Famished Lover (31 page)

I rested my hand on her shoulder, but she took it immediately and held it in both of hers. “Everyone was looking away in those days. I wasn't the man you knew.”

“But why didn't you say, ‘Margaret, it's me, Ramsay!' I would've run to you, I would have —”

She faltered when she saw my eyes.

“It's not as if it would have made any difference.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. “If we head back now, I'm sure we could catch the others.”

I slid off the boulder and stumbled a few steps down to the trail, then turned to offer my hand.

“I don't want to go back now. I have to rethink everything.”

“To what purpose?”

“Those years have been so fixed in my mind. But now —” She hesitated, then took my hand and slid down, and I held her awkwardly for a moment.

“Let's go along a bit further,” she said. “I'm not hungry, are you?”

She trudged on swiftly, her mind obviously turning things over. The trail did become rocky soon enough, and while the late afternoon sun baked the open stretches, the shadows seemed to deepen on the turns through the bush. For the longest time I couldn't think of what more to say, and Margaret seemed determined to stride along in silence. She was not moving like any frail or failing woman.

“But everything has worked out for you,” she said finally. “You have Lillian, and Michael, what a beautiful boy.” She stopped suddenly. “What is Lillian going to think if we don't return with the others? She
is
jealous, isn't she? That's why she was so cold to me. We must go back!”

“She is cold to you, Margaret, because I am in love with a woman in the city.”

The words just spilled out, without any sort of plan or discipline. I started to walk again, up the hill.

“And Lillian knows?”

I shook my head.

“Who is it?”

“A lovely woman I work with. We have been . . . on fire . . . for some years now.” I could not say Dorothy's name, not to Margaret, and Margaret did not press. They were like two worlds, two separate refuges, that must not come together.

“And you are not . . . on fire . . . with Lillian?”

I felt as if I was almost running. We rounded a bend to a dip in the trail, my feet jolting with every step.

“I married the wrong woman! When I met her I got lost in some sort of dream of her beauty and her . . . youth and freshness. If you'd killed me on the first night of our honeymoon I would have died content.” I slowed down to let her catch up, to think through what I was saying. “I never stopped thinking of you, Margaret. I had you like a fever from that week in London. In the camps . . .” A grouse suddenly exploded in the bush beside us and we both jumped back in alarm, then laughed as we saw what it was.

I held both her arms to look at her. “

I was put in solitary for three days. In a hole in the ground in the middle of winter. You'll say that I was hallucinating, but not only were you with me, you held me up, you marched me around, you told me stories, you flirted with me, we kissed, we made love . . . By all rights I should have frozen in that hole, but I didn't, Margaret. Because of a dream of you.
Nothing I'm saying now will go beyond us, beyond this afternoon
.”

She looked at me in alarm.

“Because this is a dream too, isn't it? You've dragged your family across the ocean, set this all up so that we can talk clear for once and then be done with it, yes?”

“Ramsay, you're hurting me.”

I stared at my hands before releasing her.

“You can say anything to me,” she said. “It will not go beyond this day.”

We headed further up the trail — away from home, not back to it — and the silence stretched. The path was not wide enough to walk side by side, so I led; I tried to keep my pace slow enough not to tire her but quick enough to stay ahead of the bugs. As long as we were moving they seemed to bite less, and I heard no complaining from Margaret, just the regular rhythm of her breathing, her footfalls on the narrow trail.

At the next clearing we could see a span of fields down below us, the corner of a tiny lake, other hills stretching in the distance.

“We should have brought water, at least,” I said, “if not a bite to eat. Why don't we rest here, then we'll head back.”

Margaret looked away. “I didn't come just for this talk.” She looked at me fiercely. “When England gets dragged into this Spanish war they're going to want to take Alexander, and he'll want to go. It's all happening again. I don't know if the world can bear it, but
I
can't. So you must talk to Alexander. Because you know. Tell him whatever it takes to make him want to stay out if it. I swear I will shut him up in a cave and roll a rock in front of the entrance and they will have to go through my body —”

She was breathing raggedly now, as if in a hard sprint.

“He's not exactly soldier material now,” I said.

“Not any more than his father was, or you for that matter. Nobody should be forced into becoming an automaton to fire weapons and drop bombs on other humans.”

“But the Germans —”

“We
created
the Germans! And the Italians, the Japanese
— the waters are poisoned now, and there's no way out except for another unbelievably bloody war.
I know this
. And I know there are enough desperate men all over the world to sign up today for any escape from this economic nightmare. The young men did it in our day and it's far worse now.
Just not my boy
. I will go mad with sorrow and grief.” She waved her hat in the air to brush away the flies, then she reached for my hand again. “I did go mad. I could not say much in my letters — I felt horrible for writing to
you
, of all people, in such a state. But I was confined to bed for ages, Ramsay. Poor Father wanted to hospitalize me, he was so concerned. But I simply couldn't allow myself to take a spot that might have gone to a wounded soldier. What was I suffering, really, in the grand scheme of things?”

She waved the hat again, ineffectually, at the cloud of mosquitoes. I lit another cigarette and blew smoke at them.

“You're right,” she said. “It would be good to have water right now. And I am starving.” Once more she took my cigarette, but this time she kept smoking it, so I lit another of my own. “This woman you love so much. Why don't you just get a divorce and marry her? Mrs. Simpson manages to do it and she's still standing.”

“Because I have a child. And I do care what the world thinks of me. To be frank I don't know what to do. I don't know if Dorothy” — it just spilled out beneath my guard — “that's her name, Dorothy. I don't know if she's even interested in marrying. She has been content to have me as is. Lillian would be smashed to pieces. At least in this state of frozen matrimony we can stumble through our days. It hasn't been unbearable.” The sun now had moved beyond our little
spot and it was either walk on or head back. “They'll be coming to look for us soon if we don't turn around now.”

“
It hasn't been unbearable
. You don't know how heartbreaking it is to hear you say that.”

“Why should the state of my marriage — ?”

“I agreed to marry Henry in my weakest days. Not for my own sake, but to stop his suffering. He stood by me, he visited or called every day, he spent his little trickle of pay on flowers for me, on chocolates, forbidden cuts of meat, old fancy teacups he thought might please me. If I didn't get better, if I didn't join myself to him, he would have crumpled. And if that isn't a terrible reason for marrying someone I don't know what is. But yes, it hasn't been unbearable. I have my children, and Henry is a good father to them and dotes on me. So I'm lucky. No indeed, it hasn't been unbearable.”

We continued smoking in silence.

“Why didn't you insist on getting my attention until I knew who you were, Ramsay?” she said suddenly. “That was stupid of you. I'm sorry for saying it. But I was in another state. Emily's death was so sudden and so hard! I'm not surprised I walked right past you. But I never forgot you. I
never
did. You must believe me.” She looked distraught. “At least you have your fire. I envy you that.”

She stepped past me then, down the trail, back the way we had come.

It was a silent walk, and then Henry and Rufus met us on the trail. Henry's face was over-baked, and he'd sweated through his jacket — it was absurd of him to still be wearing it on a hot day like that. But even Rufus, who'd remained trim and fit through the years, was drenched from the walk.

“There you are!” Henry gushed. “Are you all right, darling? I thought for certain you'd succumbed to the heat.”

They had brought a flask of water, and we drank from it greedily.

“Shall we rest here for a time?” Henry puffed, and before we could answer he sank down on one knee and waved at the large cloud of pests we'd managed to congregate.

“If we don't keep going, we'll be eaten alive,” Margaret said. “Will
you
be all right, dear?”

“I'm fine,” Henry gasped. “I was just thinking of
you
.”

Rufus took Henry's hand and pulled him up, then the four of us began to walk together.

“We heard the most disturbing news on the radio back at the house,” Rufus said. “Spanish loyalist planes have bombed a German battleship in some rebel port.”

“Iviza,” Henry said.

“The Spanish government is firing back at last,” I said. “It's not as if there hasn't been provocation.”

“Exactly,” Rufus said. “The loyalists claim the
Deutchs-land
— that was the German ship — fired on their planes. I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Of course officially it's part of the Non-Intervention patrol fleet.”

“Will it be a European war then?” Margaret asked.

“We're waiting for the German reaction,” Henry said. We'd begun walking more quickly now, as if the bad news had somehow changed the pace of the day, made it imperative that we return at speed.

“Won't this simply be an excuse for the Germans to pour all their troops openly into the fight on behalf of their brother fascists?” Margaret asked.

“The Germans have pulled out of the Non-Intervention Committee,” Henry said. “But Hitler is just a lot of nasty talk, isn't he?”

When we made the river the sun had already fallen behind the trees, and the light on the water was completely different — the colours were darker and richer than in the heat of the day. How many times had I painted this very spot? And each time another shade of a subtly changed world.

Henry held onto Margaret's hand in the water, and as I watched from behind I had a hard time deciding who was supporting whom.

At the house the radio spilled its sporadic reports with all of us crowded around its staticky speaker, waiting to hear the worst — except Lillian, who was preparing chicken pies. It was Henry who had to have his ear closest to the set and who would sit up from time to time and announce, in headline form, what all of us could already hear.

“Twenty-three dead! Eighty-three wounded. The
Deutsch-land
is a ‘pocket' battleship — whatever that is. The rebel siege of Bilbao continues! What's this? The
Deutschland
shouldn't have been anywhere near Iviza, since they were actually on Non-Intervention duty at the time! The Committee is meeting tomorrow.”

I walked quietly into the kitchen to see if Lillian wanted any help. She'd strapped on her apron like battle armour and looked at my feet when I spoke.

“Should I get the card table out to add to the —”

“I've already done it.”

I called out to Michael. “Would you set the table for your mother?”

“I've done that too,” Lillian said. “You'll just have to wait to eat.”

“There's no hurry. It smells wonderful,” I said softly, backing away. Her eyes stayed down, her jaw welded shut.

I retreated to the front room, where Margaret was studying one of my paintings, a winter scene by the window that showed a winding section of creek in an open, snow-covered field. I watched her as she examined the sliver of silver in the middle where I'd hinted at the sun reflecting off a frozen patch of clear ice that couldn't quite be seen — it was mostly the reflection, the inference of ice.

“I would love to be here in the winter,” she said.

“At thirty below you wouldn't love it for long.”

“But we would be under a blanket by the fire, just the two of us,” she said in a low voice, “and we'd talk enough to make up for decades of lost time.”

“Yes, you and me. And your husband and three children, and house servants. You have house servants?”

“Just a couple. And there'd be Michael too, of course. And your wife and mistress.”

“We'd all be very cozy watching the snow.”

She turned to an old photograph on the windowsill of Father in his youth in the Far East, sitting in a studio rickshaw wearing a white pith helmet, with a dark, skinny coolie boy in a loincloth apparently about to pull him somewhere.

“What a marvellous moustache!” Margaret said of his handlebar.

She turned to me. “You will talk to Alexander. Promise me, Ramsay.”

“Yes, I will.”

It was an evening scramble to erect the tents. The old pine poles I thought I'd kept so well in a separate pile by the side of the meadow had rotted through over the years, so in the dying light I took Michael and Alexander with me back to the bush with an axe, and I cut several fresh ones, and then together we hauled them back. Michael talked all the way, especially when we passed by a swarm of fireflies spinning in the air like lighted fairies. Even Alexander laughed and ran after them then, but mostly he was quiet and kept within himself.