Foreign Affairs (38 page)

“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.

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?