One afternoon—I think it was more or less in the middle of our stay in Lisbon—Edward and I took a ride on the Bica Elevator. This elevator, in case you do not know it, is actually a funicular. Its one car has three staggered compartments, rather like the treads of a stepladder. Well, that week we were always looking for places where we could be alone, Edward and I, even for a few minutes. And since the Bica Elevator was cheap, and it was relatively easy to get a compartment to ourselves, it became one of our haunts. I don’t recall that we ever touched each other during those brief trips. For that was not the point. The point was to breathe, just for a moment, some air that no one else was breathing.
I have never much cared for funiculars. Chalk this up to the car salesman’s native distrust of all vehicles that, in the fixity of their routes, deny the open road we cherish. And what is the funicular but a freak even among trains and trams and the like, humpbacked and fused to its precipitous track, from which it can never be parted and without which it cannot live? Edward used to say that the Bica Elevator reminded him of Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill. To me it was more like an invalid attached to an iron lung … Now it occurs to me that marriage itself is a kind of funicular, the regular operation of which it is the duty of certain spouses not just to oversee but to power. And the uphill portion, for all the effort it requires, is nothing compared with the downhill, during which there is the perpetual risk of free fall. Ask any bicyclist and he will tell you that descending is far more dangerous than ascending.
At any rate—and now this strikes me as apposite—it was aboard the Bica Elevator that Edward first told me that Iris was Roman Catholic. “I suspect that this was what her childhood felt like,” he said as the climb began. “The nuns always giving her these little penances to perform. Yet no sooner had she completed one set than she’d commit another sin. And so on, forever and ever.”
“Does she still practice?”
“Not anymore. She gave it up when she married me. The tenets of the faith, if not the terrors. The terrors—those are harder to get rid of.” Years had passed since Iris had last gone to confession, and still she totted up her transgressions in a sort of spiritual account book, and tried to balance them with acts of contrition. The sin of which she considered herself guiltiest was pride, which is unique among the sins in being regarded by the secular world as a virtue. Pride in one’s work, pride in one’s success … These are good things, aren’t they? And Iris was proud of her work, she was proud of her success, above all she was proud that for so many years she had kept the funicular from crashing to the ground. Indeed, there was only one thing of which she was not proud, and that was her love for her husband. Its very immoderacy shamed her. This was why she hated me so. For until she met me she had never once in her life let down her guard on this score, not even when she was at her most abject, not even on those dark nights of the soul when, having dismissed the lover Edward had sent to her, she turned to the wall and thought, “If only I had a mother …” For she could not imagine confiding such a thing in anyone but a mother. And now she had confided it in me, her worst enemy.
Mind you, she was not blundering. She was a skilled card player. She knew that when you are dealt a weak hand, the only thing is to play it as if it were strong. And the hand she had been dealt really was incredibly weak. For what cards did it hold? Habit—the habit of a long marriage. Loyalty—at least the hope of it. A daughter in exile. A dog nearing the end of its life. And these were the strong cards.
Well, she looked them over and she made a calculation. The best chance she stood of keeping Edward was not by forbidding the affair, but by managing it. To manage it, she had to manage me. To manage me, she had to persuade me that Julia, were she to catch so much as a whiff of Edward’s scent on my clothes, would just crumble into a pile of dust. And here she had a lucky break. Our talk at the British Bar came right on the heels of that terrible episode in Sintra, indeed just minutes after I had left Julia at the Francfort’s revolving door. And so the image that came into my mind as Iris made her case was not of my wife as I had first known her, that youngest child radiant in her willfulness, but my wife as I had last known her—frail and febrile, crossing through glass, crossing a river, crossing the Styx.
So that was that. Iris left the British Bar, and she saw that she had achieved her purpose. Never again would Edward and I be alone together. Wherever we went, she would be with us: Iris, and, through her, the specter of Julia, crumbling into pieces. Yet did Iris also see that, in ensuring my compliance, she had paid a higher price than she had to? For she had meant only to show me the depth of her pride. But instead she had broken down and shown me the depth of her passion. By comparison, sleeping with me would have been nothing.
Now I see her processing (that is the word for Iris) down Rua do Arsenal. Not once turning her head. Along Rua do Ouro she makes her way, past the Elevator and across the Rossio to the Francfort Hotel, where, as she climbs the stairs, the clerk thinks, There is a true English lady … She locks her door behind her—and it is only then, in the darkness of that insalubrious bedroom where you had to choose between suffocating from the heat or from the smell, that she divests herself of the heavy armor with which she hid and protected her heart. For now she was utterly alone. She did not even have Daisy for company. At the last moment, she could not resist imposing a single condition on Edward: that when he went off with me, he take the dog along. Probably she was hoping that Daisy would prove an impediment to us—that because of Daisy we would be turned away at doors or out of rooms—when really all she was doing was depriving herself of the one creature from whose company she might have derived some comfort in those terrible hours.
It must have felt to her as if she was being returned to her childhood. Once again she was making the sea journey from Malaysia; once again she was being delivered into the cold, clean hands of the nuns; once again she was peering down the path to the house of her imposing relations. I suspect that it was in those years that she acquired her taste for penance, for even in the grimmest circumstances, you have to find some means of amusing yourself. Well, if nothing else, it was good training for what was to come.
She met him in Cambridge, at one of those spring balls or whatever they’re called that they have there. He had then been in England for eight months, studying philosophy under G. E. Moore. From what I gather, Moore was considered a Great Force—and so his endorsement of Edward carried great weight. Supposedly it was all based on some papers Edward had written in Heidelberg.
Well, Edward asked Iris to dance—and at first she was suspicious. She had never considered herself pretty in any way. More to the point, her relations had done their best to nip what self-confidence she had in the bud. For she stood to inherit a lot of money when she turned twenty-one, and if she married, these relations knew, their chance to manage that fortune would be spoiled. And so they made sure to remind her at every opportunity that she was not pretty, and that therefore any man who paid her the least attention should be regarded with distrust—a strategy that might have worked, had Edward not seemed so utterly guileless, which he was, and had he not compared her to the Madonna with the Long Neck, which he did. For until then her height had been her greatest embarrassment—and now he was telling her it was her greatest glory. Of course, far worse embarrassments were in store for her.
From what I am told, the first year of their marriage was a relatively happy one. In Cambridge they lived in some little hovel, some squalid nest, from which they would emerge once or twice a day to take a brisk walk around the green. A stranger observing them would have thought them, if not an attractive couple, then an interesting one—both so tall, and able to take such great strides. And they could talk to each other. In marriage this is no small thing. Julia and I could not talk to each other—and in retrospect I see what an impoverishment that was. Whereas Iris, despite her lack of education, had the sort of mind that Edward appreciated. Few people outside the rarefied circles of Cambridge could make sense of his papers—but she could. Nor did she begrudge him the effort they cost him. For when he was working, he was prone to a certain fanaticism, particularly regarding early drafts and pages with which he was dissatisfied. First he would tear the pages into shreds. Then he would burn the shreddings in the fireplace. Then he would bury the ashes in the back garden. All this Iris observed with a kind of erotic ravishment. What she could not bear were his disappearances. These were sometimes figurative (he would hardly speak to her for a whole day) and sometimes literal (he would go for a walk—and not return until the next afternoon). They were sometimes accompanied by explanations (a sudden urge to see the Elgin Marbles) and sometimes not. And how Iris suffered during those long hours of his absence! It was, she said, as if the earth were trembling up under her feet, as if she might at any minute be sucked down into the abyss … Until he returned and the world regained its solidity. All this would have been tolerable had he given her some warning. But he never did. For Edward, his broad shoulders notwithstanding, was mercurial. You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door.
Well, perhaps now you will understand why he lasted in Cambridge such a short time. For even in that haven of erratic temperaments, there were rules you had to follow. Granted, from an American perspective, they were strange rules, mostly having to do with dinners and teas at which it was obligatory to make an appearance. Especially if you were a junior fellow, your absence at these occasions was regarded with disfavor—not because the other fellows cared especially for your company, but because in not showing up you were flouting tradition. If you were a foreigner, it was worse. The infraction was then regarded as implying a national slight.
Anyway, Edward missed several of these teas and dinners—and in due course the master of his college sent him a note of chastisement. It was in the nature of a slap on the wrist. But Edward took it in deadly earnest and resigned.
The trouble, in my opinion, was that he had never had a real job—and so he had never been fired from a real job. Being fired is a signal experience for any man, one that he should have sooner rather than later if he is to get on in the world. For until he does, he will suffer under the delusion that employers are as forgiving as mothers. Well, all his life Edward had been told he was a genius, and cosseted accordingly; and so he failed to see that where the ego of a Great Institution is concerned, the whims of one little scholar are nugatory. And sometimes examples must be made.
So that was that. Far from begging him to change his mind, the master accepted his resignation coldly. Like most blows, Edward took this one without flinching. It was Iris who panicked. And who can blame her? In the course of a single day, her notion of her own future—as the charming wife of a charming don—had gone out the window. Of course, she had known that Edward could be capricious. What she had not guessed was that his caprice could carry him to such an extreme. And still she stood by him. She saw no alternative.
The next step was to decide where to settle. She had come into her inheritance, so money was not a problem. Edward said he wanted to go to New York, to see the great-aunt of whom he was so fond. Under her tutelage, he thought he could finish the book that was supposed to be his dissertation. It was during the crossing that the child was conceived.
Oh, the child! That really was the fatal blow. In Lisbon, Julia told me, Iris carried pictures of the girl in her pocketbook. She was very pretty—and, according to Iris, her lovely head was so empty it might have been made of porcelain. Iris was afraid to handle her—in case, in her clumsiness, she should drop her and that porcelain head should shatter. Whereas Edward adored his daughter without pity or guilt. He would talk to her for hours, undeterred by her failure to show even a glimmer of response. Or he would play with her, throwing her up into the air and catching her again. The spectacle of their capering disarmed his wife. She felt rebuked, rebuffed. Did he not realize that in being born, the child had nearly killed her? Not only that, since her arrival, he had not written a word of his book. And so when Iris conceived the notion of putting the girl in an institution—not an especially outrageous notion in those days—she was able to tell herself that it was for Edward’s sake. The mistake she made was not giving him a chance to object.
It was then that they took that legendary trip to California—and as they trundled across the Midwest, poor Iris had no idea, no idea whatsoever, that she had just guaranteed what in the courts they call the alienation of her husband’s affections. This was not entirely her fault. I don’t believe Edward ever communicated to her the degree of his resentment over her decision to put the child away. I don’t even know that he ever communicated it to himself.
So it was that the girl ended up in a gruesome state mental hospital that had the sole advantage of being a few hours’ drive from Edward’s mother—and from which his mother had the good sense, in a matter of days, to rescue her. And thank God she did. His mother—by all accounts a weird woman, a holder of séances and pursuer of psychical phenomena—was the silver lining on that cloud. For had it not been for her, the girl would have languished in that institution for the rest of her days, instead of which she grew up among the Theosophists, who regarded her as a kind of silent sibyl, through whom they hoped to make contact with their masters. Certainly a better life than the one to which the State of California would have sentenced her, and probably a better life than she would have led with her parents.
After that, Edward’s book was abandoned, along with his child and the sexual side of his marriage—this last loss a double-edged sword for Iris, whose fear of conceiving another idiot exceeded her fear of losing her husband to another woman, though only by a hair. They sailed to France, where they took up their vagabond life—that life of Daisy running up and down the corridors of first-class hotels—not because either of them especially craved itinerancy, but because neither had the disposition for settlement. For Iris, as Edward had observed, felt at home nowhere, whereas Edward had a habit of becoming besotted with a place until his infatuation soured into boredom, his boredom into depression, and he suffered what Iris called an “episode.” The episode of the six bottles of champagne. The episode of the mixed-up pills. The episode of the train tracks. The episode of the fifth-floor balcony. And then, perhaps four years into their sojourn in the fairyland forlorn that was Jazz Age Europe, the episode of Alec Tyndall.
Now, Alec Tyndall—to hear Edward tell it, he was a bit player in the drama: the accidental instigator, first, of Xavier Legrand’s accidental career and, second, of the “arrangement” by which he sent men to Iris in the night. My hunch, though, is that the role he played was far more crucial than that. For before Alec Tyndall, Edward had not realized that he could love another man.
Well, who can say what it was about Alec Tyndall that turned the tables for him? I certainly can’t, never having met him. Probably to any eye other than Edward’s, he was nothing special; a married businessman in his thirties; as unremarkable as … well, as I am.
And maybe that was the appeal. At the British Bar, Iris had told me that she assumed it would be some absurdly handsome youth who would “slay” Edward. Yet the truth is, no handsome youth could have slayed Edward. Edward was unslayable by handsome youth. Instead, what was fatal to him was the clumsy touch of a flawed and ordinary man.
Anyway, Tyndall—that was, for Iris, the beginning of her exile in the desert, her epoch of temptations and trials. When she opened her door to him that night, she could not at first believe her eyes. Then his avid presence began to make a horrible kind of sense. For just that week Edward had had another episode, this one involving a borrowed revolver. Now she thought she understood why.
And so she allowed Tyndall into her bed—because she loved Edward. And yet what does that mean—that she loved Edward? I mean, if you put a drop of that vital fluid under a microscope, what would you see?
In Iris’s case, I think what you would see would mostly be fear: fear of the earth opening up under her feet, fear of Edward’s loss—which meant her own. She thought that she loved him as a saint loves God. Yet isn’t the love of saints a kind of monstrosity? Saint Agatha with her breasts on a plate, Saint Lucy with her eyes on a plate … Wherever she turned, little red-tailed devils plagued her. Being devils, they knew exactly where to aim their pokers: at her pride. You might think they urged Iris into Tyndall’s bed. No! They tried to keep her out of it. And what an ordeal it was, resisting their implorations, and submitting instead to the mortification of the flesh—her own flesh—that her love of Edward demanded. And not even Mrs. Tyndall cared. For this was France in, I believe, 1927. Infidelity was de rigueur. In sleeping with Tyndall, Iris was betraying no one but herself.
Now, let me return to Edward. I have mentioned the episode of the borrowed revolver. I have not mentioned the person from whom it was borrowed: an elderly Englishman, jovial and tipsy, who happened to be present when Edward pointed that revolver at his head, and who proved instrumental in convincing him to put it down. In fact, that Englishman might have been the most sensible person ever to stumble into their lives, for once the crisis was averted, he took Iris aside and said, “Your husband is a troubled chap. If I were you, I’d get him to a doctor.” And at this advice she bristled—not just because she feared what a doctor, were one to be summoned, might say; not just because she considered the Englishman impertinent; but because, in suggesting that Edward was “ill,” the old man had failed to appreciate her husband’s genius—which, she was certain, explained, even excused, his putting a revolver to his head. Of course, in the long run it would have been better if she had heeded the Englishman’s advice. At the very least it would have saved her some time. Instead she went up to her room and started packing. Three hours later, they left—the first of many precipitous departures, all before dawn, and all at Iris’s instigation, as if by fleeing to another hotel, another beach, another town, they could leave Edward’s difficulty behind. But it always followed them.
After that, things got worse. At the new hotel, Edward refused to get out of bed. This impeded the maids in their efforts to make up the room. The maids “talked.” The talk led to speculation among the other guests as to whether the odd American in 314 might have anything to do with certain rumors that had recently come in, as if by carrier pigeon, from up the coast.
Alas, Iris took this gossip more seriously than she did her husband’s condition. Now it was Edward who was asking for a doctor. Every day, he said, he could feel himself sinking deeper into the “slough of despond”—a phrase she could not place, but which, in its very allusiveness, affirmed, to her ear, the vigor of his intelligence and the breadth of his learning and gave her the excuse she needed to deprecate his ailment. For her notion of psychiatric illness, even by the standards of the times, was crude—another benefit of her Catholic upbringing. What Edward needed wasn’t a doctor, she insisted; it was fresh air, wholesome food, sunlight—a point she underscored by flinging open the curtains—at which he groaned. Now, as much as she could, she stayed in his room with him—until, one afternoon, the necessity to purchase certain items too intimate to entrust to a servant impelled her to make a brief foray into town. A mistake, as it turned out. For no sooner had she left than Edward, on his own, telephoned the hotel manager and asked for a doctor. It was, he said, an emergency. And so when Iris returned, it was to find the NE PAS DÉRANGER sign hanging from his door handle, and two old women loitering near the elevators. Not recognizing her as the wife, they informed her that the American in 314 had had “some kind of breakdown.”
“Nonsense,” Iris replied. “My husband has a cold. That is why he has been in bed these last few days.” She then pushed past the two women and went into her own room, which adjoined his. Here she found Daisy whimpering by the connecting door. She gathered the dog to her breast and waited, braced for the worst, already planning their departure and anticipating their next port of call.
Twenty minutes later, the door opened. The doctor came in. “Are you Mrs. Freleng?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Well, I’ve examined your husband,” he said, “and there’s nothing wrong with him except that he’s a garden-variety neurasthenic. You find them by the thousand in these places.”
She was about to reply that her husband was not a garden-variety anything when Edward himself appeared. To her amazement, he had gotten dressed. He seemed immensely pleased—both by the doctor’s diagnosis and by the proposed treatment: a month’s stay at one of those maisons de repos in which the Swiss specialize, along with just about every other means of profiting from human misery and human greed. And this, to Iris, was the most confounding thing of all. For she had always taken it for granted that Edward was unique and special, and that therefore any malady from which he suffered would be a unique and special malady. And so the fact that Edward himself should welcome the news that he was just another idle, hotel-dwelling neurotic left her at a loss for words. She was, as the English say, gobsmacked.
The next day, they left for Switzerland, for the maison de repos, where Edward proved to be a model patient, submitting meekly to every order his nurses issued, no matter how arbitrary. And this was the man who, not so many years before, had renounced his Cambridge fellowship rather than knuckle under to afternoon tea!
Well, perhaps you see what I am getting at. At heart Edward was, I think, quite a modest person. The urges by which he was entranced and tortured were modest urges. He appreciated the doctor’s diagnosis for the same reason that Iris disdained it: because it established his membership in the fraternity of ordinary men, even as it confirmed what he had suspected all along: He was no genius. He was no Great Force. His mind was sharp enough to perceive its own limits, not to transcend them. And this may have been why he was drawn to Alec Tyndall, and to me, and why he felt such fondness toward his daughter—because we did not require him to be remarkable.
And so Edward spent three months at the maison de repos. Loyal spouse that she was, Iris put up the whole time at a hotel down the road. Every day she brought Daisy to visit him. He would take her into the garden, where she would sniff at the edelweiss or whatever it is that grows in Swiss gardens. True to its name, the maison de repos put much stock in resting. Its inmates were required to rest something like twelve hours a day—and this suited Edward perfectly. So did the meals, which were ample and rich in the manner of nurseries: everything buttered and creamed and breaded, no bony fish to dismantle, no innards or brutish singed steaks. This is not to say that he received no treatment. There was a psychiatrist at the maison, with whom Edward talked every day. Mostly he talked about Cambridge—about how, in the wake of his resignation, a tranquillity unlike any he had ever known had suffused him. For at last he was free from the vagaries of human endeavor. And yet beyond the horizon of that great relief was great uncertainty. For what was he to do with the rest of his life?
Inimical as I may be to all things Swiss, I must allow that the maison de repos did Edward and Iris a world of good. Among other things, it gave them Xavier Legrand. Like their daughter, the author was conceived en route between two places—Montreux and Geneva, I believe, as they were returning to France following Edward’s treatment. At first Monsieur Legrand was merely a way of passing the time—and so they made the passing of time his raison d’être. Bored in his retirement, he had taken to novel writing as other pensioners take to watercolors. Of course, the fact that Tyndall had put the idea into Edward’s head lent the whole enterprise, for Iris, a slightly sordid air. And still she went along with it, both because Edward’s psychiatrist thought writing would be good for him and because, to her own surprise, she discovered that she rather enjoyed contriving plots. In Lisbon, Edward insisted that he had never cared much about the novels, that they were “Iris’s baby,” that in their production he was at most a glorified amanuensis. I am not at all sure, though, that this is true—for his fingerprints are all over them. And of course, the first of them gave him the excuse he needed to stay in touch with its inseminator and dedicatee, Alec Tyndall.
So Xavier Legrand’s accidental career was forged—in the oddest crucible imaginable. In due course, the first novel came out. With the copy he sent Tyndall, Edward included a note asking if Tyndall wouldn’t be a good chap and keep the secret of Monsieur Legrand’s identity to himself. Tyndall replied that he was more than happy to do so. Indeed, he asked only that the next time Edward and Iris found themselves back in England, they should give him and Muriel the pleasure of opening a bottle of champagne in their honor. But of course they never did find themselves back in England. Officially the reason was Daisy.
And that, for years, was their life. They wrote, and Daisy ran up and down the corridors of first-class hotels, and once or twice a year Edward had an episode that required him to return to the maison de repos. Increasingly these episodes involved men—Alec Tyndall giving way to a Greek, who gave way to an Austrian, who gave way to an Argentine—each, for Iris, unique, and uniquely harrowing, since in the erotic realm there is no predicting how a man will behave. One fellow hit Edward in the jaw, another fell madly in love with Iris, a third, having gotten in bed with her, suffered a fit of contrition and rushed back to his wife. Twice she thought she was pregnant. Long ago she had accepted the cessation of sexual intimacy between herself and Edward, in that spirit of penitential fervor that makes the sacrifice of pleasure in itself a kind of pleasure. Yet in comparison with what Edward demanded of her, even a life without sex of any kind would have been welcome …
Honestly, I don’t know why she put up with it as long as she did—which is to say nothing of why he made her put up with it, when he could just as easily have done the sensible thing and gone looking for men to sleep with on his own. He had no excuse not to. He had done time at Cambridge, was sufficiently conversant with Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis to see his own appetites for the commonplace things they were. Now I am convinced that Iris was as wrong to assume that Edward sought only to satisfy his own urges through her as Edward was dishonest to claim that he sent the men to her bed as a sort of recompense. He sent them to her bed for his own gratification—and to test how much she would tolerate. He did it to punish her and reward her, to draw her closer and drive her away. And really, is it that uncommon to act out of mixed, even contradictory, motives? If it had not been for Iris, Edward told me later, he would likely have done himself in the day he tendered his resignation at Cambridge. Indeed, all that had kept him alive since was her refusal to let go. He pushed her to the limits of human endurance, and still she would not let go. Instead she force-fed him. She crammed the will to live down his throat just as sustenance was crammed down the throats of the suffragettes. And so he was grateful to her—as the patient is grateful to the surgeon who saves his life—and yet he despised her—as the prisoner despises his warden.
And that was how it went with them—for eighteen years. Privately, Iris worried lest a time should come when Edward would want more than just words and smells; when he would want to watch the other man in bed with her or (God forbid) try to get into bed with them himself. But this never happened. They got older, and the episodes came less frequently. These aside, you must understand, their life was a relatively sedate one. They had the writing of the novels to absorb them, and a wire fox terrier to amuse them, and that companionability, that ease of understanding, that is the great boon of marriage. In becalmed periods, Iris would consider the other couples she knew. All of them had secrets: drinking, gambling, money troubles. She would listen to their stories and she would think, Our problems are no worse than anyone else’s. And then Edward would send a man to her bed and she would think, I am lying to myself. They are worse.
And in due course, they took the cottage in the Gironde, so that Daisy could run about doggishly while she still had the wherewithal. It was Edward who suggested the move. At first Iris was nonplussed. Was this a trap laid by yet another devil, an infinitely more cunning devil than the ones with which she had previously done business? Apparently not—for Edward thrived in the Gironde. He did mannish things. He planted a vegetable garden and converted one of the outbuildings into a studio. In the mornings they would write. Then they would return to the house to eat whatever delicacies their cook, Celeste, had prepared for them. Then Edward would take Daisy for a gambol on the beach, and Iris would nap. And what a miracle that was, to be able to lie down on the sofa in the afternoon without worrying in case he should disappear, or threaten to jump off a balcony! For in the Gironde, it seemed impossible that he should disappear, and there was no balcony. True, he suffered one more episode, which necessitated one more visit to the maison de repos. Yet by and large these were for both of them years of ease, of pleasures that were all the keener for their plainness, and difficulties that were in their plainness close to pleasures.
One morning they stopped work early and took a walk on the beach. It was winter, and the wind was blowing the sand up into little eddies. Edward let Daisy off the leash, and she ran along the shore joyfully, darting in and out of waves that moistened her delicate paws, sniffing and marking and chasing the ball that he threw for her. She would catch it, carry it to him, and refuse to relinquish it, which pleased him to no end. For what, he asked, was a retriever if not a sort of sentient boomerang, a creature spellbound by its instinct to fetch and carry back, fetch and carry back? Whereas a terrier had grit. A terrier would be caught on the horns of a dilemma: whether to fight to hold on to the ball or let it go. A terrier understood the terrible predicament of being alive, the impossible choices it necessitated, the endless ceding and seizing and bargaining.
As Edward spoke, Iris pulled her shawl tighter around her neck. The wind was blowing behind them, billowing them forward. And then Edward did something he had not done in years: he took her hand.
She knew better than to speak. They kept on walking until Daisy returned with her ball. Only then did Edward let her hand go—and in that moment it was as if a great forgiveness, greater than anything she had dared hope for, descended upon them.
Six months later the Germans came—and then, in Lisbon, I came.