Famished Lover (34 page)

“You never told me that story,” she said fiercely. She turned with the breadknife in her hand and walked past me, then
picked up a ladle and began angrily stirring the soup. “But you told
her
.”

“I told everyone.”

“You were talking to her.” Now she slammed the soup ladle onto the floor. “You love
her
. it's all over your face whenever she's there!”

“Let's not talk about this now,” I said. Soup had stained her apron and was dripping down the side of the stove, puddling onto the floor.

Rufus called from outside, “Where's Lillian? Come on, Ramsay! Can't you get a grip on your own wife?”

Lillian looked at me through hard tears. “We never talk about it.” She reached for a rag then from the sink and started to wipe up the stains.

I left her there and steamed out the back door.

“Where's Lillian?” Rufus asked jovially.

“She's not much for games,” I replied.

Back in the meadow the children had got hold of the rackets now and were flailing away. Michael swung his with both hands, like a baseball bat, and Abigail and Martha seemed to be chasing butterflies with theirs.

“Lillian's not still back in the kitchen, is she?” Margaret said.

“She didn't want to play.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and looked elsewhere. A flock of sparrows was performing daring feats over the fields in the distance, speeding black spots against an impeccable blue sky.

“Well, I must go and help her, then,” Margaret said. “She has done everything for us.” She began to step off towards the house, but I put a hand on her shoulder.

“Best leave her for a while.”

“Oh dear,” she said, scanning my face for clues. “Have I — ?”

I shook my head, not in denial but frustration.

“Oh dear,” she said again.

Rufus insisted that he and I play singles. I felt like smashing him over the head with the racket, he was so relentless in his goading. But I finally convinced him to take on Henry. “He'll give you a much better game than I ever could,” I said. “I don't know the first thing about badminton.”

“He'll not want to play
me
!” Henry called out, but he already had the extra racket in his hand and was swishing it experimentally through the air. After his wife's creditable showing he seemed to want to impress her. So the court was cleared of children and we all watched Henry huff and slash at the empty air, and smash himself in the knee, and fall and kick at his hat clownishly, his face wreathed with smiles. Margaret said to me, when her husband was on the grass searching for his fallen glasses, “I
must
go talk to her.”

“No.”

“But I can't have her feeling so wretched on my account!”

“It has almost nothing to do with you,” I whispered.

The game continued. At one point poor Henry fell backwards and lay, very still, gazing up at the sky. Margaret ran to him on the court. “Are you all right, dear?”

He pulled her down and kissed at her — she turned her head in reflex and he grazed her cheek — and then he said, “It's very pleasant just looking up at nothing, now, isn't it?”

And the hours slowly passed. Rufus and Alexander played game after game. Vanessa drifted off to the garden with the children, and Henry crawled over to the edge of the wood
and lay on his belly examining some ant works. Margaret and I found ourselves sitting in the shade not far from the court but at a distance enough to talk in confidence.

“I looked at your paintings,” she said quietly. “Thank you for seeing me with so much love.”

She was sitting back against her hands, and I allowed myself to run my fingers over hers in the grass.

“And for what you said to Alexander. Thank you,” she said. “I know it can't be easy for you to talk of those years.”

I laughed ruefully. “I talked of only the smallest bit.”

Later Lillian, without a visible trace of anger, served us all another fine meal, which we ate as if it would be a sin not to satisfy ourselves when the food was so good.

The afternoon slid on, and then it was time to go. The sky above continued to blow bluer than a dream, and the sun shone kindly down, and the wildflowers seemed to be waving to us from the roadside. Even Charles was in a sprightly mood as he trotted us up the hill, the hay wagon behind loaded down with relatives and their travelling goods. We were not early this time. Already other cars and wagons had gathered in the lot. I parked Charles in the shade where I'd left him just the day before.

How ridiculous of them to stay for such a short time. We discussed it again, but the tickets had been purchased, plans were set. Rufus filled me in on the itinerary: the Basilica, of course, and Mount Royal, and staying at the Ritz-Carlton.

“If you're going to be working in Montreal this week, then perhaps we could get together for a lunch,” Rufus said.

“I'll have to see about it,” I said vaguely. I was suddenly looking forward to a return to the office and perhaps for a
little while sitting in sanctuary on Stanley Street, holding my Dorothy. It seemed like ages since I'd last seen her.

Then, as if reading my thoughts, there was Margaret, standing a little off from the others, looking at me, waiting to be approached.

“Are we to meet then only every twenty years?” she said, when I finally walked over to her.

“You look as if you're in your twenties still,” I said, “and I'm a hundred and four.” Henry popped suddenly into view behind her, wrestling with the girls' bags. Margaret kissed my cheek as a cousin will. A cousin who is travelling on with her husband and children, who is holding herself very much in check.

“You're a marvellous specimen for such an advanced age,” she said quietly. “You had such a reckless intensity to you back then. Now you seem . . . quite formidably calmer. Are you, Ramsay?”

All the people around us seemed to begin moving at once, and then in the distance we heard the first rumblings and whistles of the train.

Gently I stepped past her to help with the mountain of luggage. Suddenly there were too many people to deal with: goodbyes to say to Rufus and Vanessa, to Henry and the girls and Alexander, and all these suitcases to manage, and Margaret's trunk, and this herd of relatives to move through the station and onto the platform and down the way while the train eased into place. Breathing became harder, tears seemed set to wash me over.

“I'm sure there won't be war,” Henry said, grasping my hand. “This is just another tempest. And I have met Chamberlain. He's very able. I'm sure level heads will prevail.”

We can only hope,” I said to him. “Safe travels.”

“And work on your badminton!” Rufus said jovially to him, as if seeing him off, but of course Rufus was going along for the holiday as well.

“Yes! Yes, we all must work on our badminton. Except for you and Vanessa!”

The children now were boarding, and I looked around but couldn't see Margaret anymore. Had she already stepped on?

“Thank you for your story,” Alexander said to me, somewhat formally. His mother must have put him up to it, I thought immediately, but he stayed gripping my hand and seemed to mean what he said. “It made me think.”

“Thinking is good,” I said, somewhat stupidly. Where had Margaret gone?

“Would you fight against Hitler?” he asked.

I thought I'd seen her, but it was someone else in white.

“If Nazi planes were threatening someone you loved —”

He was still gripping my hand. Most of the platform now was clearing.

“Pray it doesn't come to that,” I said. “Just remember, you'll break your mother's heart if you go to war and Hitler's planes are not already sounding in the distance.”

He ducked his head. “It would be too late by then. And I
would
like to be a pilot,” he said quickly, and stepped on board. The platform had emptied considerably. Michael and I stood together looking at all of them leaning out the window — little Abigail and Martha, with Henry squashed between them and Rufus just behind. The conductor called and the car bumped forward a first tentative lurch . . . and then she
threw herself upon me, a flash of white bursting from the train. I had to take a step backwards to keep from falling over. And she kissed me in front of everyone — a hungry, hard, gasping kiss.

Henry was watching from the train window just a few feet away.

“This is yours!” she said, and she handed me a scroll of paper done up in a faded old ribbon. “I'm giving it back. But only if you promise to write from now on,
faithfully
, about everything that happens. Do you understand?”

We started walking beside the train.

“Yes, of course.”

She disappeared back onto the car.

Michael and I kept walking to the end of the platform, then we stood and waved until the train rounded the corner.

My heart was running downhill on gravel.

“What did she give you?” Michael asked.

I picked at the tight little knot of the ribbon until the scrolled sheet came free. It was an old pencil sketch — of Margaret, a young, very beautiful Margaret.

“Did you draw her?”

“A long time ago,” I said. Her hair was piled up on her head in the old-fashioned way, and her cheeks, her throat, her eyes especially, were young and full of life. “I was sick one night when I stayed in London as a soldier, and Margaret sat by me the next day for a while. So I drew her.”

At the bottom of the paper, in pencil, she had written something new:
I believe that the love we hold helps us through the worst of times
.

“Will you draw me?” Michael asked.

We started walking back towards Charles and the wagon. I looked up again, as if expecting the train to be bringing her back. But the track was clear, of course.

“Certainly.”

“Because it has been a long time since you drew me. I've grown a lot.”

Every inch of the sky was immaculate still, without a mark or hint of warning.

On the wagon Michael stood before me and held the reins. He chattered most of the way about Abigail and Martha. He said straight out, without a hint of embarrassment, that he thought Martha was beautiful. “As soon as I saw her I felt all wobbly,” he said.

“Really?”

“Like this,” he said, and he half-turned and wobbled my stomach with his little hand.

“Watch the road, sonny-boy.”

“Have you felt like that?” he asked me, his voice very serious. “It's like . . . there's a dizziness inside you.”

“Yes. I've felt that.”

Once we made it through town the wind picked up and blew dust into our eyes, and Charles snorted and snuffed. I took over the reins, and Michael whistled between his thumbs and turned his head away from the breeze. I whistled too, and the clop-clop of Charles's huge hooves and the groaning roll of the wagon wheels turned us into a small moving symphony. Finally we made the Bretton farm. I unhitched the wagon and together Michael and I towelled and brushed down Charles. Michael got him a bucket of water and fed him oats, and I talked with Bretton for a time about the weather. He was sure that the endless prairie drought was
moving east, hoppers would take every crop, and soon dust would parch every stream in the area.

His property couldn't have been more lush — every inch of it seemed verdant and full of life, with plants growing even out of the fence posts where we were, in the shade by his barn.

“Pretty serious news out of Europe these days,” I said.

“What's that?”

I told him that the Germans had flattened Almeria and were threatening to enter the Spanish war.

“Oh, that business. I haven't been following that.”

On the walk home Michael asked me if there was going to be another world war.

“I don't see how we can avoid it.”

“Will you be a soldier again?”

“No, not me.”

“Why not?”

“I did my bit.”

He wanted me to tell him all about the news of the last few days. He'd been listening, and trying to understand, he said, but he couldn't follow it all. “There are antichrists and —”

“Anarchists,” I said.

“And loyal ones and commentists —”

“Communists.”

“But who are we cheering for?”

I couldn't answer right away. A pair of red-winged blackbirds swooped beneath low-lying limbs some feet away and then skirted off. “For peace, Michael. Peace is the underdog here.”

As we approached the lane to the house I stopped him. Nothing had changed, really — the sky was the same as a few
minutes before, the road as dusty and worn as ever, the summer weeds and flowers were still slowly fighting it out in the ditches around us — and yet the air felt thicker. I had the beginnings of a dreadful sickening in the pit of my stomach.

Not the dizziness Michael had mentioned.

“No matter what happens,” I said to him, “if there's a war or . . . something else —”

His face was so grave, his eyes so large and trusting.

“We are in this together,” I said.

“In what?”

“This life, kiddo.” I knelt down and hugged him and tried to keep my tears from soaking the shoulder of his shirt, but I was gasping suddenly, shaking with sobs.

A car came by. It was Blaine Williams, a man from the village I did not know well. He slowed and leaned out his window. “Everything all right?”

I couldn't speak. But I wiped my face away from his view, then nodded to him and straightened up in a familiar way. He tipped his hat to us, then drove on.

“What's wrong, Daddy?”

“Nothing,” I whispered. “You go on ahead.”

Michael was only too happy to sprint up the lane by himself. When I got to the house he jumped out from behind a bush with two badminton rackets in his hands.