Famished Lover (5 page)

I rubbed my hand up and down her back. A dog came racing out of one of the back alleys, chasing a snowball some
boys had thrown. Then the boys emerged too and ran around the dog, while the dog ran around them.

“I didn't know you smoked,” I said.

“I don't.” She took another deep puff, then handed the cigarette to me to finish. She held the smoke in her lungs, then slowly let it stream out of her nostrils — exactly as Margaret used to do when she thought she could get away with it.

“How was church? I'm sorry. Of course I'll go with you in future. I don't know what got into me. I think this whole economic disaster is starting to —”

“Your father is a hard man,” she said then. “He was nice enough at the wedding, and I enjoyed meeting your mother, though I wasn't sure how that would go. I'd never met a Colombian before, and she was sweet to me. But I could tell I disappointed your father. And he asks a lot of his sons, doesn't he?”

“He isn't disappointed in you! But of course he's hard on his sons. Any man would be.”

“You too?”

She still didn't look at me, but we were standing together at least, gazing out in somewhat the same direction.

“When I was all of seventeen he packed me on a train, and we crossed the country together. I couldn't wait to get away from home. Mother was the one who raised us, you see, mostly on her own because of Father's work overseas. We only saw him a few times most years. He didn't get his papers, and in North America an engineer without a certificate is hardly worth more than a ditch digger. So he went wherever they'd have him — Peru or Bolivia or the Far East.
Much as now. Whenever he came home he was like a god, filled with such stories of the jungle and the high pass. We idolized him. Now I thought he and I were heading off together somewhere tropical to drain a lake or excavate a mine. But he abandoned me in the train station right here in Montreal.” The word “abandoned” finally got a rise from her — she looked at me straight on in some alarm. “In the midst of the crowd he handed me fifty dollars and an address where I might find a bit of work. ‘Write your mother,' he said to me. ‘She'll want to hear from you. And if you should ever find yourself with a —'”

I faltered then. For I suddenly realized I'd told the same story many years before to Margaret and her family in London, got to the same spot and encountered precisely the same problem. For the briefest moment I seemed to be dizzily in both eras.

“Well, it doesn't matter,” I said quickly.

“Find yourself with a what?”

“Nothing. Shall we go inside? It's so chilly out here.”

“How am I supposed to learn anything if you won't talk to me? What was it your father said to you in the train station?”

Lillian's will could be like a horse pulling a plough. In that moment I did not have the strength to resist it.

“He said if I ever contracted a . . . a . . . particular disease, I was to get in touch with him immediately, and he would send money, no questions asked. That's all. And I never have. Contracted one, I mean. Let's go in.” I turned towards the door.

“What disease?”

“It doesn't matter! You don't need to know about it!”

“I hate being a child around you,” she said quietly.

“There are particular diseases that a man can get from a
woman — and vice versa — from sexual contact. That's what he was talking about. I'm sorry I brought it up. That's all.”

Lillian shivered but made no sign that she wanted to move inside.

“Will you be like your father, do you think?”

“Well, I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever thought about it, really. The discipline was good for us, I suppose. Whenever Father arrived home after a long absence he would line us up and make us bend over. He would say, ‘This is for the grief I'm sure you've been giving your mother —'”

“So will
you
do that too?”

“Father never beat my mother. No matter how long they spend apart, whenever he comes back they are like two rocks cemented together in the same wall . . .”

Lillian was shaking her head at me, and slowly her meaning began to penetrate my skull.

“You're not — you aren't — ?”

Her nod was almost imperceptible.

“But how do you know? Have you been to the doctor?

When did you — ?”

“I know, Ramsay,” she said softly. “Tomorrow you're going to bring me to the doctor. But right now you're going to tell me . . . everything about the war. About being a prisoner.”

“Darling, I —”

“I want to know the man I married,” she said, slow and steady, powerful beyond her years. “I want to know the father of my child.”

We slipped inside the apartment, but I did not feel like taking off my coat; the chill was gripping me as it did in those bitter days. But this time it was a frigid wind within, and I felt as if there was no withstanding it. Lillian boiled some water for tea and we sat at the rickety table and clinked cups. “To our child,” she said, and then added, “Drink quickly, dear. You look like you're going to break of cold

.”The first sips did warm me somewhat.

“How were you captured?” she asked.

“I was taken in the Battle of Mont Sorrel. Are you sure you're interested in this? There's hardly anything to say —”

“Mont Sorrel was after . . . oh, I wish I'd paid attention in class! I remember Second Ypres, and the big one, the big Canadian victory —”

“Vimy Ridge,”I said. And I thought, it's just names now, facts for people to forget. “Mont Sorrel was in early June, 1916. Near Ypres. It was just before the Somme, our big offensive that went so badly, so it has mostly been forgotten now. But Mercer was killed — he was a major-general, our commander. And a brigadier was captured — Williams — and
Ussher, a lieutenant-colonel. They came by and inspected our positions that morning. We'd been up all night working on a dugout, and Shipley came round with the rum ration and told us we were going to be inspected. Well, bloody hell —I'm sorry, Lillian, I can't talk about this in completely polite language.”

“Just talk about it, then,” she said quietly. She was warming her hands on the cup, and she looked small and terribly pretty. Let's stop this, I thought. I'll get my sketchbook. We'll think about what's really important.

But instead she asked, “What's it like being in a battle?”

I hardly had to think of a reply. “Like being in an avalanche. There was nothing anyone could do, really. The earth is suddenly moving all around you. I was buried for a time in a hail of bombs —”I was conscious of the inadequacy of such words, as if they could come anywhere near describing it.

“Did you kill anyone?”

“Some. I manned a Lewis gun for a time. And the Germans were pouring over the fields by the thousands, it looked like. You know, you imagine for a moment it's the end, you personally are losing the war. Slip past us, then the town of Ypres would be open. So yes, I killed some. Then I got blown out again and I wandered around — I must have been unconscious for a while — and then it was as if I was in a dream. I was staggering and eventually was taken.”

She was hanging onto my words, but I couldn't really tell her, not so that she'd know.

“A German fellow called out to me. Who was I? A Canadian? Then: ‘Have you ever fished the Chemainus River?' He was a baron and he'd spent many years in British Columbia, and he loved fishing.”

She couldn't possibly know. Not from these words. Not from anything I told her.

“So you were held in a camp?”

“Raumen was the main one, then I got transferred to a different one near Münster. We were starved, mostly. The food was a disgrace. And we were made to work, though we dragged our feet a lot. You see, I can tell you, but —”

“Who was Margaret?”

I was so stunned I sat with my mouth open.

“You say her name sometimes at night. When you get in your sweats, and I am lying awake listening to you. You say — sometimes you say, ‘Margaret!'”

Lillian was studying my face so closely that there was no use trying to lie.

“My cousin. In London. I stayed with her — and her family — for a short time before Mont Sorrel. It was my only leave in London.”

“Were you in love with her? Do you love her now?”

“Why would you ask that?”I said, incredulous. How could she possibly come to that conclusion from a few things mumbled in the night? Yet she was looking at me as if she knew a great deal more than that, even. As if she'd taken out and laundered my thoughts and now was set to wring them clean and dry.

“You say her name,” she said slowly. She looked away and I guessed it even before she could mouth the words. “And there are those paintings.”

“What paintings? What are you talking about?”I said, as if I could take back what her eyes obviously had examined — without permission. Without a thought to my privacy. “I've
shown you everything I thought you should see. You had no right —”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” She stood up then, and so did I. “This is my home! Am I not supposed to go in the closets? Should I ask your permission every time I want to get the broom?”

“That's my work! You had no right — !”I grabbed her. She would have had to move several boxes to get at those canvasses, which I'd never told her about, which were mine and mine alone. She would have had to untie the strings and separate them one by one, then tie them again and replace them at the back for me not to have noticed. All while I was at work.

“What are you going to do?” she blurted. “Hit me?”

I pushed her aside to get her out of my grasp, to try to keep a grip on myself instead.

“You painted her
naked!
Picture after picture. Was that Margaret? Did she pose for you? Getting out of the water like that? Sitting on the rock? What kind of cousin is she? It's the same girl over and over. It must be Margaret, and you must love her or you wouldn't be so upset!”

“She never posed,”I said. Burning coal sat behind the space between my eyebrows. “She knows nothing of those paintings. They are not for you or the world. They were . . . exercises . . . ”

“They're indecent!”

“They're not that, either. I know you can't understand. But in private I need to be able to go anywhere . . . freely . . . in my imagination. There can't be closed doors. That's what my art is for. If I lost it —”

She started crying, her fists at her sides. “They're horrible, Ramsay. If I thought you were that kind of painter I wouldn't —”
Wouldn't what?
I thought. “Everything you showed me was so beautiful. The stream. The rocks and flowers. You painted
me
. You made
me
look so beautiful.”

I took her in my arms, for she was sobbing now and I could see it was my fault. She was carrying our child, and she was so young herself, and this was such a shock. And clearly she hadn't looked at all the paintings, for she would have mentioned them by now — the Russians standing like starved cattle by the fence, the hollows of their cheeks empty caverns, and the bunkhouse at night in deep shadows with the hunching fannigan forms like lumps of men on every bed, and the twisted grey corpse by the side of the road with the single empty boot glistening beside the stump of an arm — all those images torn from memories no sane person now wanted to witness.

If she'd seen them she might not have asked with so much energy about the German camps.

“You love her, don't you?” Lillian said. “This Margaret. This cousin of yours.”

I tried to brush the tears from her face.

“I did love her. Yes, of course I did. I would have fallen in love with any young woman I met in London in that week away from the front. It would have been inhuman not to. And the thought of it, the memory of it —”
her
I thought; I should at least say
her
— “did help me through some terrible times. More than I can say. But it was ages ago, and I love you. I've
married
you. And we're going to have a child. That's all that matters. Let's talk no more about it. We'll move forward from
here. It just stirs things up for me to think about those days, and it's upsetting for you. Yes?”

She buried her face in my shoulder, and I had a hard time keeping the waterworks from my own eyes as we stood in the middle of the draughty flat and did our best to keep away the world.

“Tomorrow we go to the doctor's, and after that we'll see about moving. I don't want our child's first view to be this sorry box filled with bad air.”

“But we have so little money!”

“Maybe I'll sell some of those paintings. Spread a bit of Margaret around this dirty old town —”

She gazed up at me then, aghast that I might actually do it.

“Not to worry. Enough said. We'll find another way.”

“Maybe we could move to Mireille,” she said. Her voice was suddenly far less timid, and I realized she must have been thinking of this for some time, just as she must have been thinking of the paintings, choosing her moment to be most upset. “There's room with my father. We could save the rent, and he certainly needs me.”

I felt my dander rising again. “Lillian, I couldn't just walk away from my work. Not now, not when most of the commercial artists in the city are out banging on doors —”

“There's the train,” she said. Another card falling. Another calculation.

“Riding in every day and night, how much would that cost us?”

“A lot less than rent. And the country air's better. We'd have our food and so much more room than here. And Papa's not going to last forever —”

“No!”

“He wants us to take over the property. You wouldn't even have to farm it. We could hire others —”