Famished Lover (29 page)

“We saw the horses and the guards and the big parade and all the flowers. And we heard the King on the radio!”

“We heard him too!” Michael burst in. “Remember,” he said to his mother, “he was all the way across the ocean. And he said so too. It was the first time!”

“I read the most transfixing account of the ceremony,” Rufus offered. “The shafts of sunlight streaming through the ancient windows at Westminster Abbey just as the King was being crowned!”

Margaret was now eating something. She gazed at me and for a moment we might have been miles away, quite alone. I wondered if she remembered — that touch of her hand in Westminster Abbey on my first day in London, when I'd gone so suddenly cold and dizzy wandering in that great tomb.

It was like hot water cutting through ice, that touch.

Now Vanessa was speaking. “I'm afraid I really don't understand this British and Canadian fascination with royalty. It's a symbolic function anyway. Poor Edward has run from it into the arms of his Mrs. Simpson. He couldn't seem to get away quickly enough. Why all this gushing over an outdated and expensive institution? Of course I'm only an American, and we overthrew the monarchy over a century and a half ago.”

It was Henry's turn then, and as he talked — about Cromwell, and poor beheaded Charles I, and how important pageantry and pomp were to the British psyche and the strained bonds of the Empire itself — I couldn't keep my gaze from settling on Margaret. She seemed not to be listening to her husband at all, but had her eyes fixed on the butter dish
beside my plate — or perhaps on my hands near it. She looked thinner and more pale than I remembered, leeched of some layers of vitality. Yet in that light she seemed an entrancing counterfeit, at least, of the woman she had been.

And I was terribly conscious of looking lifetimes older than the young soldier she had known.

“Think of that one historic moment,” Henry said. “Our new king, George VI, is able to speak into a microphone and be heard directly by millions of subjects, thousands of miles away, in the sweltering cities of India, of Singapore and Hong Kong, here in Canada —”

“And he didn't say anything important or memorable,” Margaret cut in. “What he actually said was so bland it was hardly worth listening to. But the fact of the matter is that he will be revered and his brother will be reviled, and why? Because Edward chose love over duty, and he did it at a time when we all know we're going to war again. And it's going to be soon, and we'll need someone willing to wear royal garb and to tell young men and their families — over the radio, no less — to sacrifice everything for the good of the nation, for king and God and whatever else we can think of. Edward just wants to hole up in a rented Austrian castle and be with his American divorcée. And what's wrong with that?”

She spoke with such sudden force that everyone else fell into a shocked silence.

Finally Henry spoke. “Certainly, darling, we don't know at all that we are going to war.”

“No, no, you're right,” Margaret said. “Just because Chamberlain's new budget includes seven and a half
billion
pounds for rearmament, and Germany, Russia and Italy are happily fuelling the war in Spain, and the Japanese are running around
China, and Mussolini is parading into Africa, and the Nazis are imprisoning more and more Jews and now are rounding up Catholics, for God's sake —” She stopped herself. Lillian, especially, looked shocked. “Excuse my language, children,” she said. Then she looked at everyone. “Excuse me.”

She picked at her food while Henry eyed her with a sort of tolerant patience that, I imagined, could drive its object to murder.

“I wanted us to take this trip while it's still possible,” she said. She raised her glass of lemonade. “Here's to family. To love, and peace, and children, and to all of us. To the simple pleasure of ordinary days.”

I drained my glass and she looked back at me as if memorizing my features.

“What do you think of the new divorce bill, cousin Ramsay?”

“Well, I —” I stammered. “It's not being proposed for Canada, is it?”

“But surely there has been debate here? Should adultery remain the only allowable grounds for divorce? What about cruelty, or insanity, or if one's spouse has been thrown in jail for life? What about habitual drunkenness or, what's the phrase — ‘inveterate drug addiction'?”

Henry cut in. “Everyone in London is talking about this. Because of Edward, no doubt. Certainly there should be no grounds for divorce at all in the first five years. How many young couples would stay together through the early storms of getting used to one another?” Henry and Margaret exchanged a particularly married-looking glance. “Well, it's no secret,” Henry stumbled on, addressing Margaret directly.
“You had some unhappy periods in the early years, before the children, and I was learning the ropes, so to speak, as a young husband. These things take endurance. It's not all the dance and stuff of fairy tales.”

The meal was done, and flies were beginning to buzz about the mostly empty plates, but nobody moved while this topic sat among us.

“Of course we hardly make marriage any easier with our tax laws,” Henry said. “And I should know. A couple of modest means, say two hundred and thirty-five pounds a year, would pay about twenty-two pounds in taxes if their income were split between them, but as a married couple the bill is over twice that. And the wealthier you get, the worse it is. A man making forty thousand pounds would be far better off to split his income and live in sin with his mistress —”

“Money aside,” Margaret cut in, “how many friends do we know who are clearly mismatched, and have been for years now, and who struggle on unhappily, because that is the way it has always been done? They are in love with someone else, and everyone knows it, and yet it must be tiptoed around because adultery and divorce itself are considered so disgraceful —”

Lillian got up and started scraping and stacking the dishes closest to her.

“It all goes back to choosing a spouse with utmost care in the first place!” Henry exclaimed. “So many of our friends married during the war, you'll remember, when people were throwing caution to the wind. Frances had no idea whether she would see William again. But when he came back he was a different William. We all recognized that. He was a
returned
man.” Henry took a sip of lemonade and thanked Lillian for collecting his plate. “We
are
talking about Frances and William, are we not?” he said to Margaret.

“
We
married during the war, dear husband,” Margaret said, smiling. “And we are talking
in general
. Surely there is no need to drag names into the conversation. But now that you have, I should say that William works with Henry at Inland Revenue. Or at least nominally he does, though he's drunk much of the time, and we happen to know that Frances, who has become a friend of mine, has taken a lover for the last four years perhaps, whom she met through some volunteer work she was doing with the East End poor. He is not a poor man, but a doctor, and a young one at that. Now, if she were to get a divorce, would she have to endure the stigma of confessing to adultery in court? Would the doctor's family agree to allow him to marry a divorcée? Or should she just continue to plod through a sham marriage until William drinks himself to death in an honourable and publicly acceptable manner? What if he takes forever?” She turned to Lillian. “Let me help you with those,” she said, rising.

“No, please,” Lillian insisted. But Vanessa got up then as well, and with some prodding both Martha and Abigail joined them, and soon the women and children were off cleaning up and the men were left to smoke in the garden.

“Your wife is magnificent!” Rufus enthused to Henry. He turned to me. “Isn't she? She's beautiful, she's brilliant, she's full of unusual and challenging ideas.” He turned back to Henry with a smile. “She must be hard to handle sometimes at home, though?”

Henry shook his head ruefully. “There is no handling
Margaret. My main challenge is in trying to understand clearly what she wants. Once I've attained that, then I just do whatever it is, and we're all happy.” He did not look like a man who was kidding. “For a time,” he added.

Rufus laughed. “Now there's a sane man's prescription for a happy marriage!” he said. “How are things in Inland Revenue these days?”

Henry eyed him wearily. “I am looking forward to my retirement,” he said. “But at present rate of savings, that will be in about a hundred years. Once Alexander is settled in a good position, and the girls have been and safely -married —” The thought trailed off into nothing. “Of course it's hard to plan these things with the world as it is.” He looked at me sadly. “I suppose you know more than any of us what things can come to.”

We were silent for a time, and then the talk swirled with the issues of the day, about Bolshevik trade unions in particular — how harmful they were for business, Rufus said, and how they were pulling us all towards civil war. “You'll see, in a few years every industrialized nation will be headed by strongmen who will get us back on track. Most sensible people will yearn for it, as opposed to this chaos. Can you believe it — even the busmen in London went on strike for the coronation. It must have been pandemonium in the streets, Henry.”

“And yet we managed somehow,” Henry said meekly.

Sometime later the women came out again and saved Rufus and me from fisticuffs. He'd done so well by his wife's money, and was now moving entirely in such well-shod circles, he seemed to have lost track of the surrounding desperation.

“I hope you men have been solving the world's problems,” Vanessa said cheerfully. Then, without waiting for a reply, she added, “Of course if it were up to women we wouldn't have problems. Except what to wear. That's always a problem. What do you think — if men worried more about what they wore, would we still be bombing each other and erecting huge trade tariffs?”

“If women were in charge of the world,” Rufus said, standing now, evidently relieved to be onto a lighter topic, “then university courses would focus on flower arranging and hat design, and international trade talks would founder for months as the negotiators gossiped about their children and sweethearts.”

“And the world would be a better place,” Margaret said pleasantly, as if in apology for the heat of her earlier words. “How about a walk in the fresh country air?”

We were all standing now. Henry said, “Darling, I should think a nap would do you better. We've had a long train journey and you don't want to overstrain —”

“I feel perfectly fine!” Margaret said. “Why don't
you
have a nap, dear, and I'll go for a walk with these handsome young men?” She linked arms with both Rufus and me. “And their beautiful wives, of course.”

“But you haven't slept the last several nights —”

“Because you kept talking to me about the importance of sleep! Honestly, we're here, finally. I don't want to sleep through it. That's not what I've crossed the ocean for.”

“Why did you cross the ocean?” I asked.

“To go on this walk, of course,” she replied.

I found Lillian in the kitchen, wiping the counter with furious concentration.

“Everyone seems to want to go for a hike. I thought perhaps down to the river.”

She didn't seem to have heard.

“Does that sound all right?”

“Are you asking permission?” She stopped and glared at me. She had taken the rouge off her cheeks and donned the tight blue kerchief she often wore around her head for performing housework.

“I think we should all go,” I said.

“And who's going to make supper?” She started to wipe again, some stain she looked ready to start chiselling.

“Lillian, we just ate.” I was trying to keep my voice soft. “Come with us for a nice afternoon walk in the country.” I stepped behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened until I pulled away.

“Where is everyone supposed to sleep?” she asked suddenly. “Didn't you tell them our house is too small? I don't have enough sheets or beds. And I don't want to ask them to sleep on the floor.”

“We talked about this. Margaret and Henry will take your bedroom, Vanessa and Rufus will have my spare room, the girls can take Michael's room, and I can set up the tents outside, one for the boys and one for us. It's what Alexander wanted, as far as I know — a wilderness experience.”

Lillian threw down her rag. “Your cousin just asked me if she and Henry could have separate bedrooms, because he snores and she can't sleep and gets headaches. What are we, a hotel?”

“Henry can sleep in the tent with Michael and Alexander!” I said. “He can sleep with us for all I care! What does it matter?”

“Yes. What does it matter?” she snapped.

Michael led the way. He had latched onto Alexander like a burr and the two ran down the trail together through the woods, Michael's little legs churning beside his teenaged cousin's loping strides. Martha and Abigail chattered together and waved their hands wildly at the odd mosquito or deer fly.

“The more you fuss, the worse it gets!” Henry said to them. “Try to stay relaxed. It's only nature.”

“But nature is eating
us
, Father!” Abigail said.

Soon the girls were running after the boys, Henry not far behind. Rufus and Vanessa had linked arms, and Margaret, who talked with them for a time, drifted back to walk with me. In the shadows it was cool, the ground muddy from recent rains.

“I'm sorry, you're going to soil your good shoes,” I said. “I'm sure Lillian has an extra pair for working in the yard. I should have got you those.” She was wearing black oxfords with heels that sank into the mud and left her unsteady.