In the nineteen-sixties, a worldwide tide of euphoric prosperity and love of country reached Osier, dislodging the British. When the tide receded, it was discovered that their places had been taken by teachers from Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, who could stand the winters. By the seven-ties, Osier had buried Nutrition and Health (Miss MacLeod was recycled into Language Structure), invented a graduate-studies program, had the grounds landscaped — with vast undulating lawns that, owing to drought and the nature of the soil, soon took on the shade and texture of Virginia tobacco — ceased to offer tenure to the foreign-born, and was able to call itself a university.
Around this time I was invited to Osier twice, to deliver a guest lecture on Talleyrand and to receive an honorary degree. On the second occasion, Lapwing, wearing the maroon gown Osier had adopted in a further essay at smartening up, prodded my arm with his knuckle and whispered, “We both made it, eh, Burnet?”
To Lapwing I was simply an Easterner, Anglo-Quebec — a permanent indictment. Like many English-Canadians brought up to consider French an inferior dialect, visited on hotel maids and unprincipled politicians, he had taken up the cause of Quebec after nationalism became a vanguard idea and moved over from right to left. His loyalties, once he defined them, traveled easily: I remember a year when he and his wife would not eat lettuce grown in Ontario because agricultural workers in California were on strike. With the same constancy, he now dismissed as a racist any Easterner from as far down the seaboard as Maryland whose birth and surroundings caused him to speak English.
Our wives were friends; that was what threw us into each other’s company for a year, in France. Some of the external, convivial life of men fades when they get married, except in places like Saudi Arabia. I can think of no friendship I could have maintained where another woman, the friend’s wife or girlfriend, was uncongenial to Lily. Lapwing and I were both graduate students, stretching out grants and scholarships, for the first time in our lives responsible for someone else. That was what we had in common, and it was not enough. Left to ourselves, we could not have discussed a book or a movie or a civil war. He thought I was supercilious and rich; thought it when I was in my early twenties, and hard up for money, and unsure about most things. What I thought about him I probably never brought into focus, until the day I felt overburdened by dislike. I had been raised by my widowed aunt, cautioned to find in myself opinions that could be repeated without embarrassing anyone; that were not displeasing to God; on the whole, that saved wear.
In France, once we started to know people, we were often invited all four together, as a social unit. We went to dinner in rooms where there were eight layers of wallpaper, and for tea and drinks around cracked ornamental pools (Rivebelle had been badly shelled only a few years before), and Lapwing told strangers the story of his life; rather, what he thought about his life. He had been born into a tough-minded, hardworking, well-educated family. Saying so, he brought all other conversation to a standstill. It was like being stalled in an open, snowy plain, with nothing left to remind you of culture and its advantages but legends of the Lapwings — how they had studied and struggled, with what ease they had passed exams in medicine and law, how Dr. Porter Lapwing had discovered a cheap and ready antidote for wasp venom. (He blew cigar smoke on the sting.)
We met a novelist, Watt Chadwick, who invited us, all four, to a concert. None of us had known a writer before, and we observed him at first uneasily — wondering if he was going to store up detractory stuff about us — then with interest, trying to surmise if he wrote in longhand or on a typewriter, worked in the morning or the afternoon, and where he got his ideas. At the back of our wondering was the no-tion that writing novels was not a job for a man — a prejudice from which we had to exclude Dickens and others, and which we presently overcame. The conflict was more grueling for Lapwing, whose aim was to teach literature at a university. Mr. Chadwick’s family had built a villa in Rivebelle in the eighteen-eighties which he still occupied much of the year. He was regarded highly in the local British colony, where his books were lent and passed around until the bindings collapsed. Newcomers are always disposed to enter into local snobberies: the invitation delighted and flattered us.
“He finds us good-looking and interesting,” Lily said to me, seriously, when we talked it over. Lapwing must have risen as an exception in her mind, because she added, “And Harry has lots to say.”
Rivebelle was a sleepy place that woke up once a year for a festival of chamber music. The concerts were held in a square overlooking the harbor, a whole side of it open to a view of the sea. The entire coastal strip as far as the other side of Nice had been annexed to Italy, until about a year prior to the shelling I’ve mentioned, and the military commander of the region had shown more aptitude for improving the town than for fortifying its beaches. No one remembers his name or knows what became of him: his memorial is the Rivebelle square. He had the medieval houses on its south boundary torn down (their inhabitants were quartered God knows where) and set his engineering corps to build a curv-ing staircase of stone, mosaic, and stucco, with a pattern of “V”s for “Viva” and “M”s for “Mussolini,” to link the square and the harbor. In the meantime children went down to the shore and paddled in shallow water, careful not to catch their feet in a few strands of barbed wire. The commander did not believe an attack could come from that direction. Perhaps he thought it would never come at all.
On concert nights Lily and I often leaned on the low wall that replaced the vanished houses and watched, as they drifted up and down the steps and trod on the “V”s, visitors in evening dress. They did not look rich, as we understood the word, but indefinably beyond that. Their French, English, German, and Italian were not quite the same as the languages we heard on the beaches, spoken by tourists who smacked their children and buried the remains of pizzas in the sand. To me they looked a bit like extras in prewar films about Paris or Vienna, but Lily studied their clothes and manner. There was a difference between pulling out a mauled pack of cigarettes and opening a heavy cigarette case: the movement of hand and wrist was not the same. She noticed all that. She once said, leaning on the wall, that there was something unfinished about us, the Burnets and Lapwings. We had packed for our year abroad as if the world were a lakeside summer cottage. I still couldn’t see myself removing my squashed Camels to a heavy case and snapping it open, like a gigolo.
“You’ve never seen a gigolo,” said Lily. And, almost regretfully, “Neither have I.”
She dressed with particular attention to detail for Mr. Chadwick’s evening, in clothes I had never noticed before. Edie gave her a silk blouse that had got too tight. Lily wore it the way Italian girls did, with the collar raised and the sleeves pushed up and the buttons undone as far as she dared. I wondered about the crinoline skirt and the heart-shaped locket on a gold chain.
“They’re from Mrs. Biesel,” Lily said. “She went to a lot of trouble. She even shortened the skirt.” The Biesels were an American couple who had rented a house that Queen Alexandra was supposed to have stayed in, seeking relief from her chronic rheumatism and the presence of Edward VII. Mr. Biesel, a former naval officer who had lost an arm in the North Africa landings, was known locally as the Admiral, though I don’t think it was his rank. Mr. Chadwick always said, “Admiral Bessel.” He often had trouble with names, probably because he had to make up so many.
The Biesels attracted gossip and rumors, simply by being American: if twenty British residents made up a colony, two Americans were a mysterious invasion. Some people believed the Admiral reported to Washington on Rivebelle affairs: there were a couple of diplomats’ widows and an ex-military man who had run a tin-pot regiment for a sheikh or an emir. Others knew for certain that Americans who cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency were let off paying income tax. Mr. Chadwick often dined and played bridge at Villa Delizia, but he had said to Lily and me, “I’m careful what I say. With Admiral Bessel, you never can tell.”