by Alan Cumyn
The Famished Lover
Also by Alan Cumyn
FICTION
For Adults
The Sojourn
Losing It
Burridge Unbound
Man of Bone
Between Families and the Sky
Waiting for Li Ming
For Children
After Sylvia
The Secret Life of Owen Skye
NON-FICTION
What in the World is Going On?
The Famished Lover
ALAN CUMYN
Copyright © 2006 by Alan Cumyn.
All rights reserved. no part of this work may be reproduced or used in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of
the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency
(Access Copyright). to contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.
Cover photograph: orsillo, istockphoto.
Cover and interior design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cumyn, Alan, 1960-
The famished lover / Alan Cumyn.
ISBN 0-86492-448-8 (bound). — ISBN 0-86492-463-1 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8555.U489F34 2006 C813’.54 C2006-903465-6
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council
for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and the new Brunswick Department of
Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.
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For Laurel
One
“I’m sorry it’s so cold,” I said to Lillian, my young bride, who was snuggled beside me under the bearskin blanket. We clung to one another at the bottom of the old sleigh that took us from the train station at St. Simone, a tiny smudge in the woods north of the little chapel in Mireille where we’d been married some hours before. It was late in the afternoon, late in the year, and the steely grey of the sky was edging into black.
“It’s not so cold,” she said.
Her face was moulded to my shoulder, and silky wisps of blonde hair, escaped from formal arrangement, brushed against my cheek. Her breath warmed my neck, and indeed we were out of the wind and our trail was taking us further and further into the woods, the upper boughs of the tall, rigid pines dusted in snow. Yet I felt chilled through, as if not the thickest fur in the world could warm my bones, and I was strangely wracked with hunger, as if we had not just feasted with our families. No, it was more as if I had not partaken — of real food, of love, of life — in decades and now, at the edge of the banquet, could not control my trembling.
Our driver was a burly, bearded man who muttered to himself in French and seemed able to guide his horse, a snorting, solid, slow-moving beast, with only the slightest of gestures. We were on our way to a honeymoon cabin procured by my younger brother Rufus, who was friends with half of upper-crust Montreal and who often had the loan of this country place or that.
“I haven’t actually seen the cabin,” i said to Lillian.
“Yes, I know, you explained it . . . dear.” She stumbled over the novelty of the word. As I looked at her fair face and hair so close to mine I wondered how to render it — not from a distance but from these few inches. What would such a painting look like? A curve of cheek, her eyes so young and pale and blue, those hints of hair edging off the canvas, and in the background so much grey and black and old, hard brown — the timbers of the sleigh, the bristly hairs of our bearskin, the darkness of the forest beyond.
I kissed her again, for the hundredth time perhaps, but I could not stop trembling.
“Rufus has made all the arrangements, so I suppose it will be all right.”
“Whatever it is, it will be all right.” Just then her voice made me think of someone playing the part of a mother in a play in which all the actors were children. And for the first time — I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me before this, in the months of our courtship — I realized that I was old enough to be her father. If not quite in actual years, then in grains of life slipping through the tightened neck of experience.
I sat up to look around. The wind felt unjustly cold on such a day. But I had faced down colder winds than this.
In the distance I saw not a cottage but a clearing with a lonely, tall stone cross. And as we passed I could not help but read the carved and familiar list: Ypres, Amiens, St. Eloi, the Somme, Vimy, Mont Sorrel.
I ordered the driver to stop, threw myself off the sleigh before it finished moving and walked briskly towards the monument.
“Ramsay, what is it? Where are you going?” Lillian asked.
“It’s nothing!” And I thought: why have they put this memorial on a backcountry trail where no one will see it? But also: they’re everywhere now. A man can’t even get married and run away to the wilds for a few days without stumbling into one.
I had to dust off the names from Mont Sorrel: four local boys, two named Hughes, a Duncan and a MacDonald. No regiment listed. I tried to think of the men I knew. Their faces swam before me, in the barns and other cozy spaces of our off-duty hours, and in the dugouts and the trenches of our time in hell. Their odour — mud, tobacco, body stench — rose to my nostrils, and I might as well have been back there, just for that moment. Did we have a Duncan, a MacDonald and two Hugheses?
It had been thirteen years. But it’s an awful thing to forget even the smallest part of what you swear will line the remaining days of your life.
I suppose I stood for some time in my own stupor. When I turned, Lillian was waiting a few yards off, her red, ungloved hands folded across the front of her dark coat, the silly dessert tray of a going-away hat askew on her head from the long ride and our snuggling. The driver and his horse had both twisted round to stare at me, at the tears freezing to my cheeks.
“Were you in the war?” Lillian finally asked.
We had not yet talked of it, and here we were embarking on a life together.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and I walked past her quickly. I clambered back onto the sleigh and then, remembering myself, turned to pull her up. But she was already halfway in, and her face had that look — of someone not to be diverted from a path of inquiry. “Drive on!” I said, “Allez! Allez!” even before Lillian was seated. I steadied her against the lurch of the sleigh.
“You’re crying,” she said, facing me, not so much in accusation as in wonder. “Ramsay, tell me.”
“I knew some men who got caught up,” I said vaguely. “Sometimes I think of them. But not today. Today is for other things.” I took her cold hands. Where had she put her gloves? There, on the floor of the sleigh. I picked them up and helped her on with them. They were so fashionably tight I could not imagine them providing any warmth.
“But you will tell me,” she pressed. “We’re not going to have the kind of marriage where people keep secrets?”
I kissed her and kissed her, and the miles slid by, and it was almost, almost enough.
From a distance the cabin looked derelict, a pile of logs thrown together ages ago and forgotten by whatever pioneer family had abandoned it in the purgatory of rocky fields, fly-infested summers and unendurably bitter winters.
“That can’t be it,” I said. Rufus would never have steered
us this far wrong — he had such a sense of the lightness of things, that’s what Rufus was good for. Some weeks earlier, when the stock market had spiralled so unbelievably, Rufus was somehow able to pull out his own holdings and maintain a good semblance of their worth, and he’d even protected a few of my investments as well — the very ones he’d urged me to buy in the first place, when all around us were profiting so handsomely and living so well.
No, this pile of crumbling logs could have nothing to do with Rufus. Yet our sleigh stopped and the driver clambered down to grab the bags.
“Oui, oui, c’est ça,” he grumbled. Even the horse snorted in apparent affirmation. The driver wrestled our bags along the path — untrodden till now, covered in snow — then shouldered open the low door and disappeared into what looked like the mouth of a cave.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I said.
Lillian turned to me, startled. “Ramsay, please don’t swear.” that word especially, swear, came out like steam forced through a pipe. She looked at the ground, her face burning, as if her husband had publicly admitted embezzlement or adultery.
Was this the woman I’d married?
Our driver re-emerged. I was set to demand he take us to the real cottage, the charming, rustic place that Rufus had talked up so glowingly. But Lillian walked away from me, her shoulders inclined into the wind. She disappeared into the shack.
In my haste to catch up with her I slipped on some ice and was caught by the driver, who’d been drinking on the journey, I now realized — he smelled like whisky. I almost asked him for a swig. He smiled maddeningly, as if he wanted to stay and watch us. Just to speed him on his way I produced a dollar from my pocket and pressed it into his hand.
Then I plunged into the cabin after my bride. I was acutely aware that I’d not carried her over the threshold. I was no traditionalist, but it would have been nice to have the moment of laughter. All summer, it seemed, had been full of laughter, of weekends by the stream on her father’s farm, of fly-fishing those blessed waters, and capturing on canvas the rocks and trees and the sunlight on the pools, and gazing at the lovely Lillian as she emerged from the trail with a loaf of bread just pulled from the summer oven, wrapped in a towel, with a knife and home butter for us to share.
I’d married the farmer’s daughter — not a stranger at all.
And perhaps the cabin was not so bad. Though ancient, much of the original mortar remained between the cracks, and the thick walls seemed to stop the worst of the draft. The one main room was dominated by a wood stove. An old pine table with splintery chairs sat beneath a drying rack for laundry that lowered from the ceiling. At the far end was a loft for sleeping, connected to the ground floor by a plank ladder.
Already Lillian had a fire burning, and now she was taking off her long coat and looking square at me. Her thick blonde hair was still mostly pinned back in the fussy arrangement concocted for the ceremony, but she’d abandoned her hat, and now I noticed her neck was red in places — from the rubbing of my moustache, I realized.
There will be things for me to learn, I thought, as a married man.
I crossed the floor and let my own coat fall onto the table, then held her to me. Her shoulders were wide and strong, and I felt her burning in my blood again, like a fire in the fields.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper. If I’d known how filthy and old and rundown this place would be —”
“It’s not so bad.”
“But it is! Don’t you see? I’ve lived years of my life in awful places. No more, and not for you, certainly. I may never be rich, but we’re going to live in comfort at least, surrounded by beauty . . . ”
She was looking at me then in what already felt like the old way, her heart bursting just to be with me. A man can wait decades to be looked at like that. It can be the hardest thing in the world to win for yourself, and yet I’d won it at last.
“You’re still trembling,” she said. “Stand by the fire. I’ll make us some dinner.” She hurried over to the pantry. “What’s to eat?” She started taking things off the shelves. “Here’s some beans.” She shook the container — it sounded as if it couldn’t have held more than a half-dozen. “And what’s this, flour?” She took off the top. “Oh!” she said, and clapped it back on. “Mice must be running all through here.” She opened up the larder and we both stared at the empty shelves.
“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?”
