Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Oh, thank you,” Vinnie says. “Chuck, this is Fred Turner, from my department in Corinth. Chuck Mumpson.”

“Wal, howdy.” Chuck extends a broad, fleshy red hand.

“How do you do,” Fred replies guardedly. His immediate thought is that Chuck’s accent and costume, so exaggerated and inappropriate to this party, are assumed-and maybe his name as well. This is not an American, but one of Rosemary’s theatrical friends amusing himself by taking on a role-something he has learnt that actors occasionally do when they have been too long between engagements.

“Heard a lot about you.” Chuck grins.

Fred asks himself what this man, whoever he is, has heard. Probably that he is Rosemary’s lover. “I haven’t heard anything about you,” he says, consciously listening to his own voice for the first time since adolescence. The pronunciation is similar, he decides, but the tune different. In fact, over the past few months Fred has taken on, not a British accent, but a British intonation and vocabulary. Almost unconsciously, he has begun to imitate the characteristic melody of British speech, with its raised final notes; consciously, so as to be understood, he now uses terms like lift, lorry , and loo instead of elevator, truck , and bathroom .

“Chuck’s from Oklahoma,” Vinnie says.

“Oh, yeh?” There is still an edge of doubt in Fred’s voice-though it seems unlikely that Vinnie would conspire in some actor’s impersonation. “I’ve never been there, but I saw the movie.”

“Haw-haw.” Chuck gives a genuine, or very plausible, western guffaw. “Wal, it isn’t much like the movie, not any more.”

“No, I guess not.” This uncomfortable conversation is interrupted by the arrival of more guests, and more behind these. Soon the long high-ceilinged room is thronged. The twin chandeliers, their prisms newly polished, scatter light and echo the tinkle and splash of liquids poured into crystal, of high-pitched laughter and exclamation.

The miracle wrought by Rosemary’s new cleaning lady does not pass unnoticed. All her friends compliment her on it, including some who had speculated earlier that maybe Mrs. Harris wasn’t as wonderful as Rosemary and Fred made out. Neither of them might know whether a house had been properly cleaned, some suggested; others said that Mrs. Harris sounded too good to be true. Now that the evidence is before them they take another line.

“Perhaps it’s a bit too perfectly cared for,” Fred overhears one guest remark. “One almost feels one’s in some National Trust property.”

“Yes, exactly,” agrees her companion. “I expect Mrs. Harris is one of those types who have an absolute obsession with cleanliness. People like that, of course they’re a little bit crazy,” continues this friend, whose own flat could have used a visit from Mrs. Harris. “Rosemary had better be careful she isn’t murdered in her bed one day.”

This sort of spite on the part of Rosemary’s friends is a new development. In the past, envy of her prettiness, fame, high spirits, charm, and income-television, even British television, pays well-has always been tempered by compassion for her disorderly living conditions and her history of romantic disaster. Though widely courted, she always seemed to end up with the least stable and attractive of her many suitors. Moreover, the men she chose were usually married, and presently they either returned to their wives or, worse, left both the wife and Rosemary for some other woman. Thus, however pretty and successful she might be, her friends have been able to love and worry about Rosemary, her acquaintances to like and pity her. But now that she has a perfect house in Chelsea and a handsome, apparently unattached young lover, many of them cannot forgive her.

Besides making ominous predictions, some of the guests tonight try to pump Fred about Mrs. Harris. As Rosemary had remarked, it isn’t easy to find a good English-speaking charlady in London. “You wait and see,” she told Fred. “There’ll be plenty of people who’ll want to lure Mrs. Harris away, even though they call themselves my friends. You musn’t tell anyone anything about her, even what her days are; promise me, darling.” Fred, thinking it unnecessary, had nevertheless promised. Now he sees that Rosemary was right. More than one of her guests, when she is out of hearing, make pointed inquiries: How much does Mrs. Harris ask? Does she have a free day? Fred replies truthfully to both questions that he doesn’t know. An elderly actress called Daphne Vane, who had starred with Rosemary in Tallyho Castle until her pathetic on-screen death from pneumonia last season, is especially persistent.

“I’d really like so much to meet Mrs. Harris,” Daphne murmurs in the wistful, breathy manner that made her a romantic heroine of the stage and screen half a century ago. “She sounds like the genuine article, and one comes across that so seldom now. I had so much hoped that she would be at the party-helping, you know.” She glances round the room, making great play with her famous feathery eyelashes.

“She’s not here,” Fred tells Daphne. “Rosemary didn’t ask her to serve; she says Mrs. Harris isn’t very presentable.”

“No? Well, one can’t have everything, can one? But perhaps she’s below in the kitchen?” Fred shakes his head; if he had nodded, he suspects, nothing would have prevented the unworldly, ethereal-looking Daphne from scooting down the back stairs to the basement. “Do you know what her days are?”

“I’m not sure, no.”

“What a pity.” Daphne gives him the sweet, condescending smile she might give some village idiot; then, without seeming to move, she floats-off into another conversation.

In fact Fred knows very well that Mrs. Harris comes on Tuesdays and Fridays, since he can’t visit Rosemary then-and, after one attempt, she won’t come to his flat. Though he did all he could to make the place attractive, his love hardly spent five minutes there. Drawing her pale fur coat more closely about her, she declared it “absolutely freezing” and “frightfully unromantic,” and declined even to sit on the sofa bed where Fred had pictured her lying half naked.

Efficient as she is, Mrs. Harris has her defects. She can’t bear to have anybody “underfoot” while she cleans. She also refuses to answer the phone and take messages, claiming that it puts her off her work. Occasionally she will snatch up the receiver, shout “Nobody ‘ome!” and bang it down again; more often she just lets it ring. Some of Rosemary’s friends view this as another sign of dangerous battiness; Fred’s own suspicion is that Mrs. Harris is more or less illiterate. That would help to explain why such a hard-working and reliable woman hasn’t been able to find a better-paying job.

In support of the battiness theory, however, it has to be said that Mrs. Harris also won’t answer the door. Last Tuesday afternoon, when Fred discovered that he was free that evening after all, because the Vogelers’ baby had a cold, and he wasn’t able to reach Rosemary on her private line or get a message through her answering service, he decided to go to the house. He knocked, rang, and called out her name; but though he could hear muffled noises within, nobody came. Finally he scribbled a note on the back of an envelope.

As he pushed back the letter-flap, Fred was aware of motion inside the house. He stooped to the newly polished brass slot, and got his first glimpse of Mrs. Harris at the other end of the darkened hall, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees: a shapeless middle-aged woman in a shapeless cotton skirt and cardigan, her hair tied up in a red kerchief. At the sound of the note falling and skidding on the marble tiles, she swiveled her head round, scowling-or maybe her expression had long ago set into a mask of suspicious ill-temper.