by Alan Cumyn
I ground my teeth in silence.
“The world owed you, Ramsay. You suffered, but then you got your land out of it. Everything balances out.”
There was a ruckus then, and we all turned to watch Henry holding a small turtle by the shell while the children splashed and jostled to get a better look. Abigail called out to her mother to come have a look.
“Yes dear, I can see!” Margaret called back. “He’s beautiful!”
“But come here, Mummy!” Abigail said. So Margaret got up and walked to the edge of the water, and Henry brought the turtle over to show to her and Vanessa.
Rufus was staring at my face, watching me look at Margaret.
“Sometimes you are an absolute surprise,” he said.
After Henry had handed round the turtle for all the children to handle and let it go its merry way, Michael pointed out minnows in the shallows, and there were butterflies to watch and talk about and a course of stepping stones to build. Eventually I was enticed into the water to help shift some of the larger rocks, and Henry lectured us on beavers — he had a particular fascination and was hoping to see some. Michael was nearly ecstatic to show him and all the others three beaver-chewed birch stumps on the opposite shore, and he made certain that his cousins learned that the beaver must continue chewing wood or else his teeth will grow through the bottom of his mouth. Margaret, especially, listened with rapt fascination, not to her husband but to Michael.
The sun moved higher, and Margaret pulled her hair free from its coils beneath her hat and let it fall about her shoulders. Of all the times I’d seen her — the phantom of her in my mind — now it seemed both impossible and absolutely normal that she should be before me.
“Perhaps we should go back,” I said as the afternoon burned on.
“But is there something further up this trail?” Margaret asked immediately. “It doesn’t end at the river, does it?” I explained that the trail indeed went on for some miles, all the way up to a scenic spot that looked out over the town and several lakes. “But it’s a good two hours’ hike up there. Maybe tomorrow, if we have the energy.”
“Our train leaves tomorrow afternoon, doesn’t it?” Margaret said.
“I thought you were staying the week!” I glared over at Rufus, who had written me with all the details.
“There are a few things to do in Montreal, before our cousins sail for home,” Rufus said in his feather-smoothing tone. “And we thought . . . well, I knew —”
“We didn’t want to put a strain on your household,” Margaret said brightly. “Short visits are best, aren’t they, dear?” At her glance Henry chipped in that even on a short visit she mustn’t strain herself. His hat was on the ground beside him, but he had tied a white handkerchief on his head into which he was sweating profusely. “You tend to push too hard on very little food or rest, and then —”
“Oh, poof!” Margaret said to him. “I feel perfectly fine. We just had an enormous meal —”
“That was ages ago, darling,” Henry said. “And it is tea time now. I’m beginning to feel nearly faint myself.”
“Then you go back and have some tea! I’m perfectly fine!”
I told Margaret it was absurd to come all this way then rush off.
“The tickets are bought, I’m afraid,” Henry said. There was more discussion but I didn’t press further. At least Lillian would be happy, I thought. I glanced at the children, who were lolling like lizards on the smooth rocks.
“Now what about this walk?” Margaret said. “Ramsay, will you accompany me? Just a little further up the trail?”
“But, dear —” Henry said.
“I will be fine.”
“I could show you!” Michael announced, suddenly full of vigour again.
“But your mother will need help with the tea,” Margaret said, too quickly and with too much strained cheeriness. We all looked at her in awkward silence. Vanessa, especially, was glancing from Margaret to me to her husband, whose expression seemed to be keeping her quiet.
Then I said, “Michael, you make sure everyone knows the way home. We won’t be long. We’ll probably catch you up on the way back.”
Without waiting for another word Margaret started across the river, her shoes and hat in her hand. Henry protested again, but she simply waved at him as if he were talking nonsense. She was halfway across before I headed after her.
“We won’t go far,” I said to Henry and the others.
At the crossing the river was less than fifty yards wide and shallow most of the way, but the stones were slippery and the passage slow. When she reached the other side Margaret did not wait for me to catch up to her but continued along the trail without even putting on her shoes. By now the afternoon was waning and the shadows in the woods were deep and cool. I gained the other side and shoved my wet feet into socks and shoes, then hurried along. In the low areas by the riverbank the soil was wet and black and smelled of rot and swampy gas.
“It’s perhaps not the best trail right here,” I said when I reached her. “But you’ll want to put your shoes on soon. It’s going to get rocky.”
“The mud feels so good between the toes,” she said. Then she stopped and faced me. “That was clumsy, I’m sorry. But I am only here a day. Why have you never written? Why did you not come see me at the end of the war?”
“Of course I came to see you!” I blurted. “You did not see me!” I could barely look at her, I was so flabbergasted.
“I beg your pardon?”
I explained it as clearly as I possibly could. Her face fell further into bewilderment.
“What are you talking about?” “
I was standing at your gate. You looked straight at me. You didn’t recognize me. You could have planted me in the soil right there, I was so devastated.”
“Ramsay, stop this!” She raised her hand as if about to slap my face. “I did no such thing!”
I stepped to her, pulled her arm and moved her some paces up the trail. “Not in this bloody swamp.” I sat her by a mossy tree trunk, out of the mud, and wiped her feet clean with my handkerchief, then struggled them into her shoes. I pulled her up and held her hand and we walked faster and faster, a cloud of mosquitoes and blackflies now on us. We climbed rapidly until we reached a boulder jutting out into the sun. I hoisted her up and joined her, and lit a cigarette and blew smoke to clear the bugs.
“Do you want one?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “It’s a filthy habit.”
I laughed rudely. “You used to smoke.”
“I never did.”
“You begged me for a cigarette once. When we were in clear view, walking on the street.”
“I swear you are hallucinating!”
“No, I’m not.” I blew more smoke and tried to contain my anger.
“I have smoked one or two cigarettes in my life, and that has been it. You know almost nothing about me.” She reached across then and took the cigarette from my fingers, stuck it in her mouth and inhaled deeply. Then she blew out in the direction of a few lingering bugs, and handed the cigarette back to me. “It’s still a filthy habit.” She coughed slightly. “Now you must tell me. What in God’s name are you talking about?”
I explained it again. “It must have been the day of Emily’s funeral. I was standing on Stokebridge Street when you walked out to the cab. You looked straight at me, but I was a shadow. A starved man, Margaret. Skin and bone. I know it’s not your fault.”
“Did I say nothing to you?”
“When I stepped onto the pier in Victoria my mother broke down and wept on her hands and knees. Father was so pale I thought he would collapse. And that was after some weeks of fattening up. Of course you didn’t know who I was.”
“But how could I not remember?” she asked in bewilderment.
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 c
ome.
Twenty
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?”
