Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Thank you.” Vinnie places the portfolio on the hall table and unties the worn black cotton tapes.

“Oh,” she gasps, drawing her breath in as she lifts a creased sheet of tissue to reveal a large hand-colored eighteenth-century engraving of a forest scene with a grotto and a waterfall. A figure dressed in rags and bits of fur and leather stands before the grotto, leaning on a staff. “Your father told me about this picture. It’s his ancestor, The Hermit of South Leigh; ‘Old Mumpson’ they called him.”

“Yeh; that’s what Professor Gilson said.”

“You don’t want it yourself,” Vinnie says rather than asks, hoping for the answer No.

“I d’know.” Barbie looks larger and more helpless than before. “I guess not.”

“Or perhaps your brother might like it,” says Vinnie, realizing at the same time that Old Mumpson, in spite of his honorary title, looks no older than Chuck and a good deal like him (if Chuck had grown an untidy beard), and also that she wants the picture so badly it frightens her.

“Aw, no.” Barbie almost recoils. “Greg? You gotta be kidding. That guy looks like some kinda hippie weirdo; Greg wouldn’t have him in the house. Anyways, Dad said if anything happened to him, Professor Gilson was s’posed to give the picture to you.” She smiles awkwardly. “You could throw it out, I guess, if you want to.”

“Of course not,” Vinnie says, taking hold of the portfolio as if it might be snatched from her. “1 like it very much.” She looks from the engraving to Barbie, who is standing there dumbly.

“You must have had rather a hard time of it these last few days,” Vinnie says, suddenly realizing this. “It’s too bad your mother or your brother wasn’t able to come to England with you.” Or instead of you, she adds silently to herself. Because surely either one of them would have been able to manage things better, and not had to lay it all on Professor Gilson. But perhaps that was the point: Barbie had been sent because she was helpless.

“Uh, well. Mom woulda come, only she was closing an important sale, a big condo deal she’s been putting together for months. And Greg’s always awful busy. Besides, his wife’s expecting a baby next month.”

“So they sent you.” Vinnie manages to keep most of her disaproval out of her voice.

“Yeh, well. Somebody had to come, y’know.” Barbie blinks. “I don’t have a family, or much of a job, so I was kinda disposable.”

“I see.” Vinnie has an image of those shelves in her Camden Town supermarket that hold “disposables”-paper plates and napkins, plastic cups and spoons, aluminum-foil pie tins and the like: made to be used on unimportant occasions and then discarded. A strong dislike for Barbie’s living relatives comes over her. “Well, you’ll be able to go home now.”

“Yeh. Well, un, no. I’ve got to stay another couple days in London. Mom decided we’d better plan on ten days. Anyhow it costs a lot less that way, on the charter. I have a free hotel and everything.”

“Not a very nice hotel, I should imagine,” says Vinnie.

“Uh, no. It’s not specially nice. It’s called the Majestic, but it’s kinda yucky really. How did you know?”

“Because they always are. And what are you planning to do while you’re here?”

“I d’know. I haven’t thought, really. Look at some tourist attractions, I guess. I’ve never been to England before.”

“I see.” The thought comes to Vinnie that she ought to do something about Barbie; that it’s what Chuck would have wanted. She tries to remember some of the things he’d told her about his daughter, but all she can recall is that Barbie’s keen on animals. There’s the Zoo, of course-But the idea of another visit to the Zoo-where only a few weeks ago she was so happy watching the polar bear that looked like Chuck-upsets and depresses Vinnie so much that she can’t bring herself even to mention it.

“Well, so long, then,” Barbie says awkwardly. “Oh, thanks.” She accepts the ugly umbrella, which Vinnie has closed for her since it is no longer raining. “Thanks for everything, Professor Miner. Have a nice day.”

No, Vinnie thinks, shutting the door behind Barbie. It’s too bad what Chuck would have wanted. There’s nothing she can do for someone who, on an occasion like this, would say “Have a nice day.” And hasn’t doing things for other people caused most of the trouble and disruption and pain in her life? Yes, but it has also caused most of the surprise and interest and even in the end joy. Does she, for instance, really wish that she’d never lent Chuck Mumpson that book on the plane?

She begins mechanically to clear away the tea things, thinking of Chuck-that all the time she knew him he had been ill, and had known he was ill. That’s why he’d told Professor Gilson he wanted her to have the picture of Old Mumpson “if anything happened to him.” He knew something might happen to him; all these months he had been living under a kind of death sentence, but failing to take any of the precautions that might have commuted it. He didn’t put much faith in doctors; he had said that to her more than once, the stupid, unlucky… Vinnie has to put down the plate she is rinsing and catch her breath. She is shaken by pity for Chuck, living on the edge of a cliff all this time, and knowing it-and shaken by fury at him for deliberately walking so near the edge, for not taking decent care of himself.

And of her too, she thinks suddenly. Because he could very well have died right here in this flat, with a glass of whisky dropping from one big freckled hand and a smoldering cigarette falling from the other as he pitched heavily, fatally, onto her carpet.

Or worse. Vinnie stares out the window, letting water splash unheeded over the rim of the sink. He could have died in her bed, on top of her. She recalls vividly how red Chuck’s face got-with passion, she had thought; how he gasped at the climax-she had thought, with pleasure. Why did he keep taking that chance? How could he do that to her? Is that why he never told her he was ill, fearing, and perhaps rightly, that if she’d known she might never had let him… All those times…

Miserable, furious, even frightened-though the danger, of course, is past-without knowing exactly what she is doing, Vinnie turns off the faucet and, holding the colander she has been washing, walks back through the flat into her bedroom. She stands staring at the double bed, now smoothly covered by its brown-and-white flowered comforter, so often before stirred into a whirlpool of sheets. The last time Chuck was here, she suddenly recalls, he hardly smoked at all. He was trying to give it up, he had told her. And he hadn’t drunk anything to speak of either: only one glass of soda with a little white wine. He must have decided to live, he must have wanted to live-

But if Chuck really wanted to live, why did he go on making such passionate love to her? Wasn’t that just plain stupid?

No, Vinnie thinks. Not stupid on his terms, because that was one of the things he had wanted to live for. He loved me, she thinks. It was true all the time. What a horrible bad joke, that after fifty-four years she should have been loved by someone like Chuck, who on top of everything else that’s wrong with him is dead and scattered on the side of a hill somewhere in Wiltshire: If she’d believed him; if she’d known; if she’d said-

A wave of confused memory and feeling churns up inside her; still clutching the wet colander in one hand, she falls onto the bed, weeping.

“Rosemary? Oh, she’s fine now, really.” Edwin Francis says, helping Vinnie to more shrimp salad. It is a warm afternoon a week later, and they are having lunch in his tiny, beautifully tended Kensington courtyard.