Foreigners (22 page)

Edward had his suspicions. Never anything definite or concrete, just awkward, intangible feelings that would come upon him unawares, when he was in a meeting with clients discussing a new campaign, or sitting in front of his computer banging out more bland copy for Anglia Rail or Tescos. Sometimes it was a fluttering in his stomach, sometimes a loosening of his bowels, sometimes a constriction in his chest; sometimes it was all of these together. And he would have to lean back if he was sitting, or sit if he was standing, and take a slow deep breath and fight the urge to grab the nearest telephone and call home. The telephone calls only made him feel worse, waiting with the receiver pressed close to his ear while the short double rings went unheeded until the answerphone finally picked up and her voice taunted him: “You've reached 5-7-4-5; neither Edward nor Linda are available to take your call. Leave a message at the tone and we'll ring you as soon as we're able.”

He would always hang up before the machine beeped, then chide himself for having made the call in the first place. For once having done so, the rest of his day was ruined. His concentration compromised, he would spend his remaining hours at the office imagining horrible things of his wife.

Once, returning home to find Linda curled up on the settee in the lounge watching the evening news, he'd asked where she'd been, said that he'd called her from work. She'd smiled sweetly and said, “I did pop out to the shops for a bit. You must have missed me then.” He hadn't bothered to tell her that he'd been phoning all afternoon.

When the day came, he steeled himself with vodka in his breakfast orange juice. Three quick glasses while Linda was in the shower. He waited until he heard her turn off the faucets, then called down the corridor to say he was leaving. She opened the bathroom door.

“Drop in at the cleaners on your way home and pick up my black dress, will you,” she said, her hair bound tightly in a white towel, another wrapped around her body, cinched across her breasts. “I want to wear it to the Wooltons' tonight.”

Seeing her there, framed in the lingering mist of the shower, Edward wanted to cry, to lie down on the floor and weep, and have her hold him and rock him against her chest. But he just smiled stupidly and promised not to forget.

After leaving the flat, Edward went to a caff on Kennington Park Road, ordered a cup of tea and took a table two in from the window and waited. Half an hour later he saw her walk by. She was wearing loose cotton slacks and an oversized T-shirt that fluttered at her waist. Her hair was down and slightly frizzy, which meant she had used the blow-dryer. From her shoulder hung the woven and beaded tote bag he'd bought for her the year before on their trip to Morocco, the one she used to carry her supplies: notebooks, pens, Tipp-Ex, mini-tape recorder; and her sundries: mints, tissues, debit card, lipstick, tampons.

When she was well down the street he slipped out of the caff. He followed at a distance, keeping constant the space that separated them. She slowed outside a chemist's, as if collecting her thoughts, then continued on. At the Kennington tube station, Edward lingered on the pavement, waiting as she purchased her travel card from the automated wicket, then he followed suit. Again on the platform he had to lag back, this time pausing in the tunnel as she sat on a bench and searched through her bag. When the train arrived he waited until she'd boarded before he slipped into the car directly behind.

It being past the rush hour, the train was close to empty, so Edward took the seat nearest the coupling and watched her through the window, ready to tip his head back behind the frame should she look in his direction. He needn't have worried. Once seated, she pulled out a paperback novel and was immediately engrossed in her reading. Seeing her and not being seen, Edward found himself growing excited. In her ignorance at being watched she took on a natural innocence. He imagined her a stranger on a train with whom he could fall completely and instantly in love. Then he remembered what he was doing and the twisting feeling of sickness in his belly returned.

To fight the fluttering nausea, he thought about the world carrying on above: the bustle of Charing Cross; the tourists in Leicester Square taking pictures of the lions and feeding the diseased flocks of pigeons; the chaotic hub of Euston Station; the jabbering markets of Camden Town.

Preoccupied with these musings, he'd almost missed her leaving the train at Belsize Park. When he'd glanced through
the window and seen the empty seat, he'd panicked and jumped up, making it through the sliding doors just as they were about to close. Coming around a corner in the tunnel, he had to stop short and step back out of view, not having realized that the station had lifts rather than escalators. He waited until the few people gathered there had got into the elevator and were on their way to street level before he pressed the button for the second car. It seemed to take forever to arrive and he became frightened, sure that he would lose her in the wasted moments.

Outside the station, he almost walked straight into the back of her. She'd stopped at a flower stall and was smelling carnations. He stood frozen only a few feet behind her.

“Fresh cut this morning, miss,” the flower seller said. “Shall I wrap a dozen up for you?”

“Thank you, no,” she replied, and Edward could tell from her voice that she was smiling. “Though they are lovely.”

Then the flower seller caught Edward's eye and was about to ask him the same, so he turned quickly away and walked a short distance in the opposite direction. When he turned back, he saw that she had started up Haverstock Hill toward Hampstead. He trailed behind her again, trying to re-establish the distance he'd settled into on Kennington Park Road.

This part of London seemed a world away from where they lived; the bistros and cafés and boutiques that lined the wide sidewalks were almost intimidating in their affluence. The wrought-iron chairs in the roped-off, umbrellaed patios and the darkened interiors of the upscale shops seemed designed to exclude rather than invite. And as Edward passed them he felt as if eyes were turning in his direction, aware and accusing.

As Haverstock Hill became Rosslyn Hill, the
ristorantes
and shops gave way to great Victorian townhouses, their front gardens closed in by thick stone walls. Those few that had been converted into flats were ragged and peeling, and looked embarrassingly apologetic. But the others stood indignant in their rectitude, their polished and gleaming panes glowering down at Edward as he passed by.

She stopped before one of these and hitched up the bag on her shoulder before pushing through the iron gate, which swung smooth and silent on its hinges.

Two doors away, Edward stood behind a wall that was topped with shards of green glass. He watched as she rang the bell and bounced nervously on the balls of her feet. The door to the house opened almost immediately and a man stepped onto the threshold. Even from a distance Edward could see that he was tall and well built, a dusting of grey silvering his temples. His face was clean-shaven and pinkish, and he wore beige corduroy trousers and a soft burgundy pullover. He had his hands in his pockets.

They stood there looking at one another, unheard words passing awkwardly between them. Edward felt the lightness of relief. A freelance job, he thought. She must have picked up an interview for one of those glossy magazines she'd done some writing for.

He'd just been considering what a fool he'd been when they pulled one another close and kissed so hungrily, so passionately, there on the front step for all to see, that Edward felt as if he'd been kicked—a violent, heavy boot in the softness of his belly. And then they were gone, swallowed up by the house, the door closed tight behind them.

Suddenly, it was as if everything he knew had been taken from him. He was a stranger, lost in a foreign city with no map to guide him.

He ran all the way back to the tube station but couldn't bring himself to re-enter. He couldn't do it, couldn't sit on that train again as it snaked its way under the city and back to their home. He hailed a black cab instead and sat doubled over in the wide back seat all the way to Kennington. He had the driver drop him outside a pub a few streets away from their flat. It was a rough-looking place, not the posh local that he and Linda met their friends at on Thursday nights. He sat there alone at a table drinking pints of thick stout until half-past two. Then he went back to the flat. He needed to sleep, but the thought of climbing into their bed made him feel sick. So he curled up on the settee, closed his eyes and waited for his wife to return. When she shook him awake at a quarter to five, he told her that he'd been taken ill, that he'd come home early from work. He apologized for not picking up her dress.

• IV •

It should have been simple enough: four turns, easily identifiable on the map, and they would find the plaque on a large stone by the roadside. Or so the master corporal from the airframe shop had told him. But there was nothing but scrub pasture and wire fencing as far as the eye could see. And Edward didn't seem at all bothered by it. So Paul pulled the car onto the shoulder and stopped.

“Just give it to me, will you,” he said, trying to keep his anger in check.

His brother handed him the map and by way of apology offered a meek shrug of his shoulders.

Paul spread the map out against the steering wheel and traced with his finger the route they were supposed to have taken from the main highway. Two kilometres down the first road they were to have taken a right, which they had. After another kilometre, a left, followed by a second left, half a klick on. That was where they made their mistake. There were two roads set very close together that ran parallel to one another for a short distance before veering gently in opposite directions.

“Which of these did we take?” he asked Edward.

His brother leaned toward him and looked at the map. “What do you mean, which?”

“I mean, which,” Paul said, feeling his throat begin to tighten. “Did we take the first road or the second?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Well, there you go then,” he said, and refolded the map. He looked at his watch. It was getting on past two in the afternoon and he wanted to be at Ypres by four so they could be back on the road home while there was still plenty of daylight. “Let's just skip it,” he said, “and get back on the highway.”

“Look, I'm sorry, all right,” Edward said, a slight catch in his voice. “You didn't say anything about there being two roads.”

“Don't worry about it,” he replied as soothingly as he could. “I'm sure it wasn't much to look at anyway.”

Below the marker, Paul knew, were the remains of fourteen engineers. They lay there, under nine metres of dirt, entombed when their tunnel had caved in on them. All had
been volunteers, their mission to burrow their way under no man's land to the enemy lines so as to open another avenue of attack. Aware of the plan, the Germans had shelled the ground above, collapsing the cold earthen roof and burying them alive. Paul had wanted to read and remember their names.

After they'd turned around and were heading back along their misread path, Paul let his eyes wander across the rustic countryside. He could see now what Edward was talking about when they passed by the outskirts of Brussels. There was something in this landscape that was recognizable, reminiscent of Canada. What came to mind, as he gazed out across the fallow acreage, were the wide, flat reaches of farmland outside Port Elgin, where Sheila's parents lived. She would be there now, probably just waking up in the bedroom that was still decorated with stuffed animals and pretty-boy posters, just as it had been when she moved away to go to college in the city. She would be pulling on her pink terry-cloth robe and sliding her feet into her oversized fuzzy slippers and heading down the wide wooden staircase to make herself a strong cup of coffee. Or maybe she would still be buried beneath the comforter on her bed, crying.

She will have told her parents by now, Paul thought, her mother at least. How would she react, he wondered. She was a good woman, always kind to him, always genuinely warm. Whereas Sheila's father had been standoffish. A quiet, sturdy farmer, he never showed emotion: neither disapproving nor affable. It felt strange, realizing that he was now utterly cut off from them. He had hurt their child, had become the enemy.

Next he thought of his own mother. She would be devastated. She'd grown so close to Sheila during the years of their
marriage. He recalled how her face had lit up when he'd announced their engagement. They'd been sitting out back of the house, on the wide cedar deck he'd spent all summer helping his father build the year before he enlisted. His mother had put her hands to her face, as if to hold back tears.

“A daughter,” she said. “Finally, after all these years in a house full of men, I'm getting a daughter.”

There'd only been he and Edward, and their solidarity had always lain with their father. It was as if with Sheila's arrival his mother had gained a long-awaited ally, the much-needed reinforcements that allowed her to assert herself in what had been a dominion of men. She took strength from her daughter-in-law and used it to support herself. Together they were more like sisters. And now he'd destroyed that as well.

He dreaded the prospect of having to explain himself. What would she say? he wondered. There was no gentle way to relay what he had done. No way to tell it where he didn't end up sounding the villain. Would it turn her against him? How couldn't it? How could his mother not hate him for stealing Sheila away from her?

He would have to make her understand that what he was doing was the right thing. That it made him happy. And wouldn't she want him to be happy? It would have been easier of course if he could lay the blame on Sheila. If he could say to his mother, “Look what she's done to me.” But she had done nothing. She'd simply carried on unaware as he set about dismantling the world they'd built together. In bed at night she curled against his turned body, fitting her knees perfectly into the hollows of his own, and inhaled the scent of his freshly showered body.