Famished Lover (2 page)

“Rufus said he'd take care of all the details,” I said furiously.

“Maybe you should walk back to town and get us supplies. I'll stay here and tidy. You're right, dear. The place is
filthy
.”

It would take at least an hour to get to the store, and darkness was coming on.

“Maybe I could catch us some fish and we'll make an expedition tomorrow. I doubt the store in town would be open by the time I got there.”

I kissed her again, then gathered my fishing gear and walked outside. The wind seemed chillier than before, humming
dully through the trees. I descended a narrow path that came out finally on a newly frozen pond. I tried a few tentative steps but the shore ice broke even under my slender frame. There'd be no walking out, no fishing, no easy honeymoon dinner. I said a few choice words to the absent Rufus. Then I trod up the hill again and ducked my head under the doorway. A multitude of beeswax candles filled the room with light and their heavy scent. Lillian had turned up some old silver too and had set the table. “I found some oatmeal,” she said, indicating a door to the side of the pantry that I hadn't noticed. “And some preserves. Someone around here has pear trees. Lucky us.” In the candlelight she looked like a wet vase still on the wheel, glistening and sleek and absolutely new.

I must have been staring at her, for she smiled and blushed deeply again. “Could you get us some water?” Instead we kissed once more. She put up with it for a time, then pushed me away. “The bucket's over there.”

I found the pump around the other side of the house, delivered the water, then spent a satisfying time by the woodpile, though the axe was dull and I could find no file or sharpening stone. From the cabin I heard Lillian humming softly to herself in a fine voice as she prepared the dinner. But as soon as I stepped inside she stopped.

“Please Lillian, keep singing.” She looked at me happily, but stayed silent.

I fed the fire and we sat down to eat — a big bowl of porridge for each of us, without milk or cream or brown sugar, but with warm and sweet slices of preserved pear. And a glass of well water each, in a chipped teacup.

“Cheers to you, my darling,” I said. I drank, but she set
down her own water nervously, then bowed her head in a sudden gesture and closed her eyes over the food. It took me a moment to realize that she was praying. I bowed my own head, too late, just as she was raising hers.

Her father, a religious man, had prayed before dinner whenever I'd eaten with them. Yet somehow I hadn't expected Lillian to be quite that way on her own. She stole out so often to see me at the river when I was fishing and seemed so mischievous in the eye. But of course she was religious, I realized now. We'd simply not spoken of it. And what did it matter?

“We'll remember this meal the rest of our lives,” I said. “We'll tell our children.” Three weeks ago, when I'd proposed, I couldn't have been more sure of what I was doing. And she'd fallen into my arms and seemed even more eager than me to chart our course together. But now she was white in the face and silent and did not eat much of the grey food she'd prepared. I rose and stepped to her. “Are you all right, Lillian?”

“I'm afraid you've made an awful mistake,” she blurted. In a moment she was sobbing with her face in her hands.

“What, darling? What mistake? No, I haven't!” I knelt by her and held her shaking body. “What are you talking about?”

Several minutes passed before I could even get her to look at me.

“I don't . . . I can't . . . I don't know a thing about being a wife or —” she stammered. “You know my mother died when I was so young and —” She wiped herself with the old cloth napkin she'd found, her wedding face now smeared. “I don't know what to do!” she said, finally looking at me. “Nobody told me.”

“Darling” — I tried to soften my features, which I know can seem hard even when I'm simply thinking — “we'll make it up together. That's what we're here for. To help one another.”

She cried in my arms, and we breathed hard together as if we had run a long way. But oh, the feel of her, my God, her warmth and youth against me.

“I'm so frightened, Ramsay!”

I held her face so she had to look at me. “I will never hurt you. Do you understand that?
Never
.”

We continued to cling to one another like a shipwrecked pair floating on debris.

“Tell me about the war,” she said then. When I did not respond she said, “It was hard on you, I know. You have such sad eyes. And your hands” — she wound her fingers among mine — “you have an artist's fingers. But you've done such hard work, too. Was that in the war?”

Such are the moments that life presents, and a man is either up to them or is not.

“I can't . . . I shouldn't talk about it right now,” I said.

“I was just a child. I hardly remember anything of it.”

“And that's part of what's so beautiful about you!” I gripped her hand too hard. It took the look of alarm on her face for me to realize and shake free. “i'm sorry! I'm sorry! Another time, I promise. The best I can say about the war is that it's over, and it will never happen again.” I tried to kiss her, but once more with too much force.

Lillian stood then and began clearing the dishes, her gestures sharp and angry. “I heated water, but it seems we don't have any tea or coffee,” she said.

In vain I tried to help yet not get in the way. She dumped
the hot water from the kettle into the wash basin. Then she started looking around fruitlessly.

“Was Rufus going to supply soap too?”

“Let's sort it out in the morning,” I said gently. I took her hand, which suddenly felt as cold as if she'd been outside in the raw wind. Her face was sickly pale beneath her teary paint, and she looked away from me, at the dishes in the basin.

“You go ahead,” she said. “I'll finish this.” She glanced up, I suppose to reassure me, but with a look of terror.

So I retreated to the loft. There was very little headroom and the mattress was tough and musty. But much of the warm air from the wood stove had collected around the bed, and a small, square window rattled with the outside wind to make this pocket seem hospitable in comparison. I plumped up the hard pillows and pulled off my shoes, then settled back to watch the light and shadows from the candles below play against the rough logs of the ceiling.

I longed to hear her sing again. But down below cutlery clattered, pots clanked, cupboards snapped open and shut. And I worried about the bed. The sheets were old, the blankets heavy and rough. There wasn't a lot of room for the two of us to lie side by side. Nor was there space for our bags — I'd left them on the main floor and thought now I should bring them up. Yet I didn't move. I didn't want to disturb her, to do anything else wrong.

Presently the candles downstairs went out, one by one, and I heard her footsteps carefully cross the floor. She mounted the ladder. My eyes had adjusted, and in the low light I could see she had put on a long, thick white nightgown buttoned high up at the neck. She felt about and stumbled into the corner of the bed.

“I'm here,” I said.

“You aren't asleep, then?”

I thought I heard disappointment in her voice. “No. I'm right here.”

Her hands groped for the bedcovers and then she was underneath them, beside me but separated, for I remained on top of the blankets. She turned her back and nearly sent me rolling onto the floor.

“Good night,” she whispered.

I stared up at the ceiling. She held herself on her side completely still, her knees drawn to her chest. I put my hand on her shoulder and kissed lightly behind her ear. Her eyes were pressed shut.

“Lillian.” I rocked her gently. “Mrs. Crome.” “

Yes?”

But I didn't know what to say. Finally, as if to utter anything to fill the silence, she said, “Why aren't you under the covers? Don't you have your pyjamas on?”

“No, I don't.” I rolled off the bed and began to unbutton my shirt and trousers. It seemed a strange and unbalanced dream. Out the tiny window I caught sight of a trio of narrow clouds lurking around a bright, cold moon whose light was now slicing my thin legs. I kept on my underclothes and slid in beside her. Her body felt chilled and rigid.

“Darling,” I said, and clung to the only words that seemed appropriate. “I love you.” They came out waxy, as if rehearsed and recorded years ago. “I know this is new. But we don't have to do anything tonight except hold and get used to one another. It's completely up to us. Do you understand?”

As I clung to her the chill between our bodies began to ease. Her breathing settled, and for some time it seemed to
me that she had fallen asleep. I was accustomed to years of wretched sleep by then and determined I would not move, but would simply hold her like this for all the hours of the night. Perhaps I thought that in the morning we would be welded together and would rise hungry but a single unit.

In my starvation for life, even these scraps seemed enough.

I would paint the two of us like this, I decided. In her deepest slumber I would rise without disturbing her and set up my small board over there, by the little window, and paint her with shadows cutting across her young body, and the rough covers tucked under her chin, and myself beside her — thin and rugged and small, with eyes open, grateful for whatever the night would offer. For it seemed to me that's what love was, what I'd been missing.

But she wasn't asleep. I shifted my arm — it had gone dead beneath me and was painful now to move — and she blew out between her lips, not a sleeping sort of sigh but as if she'd been holding her breath and feigning stillness. “I'm sorry, Ramsay,” she said finally, still turned away from me. “I do love you. I know it doesn't seem that way. I'm scared is all. Please talk to me. Tell me about anything. About the girlfriends you have had.”

“What makes you think I've had any?”

“Well, I wasn't the first girl you ever kissed. Who did you love before me, and why didn't you marry one of them?”

Even a new husband can sense such a bomb in the water. I laughed nervously, and so she turned towards me. Her face seemed to glow in the moonlight.

“Was I the first girl you asked to marry you?”

“Of course, darling.” I kissed her and she seemed to linger, to enjoy this new proximity.

“But who did you love before me? Was there somebody . . . There must have been somebody during the war!” She began to tickle in among my ribs. She was young and strong and her legs gripped mine in the hard thrust of play. “What was her name?”

We kissed again — partly I wanted to stop her, but the fire was building once more. I held her tenderly and tried to keep my breathing from overtaking me.

“Ramsay, what's — ?” She groped around and I tried unsuccessfully to catch her wrist. For a moment she couldn't speak. She drew back until she was kneeling above me, most of the covers drawn around her. “it's like an animal's!”

I tried to cover myself.

“Let me see. I want to see it!”

I sat up and held her hands. “Lillian, my dear, it's all right. It's completely natural.”

“I want to see it,” she said again, slowly and seriously. So I shucked off my remaining clothes and paused before her, while she looked at what she'd ended up with: the brown skinny chest, the deep-veined arms and hands, the ancient, hardened pole at the centre of it throbbing with its own certainty.

“Is it always like that?” she asked.

“No, darling. Of course not.”

She seemed to take a long time to digest the information. She didn't move, just slowly observed all my points and angles. At last she said, “Was it the war then, when you hurt your arm?”

She meant my left, which doesn't quite straighten. It's strong enough but looks withered beside the right.

“It's nothing. Yes, the war. It isn't painful.”

“How did you hurt it?”

“We'll get to all one another's secrets,” I whispered. But it was hardly the time for talking. I wrapped the covers around us again yet did my best to retain a distance even in the narrow confines of the bed.

“I don't want to disappoint you,” she said finally.

“You're not. You won't. We don't have to —”

But she was pulling me on top of her, and her legs fell open more or less naturally, and I tugged at her nightdress. She closed her eyes and held onto my shoulders.

“It's what God wants, isn't it?”

“God?”

She opened her eyes, partly in pain, as I entered her. I tried to move slowly, calmly, but I felt rope-tied to a moving train.

Forgive me, I thought.

I closed my eyes, and a particular young woman arose in a way that I'd imagined her a thousand times before. Not Lillian at all, but Margaret — the woman I'd been trying to forget. But it would have been like trying to forget the bones in my body, the veins of my hands. Her hair was a warm brown and her skin was pale and white and smooth as milk. She smiled at me in certain ownership.

I became aware of the noise of the bed bucking against the plank floor, of tiny exclamations and hot breath in my ear, the surging sweetness culminating within. I was aware of the spasms starting in my body and the strength of the hands on my back. And mostly I was aware of Margaret's knowing gaze as she turned back to look at me from further and further away, with those eyes that would not release me.

“Ramsay!” Lillian said in a daze beneath me, and for a moment I had to look hard at her to recognize who she was.

“Forgive me,” I whispered. “Did I hurt you? I am so —”

“Shh! Dear Ramsay,” she said, and held me against her warm, pillowy breasts. “Go to sleep now.”