Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Over the next forty minutes this series of events is repeated many times, with only minor variations. Rosemary and the elderly actor exchange sides as they descend the steps; they walk faster, and then slower; the flamingo-pink hat is tilted at a different angle; a dangling branch above the railings is lopped off by a man with a saw and a ladder; the nanny is instructed to walk away more rapidly; the lights are moved again. At other times Fred, unfamiliar with the language of television production, can’t figure out what change has been made. Twice the actors get as far as the front gate and are accosted by the shabby woman in black, causing Rosemary to look concerned, smile graciously, and make an inaudible but earnest appeal to her companion.

As he watches, Fred is overwhelmed again by his love’s beauty and charm, which seem almost supernatural in the supernatural sunlight, and then by her cheerful endurance. Each time she emerges from the house she smiles with the same soft brilliance, trips down the steps with the same easy grace, laughs at the actor’s inaudible joke with the same perfect spontaneity. He understands for the first time that Rosemary is more than a beautiful creation of nature, a lily of the field; he sees that acting for television is hard, boring, skilled work, and admires her even more than before.

At the same time, many details of Rosemary’s performance make him uncomfortable. Her way of tilting her head and placing three fingers on the actor’s sleeve in half-serious, half-childish appeal, for instance. Until now, he has thought of this gesture as natural, impulsive, private-not a stage mannerism. Is this why Rosemary has never arranged for him to see Tallyho Castle on video tape, though the project has so often been discussed?

Finally a halt is called in the shooting. The pram is abandoned in the middle of the street: electricians and carpenters (Rosemary would call them “sparks” and “chippies”) lean against their equipment and pop open cans of soda; coffee in plastic cups is distributed. At last she emerges from the house again, without her hat. Fred hurries toward her, avoiding the tangle of cables as well as he can, once almost falling.

“Freddy!” Her face lights with pleasure, exactly as it has just done over and over again on camera. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you phone me? No-mustn’t touch-I’m plastered with makeup.” She gives him a quick hug, averting her face, which in close-up has an unnaturally flawless pasty surface, like the freshly painted house.

“I did, but all I got was the answering service. And you never called me back.”

“Oh, nonsense, darling. There wasn’t any message.”

“I called four or five times at least; and I left my name every time,” Fred insists.

“Really? Those stupid girls; I expect they’re jealous. Trying to ruin my love-life.” Rosemary giggles.

“I can’t believe-I mean, why the hell should they want to do that?”

“Who knows?” Rosemary shrugs. “People are so peculiar sometimes.” She reaches up to ruffle his dark curls. “Not like you. That’s what I adore about you, Freddy darling-you’re so reasonable. Come into the dressing-room. I’ve got to sit down; this corset is murder.”

She leads the way to a bus parked further up the street with its doors open. Within, most of the seats have been removed; the space is filled with mirrors, clothes-racks, and folding metal chairs and tables.

“Oh, darling.” She hugs him again, more closely, then sits, gives a quick, searching look into a glass, and swivels round. “I’m so happy to see you; I’ve got wonderful news. Pandora Box has invited us to her tower in Wales for the last week of June, it’s the most glorious place, and George owns the fishing rights on the river now-do you like to fish?”

“Yes-but I won’t be here at the end of June, you know.”

“Oh, Freddy, please. Don’t start that again.” She pivots back to the mirror and begins to smooth stray wisps of silken hair into the white-gold billows above.

“I can’t help it, damn it. I have to go back and teach. Besides, I’m broke. I can’t afford to stay here any longer even if I could.”

“Oh, Freddy,” Rosemary repeats, but in a very different manner, soft and surprised, leaning over the back of the folding chair toward him and extending round white arms delicately veiled in gray lace. “You mustn’t worry about that, pet. If that’s all it is, I can easily help you out. I’m quite flush now from residuals, and this thing we’re shooting here-it’s a bore, but it does pay rather well.”

“I can’t live off you,” Fred says, his voice thickening.

“I’m not offering to keep you, silly. I haven’t come to that, I hope.” Rosemary laughs lightly, but there is an edge of impatience in her voice. “I’m only offering to lend you something.”

“I can’t take money from you. It would ruin everything.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be a ninny. It wouldn’t be very much. And you could save something by moving out of that nasty overpriced flat and staying with me for a bit, if you liked. And then once we’re in Ireland, everything’s practically gratis. Besides, I might ask Al if he couldn’t get you into the show as an extra. That’d be rather a lark, don’t you think?”

“Well…” says Fred, noticing that Rosemary seems to have adopted the slang of the Victorian age along with its fashions.

“You wouldn’t have to say anything,” she assures him. “Well, of course you couldn’t anyhow, because of your Yankee accent.”

Fred smiles. Though impossible from a practical point of view, the fantasy of appearing in a British television drama with Rosemary is agreeable.

“But you could be a silent brooding undergardener, or a gypsy tramp, or something like that. And you’d be paid a bit too, of course. I’d insist on that.”

“No,” Fred says with force. He scowls, unconsciously acting the insulting role assigned to him by his love’s imagination. “That’d be as bad as taking money from you. Worse.”

Rosemary’s fair, finely penciled eyebrows approach each other in a tiny but somehow threatening frown. She stands up gracefully, smoothing the lacy tiers of her skirt. “Really, you’re being awfully stupid,” she says, gazing down at Fred. “You think you’re in some historical drama; it’s you who ought to be in costume. You want to make both of us perfectly miserable, all because of some Victorian moral principle, that a man can’t borrow money from a woman.”

“Not from one he loves, no,” says Fred stubbornly.

“I don’t understand what’s happening.” Her musical voice quavers, and so does her small round chin above the high frilled collar. “What do you want from me? Oh, damn.” Tearing a tissue from a cardboard box, she blots eyes shiny with moisture. “You’re ruining my makeup.”

Fred rises to embrace her. Avoiding the creamy plastered face and the soot-streaked eyes, he kisses the fine floss of hair behind her ear, the soft neck veiled with lace, the white ringed hand that holds the damp tissue. “Nothing. Everything. I just want us to go on loving each other. That’s all.”

“For four weeks.”

“Yes,” he says, distracted by the contrasting stiffness and softness of Rosemary’s body: the heavy, slippery watered silk and frail net and lace; the feel of corseting underneath and soft yielding flesh beneath that; he presses her harder to him.

“You little shit,” says Rosemary in coarse, unfamiliar tones, using a word he has never heard or expected to hear from her. “Take your bloody hands off me.” Jolted, he steps back.

“I should have listened to Mrs. Harris,” she goes on in a voice that is her own, but charged with fury. “She warned me not to trust you.” She is facing him now, her great fringed eyes narrowed. “‘He’s a Yankee skip-jack,’ she told me a long time ago. ‘He’s a low-life deceiver of women.’”