Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

“Hi there! What’s the trouble?”

“Nothing,” says Vinnie repressively, realizing that her state of mind must be engraved upon her countenance. “1 was just looking for a taxi.”

Mr. Mumpson stares out across the empty, rain-sloshed, light-streaked pavement. “Don’t seem to be any here.”

“No.” She manages a brief defensive smile. “Apparently they all turn into pumpkins at midnight.”

“Huh? Oh, ha-ha. Listen, I know what. You can come on the bus with us. It’s going right into town: centrally located hotel, said so in the brochure. Bet you can get a cab there.”

Over her weak, weary protests, he plunges into the crowd and returns a minute later to report that it is all fixed up. Luckily, since Vinnie and Mr. Mumpson are the last to board, they have to sit separately, and she is spared any more of his conversation.

The journey to London passes in a silent blur of weariness. Though Vinnie has often been abroad, this is her first (and she hopes last) ride on a tour bus. She has of course often seen them from the street, and observed with a mixture of scorn and pity the tourists packed inside, gazing out with weak fishy stares through the thick green distorting glass of their rolling aquariums at the strange, soundless world outside.

The bus stops at a large anonymous hotel near the Air Terminal, where several taxis are actually waiting. Mr. Mumpson helps her stow her luggage into one of them, and she parts from him with sincere thanks and insincere agreement with his hope that they will “run into each other” again.

It is now nearly one in the morning. As her cab splashes north through the rain, Vinnie, exhausted, wonders what new disasters await her at the flat on Regent’s Park Road she has rented for the third time from an Oxford don. Probably there won’t be anyone at home downstairs to give her the keys, Fido whines; or the place will be filthy; or the lights won’t work. If anything can go wrong for her it will.

But the young woman in the garden flat is in and still awake; the keys turn smoothly in their locks; the light switch is where Vinnie remembers it, just inside the door. There is the white telephone with its familiar number, and the stack of phone books in their elegant pastel colors: A-D cream, E-K geranium pink, L-R fern green, S-Z forget-me-not blue, holding between their closed petals the names of all her London friends. The sofa and chairs are in their proper places; the gold-framed engravings of Oxford colleges glow quietly on either side of the mantel. The clean grate is decorated as always with a white paper fan that echoes the white enameled pots of English ivy on their stand in the tall bay window. For the second time that evening tears ache behind Vinnie’s eyes; but these are tears of relief, even of joy.

Since she is unobserved, she allows them to fall. Weeping quietly, she hauls her bags into the flat, bolts the door behind them, and is safe at last, home in London.

IN the Underground station at Notting Hill Gate a tall dark handsome American is waiting for the eastbound train. Restlessly, he stamps from one foot to the other, staring across the dark dirty tracks at bright colored advertisements of products he will never purchase: Black Magic chocolates and Craven cigarettes. Trained in the close reading of texts (he is an assistant professor of English), he wonders how the British public can be persuaded to buy candy that suggests an evil spell and tobacco designated as cowardly. Maybe there is a darker meaning to the glossy social and sexual occasions illustrated in these posters. Is the scarlet-mouthed blonde offering the box of chocolates about to poison or bewitch her guests? Are the smiling, smoke-breathing young man and woman secretly terrified of each other? In Fred Turner’s present mood both scenes seem empty and false like the city above him, almost sinister.

Though he has been in London for three weeks, this is the first time Fred has used the Underground. Usually he walks everywhere, regardless of the distance or the weather, in imitation of the eighteenth-century author John Gay, about whom he is supposed to be writing a book. In Gay’s long poem, Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London , mechanical transport is scorned:

What walker shall his mean ambition fix

On the false lustre of a coach and six?

O rather give me sweet content on foot,

Wrapped in my virtue, and a good surtout!

In a vain search for sweet content, Fred has tramped half over London. Unless it rains hard, he also runs two miles every morning in Kensington Gardens, pounding along past dripping empty benches and gnarled bare trees, under a dark or dappled sky. While his lungs fill with damp chill air and the thin smoke of his breath steams away, he asks himself what the hell he is doing here, alone in this cold, unpleasant city. This evening, however, an icy sleet is falling, and Fred is expected for dinner in Hampstead; even Gay, he decided, wouldn’t have walked so far in weather like this.

Most of the other people on the Underground platform are not gazing at the advertisements, but-more or less covertly-at Fred Turner. They are wondering if they haven’t seen him somewhere before, maybe in some film or on the telly. A miniskirted billing clerk thinks he looks exactly like the hero on the cover of The Secret of Rosewyn , one of her favorite Gothics. A grammar-school teacher, collapsed on a bench with a bulging string bag, believes she saw him in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford last summer, in one of the main supporting roles. The manager of a small menswear shop, professionally noting the transatlantic cut of Fred’s duffel coat, wonders if he was in that American detective series his kids always watch. None of Fred’s fellow passengers connect him with a comedy or a game show: something in the tense set of his broad shoulders, the angle of his jaw, and the way the dark arches of his eyebrows are drawn together precludes these associations.

Fred is not embarrassed by this attention. He is used to it, regards it as normal, doesn’t in fact realize that few other humans are gazed at so often or so intensely. Since babyhood his appearance has attracted admiration, and often comment. It was soon clear that he had inherited his mother’s brunette, lushly romantic good looks: her thick wavy dark hair, her wide-set cilia-fringed brown eyes (“wasted on a boy,” many remarked). If anything, Fred is less conscious of being observed now than he was at home, for the polite British are taught as children that it is rude to stare, and have learnt to disguise their public curiosity. They are also taught not to speak to strangers; and as yet no citizen has broken this rule in Fred’s case-though two Canadians stopped him on the street last week to ask if he wasn’t the guy that fought the giant man-eating extraterrestrial cabbage in The Thing from Beyond .

Fred Turner knows, of course, that he is a handsome, athletic-looking young man, the type that directors employ to battle carnivorous vegetables. It would be going too far to say that he has never derived any satisfaction from this fact, but he has often wished that his appearance was less striking. He has the features, and the physique, of an Edwardian hero: classically sculptured, over-finished, like the men in Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings. If he had lived before World War II, he might have been more grateful for his looks; but since then it has not been fashionable for Anglo-Saxon men to be handsome in this style unless they are homosexual. For modern straight tastes his chin is too firmly rounded and cleft, his carriage too erect, his hair too wavy, and his eyelashes much too long.