Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“L. D. Zimmern?” Vinnie repeats slowly.

“Uh huh. Maybe you know him? He’s a professor.”

“I think I’ve heard of him, yes,” Vinnie says.

“And hey. When you speak to Fred, you could tell him, if you wouldn’t mind-”

Stunned by what she has just learnt, Vinnie is silent. Ruth March takes this for assent.

“Tell him I love him. Okay?”

“Okay,” Vinnie replies mechanically.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. You’re a real sport.”

As soon as she hangs up, Vinnie begins searching for the Vogelers’ phone number. At the same time, rather distractedly, she wonders why Fred’s wife is not named Ruth Zimmern or Ruth Turner. Maybe she’s been married before. The idea in the forefront of her mind, however, is that her wish has been granted. Her generic and specific enemy has been, in a manner of speaking, delivered into her hands; the sins of the father can be visited upon the daughter, a young, beautiful, and loved woman. Without the slightest effort Vinnie can prevent Ruth and Fred from having a reconciliation-for surely that is what it would be-in New York. And her subconscious seems eager to cooperate, for the Vogelers’ phone number refuses to surface. Vinnie is positive that she has it somewhere, written on the back of a British Museum call slip; but this slip, in league with her worser nature, has concealed itself completely. Yet her better nature, which doesn’t believe in the law of genealogical justice-what harm has Ruth March ever done her?-continues to search.

Of course it doesn’t really make any difference, she thinks, giving up at last. If Fred doesn’t meet his wife in New York tomorrow they’ll get back together eventually. She will phone him from New York tomorrow, or from New Mexico, or wherever she is going.

Or maybe she won’t phone him, because she’ll believe that he got her message and deliberately ignored it. She’ll be hurt, angry. She’ll take that job she mentioned and move to the opposite corner of the United States and that will be the end of their marriage.

Well, too bad-or maybe not so bad after all. Since she is L. D. Zimmern’s daughter, Ruth may very well take after him. She may be spiteful, inconsiderate, destructive; the sort of wife Fred or any man is well rid of-just as her first husband, if he exists, was well rid of her. Probably it’s her fault that her marriage broke up in the first place; nobody could say that Fred was hard to get on with. Anyhow, Vinnie can’t do anything for her. She hasn’t got the Vogelers’ phone number, and she doesn’t know anyone who might.

The trouble is, she does know where Fred is, or at least where he soon will be: on the highest part of Hampstead Heath with the Druids. But she certainly can’t go out at this time of night and look for him there. Nobody would expect her to do that. Let events take their course. Vinnie turns off the sitting-room lights and begins to prepare for bed.

No, most people Vinnie knows certainly wouldn’t expect her to go to Hampstead Heath. But one person would, she thinks as she sits on the side of her bed with one shoe off and one on. Chuck Mumpson would take it for granted that she’d go, without even stopping to consider the great inconvenience and even possible peril of such an excursion. And when he hears that she hadn’t delivered Ruth March’s message, he will stare at her in a surprised unhappy way, as he did once when she said she’d never met a dog she liked. She can see exactly how his face will look, and hear his voice. “You mean you didn’t even try?” it says. “Aw hell, Vinnie.”

Vinnie returns to the sitting room and turns on the lights. She unfolds her bus and Underground maps and opens her A to Z . Getting to Parliament Hill, as she suspected, would be a real chore. The London Transport Authority has made it easy for her to shop at Selfridges, consult a doctor in Harley Street, or see friends in Kensington; but it hadn’t conceived that she or any well-bred resident of Regent’s Park would ever wish to visit Gospel Oak, and little provision has been made for such a journey. She’ll have to walk all the way to Camden Town Station, take a bus or the Underground to Hampstead, and then tramp another mile or more across the Heath. And after she finds Fred-if she finds him, which is unlikely-it will be too late to return by the same route; she’ll have to pay for a taxi home.

She refolds her maps, thinking how expensive and tiring and difficult, if not dangerous and impossible, it would be to find Fred Turner on Parliament Hill at midnight; how easy and satisfying it will be to stay home and cause lasting pain and grief to a close relative of L. D. Zimmern. As for Chuck, he needn’t ever know. But at the same time she finds herself putting her shoes back on; taking her passport, bank card, and all but five pounds and some change out of her wallet as a precaution against pickpockets and muggers; and getting her new raincoat out of the closet-for though it is a warm summer night it may be cool and windy up on the Heath.

Even at past eleven Regent’s Park Road is familiar and reassuring, with only a few respectable-looking people walking dogs, or on their respectable way home. But as Vinnie crosses the intersection and starts down the Parkway toward the center of Camden Town her breath comes tighter. It is the worst time of night now, just after the pubs close; and numbers of the homeless unemployed men who hang about Camden Town have been released onto the street in a drunken and confused and possibly violent condition. She sets her mouth and walks faster, turning her head away as she passes each moldy figure or group of figures, ignoring remarks that may or may not be directed to her; once crossing the street to avoid two especially dubious-looking individuals lounging in a dark doorway, thinking that each step she hammers onto the pavement with her size 5 heels is another step further away from comfort and safety.

When Vinnie reaches the town center, rather out of breath, there are no buses at the stop, and no one waiting for them. She scurries into the station, though it hardly seems much of a refuge. It is a disagreeable place at any time of day, with a cold blast of air always rising from below and the loud, loose, continuous death rattle of the antique wooden escalator. Three scruffy young men shove their way onto the moving stairs ahead of Vinnie, glancing at her in an unfriendly, possibly threatening way. Utterly against her better judgment, she steps on behind them. At the bottom, however, without a backward glance, they disappear down a corridor.

Vinnie takes the opposite tunnel, descends the stairs, and waits for the train to Hampstead. How horrid the dark holes at each end of the platform are: they suggest that something huge and nasty is about to come rushing out of them, heading for her. A stupid thing to think, almost mad. Is it perhaps some vestigial folk-memory trace, some lingering Jungian subconscious dread of caverns and giant slimy serpents?

What does finally come out of the cavern, of course, is a train: ordinarily no danger but a kind of sanctuary. The London Underground is usually in all respects the opposite of the New York subway: well lit, warm, relatively clean, and full of harmless passengers. The car Vinnie enters, however, is less reassuring. It is almost empty, littered with old newspapers, and dimmed by some fault in its electrical system. Well, she has only three stops to go; fifteen minutes at the most.

But after Belsize Park, as sometimes happens on the Northern Line, the train slows, shudders convulsively, and grinds to a halt. The engine dies; the lights blink and dim further. There are only two other passengers in the car, both male, sitting alone at the other end across from each other. One, younger, stares angrily at the floor; the other, older, seems half drunk or half asleep or both.