Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Joe and Debby are also preoccupied, though in their case more vocally. What obsesses them is their baby’s intellectual development, or rather his lack of it. Jakie is already sixteen months old, for God’s sake, and he hasn’t started to talk-hasn’t said a single damn word, though many kids his age or even younger (examples are cited) are already dauntingly verbal. Their anxiety, it occurs to Fred, is clearly a function of what some modern critics would call an over-valorization of language; it hardly matters to them that Jakie is, as he points out now, a healthy, strong, active child.

“If he’d just start to speak, he’d be so much more like a real person,” Debby explains. “I mean, sure, I know he’s healthy, and he’s kind of sweet sometimes, but he’s not exactly human, you know what I mean?”

“It’s so damn frustrating not being able to communicate with him,” says Joe. “Not to know all the things he must be thinking and experiencing. Our own kid. You can’t help wondering, when he starts speaking, what is he going to say to us?”

“You could be disappointed,” Fred remarks. “My father told me once that when I was a baby he used to look at me, having deep Wordsworthian thoughts about childhood, and wondering what message from the realms of glory I would bring down to him. Then finally I learnt to talk, and I said my first sentence, and it was, ‘Freddy want cookie.’”

“How old were you when you said that?” asks Debby, failing to get the point.

“I haven’t any idea.” Fred sighs.

“Most children don’t start putting sentences together until they’re about two,” Joe says. “But they can usually produce single words a lot sooner. Ordinarily. Jakie babbles a lot, but nothing comes of it. I mean, what do you think?”

“He looks okay to me,” says Fred, who has no experience of babies. Maybe there is something wrong with Jakie; how the hell should he know? He has a hard time considering the subject, or any subject; he scarcely sees the picturesque scene through which he is walking: on the one hand a bank of long grass and wild flowering weeds, on the other the brightly painted barges and the tall horse chestnuts in the gardens on the opposite shore, which have begun to scatter their clusters of bloom onto the canal, transforming it into a floating carpet of cream and pink stars. London is visible to him now only in painful flashes of memory; most of the time he moves in a city of clouded gloomy shapes and noises.

Almost the only people Fred has seen anything of since Rosemary’s party are the Vogelers, and he has seen more of them than he wants to, mostly because he hasn’t the energy to invent excuses. Joe and Debby’s opinion of London has improved with the good weather, but not much. Sure, the place looks better, Joe admits, but Jesus Christ, it ought to be warmer than this by June. Back home they’d have been swimming for months, Debby says. And you might as well forget about trying to get a decent tan.

The Vogelers’ views are shared by several friends they have made here-two Canadian historians, met in the British Museum lunchroom, and another couple, relatives of the first, from Australia. All four of them agree with Joe and Debby about the inadequacy of British food, the lukewarmness of British beer, the chilliness of the natives, and the disappointing smallness of every national monument and tourist attraction.

They also have an explanation. Andy (the Australian) outlined it to Fred last week in a pub in Hampstead. The trouble with Britain today, he claimed, is that for three hundred years its boldest and most energetic, independent, and hardy citizens left the fucking place and went to the colonies-under which term he includes the U.S., right? The ones who stayed behind, by a process of natural selection, became progressively more timid, inert, slavish, and sickly. Hell, just look around you, Andy said. The British are poor pale sad bastards now, the dregs of a once noble stock.

Sure, Andy admitted, Australia was settled by convicts-but wait a moment, mate, just ask yourself how they got to be convicts in the first place. What they really were was working-class blokes who wouldn’t accept the class system shit, who weren’t going to rot their fucking asses off slaving for pennies and live on charity porridge when they got too old to work. They had imagination and guts; they took risks, they made a grab for a fair share of what was going. Moll Flanders, not Oliver Twist.

Essentially the attitude of all these colonials-now including the Vogelers-toward Britain is that of successful people toward parents they have outgrown. They admire England’s history and traditions; they feel a sentimental fondness for its landscape and architecture; but, Christ, they’d never want to come back and live here.

The experience of what Fred considers the real, inner London that Joe and Debby had at Rosemary’s party hasn’t affected their views. Most of the people they met there seemed to them “kind of phony-baloney,” and they are still smarting from the reaction of certain guests to their baby’s presence and behavior. Debby, in particular, seems to Fred to be nursing her grudge as if it were some ugly, fretful child-Jakie himself, maybe, on a bad afternoon. Fred’s admission now that he and Rosemary have quarreled, and his account of his last meeting with her, only confirm their prejudice.

“That’s how the English are, especially the middle-class types,” Joe informs Fred as they turn back down the towpath toward Camden Lock. “You never really know where you are with them.”

“Perfidious Albion,” suggests Fred, who half agrees with Joe and half pities his ignorance.

“Yeh, okay.” Joe declines to register the irony. “I don’t deny that they can be damn pleasant if they want. I can understand how you felt about Rosemary Radley; I was kind of bowled over by her myself at first. But your mind-set and hers are light-years apart.”

“Mf.” Fred makes a noise of discomfort. Not for the first time, he wonders why it is that married couples feel perfectly free to analyze the affairs of their unmarried friends; whereas if he were to make some comment on Joe and Debby’s relationship they would be righteously pissed-off.

“I absolutely agree,” his wife says. “Oh, what is it now?” She squats to confront Jakie, who has begun fretting and squirming in the stroller; it is one of his bad afternoons.

“It looks like he wants to get out,” Fred suggests.

“He always wants to get out. Well, all right, silly.” Debby disentangles the baby and sets him on uncertain feet-he has only been walking for a few months. “Okay, wait a second. Jesus.” She straightens out the striped ticking overalls and cap that make Jakie look like a dwarf railway engineer, and takes a firm grip on his small puffy hand.

“You’ve got to reexamine your priorities,” Joe instructs Fred, as they continue, now at a toddler’s pace, along the towpath, pushing the empty stroller.

Silently, Fred declines to do this.

“That’s right,” Debby says. “I mean, after all, there was never any future in it. Just for one thing, Rosemary Radley’s much too old for you.”

“I don’t see that,” Fred says with an edge in his voice. “You’re older than Joe, aren’t you?”

“I’m fifteen months older; that hardly signifies,” Debby returns, not very pleasantly.

“All right. So Rosemary’s thirty-seven. What the hell difference does that make, if we love each other?” says Fred, wishing he had never confided in the Vogelers or maybe even met them.

“Rosemary’s not thirty-seven,” Debby says. “No way. She’s about forty-four, or maybe forty-five.”

“Oh, come on. She is not.” He laughs angrily.

“I read it in the Sunday Times .”