Famished Lover (22 page)

“What are you working on?” she asked.

“Nothing special. An advert for shoes.”

I walked into the other cursedly tiny room, happy to escape for a moment any further conversation. The newspaper lay folded on the rickety excuse for a side table. As I opened it the mail fell out and on the floor.

A manila envelope, addressed to me, had a fancy seal on it. I looked at it without curiosity, then my eye fell on the newspaper again. Six “workless men” had been arrested and hundreds more tear-gassed for protesting the shutdown of their plant. Communists were believed to be behind the agitation . . .

I opened the envelope in irritation and then had to concentrate fully to process the words.
Dear Mr. Crome
, it said. Further to your application for war reparations due to alleged mistreatment by Germany during your incarceration there 3 June 1916 to your release at Dover 18 November 1918. . .

A cheque fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and looked at it in amazement.

You have been awarded the sum of $500 in compensation
towards your claim, plus 5% p.a. dated from 10 January, 1920, the date upon which, under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany undertook to pay and assume a contractual obligation to make good the damage caused during the war
.

The cheque was for almost nine hundred dollars.

“Ramsay, are you all right?”

When I looked at Lillian — she was holding a plate of cabbage and potatoes for me, with one tiny sausage — the room swam in tears.

“We're getting out of these damn rooms,” was all I could say.

Old McGillis's farm in Mireille had long since been sold, and he was living now with Maisie Campbell down the way, tending her cows, straightening her fence posts, and trying to stay out of range of her preaching. But another property opened up not too far from the former family land. It was mostly woodlot and there was no house, but it came with a meadow and a promise of being a place on this earth for a man to stretch his arms. And it came too with the sight of old childhood hills to bring the blood back to my young wife's cheeks and plenty of country air to fill my baby's lungs.

I broke the ground myself. With a team of lads from the local farms we dug the shallow foundation and framed out the walls and roof of the house. I knew nothing about construction except what made sense. Most of the men had built barns. While the roughest of the work was being completed, Lillian, Michael and I lived in a big canvas tent down in the meadow. It was on the soft grass of the meadow that the boy learned to walk and where his incessant runny nose cleared up.

We started to build in late August. By October I had to return to work in the city, and for the next few months I
logged full days in the office and then worked into the night on the property, setting down the roof shingles, framing in the rooms, laying in the plumbing and wiring, finishing the walls, fashioning and hanging doors. Young Michael would quietly root and play beside me and had to be watched, of course, among the stray nails and boards, the sharp tools lying around.

For days on end it rained. The tent was cold and smelled of must and did little against the chilly wind, but Michael only grew stronger, and Lillian too began to revive. She was like a plant kept too long in a dark corner but now returned to fresh soil and air and light. Her face shone in a way it hadn't in the dust and grime of Montreal, and she brought her own strong will and farm sense to fashioning a good life out of disruption and chaos. She chose the plot and broke the soil for what would be the garden and fed us with soups and stews and bread and turned us out in clean clothes, ironed dry despite the rain.

And at night in our cots her embrace was warmer than it had ever been before. Often we would sleep together on one cot, entwined in a single bed roll, our legs interlaced as we snuggled warm against the deepening cold of the night. I would wake up in the darkness with my limbs stiff and numb but not daring to move, wishing only to prolong the feeling of breathing together, of having our hearts beat out the same drum song.

“I'll be a little sad when we're finished,” Lillian said to me. We were on our knees fitting boards. Sawdust covered her hair and lit on her eyelashes like a butterfly's wing dust.

“Aren't you looking forward to having our own room and waking up not chilled to the bone every morning?”

“Of course!” she said. “And having a garden, and decorating all the rooms, and getting some decent furniture. I know we can't afford it all right away —” She saw the warning look in my eye. She stopped and put her warm hand on the back of my neck. “But this has been good too.”

There is great comfort when things are getting better, when you can see the structures rising around you and the materials smell of new hope, and your efforts seem to stand plumb and straight against the rains and winds of the world, the drunken, reeling decisions of the gods.

“He has deigned to appear!” Dorothy said, as I stepped through the office door. She had moved the coat stand for some reason, and I stood in dumb silence looking for it as the rainwater drained from my coat and umbrella.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Yesterday I was working on the wiring. I just couldn't get away. I should have sent a message that I wouldn't be in.”

I spotted the coat stand then — behind her desk, hidden under clothing, of course.

“I'll stay late tonight,” I said. “I'm sorry if it's extra for the models, but I really couldn't —”

“Mr. Crome,” she said, looking down now at her papers. Her face was white and hard. “I'm not sure I can afford an artist as preoccupied as you've become with this country house of yours. You've missed days and been late on other occasions.”

“It won't happen again,” I said quickly.

“You're looking unnaturally happy as well,” she said then,
and without tilting her head she let her clear grey eyes roam upwards to catch my gaze. “The country air seems to be good for you.” The slightest edge of a grin was beginning to appear.

“Yes.”

“And the wife and child, are they well planted?”

“I've put them in the back meadow between the old cornstalks. They get full morning sun and shade in the afternoon. They should come up like blazes in the warm weather.”

David wandered into the office then. His coat was hanging open and the buttons of his cardigan were done up in the wrong order. He had his hat in his hand and his grey mess of hair was flattened on one side, as if he'd been sleeping against it on a soaked park bench until three minutes ago.

“My Lord. It's an apparition!” David said, looking at me.

“Ramsay has left his family with the chickens,” Dorothy said. “And he promises we're going to see more of him.”

“Thank God for that. I'm getting tired of holding up this business single-handedly. Perhaps I should just go home and let Ramsay do
my
work for several weeks while I recuperate?”

I wedged myself behind Dorothy's chair and set to hanging up my coat and umbrella. She scooted her chair back so that my legs were jammed against the file cabinet. “There now! You're trapped. No more escaping to Arcadia. You will stay here and do my bidding, do you understand?”

Featherweight though she was, she was pushing with some force against me, and it would have taken an effort to move her. She was grinning at me too, like a girl racing around the playground.

David shuffled his feet, his own soaked coat in his hand.

“If I didn't know better,” he said, “I'd swear you two were married.”

“How have you been, Ramsay?” Margaret asks. It is late at night and the cold wind is seething through the barracks walls. I'm shivering in my clothes beneath a single hard, threadbare blanket, straining to make her out in the gloom.

“I didn't expect to see you,” I say.

Her neck is so white. She has wrapped herself in a shawl but her throat is exposed. Her eyes are dark and thoughtful.

“I haven't forgotten you.”

“But you've married Boulton!”

“Would you shut up?” someone says in the darkness, and several others groan. A few men smoke in the corner, the dull light of their cigarettes poking the gloom. But I'm not the only one making noise. There are the usual assorted sobs and snores and angry whispered conversations with the devils in men's own head.

She kneels close to me and puts a hand on my cheek. “I had to see how you were.”

“A bloody mess,” I whisper back. Her fingers are cold, as if she's been walking miles in the frigid wind to get here.

“I don't want you to forget me,” she says.

Someone laughs out loud, a harsh, breathless, lunatic noise.

I stare at her. I can't move, can't take her face in my hands or kiss her lips or push her away. Her hair is coming undone at the back. One good pull from me and it will cascade all over.

“Margaret, you are a dark poison in my brain. I couldn't
root you out if I wanted to. Why in God's name did you marry him?”

She is quiet for the longest time, and her glistening eyes hold mine no matter where I turn. I feel myself slowly crumbling into just another sobbing wretch.

“You come back to London,” she says gently. “I need to see you safe.”

A thousand blasphemies rise and die in my throat.

“You come back to London,” she says.

Now the paint was dry. We'd been moving furniture most of the day. We'd even somehow managed a Christmas tree with homemade ornaments and a few trifling gifts for ourselves. But we were in our castle and the boy was asleep in his own room and the walls smelled of paint, not wet canvas tenting. We had running water, wooden doors, glass windows and a new electric icebox that vibrated the whole house when it hummed.

Here was my new studio surrounded by windows that, in the light of day, would look out on blue mountains and rolling fields. And here was the storage room where I could keep my paintings under proper conditions, safe and private and free from dusty, crowded corners. And here was my tired but blossoming wife, and here was our bed, and everything was new and built and in order.

“I can't believe it,” she said, and let herself fall backwards onto the mattress. Her body bounced once and again, then she lay giggling. “It's ours.”

“Mainly the bank's.” I followed her onto the bed. Our
beautiful new coal furnace was heating the house prodigiously against the cold of Christmas Eve.

“But we own this bedroom.”

“Yes. This part is ours.” I rolled on top of her and we kissed and she settled herself beneath my weight.

“I hope we never have to move.”

“Never. They'll bury us out back!” I said, and I kissed her again. She smelled of the sweet bread she'd been baking all afternoon. I was waiting for her to tell me she was exhausted or to remember one more thing to do for Christmas. But she stayed where she was.

“It
will
be better here,” she whispered.

We left the lights blazing. I'd done all the wiring myself, all the plumbing, had raised the walls and seen it through, and we deserved this night of love. I yearned to lie in the soft, strong luxury of her flesh and feel her waters rise. I wanted to keep my eyes open and have it last eternally. She was gaining a taste for it. It had been a long time coming, but the exit from Montreal was what started it, the months under canvas added to the momentum, and now she moved to my touch and bound herself to me, and our bed jumped and clanged on the new, unfinished floor.

I fell asleep against her as she stroked my hair and held my head.

That night I dreamt I was walking in the woods, although the mountains in the distance were not English, and Margaret was wearing a long gown I'd never seen her in. I was looking for a spot in the bushes, some dry clearing out of sight where I could take her hand and pull her next to me. But nothing seemed to be quite right.

She said, “You really do deserve this, Ramsay.”