Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

In the sudden silence another Jungian monster can be heard far off, roaring through distant tunnels. Vinnie stares at her own smudged reflection in the opposite window, and then at the notice above it, which recommends a poison for blackbeetles. As the minutes pass, she begins to feel that time has stopped; that she will never reach Hampstead or anywhere else, that she will sit on this seat forever.

If it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, she wouldn’t be here. If he had never existed, he wouldn’t have had a quarreling inconsiderate daughter for Fred Turner to marry. Fred would have married some other much nicer girl, who would not have quarreled with him, who would have come with him to London. He would never have had an affair with Rosemary Radley, and Rosemary would never have insulted Vinnie in a taxi.

It is Zimmern who should be here now, imprisoned in time on an almost empty half-lit train. Vinnie imagines him sitting across from her under the advertisement for blackbeetles, looking rather like a blackbeetle himself. She imagines how as the minutes lengthen toward hours the insects so graphically depicted above Zimmern’s head will begin to crawl out of the poster and down the window frame toward him, how they will crawl in procession onto his shoulders and arms and neck and head; how he will try to brush them off, but it will do no good, for more of them will come out of the picture, and more and more. Zimmern cries out for help, but Vinnie only sits looking steadily at him, watching what happens to him, willing it to happen…

The lights blink brighter; the image of L. D. Zimmem fades and vanishes. The engine gives a drunken hiccup and begins to hum. Finally, with a jolt, the train starts off.

Hampstead, when Vinnie reaches it, is at first unthreatening. A blurred haze of interlocking street lights hangs over the High Street, which is well populated with harmless-looking pedestrians, and here and there an illuminated shop window. But the side streets are empty and silent. Now and then she hears the echo on the pavement of some other late walker’s tread, and occasionally a car rushes past her. At East Heath Road she halts, gazing at the path opposite, which disappears between overhanging heavy trees into acres of windy darkness. Really, to venture onto the Heath at this hour would be plain stupidity, just asking for it. The only sensible thing is to turn around and go home now, while the Underground is still running.

Impelled by this idea, Vinnie starts back down Well Walk. “I tried,” she says in her mind to Chuck Mumpson, “But the Heath was pitch-black, and I really didn’t want to get myself mugged.” “Aw, come on, Vinnie,” his voice replies. “You got this far, you can do it. You just gotta have a little gumption.”

All right, damn it, she says to him, turning round again. But as she crosses the road and starts onto the Heath her heart begins to pound warningly. A hazy, pale, nearly full moon is just clearing the trees, and the sky is a strange fluorescent smoke-red. In the fitful night breeze every stooping bush, every overhanging tree is a moving presence; and there are other, worse presences: voices and figures. Vinnie keeps stupidly walking on, feeling more and more frightened and angry at herself for having come, swerving away from every blowing leaf or strolling couple, thinking how insane it is for her to be wandering across Hampstead Heath in the middle of the night on this wild-goose chase. Who knows if she can find the goose Fred Turner on Parliament Hill, among the drifters and tramps and thieves that may be-probably certainly are-prowling about there in the dark? Who knows if she can even find Parliament Hill?

And whether or not she is robbed and injured on this foolish excursion, Vinnie realizes, there is a more certain, though more intellectual danger: the danger that her vision of London will be injured, even destroyed. So often she has boasted to her American friends that this is a benign and nonviolent city, in which her flat may be burgled when she is away, perhaps (not that this has ever happened), but she herself will never be attacked or threatened; a city where even a small woman in her fifties can go out alone at night in perfect safety. If she really believes this, why is her pulse so fast, her breathing so tight? What if it isn’t true, never has been true? How long is it since she was last alone in an unfamiliar part of London at midnight?

It is not only L. D. Zimmern’s fault that she is here, but Chuck Mumpson’s. If it weren’t for Chuck, she would be safe at home now, probably already asleep. And if she is attacked and murdered tonight on Hampstead Heath, he won’t even know what she was doing there; no one will. Vinnie almost wishes she hadn’t ever met Chuck Mumpson, or even heard of him. But it is too late for that now, So she walks on, as fast as possible, across the shadowy grassy common, under the watery moon.

At the summit of Parliament Hill, near a thicket of bushes and trees, a small and rather scattered crowd has gathered to watch for the Druids. Among them are Joe and Debby Vogeler and Fred Turner. None of them feels the least anxiety about being out on the Heath at midnight, but their minds are not at ease. The Vogelers are a bit worried about Jakie, whom they have left with a sleepy-looking teenage babysitter. Fred, though he is actively trying not to think of it any more, is silently haunted by the overlapping images of Rosemary Radley and Mrs. Harris. What has happened to her/them since yesterday afternoon? Where/how is/are she/them now?

Awful scenarios flicker before him of Rosemary/Mrs. Harris staggering round her house in a drunken, schizophrenic state, or dead of a broken neck at the foot of her graceful curving (but slippery) staircase. Also of her quite happy and well, laughing with friends at a dinner party, relating what a clever trick she’d played on boring old Fred: pretending to be her own charlady, pretending to be drunk. It had been so easy to fool him, she says: he was like that silly rude clerk who wouldn’t charge her groceries, and then complained about not being able to recognize Lady Emma Tally in jeans and a sweater. Maybe he’ll never know which scenario is right, or what really happened to him yesterday. He still hasn’t been able to reach Rosemary or any of her friends, and in twelve hours he’ll be on a plane to New York.

Fred is also brooding about his uncompleted book on John Gay. The directness and brilliant energy of Gay’s work, to which he had been so strongly attracted, now seem to him a façade. The more he studies the texts, the more ambiguity and darkness they reveal. It strikes him now with greater force than before that everyone in The Beggar’s Opera is dishonest; even Lucy, its heroine. Its hero, the highwayman Macheath, named after the common on which Fred now stands, is nothing more than an urban mugger on horseback, and cheerfully false to all his women. London in Gay’s time was filthy, violent, corrupt-and it hasn’t changed all that much. The streets are still dirty, the newspapers are full of crime and deception-in low-rent districts, mostly, but is it basically any better elsewhere? Who in this town gives a shit about anything except using one another and getting ahead?

Fred also compares himself, unfavorably, with Captain Macheath. The women in his life hate rather than love him; and if he is presently to perish it will not be like Macheath for what he has done, but for what he has failed to do: specifically, for his failure to write and publish a scholarly work.

Apart from their anxiety about Jakie, the Vogelers’ mood is cheerful. In the last few weeks-ever since the weather became really warm-their view of England has altered. They still don’t care much for London; but a trip to East Anglia, where their Canadian friends have been lent a cottage, has given them a passion for the English countryside. “It’s like being back in the nineteenth century, really,” Debby enthuses. “Everybody in the village is so friendly, not like here in London, and they’re all such perfect characters .”