Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

Next month, Joe tells Fred, they and the Canadians are planning to rent a boat and cruise on the canals. “It’s too damn bad you have to leave tomorrow, otherwise you could come along. It’s going to be great.”

“Yeh, it sounds like fun,” Fred says, thinking to himself that being confined for a week on a canal boat with the Vogelers and their friends, not to mention Jakie, isn’t his idea of great. While their opinion of contemporary England has improved, his has worsened. Everywhere about him now he sees all that they used to complain of: the meaningless imitation and preservation of the past, the smug hypocrisy, the petty regulations, the self-conscious pretense of refinement and virtue. London especially-like Rosemary-seems to him alternately false and mad. He wishes it were already tomorrow evening and he were back home where he belongs, though Christ knows nothing much awaits him there. Roo never answered his telegram; she’s probably off him for good.

Because of his height Fred is one of the first to see the Druids approaching up the path from the east: a procession of maybe two dozen persons hooded and robed in white, many of them carrying lanterns of antique design. At a distance, climbing the dark hill in the hazy moonlight, they are mysterious, even moving: numinous ghostly figures from the prehistoric past come back to life.

Joe and Debby suck in their breath, and Fred, awed in spite of himself, thinks a kind of prayer at the Druids and whatever supernatural powers they may be in touch with-in much the same spirit in which, as a child, he used to wish on a white horse and a load of hay. Make everything come out right, he whispers silently.

But as the Druids draw nearer, the illusion, like so many of Fred’s illusions about England, wavers and is shattered. At close hand these figures are undeniably modern, middle-class, and middle-aged or worse. Under their loose monkish hoods are long smooth pink-and-white English faces of the kind Fred used to see every day at the British Museum; they wear solemn self-conscious expressions and, in many cases, glintingly anachronistic spectacles. And beneath their long robes is an assortment of leather and plastic sandals, only a few pairs of which could pass even on stage as Early British.

The Vogelers don’t seem to be disturbed by these incongruities, or even to notice them. “Hey, this is great,” Joe says as the procession continues past them and forms into a straggly circle before the clump of trees that crowns Parliament Hill.

“Really pretty impressive,” Debby agrees; and in an almost reverent whisper she points out that many-in fact more than half-of the celebrants are female. Druidism is a gender-neutral faith; she read that in the Guardian .

Joe isn’t so sure. Maybe that’s the way it is now, he whispers back, but weren’t all the original Druids men?

Whatever the truth of the matter, Fred thinks as the Vogelers continue to debate the point sotto voce, these modern London Druids are patently phony and amateurish. The elbowy gestures with which their leader flourishes his ceremonial sword are awkward and unconvincing, and so are those of the two bespectacled women waving leafy branches toward the four points of the compass. The fragments of liturgy blown toward Fred on the night wind suggest an Edwardian rather than an Anglo-Saxon religious service; the manner of delivery reminds him of college productions of Greek drama. There’s something almost mad about them too, he thinks, as the Druids raise their lanterns aloft in semi-unison, chanting a hymn to what sounds like The Great Circle of Being in thin well-educated voices, and incidentally revealing a large number of anachronistic wristwatches and trouser legs.

Fred turns away, disgusted with this mummery, and with all the phoniness that surrounds him as far as his eye can see, from Bloomsbury to Notting Hill, from the lights of Highgate in the north to Chelsea in the south, and further.

As he stares toward Hampstead Village he sees another, even stupider-looking Druid climbing the path, coming from the wrong direction and obviously late for the show. At the crest of the hill she halts, peering anxiously about at the crowd of spectators; then she trudges on, wavering this way and that as if uncertain whether or not to approach her fellow-worshipers. Her welcome seems doubtful to Fred, for she is not only late but ill-equipped. She has forgotten her lantern; and small as she is her hooded robe is far too short; it doesn’t reach the ground by almost a foot, and exposes a pair of modern pumps.

Yes, Fred thinks as the foolish figure drifts nearer, this is what England, with her great history and traditions-political, social, cultural-has become; this is what Britannia, that vigorous, ancient, and noble goddess, has shrunk to: a nervous elderly little imitation Druid-

No. Wait a second. That isn’t a Druid, or even an Englishwoman. It is Vinnie Miner.

Eight hours later Fred is sitting on the front steps of Rosemary’s house in Chelsea, surrounded by all his luggage. Or maybe not all; when he jammed stuff into his canvas backpack early this morning he was still groggy from a second night of interrupted sleep. But if he’s forgotten anything, it’s too late now; his plane leaves from Heathrow at noon.

Though tired, Fred is in a far better frame of mind than he was last night. He knows now that Roo is waiting for him in New York; and he has managed to pass on his anxiety about Rosemary first to Vinnie Miner and then, with her help, to Edwin Francis, who is back from Japan and staying in Sussex with his mother.

“Oh dear,” Edwin said when Fred called early this morning and related his story. “I thought she must be away; she didn’t answer the phone. I was afraid of something like this. Well, I’ve nearly finished breakfast; I’ll take the first train in and go straight to Rosemary’s from Victoria.”

“All right. I’ll meet you there.”

“I don’t see the point of that. Besides, I thought you just told me you were leaving for the States this morning.”

“I can make it. My plane isn’t until noon.”

“Well-”

“I want to.”

“If you insist,” Edwin says with a sigh. “But promise me you won’t try to get into the house until I come.”

Restless now with waiting, Fred rises, crosses the street to the park in the center of the square, and scans the front of the house, both hoping and fearing that Rosemary will come out of it before Edwin arrives. The place looks deserted; all the shutters are closed and the stoop is littered with throwaway papers and advertising brochures. It’s hard to believe there’s anyone inside-let alone the woman he saw the day before yesterday. Or thought he saw. Was that really Rosemary, or was it only Mrs. Harris after all? What if his identification of the two was a delusion, a mental abberation caused by frustrated desire?

“Oh, there you are,” Edwin Francis says, getting out of a taxi; he looks white and anxious. “Did you try the bell? No? Good. Well, oh dear, let’s see now. I think perhaps you should go down the street a bit; it might upset her, seeing you suddenly.”

“I-All right,” Fred agrees.

He retreats, and from a middle distance watches Edwin ring and wait, then beckon him back.

“It’s rather worrying,” he says.

“Yeh.” Fred realizes that for Edwin, as for many Englishmen, the word “rather” is an intensifier.

“I think I’d better see if I can find the spare key.” He turns to one of the stone urns by the steps and begins to poke about in the earth under the ivy and white geraniums with a broken twig. “Yes, here we are.” Edwin takes out a large linen handkerchief of the sort Fred’s grandfather used to carry, and wipes the key and his small neat hands.