good weather, passing a bottle in a crumpled paper bag, or lurch along the streets near Camden Town tube station mumbling to themselves or to strangers. Her next, crazier notion is that the girl from the playground has somehow found out where she lives and is waiting on the stoop to recite the rest of her filthy nursery rhymes the moment Vinnie opens the front door.

Another longer ring. Cautiously, she crawls out from under the down comforter and pads barefoot along the hall in her flannel nightgown and bathrobe. The light from the entryway spills down through the transom onto the cold black-and-white tiles, and Vinnie feels a shiver up her legs. Her vision of the unknown caller multiplies, and she imagines on the doorstep an aggregation of drunken vagrants, then a gang of mauve-haired teenage punks chanting foul rhymes.

A third ring at the bell, more prolonged, somehow plaintive. It is spiritless of her to cower behind two locked doors like this, Vinnie thinks. London is not, like New York, an anonymously indifferent city. She is acquainted with her neighbors in the house; if she were to scream they would come hastening to see what was the matter, the way everyone (including Vinnie) did when the baby-sitter upstairs scalded herself last month. Holding her bathrobe closely around her, she opens the door of the flat.

“Yes?” she calls shrilly. “Who is it?”

“Professor Miner?” An American male voice, muffled by the heavy slab of oak that is the outer door.

“Yes?” Her tone is less fearful now, more impatient.

“It’s Chuck. Chuck Mumpson, from the plane. I hafta tell you something.”

“Just a moment.” Vinnie stands considering. It must be well past eleven, an impossible hour for a social visit, and she hardly knows Chuck Mumpson. She hasn’t seen him since they had tea at Fortnum and Mason’s, though he phoned once to report on his genealogical search. (Following Vinnie’s advice, he had located a village in Wiltshire called South Leigh-“They spell it different, like you said they might”-and was planning to visit it.) If she tells him to go away, she can return to bed and get enough sleep to be in decent shape for her nine A.M. appointment at a primary school in South London. On the other hand, if he goes away he may never come back, and she will never know what he has found out about his ancestor the local folk figure.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she calls.

“Okay,” Chuck shouts back.

Vinnie returns to the bedroom and gets back into the dress she wore to the opera. She pulls a brush through her hair and gives a critical, discouraged glance at her face; but neither it nor her guest seem worth the effort of makeup.

Her first impression of Chuck as he steps into the light is unsettling: he looks ill, sagging, disheveled. His leathery tan has faded to a grayed pallor; his piebald hair, what there is of it, is uncombed; his awful plastic raincoat is creased and mildewed. As she shuts the door of the flat he sways and staggers sideways, then recovers and stands gazing into the hall mirror in a fixed, dull way.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“No, I guess not.”

Instinctively, Vinnie steps back.

“Don’t worry. I’m not drunk or anything. I’d like to sit down, okay?”

“Yes, of course. In here.” She switches on a lamp in the sitting room.

“Been walking a long ways.” Chuck lowers himself heavily onto the sofa, which creaks under his weight; he is still breathing hard. “I saw your light, figured you were still up.”

“Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t explain that she always keeps the desk lamp on in the study, which faces the street, in order to confound burglars. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or a drink?”

“Doesn’t matter. A drink, if you’ve got one.”

“I think there’s some whisky.” In the kitchen Vinnie pours a rather weak Scotch and water and puts the kettle on so that she can have tea, wondering what disaster it is that has overtaken Chuck Mumpson.

When she returns, he is still sitting there staring out into the room; he looks wrong and too large for her flat and for her sofa. “Wouldn’t you like to take off your raincoat?”

“What?” Chuck blinks toward her. “Oh yeh.” He grins weakly. “Forgot.” He heaves himself up, peels off the stained plastic, and drops down again, looking no better. The jacket of his Western suit has been snapped together wrong, so that the left side is higher than the right, and one point of his collar sticks out at an angle. Vinnie makes no comment on this; Chuck Mumpson’s appearance is none of her concern.

“Here you are.”

Chuck takes the glass and sits holding it as if stupefied.

“What’s happened?” Vinnie asks, both apprehensive and impatient. “Is it-your family?”

“Nah. They’re all right. I guess. Haven’t heard lately.” Chuck looks at the glass of whisky, lifts it, swallows, lowers it, all in slow motion.

“Did you find any ancestors in Wiltshire?”

“Yeh.”

“Well, that’s nice.” She adds more milk to her tea, to avert heartburn. “And did you find the wise man, the hermit?”

“Yeh. I found him.”

“That’s very good luck,” Vinnie remarks, wishing he would get the hell on with it. “Lots of Americans come over here to search for their forebears, you know, and most of them don’t find anything.”

“Bullshit.” For the first time that evening Chuck speaks with his normal force, or more.

“What?” Vinnie is startled; her china teacup rattles on its saucer.

“The whole thing was bullshit, excuse me. The earl, the castle-My grandfather, he was just shooting me a line. Or somebody shot him one, maybe.”

“Really.” Vinnie affects surprise, though on consideration it doesn’t seem strange that Chuck Mumpson isn’t descended from the English aristocracy. On the other hand, for her purposes it doesn’t matter whether his ancestor the hermit was an earl or not. “Yes, go on.”

“Okay. Wal, I rented a car from that garage you recommended, and drove down into the country, to this South Leigh. It’s not much of a place: old church, a few houses. I checked into a hotel in a town near there. Then I went to the library, asked how I could get to see the parish registers for South Leigh, like you told me, and the tax records. I found a whole mess of Mumpsons, but they weren’t anybody special. Farmers, most of them, and none of them was named Charles. It took a hell of a long time. Everything kept being out of commission for different dumb reasons, like for instance it was Thursday afternoon. The whole place just shut down in the middle of the week. All the stores too. Hell, no wonder we’ve got so far ahead of them, right?”