Oh, yes; she used to scramble out of bed in London saying, “If you have the right kind of experience, it makes you lose weight.” The great innocence of her, crouched on the scale; hands on her knees, trying to read the British system. The best you could think of to say was “You’ll catch cold.”
“What’s a stone?” she would ask, frowning.
“I’ve already told you. It’s either seven or eleven or fourteen pounds.”
“Whatever it is, I haven’t lost anything.”
For no reason you knew, she suddenly stopped washing your nylon shirts in the kitchen sink and letting them drip in melancholy folds on France-Soir. You will never again see a French newspaper without imagining it blistered, as sallow in color as the shirts. The words “nylon shirt” will remind you of a French municipal-bonds scandal, a page-one story of the time. She ceased to shop, light the fire in the coal-and-wood stove (the only kind of stove in your French kitchen), cook anything decent, wash the plates, carry out the ashes and garbage. She came to bed late, when she thought you had gone to sleep, put out her cigarette at your request, and hung on to her book, her thumb between the pages, while you tried to make love to her.
One night, speaking of Fergus Bray, you said, “Could you sleep with a creep like him?”
“Who, the mooch? I might, if he’d let me smoke.”
With this man she made a monkey of you, crossed one of your favorite figures of speech (“frontiers”) and vanished into Franco’s Spain. You, of course, will not set foot in Franco territory — not even to reclaim your lazy, commonplace, ignorant, Polack, lower-middle-class, gorgeous rose garden of a wife. Not for the moment.
I am twenty-seven, you say to yourself. She is nearly twenty-nine. When I am only thirty-eight, she will be pushing forty, and fat and apathetic. Those blond Slavs turn into pumpkins.
Well, she is gone. Look at it this way: you can work in peace, cross a few frontiers of your own, visit the places your political development requires — Latvia, Estonia, Poland. You join a French touring group, with a guide moonlighting from a celebrated language institute in Paris. (He doesn’t know Polish, it turns out; Edie might have been useful.) You make your Eastern rounds, eyes keen for the cultural flowering some of your friends have described to you. You see quite a bit of the beet harvest in Silesia, and return by way of London. At Canada House, you sign a fraudulent statement declaring the loss of your passport, and receive a new one. The idea is to get rid of every trace of your Socialist visas. Nothing has changed in the past few weeks. Your wife is still in Madrid. You know, now, that she has an address on Calle de Hortaleza, and that Fergus Bray has a wife named Monica in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.
Your new passport announces, as the old one did, that a Canadian citizen is a British subject. You object, once again, to the high-handed assumption that a citizen doesn’t care what he is called. You would like to cross the words out with indelible ink, but the willful defacement of a piece of government property, following close on to a false statement made under oath, won’t do your career any good should it come to light. Besides, you may need the Brits. Canada still refuses to recognize the Franco regime. There is no embassy, no consulate in Madrid, just a man in an office trying to sell Canadian wheat. What if Fergus Bray belts you on the nose, breaks your glasses? You can always ring the British doorbell and ask for justice and revenge.
You pocket the clean passport and embark on a train journey requiring three changes. In Madrid you find Edie bedraggled, worn out, ready to be rescued. She is barelegged, with canvas sandals tied on her feet. The mooch has pawned her wedding ring and sold her shoes in the flea market. You discover that she has been supporting the bastard — she who never found your generous grant enough for two, who used to go shopping with the francs you had carefully counted into her hand and return with nothing but a few tomatoes. Her beauty has coarsened, which gives you faith in abstract justice. You remind yourself that you are not groveling before this woman; you are taking her back, greasy hair, chapped skin, skinny legs, and all. Even the superb breasts seem lower and flatter, as well as you can tell under the cheap cotton dress she has on.
The mooch is out, prowling the city. “He does that a lot,” she says.
You choose a clean, reasonable restaurant and buy her a meal. With the first course (garlic soup) her beauty returns. While you talk, quietly, without a trace of rebuke, she goes on eating. She is listening, probably, but this steady gluttonous attention to food seems the equivalent of keeping her thumb between the pages of “Forever Amber.” Color floods her cheeks and forehead. She finishes a portion of stewed chicken, licks her fingers, sweeps back her tangled hair. She seems much as before — cheerful, patient, glowing, just a little distracted.
Already, men at other tables are starting to glance at her — not just the Latins, who will stare at anyone, but decent tourists, the good kind, Swedes, Swiss, whose own wives are clean, smart, have better table manners. These men are gazing at Edie the way the mooch did that first time, when she looked back at him over your head. You think of Susanna and the Elders. You can’t tell her to cover up: the dress is a gunnysack, nothing shows. You tell yourself that something must be showing.
All this on a bowl of soup, a helping of chicken, two glasses of wine. “I’m sure I look terrible,” she says. If she could, she would curl up on her chair and go to sleep. You cannot allow her to sleep, even in imagination. There is too much to discuss. She resists discussion. The two of you were apart, now you are back together. That seems to be all she wants to hear. She sighs, as if you were keeping her from something she craves (sleep?), and says, “It’s all right, Harry. Whatever it is you’ve done, I forgive you. I’ll never throw anything up to you. I’ve never held a grudge in my life.”
In plain terms, this is not a recollection but the memory of one, riddled with mistakes of false time and with hindsight. When Lapwing lost and found his wife, the Queen was a princess, John Paul II was barely out of a seminary, and Lapwing was edging crabwise toward his William Morris œuvre — for some reason, by way of a study of St. Paul. Stories about the passport fraud and how Fergus Bray is supposed to have sold Edie’s shoes had not begun to circulate. Lapwing’s try at engaging Her Majesty in conversation — a favorite academic anecdote, perhaps of doubtful authenticity — was made some thirty years later.
Osier, when Lapwing started teaching, was a one-building college, designed by a nostalgic Old Country architect to reproduce a Glasgow train shed. In the library hung a map of Ulster and a photograph of Princess May of Teck on her wedding day; on the shelves was a history of England, in fifteen volumes, but none of Canada — or, indeed, of any part of North America. There were bound copies of Maclean’s, loose copies of The Saturday Evening Post, and a row of prewar British novels in brown, plum, and deep-blue bindings, reinforced with tape — the legacy of an alumnus who had gone away to die in Bermuda. From the front windows, Lapwing could see mud and a provincial highway; from the back, a basketball court and the staff parking lot. Visiting Soviet agricultural experts were always shown round the lot, so that they could count the spoils of democracy. Lapwing was the second Canadian-educated teacher ever to be hired; the first, Miss Mary MacLeod, a brilliant Old Testament scholar, taught Nutrition and Health. She and Lapwing shared Kraft-cheese sandwiches and subversive minority conversation. After skinning alive the rest of the staff, Miss MacLeod would remember Universal Vision and say it was probably better to have a lot of Brits than a lot of Americans. Americans would never last a winter up here. They were too rich and spoiled.