by Alan Cumyn
“Let’s sort it out in the morning,” I said gently. I took her hand, which suddenly felt as cold as if she’d been outside in the raw wind. Her face was sickly pale beneath her teary paint, and she looked away from me, at the dishes in the basin.
“You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll finish this.” She glanced up, I suppose to reassure me, but with a look of terror.
So I retreated to the loft. There was very little headroom and the mattress was tough and musty. But much of the warm air from the wood stove had collected around the bed, and a small, square window rattled with the outside wind to make this pocket seem hospitable in comparison. I plumped up the hard pillows and pulled off my shoes, then settled back to watch the light and shadows from the candles below play against the rough logs of the ceiling.
I longed to hear her sing again. But down below cutlery clattered, pots clanked, cupboards snapped open and shut. And I worried about the bed. The sheets were old, the blankets heavy and rough. There wasn’t a lot of room for the two of us to lie side by side. Nor was there space for our bags — I’d left them on the main floor and thought now I should bring them up. Yet I didn’t move. I didn’t want to disturb her, to do anything else wrong.
Presently the candles downstairs went out, one by one, and I heard her footsteps carefully cross the floor. She mounted the ladder. My eyes had adjusted, and in the low light I could see she had put on a long, thick white nightgown buttoned high up at the neck. She felt about and stumbled into the corner of the bed.
“I’m here,” I said.
“You aren’t asleep, then?”
I thought I heard disappointment in her voice. “No. I’m right here.”
Her hands groped for the bedcovers and then she was underneath them, beside me but separated, for I remained on top of the blankets. She turned her back and nearly sent me rolling onto the floor.
“Good night,” she whispered.
I stared up at the ceiling. She held herself on her side completely still, her knees drawn to her chest. I put my hand on her shoulder and kissed lightly behind her ear. Her eyes were pressed shut.
“Lillian.” I rocked her gently. “Mrs. Crome.” “
Yes?”
But I didn’t know what to say. Finally, as if to utter anything to fill the silence, she said, “Why aren’t you under the covers? Don’t you have your pyjamas on?”
“No, I don’t.” I rolled off the bed and began to unbutton my shirt and trousers. It seemed a strange and unbalanced dream. Out the tiny window I caught sight of a trio of narrow clouds lurking around a bright, cold moon whose light was now slicing my thin legs. I kept on my underclothes and slid in beside her. Her body felt chilled and rigid.
“Darling,” I said, and clung to the only words that seemed appropriate. “I love you.” They came out waxy, as if rehearsed and recorded years ago. “I know this is new. But we don’t have to do anything tonight except hold and get used to one another. It’s completely up to us. Do you understand?”
As I clung to her the chill between our bodies began to ease. Her breathing settled, and for some time it seemed to me that she had fallen asleep. I was accustomed to years of wretched sleep by then and determined I would not move, but would simply hold her like this for all the hours of the night. Perhaps I thought that in the morning we would be welded together and would rise hungry but a single unit.
In my starvation for life, even these scraps seemed enough.
I would paint the two of us like this, I decided. In her deepest slumber I would rise without disturbing her and set up my small board over there, by the little window, and paint her with shadows cutting across her young body, and the rough covers tucked under her chin, and myself beside her — thin and rugged and small, with eyes open, grateful for whatever the night would offer. For it seemed to me that’s what love was, what I’d been missing.
But she wasn’t asleep. I shifted my arm — it had gone dead beneath me and was painful now to move — and she blew out between her lips, not a sleeping sort of sigh but as if she’d been holding her breath and feigning stillness. “I’m sorry, Ramsay,” she said finally, still turned away from me. “I do love you. I know it doesn’t seem that way. I’m scared is all. Please talk to me. Tell me about anything. About the girlfriends you have had.”
“What makes you think I’ve had any?”
“Well, I wasn’t the first girl you ever kissed. Who did you love before me, and why didn’t you marry one of them?”
Even a new husband can sense such a bomb in the water. I laughed nervously, and so she turned towards me. Her face seemed to glow in the moonlight.
“Was I the first girl you asked to marry you?”
“Of course, darling.” I kissed her and she seemed to linger, to enjoy this new proximity.
“But who did you love before me? Was there somebody . . . There must have been somebody during the war!” She began to tickle in among my ribs. She was young and strong and her legs gripped mine in the hard thrust of play. “What was her name?”
We kissed again — partly I wanted to stop her, but the fire was building once more. I held her tenderly and tried to keep my breathing from overtaking me.
“Ramsay, what’s — ?” She groped around and I tried unsuccessfully to catch her wrist. For a moment she couldn’t speak. She drew back until she was kneeling above me, most of the covers drawn around her. “it’s like an animal’s!”
I tried to cover myself.
“Let me see. I want to see it!”
I sat up and held her hands. “Lillian, my dear, it’s all right. It’s completely natural.”
“I want to see it,” she said again, slowly and seriously. So I shucked off my remaining clothes and paused before her, while she looked at what she’d ended up with: the brown skinny chest, the deep-veined arms and hands, the ancient, hardened pole at the centre of it throbbing with its own certainty.
“Is it always like that?” she asked.
“No, darling. Of course not.”
She seemed to take a long time to digest the information. She didn’t move, just slowly observed all my points and angles. At last she said, “Was it the war then, when you hurt your arm?”
She meant my left, which doesn’t quite straighten. It’s strong enough but looks withered beside the right.
“It’s nothing. Yes, the war. It isn’t painful.”
“How did you hurt it?”
“We’ll get to all one another’s secrets,” I whispered. But it was hardly the time for talking. I wrapped the covers around us again yet did my best to retain a distance even in the narrow confines of the bed.
“I don’t want to disappoint you,” she said finally.
“You’re not. You won’t. We don’t have to —”
But she was pulling me on top of her, and her legs fell open more or less naturally, and I tugged at her nightdress. She closed her eyes and held onto my shoulders.
“It’s what God wants, isn’t it?”
“God?”
She opened her eyes, partly in pain, as I entered her. I tried to move slowly, calmly, but I felt rope-tied to a moving train.
Forgive me, I thought.
I closed my eyes, and a particular young woman arose in a way that I’d imagined her a thousand times before. Not Lillian at all, but Margaret — the woman I’d been trying to forget. But it would have been like trying to forget the bones in my body, the veins of my hands. Her hair was a warm brown and her skin was pale and white and smooth as milk. She smiled at me in certain ownership.
I became aware of the noise of the bed bucking against the plank floor, of tiny exclamations and hot breath in my ear, the surging sweetness culminating within. I was aware of the spasms starting in my body and the strength of the hands on my back. And mostly I was aware of Margaret’s knowing gaze as she turned back to look at me from further and further away, with those eyes that would not release me.
“Ramsay!” Lillian said in a daze beneath me, and for a moment I had to look h
ard at her to recognize who she was.
“Forgive me,” I whispered. “Did I hurt you? I am so —”
“Shh! Dear Ramsay,” she said, and held me against her warm, pillowy breasts. “Go to sleep now.”
Biting, drenching, endless rain, and my feet have gone through the soles of my blasted boots so that the mud and cold have invaded my flesh and bones, now rub raw my joints, suck my strength. I am reduced to a pair of hazy eyes fixed on the back of the sod ahead of me, yet with this wounded lad draped around my shoulder. He collapsed a long while ago and would have been left to rot by the bloody uhlans if I hadn’t moved swiftly. And stupidly, it now occurs to me. I’m fag-tired, and my left arm was bent hard in battle, and I’ve no idea how many miles are still to go.
The arm might be broken, but it’s nothing compared to what this lad is up against.
Ahead the uhlans ride in their polished helmets and soggy plumes, like sour gods ashamed to be assigned this menial work when there’s a war on, for Christ’s sake. Already I’ve seen too much of the tips of their fancy lances. But behind us bombs shudder the earth into the crumbling lip of hell’s boiling cauldron. And every step is away, away from that disaster.
“What’s your name?” I say to my burden. He’s bleeding down my uniform from an unbandaged belly wound. Little gurgles of gas and bubbled pus escape with every step, and his head wobbles like a toy soldier’s.
He murmurs something that I can’t make out, then I feel the weight of him even more and struggle to hold him up.
“Keep walking. Use your legs!”
He responds for a moment, then returns to drunken swaying. If only he were simply drunk. I’d lay him in the ditch and he’d wake up in the morning, cold and bedraggled and with a body that only feels split open.
A man ahead drops his haversack and staggers on. I look up at the long, ragged line of prisoners disappearing into the rain. The road is littered with heavy saucer helmets, muddied greatcoats and extra boots that look so tempting. How long would it take to set this fellow aside and trade my wrecked boots for some new leather? But I can’t imagine my fingers working fast enough. Some sour uhlan would just run me through.
So I walk on past, my feet bleeding into the road.
“Come on. Come on! What’s your name?” I say.
My load groans.
“What’s that?”
“Jekyll.”
“Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”
“No doctor.” A grudging, exhausted smile.
“No. No, if there was a doctor you’d be all right. Or even a stretcher. Do you think the German army could afford a stretcher?” I say it loud enough for others to hear, and the English officer who thinks he’s in charge of us — a captain of some sort who walks like a man who has had his horse stolen — turns to me. “Private, keep your commentary to yourself!”
Murmurs from some of the others but we’re too tired, really, to take it up.
“Where are you from, Jekyll?” I ask.
“Picton.”
“Where’s that?”
“South of Kingston.” Whenever he talks gas leaks out of him from somewhere. If I had a first aid kit I could check him over and maybe plug him up. But no bloody way. “We have a farm,” he gasps.
“You’ll be able to write them back on the farm,” I say. “Safe and sound, Ma! How’s that?”
“Jesus.” Blood spills down his lip and chin. “I wish they’d killed me.”
“None of that. Save your strength. Let’s enjoy the surroundings,” I blurt, then look around. Surroundings? I can barely see where to place my ragged feet ahead of me.
An eternity like this.
Sometime, I suppose in the late afternoon, we’re allowed to rest at a military station. The rain has stopped but the mud continues to grow, to take over everything, and as I let Jekyll slip to the ground near a tree it occurs to me again — the thoughts forming slowly, as if in a dream — that I need to get him medical help. I look around for anyone who might be a doctor or nurse. There are tents everywhere, and vehicles with grumbling engines, and a sickening number of prisoners collecting from small marching parties like our own. So many of them are Canadians.
I approach a German officer bent over by the entrance to a stone building, a farmhouse in another life, no doubt. He’s scraping the mud off his boots with a stick.
“Excuse me,” I mumble. “My friend here is wounded. He needs immediate attention. Wounded,” I say again. The officer straightens up and looks at me in malevolent incomprehension. So I point to Jekyll slumped against the tree trunk where I’ve left him. But his body is unnaturally still, and even as I gesture I know it’s too late.
The officer spits past my shoulder, then stalks off. I return to Jekyll’s cooling corpse in time to close his eyes.
The captain of our ragged group approaches. “Is this man dead?”
“Apparently.” It crosses my mind that I should have saluted the captain and used his proper title. But those rules seem to be for some other reality on the far side of battle.
“Right,” the officer says, thankful, perhaps, for something official to occupy his mind. “Strip his tags, then, and see if you can find a pay book and any effects for next of kin.” He lingers for a moment. “I’ll see about burial,” he adds, maybe as much for himself as for me. Then he struts off in another direction and I hear his voice worrying other clumps of prisoners. “Anyone here speak German?”
Jekyll’s body subsides into a different position, and for a moment I think he’s alive after all. But it’s just gravity having its way. I check for a pulse in his neck anyway, then feel for the leather cord and pull it off him, stuff the tags in my pocket. If he had a haversack he dropped it miles ago. In his pockets I find a soaked package of cigarettes, a few francs, a folded picture of a dark-eyed lady looking away from the camera.
For a second I think it’s Margaret — my Margaret! Of course it’s just a picture. She’s safe back in London. But just the sudden thought of her —
“You’re sweating like a horse!” Lillian said.
“Huh?”
“Why are you breathing like that? Ramsay?”
I looked wildly at her face, at the dark, rough walls of the cabin, our own breath misting in the cool air.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing, darling. Has the fire gone out?”
“You were all clenched up.” Tentatively she reached out and brushed some of the moisture from my brow and cheek.
“Just a dream. I don’t know what it was.” I wrapped my arms around her, and she continued to run her fingers along my face and neck. “Go back to sleep. Often I have . . . troubles at night. So I’ll just hold you.”
She looked ready to poke and pry until she’d loosened the wrappings on this new husband and truly riled the hornets within. But it was terribly late, and it had been a long day and night, and I suppose even then she was not entirely awake. In a moment her eyes closed, and I felt the sleep take over her young body even as mine remained wounded and cocked for war.
Two
A few months later we were sitting in the kitchen of the punky apartment I’d found for us in Montreal. Winter’s ice seemed to have settled for good — the bottom half of our meagre kitchen window was coated inside and out, blurring the black iron fire escape directly outside it. I watched her from my seat at the unsteady table. In oblivious moments she was as graceful as a horse dipping her head to drink from a stream. But now she held her body tight, and she breathed in little gasps as if there was not enough time to accomplish all that was slated. She banged the dishes into the cupboard, wiped up the saucepan while looking at the counter stains and then at me, sitting so still.
I sipped my tea and glanced down at yesterday’s newspaper. The world was devouring itself with an accumulating series of layoffs and failures, forfeitures and devaluations, suicides, stock collapses and windy promises that were sounding less and less plausible. I had my lump of savings but was afraid to spend it. Our
kitchen furniture consisted of a card table and two folding chairs. Yet from the safety of my position at Justin Frame Graphics and Advertising I felt, I suppose, like a man sitting onshore watching a faraway ocean liner sink beneath the waves. What possible connection could it have to me, this interesting disaster in the distance?
“I don’t see how it can last,” I said. When you have survived certain things, other people’s panic can seem ridiculous and overdone. “The big money boys are so used to making it hand over fist, they won’t stand for many more of these losses. It’s all a matter of confidence.”
“What is?” Lillian asked sharply, still banging about in the kitchen. “We’re going to be late.” She was in a dark blue Sunday dress that she’d made herself from catalogue drawings. The collar had a scratchy bit of lace that never sat properly. But in those days it only made her look more refreshing and beautiful. She was about to untie her apron and put on her coat and hat.
I said, “I’m not going. I’ll walk with you, but I won’t take in the service.”
That stopped her. She turned in surprise and I braced myself.
“What do you mean?”
“I will walk with you,” I repeated slowly, “but I won’t take in the service.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child! Why won’t you go to church? I can’t sit alone, without my husband!”
“It would be hypocritical of me,” I said, rooted in my chair. Her eyes narrowed in their way, and I said, “It means two-faced. If I go I would be proclaiming a belief in a god that I don’t have.”
“But you’ve already been with me plenty of times. And we were married in a church!”
“Yes. And I regret that. The church, not the marriage.” I had a strange feeling of watching myself to see what I might do. As if to confound things further I reached to her then, pulled her onto my lap and tried to bury my face in her shoulder.
“Whenever you say crazy things, I know it was the war that did this to you,” she said, and freed herself from my grasp.
“You know nothing of the war.”
