Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  When we made the river the sun had already fallen behind the trees, and the light on the water was completely different — the colours were darker and richer than in the heat of the day. How many times had I painted this very spot? And each time another shade of a subtly changed world.

  Henry held onto Margaret’s hand in the water, and as I watched from behind I had a hard time deciding who was supporting whom.

  At the house the radio spilled its sporadic reports with all of us crowded around its staticky speaker, waiting to hear the worst — except Lillian, who was preparing chicken pies. It was Henry who had to have his ear closest to the set and who would sit up from time to time and announce, in headline form, what all of us could already hear.

  “Twenty-three dead! Eighty-three wounded. The Deutsch-land is a ‘pocket’ battleship — whatever that is. The rebel siege of Bilbao continues! What’s this? The Deutschland shouldn’t have been anywhere near Iviza, since they were actually on Non-Intervention duty at the time! The Committee is meeting tomorrow.”

  I walked quietly into the kitchen to see if Lillian wanted any help. She’d strapped on her apron like battle armour and looked at my feet when I spoke.

  “Should I get the card table out to add to the —”

  “I’ve already done it.”

  I called out to Michael. “Would you set the table for your mother?”

  “I’ve done that too,” Lillian said. “You’ll just have to wait to eat.”

  “There’s no hurry. It smells wonderful,” I said softly, backing away. Her eyes stayed down, her jaw welded shut.

  I retreated to the front room, where Margaret was studying one of my paintings, a winter scene by the window that showed a winding section of creek in an open, snow-covered field. I watched her as she examined the sliver of silver in the middle where I’d hinted at the sun reflecting off a frozen patch of clear ice that couldn’t quite be seen — it was mostly the reflection, the inference of ice.

  “I would love to be here in the winter,” she said.

  “At thirty below you wouldn’t love it for long.”

  “But we would be under a blanket by the fire, just the two of us,” she said in a low voice, “and we’d talk enough to make up for decades of lost time.”

  “Yes, you and me. And your husband and three children, and house servants. You have house servants?”

  “Just a couple. And there’d be Michael too, of course. And your wife and mistress.”

  “We’d all be very cozy watching the snow.”

  She turned to an old photograph on the windowsill of Father in his youth in the Far East, sitting in a studio rickshaw wearing a white pith helmet, with a dark, skinny coolie boy in a loincloth apparently about to pull him somewhere.

  “What a marvellous moustache!” Margaret said of his handlebar.

  She turned to me. “You will talk to Alexander. Promise me, Ramsay.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  It was an evening scramble to erect the tents. The old pine poles I thought I’d kept so well in a separate pile by the side of the meadow had rotted through over the years, so in the dying light I took Michael and Alexander with me back to the bush with an axe, and I cut several fresh ones, and then together we hauled them back. Michael talked all the way, especially when we passed by a swarm of fireflies spinning in the air like lighted fairies. Even Alexander laughed and ran after them then, but mostly he was quiet and kept within himself.

  I asked him about school, and he replied, in as few words as possible, that he liked history.

  “Is there a particular period that attracts you?”

  After thinking for some time, he finally offered up the Greeks.

  “What is it about the Greeks you find fascinating?”

  He shrugged his shoulders — he and Michael were walking with a stack of poles between them — and Michael yelled out, “Hercules!” as if he might be able to summon the strong-man out of the mist that very instant.

  “Is it the first experiments with democracy? The struggles with the Spartans and Persians? The contrasting philosophies of Plato and Aristotle?” I remembered my father questioning me in the same way, but he would throw in Greek and Latin phrases as well — or French, German, Spanish, whatever the moment called for — and any remark I might summon would be greeted with cutting, penetrating further inquiry, designed to expose the depths of my ignorance.

  I remembered, but I couldn’t quite keep myself from doing it. “Was it the rise of Alexander?” I asked.

  “You’re Alexander too!” Michael called. Then he asked, “What did Alexander do?”

  “He conquered most of the known world. For a time,” I said.

  On we walked, our Alexander remaining as quiet as he could get away with.

  Well past dark the two tents were erected in the meadow and I’d found the cots in the crawl space under the house. Martha and Abigail put up a terrible racket when they saw that the boys were going to be allowed to sleep outside and they weren’t. I left Margaret to try to sort it out, and when she couldn’t I finally offered the second tent to the girls. “Lillian and I will sleep in Michael’s room,” I said.

  “But there’s hardly room for two adults there,” Margaret said. “I’ll take Michael’s room. It will be fine for me. You and Lillian must stay in your own bedroom, of course, though it was most kind of you to offer it in the first place. I’m so sorry to be such trouble. We’re all a family of temperamental sleepers. We oughtn’t to be travelling at all.”

  But Lillian insisted that Margaret remain in the larger bedroom. “You deserve it,” she said in an unbending voice. “You need more comfort.”

  “But this is silly!” Margaret protested. “At least Rufus and Vanessa must have it, and I’ll take the spare room.”

  “Rufus and Vanessa are fine where they are,” Lillian insisted.

  It was a balmy evening, and the boys and Henry kept the flaps open, willing to brave the bugs for a spot of fresh breeze, while the girls tightened every knot, snuggled into their bed-rolls and exclaimed at the comfort of the aging wooden cots. Margaret came out to sing the girls a lullaby, and as I listened to her soft, fine voice, I thought of Lillian singing in the cabin kitchen years ago when we were just beginning.

  I found her inside, putting away the last of the great load of dishes used by this army of her husband’s relatives who had descended upon her. I picked up a towel and set to helping with the cups.

  “Do you remember that day I proposed?” I asked her.

  Her face remained set with impatient annoyance. Finally she said, “Of course.”

  I’d been out at the river fishing, not where we were that afternoon but further downstream, near her father’s old property. I’d taken to setting up my tent in their back field, and she’d come to ask me if there would be any fish for dinner. She’d done something with her hair — coiled it up with small white lilies. And she’d put on a new green dress she’d just made. It was the sight of her that literally made me lose my balance, not the fact that a fish had struck at the same instant. After she saved me from falling in she did not move aside. Her eyes did not sink to examining the rocks. And the kiss that we fell into — our first — felt as large as a chasm, as inevitable as gravity.

  Later on, after dinner, when she was standing just like this in the kitchen washing up the dishes, I approached her from behind and just held her. Her father was sleeping beneath the evening paper in the front room, and I thought if I could not have her the storm inside me would blow my body to bits.

  Now I tried not to drop the dishes. Lillian waited for me to finish my thought — I did have a reason, didn’t I, for bringing up that earlier time?

  Instead I said, “I hope we can manage tonight in Michael’s room. It’s just for one night.”

  “I thought they were staying the week.”

  “No. Their train leaves tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Are we not good enough for them?”

  “They didn’t want to overs
tay,” I said quietly.

  Rufus and Vanessa came in then. They’d had a moonlight walk down the lane and were leaning on one another like beautiful young lovers for whom the world has scattered its rose petals. But Rufus broke the spell immediately and honed in on the radio. “I wonder if there’s been any more news,” he said.

  “Dear Mr. Crome,” Vanessa said to him. “If Europe is in flames we’ll hear all about it tomorrow. Would you just let the evening be?”

  He looked at her as if reading some secret sign.

  “Quite right, Mrs. Crome,” he said. “It is a delicious evening, isn’t it?”

  Then came the slap of the back screen door and Margaret entered as well. “What a blissful evening,” she said. “I hope those brave children have earplugs. Henry tends to blow like a foghorn, especially when he’s this tired. I must say I feel almost electric all of a sudden. Does anyone fancy a walk with me?”

  Rufus’s face lit with the possibility, and then he looked at Vanessa again and the possibility receded.

  “We’ve just come back, I’m afraid,” Vanessa said. “But look at you, all ready to go even after your long hike this afternoon.”

  Margaret turned to Lillian, who was furiously wiping the table. “Would you like to come for a short stroll? I feel as if we’ve hardly had a chance to chat.”

  “Not tonight,” Lillian said shortly.

  “Oh dear,” Margaret said. “I know I’ll pay for it later, but right now . . .” She turned to me. “Ramsay? Just a short walk?”

  “I need to turn in,” I said grimly.

  “Yes, it must be time,” Vanessa said, gripping her husband’s hand and exaggerating a yawn. “We’re over here in the spare, is that right?”

  Once again the sleeping arrangements were discussed. Margaret wanted to cede the big bedroom, but Lillian was adamant. So it was decided. Vanessa and Rufus slipped off to the spare room, and Margaret went out alone for a short stroll just to the end of the lane, she said, while Lillian cleaned up the last invisible traces of the dinner. I retreated to Michael’s room, where I sat in the shadows staring into the night. The moon hung like a paper lantern partially obscured behind a fan of thinly ribbed clouds.

  Eventually Lillian stepped into the room and snapped on the light. She had brought her nightclothes down from the upstairs bedroom, and when she shut the door she quickly began to disrobe.

  “I hope your cousin didn’t get herself lost.”

  In the cold light of the overhead lamp, the skin of her fine belly and breasts seemed paler than moonlight.

  Soon the light was snapped off and she was in bed.

  I looked out the window again and considered, absurdly, spending the rest of the night sitting with my eyes open like some cat or owl. I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. Not in this state.

  But the charade of marital normalcy had a powerful pull. I found myself walking to the bathroom and cleaning up as if this were simply any other night and returning to where Lillian had already settled in. She was facing the wall with her back to me, leaving only a pitiful few inches of bed to which I was supposed to cling while asleep.

  It really was ridiculous to think of the two of us sharing Michael’s bed. We could hardly seem to share the house anymore.

  “I’m afraid Margaret’s not back yet,” I said to my wife’s shape in the gloom. “I should have gone with her, of course. I’ll just step out and find her quickly.”

  No reaction.

  “Lillian?”

  “Do what you must,” she snapped.

  Outside, the night air was still warm on my face, and the sky, so strikingly lit, stretched clouded and star-pricked like a huge dark canvas above me. It was a relief to walk, to feel my limbs move. I headed down the lane where Margaret had said she’d be, the trees silent, brooding witnesses. From the meadow I could hear one of the girls — I wasn’t sure which — say, “If you stay beneath the covers they can’t get you!” I walked more softly, wanting to be invisible, to melt into the air and blow away.

  Margaret was sitting in darkness on a stump near the join of the lane and the larger village road, which were both quiet now, and still. I didn’t see her at first but was set to sail on past when she remarked, “There are a lot of frogs on the road.”

  I followed her gaze and made out two or three dark frogs on the lane and road, leaping about, then stopping to disappear into tiny lumps before heading off again.

  “You should come back to the house,” I said, more abruptly than I’d meant to.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tarry here.”

  But she didn’t move.

  “They have the most wonderful voices,” she said. They were singing, not the ones on the road but hundreds of others in the small pond not far off on the other side of the wood. “It all sounds hopelessly complex and mysterious. They’re mating, I suppose?”

  “I don’t imagine they’re talking about the Spanish Civil War. Or maybe they have an equivalent we just don’t know about.”

  The crickets were singing too, and the combined songs seemed to rise and fill the air then, to make further talk impossible. I didn’t step any nearer, although there was room on the mossy stump where I might have sat beside her.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” I said, suddenly feeling reckless, “telling me to divorce my wife.”

  “I said no such thing.” She turned to face me. “I asked you why you didn’t. You sounded so unhappy with your situation.”

  “Maybe you should divorce your husband. You hardly seem to be happier than me.”

  “You know that’s impossible,” she said soberly. “I could no more prove adultery or habitual drunkenness or cruelty or any of the other proposed new grounds than you could prove them against Lillian. Oh, I suppose if I asked Henry, if I could be so cruel as that, he would arrange to be found adulterous for me. But I might as well put a gun to his head. You already have your grounds. You’d just be acknowledging a reality. And you would continue to provide for your family through alimony.”

  We lapsed into a strained silence. Finally I said, “I promised Lillian I would be back with you straightaway.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.” She stood abruptly, suddenly so near to me I could feel the heat coming off her skin. Her hand brushed my arm as she stepped past me, and I grasped onto her wrist. She stopped but held herself still at a distance.

  “I thought you said Lillian was waiting?”

  “I want you to see some paintings,” I said. “They’re in a storage room in my studio off the upstairs bedroom. The key to the door is underneath the large mug on the window shelf that holds my brushes.”

  “You must show me,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  But she knew why. I couldn’t go to her bedroom with her, not alone at night when everyone else was asleep. I shouldn’t have been with her now.

  “When the house burnt a few years ago I lost every painting. But I’ve redone the ones that stayed most fixed in my head. They changed, of course, many of them. If you’re shocked or offended by what you see, I’m sorry — I apologize in advance. I could not keep myself from working on them.”

  I started walking and she fell in beside me.

  “Are they disreputable?”

  “Some are from the war. Some contain the most beauty I could summon and concentrate on canvas.” The house loomed white and ghostly before us. How long had we been gone? I was seized with the thought that Lillian would suddenly wake the house with a screaming, raging fit in front of everyone. The children would come running; Henry would look at us, guiltily together; Vanessa and Rufus would stumble out in their nightclothes, gaping at the commotion.

  But all was still.

  I closed the door quickly and hurried in some paces ahead of Margaret. No lights were on, but it was easy enough to pick our way through the shadows.

  “Good night, Ramsay,” she said at the stairs.

  The door to Michael’s room squeaked. I pushed myself thro
ugh. Lillian lay in exactly the same position as I’d left her. She looked to be in a deep and unrelenting sleep.

  I shucked off my outer clothes and climbed in behind her. I was warm still from the walk, and it didn’t matter that Michael’s sheet and thin blanket barely covered half of me. I put my arm around my wife and found her body rigid, as if she were holding herself intact.

  Lillian, I imagined myself saying. I’m in love with someone.

  I imagined the winds suddenly blowing out the windows, tearing the roof off the house.

  Her body softened slightly and moulded itself to me.

  Lillian, I imagined saying in a voice I would have to summon from somewhere. I can’t go on, I’m sorry. I can’t.

  I closed my eyes. What does it matter, at night, whose body you lie beside? We are so similar in the dark, and most of the night passes in sleep.

  I listened for the sound of Margaret’s feet on the floor above us. By now she would have found the key. Had she found the light too, or was she grabbing about in the dark? I thought I heard shuffling. Lillian tensed and tried to move away from me, but there was no place to go.

  She screwed her face into the one pillow. Against all of my rational will, I started to harden just from the heat and proximity of her, and perhaps from the close call with Margaret. Why hadn’t I simply kissed her out on the lane? No one would have seen, and certainly Lillian believed I did kiss her. That’s why she was coiled so tightly in the bed, ready to lash out at me. Margaret would be gone tomorrow. Europe was coming to pieces. I might never see her again.

  Lillian turned her face to me, wet with tears. “You used to love me,” she said in a little voice. She pulled up her night-dress and took me suddenly between her legs. “is this what you want me to do?”

  “Shh.”

  “Tell me what you want.”

  She was rocking against me now. I was balanced on a bare few inches of bed. Overhead I heard a soft thump. Lillian froze. “What’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know. Moving her trunk?”

  I began to subside. I tried to think of Margaret sitting in the water, the sunlight favouring her right breast, a reed brushing against the whiteness of her belly, her hair falling across her face. She might be looking at that painting right this moment, I thought.