copyright © Suzette Mayr, 2017
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Mayr, Suzette, author
Dr. Edith Vane and the hares of Crawley Hall / by Suzette Mayr.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978 1 77056 504 3 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8576.A9D72 2017 C813′.54 C2017-900547-2
Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall is available in other formats: ISBN 978-1-55245-349-0 (softcover), ISBN 978 1 77056 505 0 (PDF), ISBN 978 1 77056 506 7 (Kindle).
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For Robyn Read and Jonathan Ball There from the beginning(s)
‘Imagine the iron rebar skeleton inside, the bones for this rugged flesh.’
– Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries
‘ … college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature … ’
– Stephen King, Danse Macabre
August
The washing machine dings in its tiny closet.
The washing machine dings a second time, clunks, sounds out three half spurts, then clunks one more time. Edith pushes herself away from her desk, slings open the washing machine door. Her clothes slump into a soggy pile, scattered with chunks of undissolved laundry soap.
She needs a new washing machine. She has no time to buy a new washing machine. She wonders how anyone ever finds the time to make a major purchase like a washing machine, and how she can become one of these people. So serene, so capable. She has so much work to do: her Academic Achievement Overview, course outlines, a unit assessment report, emails. She slams closed the washing machine, wedges herself back into her desk chair. The washing machine simmers, clicks. Sick and resentful. She hoists herself up from her nest of books and papers and presses every single button one after the other on the control panel. She clicks every button exactly ten more times. The machine pings, clinks, thumps, but the clothes refuse to move, the water refuses to gush.
She pads back to her office. A crooked stack of papers on her desk slides, fans, flutters to the floor.
Screw it.
She scoops up her car keys and screeches off in her cracked-up red Ford Taurus to Bull Head Shopping Centre to buy a new machine. Her car buzzes past the University of Inivea campus, but she refuses to look in that direction, Crawley Hall crouched near the edge of the highway, its boxy presence chiding her like an un-fun aunt.
Fifteen minutes later, Edith bypasses the endless escalator chain that leads to the household appliances floor, seduced instead by the starburst of perfumes and jewellery on the main floor. The perfume sample on her left wrist smells like vanilla pudding, her right wrist wooden petunias. She adores them both but cannot make up her mind. A pearl bracelet burbles at her in its blue velvet bowl. So refined. So Jackie O. So much money.
She jams her purse into her armpit, bullets for the escalator and the washing machines.
At the very last microsecond, she swerves.
Eighty-nine minutes later, Edith’s feet whine in their strapped loafers. Her shoulders slump. She stands, sixth in line, at the glass-and-white-quartz counter in P. T. Madden, the new women’s clothing store to the left of the caramel popcorn stand at the south end of the shopping mall. To the right of the faux-Victorian lotion shop that sells hand lotion for $125 a tube. A part of the mall she never visits, but her mother’s birthday looms. Edith wants to buy hand lotion made from avocado, goat’s milk, and Bali sea foam to spoil her mother, her mother’s hands rough as Brillo pads from so many years as a hairdresser, and her mother agrees once a year at her birthday to indulge in a bucket of caramel corn even though she has to take out her three false teeth to do so. Edith noticed a professor from the School of Drama and Philosophy in Edith’s university was browsing in P. T. Madden, so she zoomed in, sorted through hangers and geometrically folded stacks of clothing, then settled on three new blouses and a stiff cardigan. She knows the patterns are wrong; her mother’s always reminding her she doesn’t have the body type for patterns. – Your boobs turn patterns into porridge, Edith Lynn, her mother reminds her. Frequently.
When she was a teenager and she’d show off her new clothes to her father, he would tsk and down another cognac. – I’m not sure why, he’d say, – you gravitate to clothes that make you look like … a dining room table.
His daughter a porridgy, furniture-shaped disappointment.
Her parents’ wardrobes always so natty, so on point and properly symmetrical.
She shouldn’t be spilling money on clothes. She should be planted in front of her desk at home. Or in her Crawley Hall office, burrowing into her books and papers for her next conference, her next peer-reviewed article, like a proper professor. Or at the very least filling out her Academic Achievement Overview.
But Vivianne said she could shop. Said Edith should shop, as a reward to herself. One blouse has tiny navy-blue flowers clustered all over, like in a rock garden in a murder mystery where someone is about to get smacked from behind with a rusty, dirt-crusted shovel. But you can’t tell they’re flowers unless you’re extremely close. She loves their tediousness, the repetitiveness of their petals, stamens, leaves. She strokes the collar. The dry, textile fragrance. She deserves these clothes. For she is finally the author of a bona fide book.
Her heart flutters, like the pages of a discarded paperback. It took her nineteen years to write Taber Corn Follies: The Western Canadian Life Story of Beulah Crump-Withers, soon to be published by University of Okotoks Press, a William Kurelek prairie painting reproduction on the cover. Twelve years as a PhD student, seven as a professor, and just in time for this year’s Academic Achievement Overview. The giant diamond that will sit in the platinum, Times New Roman setting of her AAO. The pages being folded and glued likely at this very second on a massive printing press. She can’t wait for the buzz of the intercom in her condominium lobby, the mail carrier in his or her smart uniform asking her to sign for the cardboard package, her slicing open the package to copies of her very own book with her very own name on it, the pages smelling of coastal forest and binding glue, the covers shiny and perfect, then moistened with her tears of elation and success. Her discovery and revival of the lost work of Beulah Crump-Withers, former sporting girl, then housewife, prairie poet, maven memoirist, and all-round African-Canadian literary genius, finally complete.
She hugs the new clothes to her chest. Beulah.
The cardigan will drape long, like a cape with sleeves. An author’s cardigan.
Edith wonders if maybe she could somehow reboot her washing machine by unplugging it, then plugging