Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Mm.” The last thing Vinnie wants at this time of night is to start an argument about the comparative economic achievements of America and Britain.

“Anyhow, finally this antiquarian society was open. I talked to the secretary, and she found what looked like it might be the right place, a ways out in the country. Her book said a hermit used to live there, back at the end of the eighteenth century. It was on the estate of some people she’d met once, Colonel and Lady Jenkins their name was. So she called them up, and they invited me over. Mind if I smoke?”

“No, go ahead.” Vinnie sighs. Usually she doesn’t allow cigarettes in her classroom, office, or home; when she gives a party she asks her nicotine-addicted guests to go outdoors or into another room.

“I keep trying to quit.” Chuck takes out a pack. “The doctor says I hafta. But I get real crazy without cigarettes. Can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on anything.” He gives a light false laugh, strikes a match, inhales.

“That’s too bad,” says Vinnie, who has often quietly (and on certain occasions noisily) prided herself on never having smoked.

“Ahhh.” A foul, smelly, gray backwash issues from Chuck’s mouth. “Wal, we all gotta go some way.”

With difficulty, Vinnie refrains from remarking that lung cancer and emphysema, according to all reports, are two of the most unpleasant methods of departure.

“Anyhow, I had almost the whole day to kill before I could see Colonel Jenkins. I was hanging round the antiquarian society reading up on the local aristocracy, and I got into a conversation with this archaeologist guy. He’s working on a dig outside the town, where there used to be an old village. I mean really old, back in the Middle Ages. For him a couple of hundred years is like yesterday. He was finding some stuff, only the best excavation site they had kept filling up with water. Nobody on his crew could figure out where it was coming from or what to do about it. Wal, that’s my line of work; at least it used to be.”

A pained, plaintive note has entered Chuck’s voice. Vinnie recognizes it: it is the whistle of self-pity that has so often in the past called Fido to her. Perhaps because she is still a little blurry from sleep, she imagines Fido hearing it too under the sofa where he has been more or less hibernating for the past two months; waking, blinking open his huge mournful brown eyes.

“Wal,” Chuck continues, “I said I’d go out and look his setup over. Turned out what they’d done was, they’d got one of the pumps hooked up wrong, so most of the water they took out was running right back into that excavation.

“So this guy, Professor Gilson his name is, got his team together, and we moved the pipes, and the water started to go down. I felt real set up with myself. I got my camera and took a load of pictures of them and the site and some of the stuff they’d found. Then we all went and had a beer to celebrate, and then we had lunch in the local pub. Better food than I ever got in my London hotel by a long shot, and a lot cheaper too. I told everybody what I was doing in Wiltshire, and how I was going to locate my ancestor the earl that afternoon. Asshole that I was. I should’ve known what was coming, with my luck.”

“Mm,” Vinnie says. The call is unmistakable now; Fido crawls out from under the sofa to lie at Chuck’s feet.

“What I did instead was kinda went back to the hotel and got all spiffed up; I was muddy from the dig, and I wanted to look like I was related to a lord. I was disappointed at first when I saw the Jenkins’ place: it wasn’t my idea of a castle. No towers or moat or anything. But it was a great big old stone house, over two hundred years old I found out later, with a pediment and columns and sculptures of Roman emperors on the lawn with two-hundred-year-old moss growing on them. And the grass was like Astroturf sprinkled with little flowers. I thought, yeh, this’ll do okay. My head was full of blown-up ideas. I knew Colonel and Lady Jenkins had only owned the house for thirty years, so I figured my ancestors must have sold the place sometime. Maybe they were living somewhere else grander, or maybe they’d all died off by now. That’d be too bad in a way, because I wouldn’t get to meet them; but then maybe I’d turn out to be the long-lost heir, why not? I mean it could’ve been like that, right?”

“I suppose so,” says Vinnie, distracted by her vision of Fido, who is now wagging his dirty-white tail and gazing eagerly up at Chuck.

“Only it wasn’t. Colonel and Lady Jenkins knew all about it. They took me to see the hermitage down in the woods behind the house. It was what they called a grotto-sort of a natural cave in the rocks next to a stream, built out with cement and pebbles and shells into a kinda little stone room. It had an arched door and one window, and the back walls were dripping wet. It was full of moss and dead leaves and spiderwebs and a couple old pieces of furniture made out of logs with the bark still on, like you see in national parks, y’ know.”

“Mm.”

“Of course nobody lives there now, but they said there was a hermit once upon a time. Only he wasn’t any lord, he was just some old guy that was hired to stay in the grotto. Rich people used to do that back then, Colonel Jenkins told me, the same way a Tulsa businessman with a ten-acre ranch will buy himself a coupla horses or a few head of cattle: not for profit, just to make the place look good, to decorate it, like. So they bought this guy. The Jenkinses showed me a picture of the grotto, when it was new, in an old book. The hermit was standing in front of it, with a scraggy beard and long hair and a droopy straw hat like some old bag lady.”

“Still, there’s no proof it was your ancestor,” Vinnie says.

“It was him all right. He was called Old Mumpson, and he got twenty pounds a year and his board, it was all in the book. He couldn’t even write, he had to sign his name with an x, he was just a dirty old bum.”

In Vinnie’s mind, Fido rises to his legs and places his front paws on Chuck’s knee. “But what about the story your grandfather told you?” she asks. “About your ancestor being a kind of wise man, and the cloak made out of a dozen kinds of fur?”

“Who knows? It coulda been fur in the picture, you couldn’t tell for sure. Colonel and Lady Jenkins’d never heard any of that stuff, though they were interested, said they were going to write it all down. They were real nice to me. They gave me tea and cake and muffins and homemade jam. The jam was kind of a weird green color, but it tasted okay. It was made out of goose berries, whatever they are. And they showed me all over the place and answered all my questions. But I could tell they thought I was a poor dumb jerk, looking for earls in a dirty wet cave in the woods. They’re loaded with ancestors themselves, real ones. The house was full of oil paintings of them.”

“That’s too bad,” Vinnie says, referring to her own frustration as well as Chuck’s.

“It about knocked me out. First thing, I just wanted to get out of there. I drove to London and turned in the car and checked back into that hotel I stayed in before, near the Air Terminal, and all the time I felt worse and worse. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep or eat anything or even sit still in the room. Finally I went out for a walk. Didn’t have any idea where I was going, must’ve walked half over London. Then I thought of you.” He sags back against the sofa and falls silent.

Research has its dangers, Vinnie thinks, looking at him. The study of children’s literature, for instance, has revealed to her a number of things she is glad she did not know as a child and is not very glad to know now: for instance, that Christopher Robin Milne’s schooldays were made miserable by his association with the Pooh books; or that The Wind in the Willows is full of Tory paranoia about the working class. Some adult fantasies, such as Chuck Mumpson’s belief in an aristocratic ancestor, might also be better left alone.