Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  And I was terribly conscious of looking lifetimes older than the young soldier she had known.

  “Think of that one historic moment,” Henry said. “Our new king, George VI, is able to speak into a microphone and be heard directly by millions of subjects, thousands of miles away, in the sweltering cities of India, of Singapore and Hong Kong, here in Canada —”

  “And he didn’t say anything important or memorable,” Margaret cut in. “What he actually said was so bland it was hardly worth listening to. But the fact of the matter is that he will be revered and his brother will be reviled, and why? Because Edward chose love over duty, and he did it at a time when we all know we’re going to war again. And it’s going to be soon, and we’ll need someone willing to wear royal garb and to tell young men and their families — over the radio, no less — to sacrifice everything for the good of the nation, for king and God and whatever else we can think of. Edward just wants to hole up in a rented Austrian castle and be with his American divorcée. And what’s wrong with that?”

  She spoke with such sudden force that everyone else fell into a shocked silence.

  Finally Henry spoke. “Certainly, darling, we don’t know at all that we are going to war.”

  “No, no, you’re right,” Margaret said. “Just because Chamberlain’s new budget includes seven and a half billion pounds for rearmament, and Germany, Russia and Italy are happily fuelling the war in Spain, and the Japanese are running around China, and Mussolini is parading into Africa, and the Nazis are imprisoning more and more Jews and now are rounding up Catholics, for God’s sake —” She stopped herself. Lillian, especially, looked shocked. “Excuse my language, children,” she said. Then she looked at everyone. “Excuse me.”

  She picked at her food while Henry eyed her with a sort of tolerant patience that, I imagined, could drive its object to murder.

  “I wanted us to take this trip while it’s still possible,” she said. She raised her glass of lemonade. “Here’s to family. To love, and peace, and children, and to all of us. To the simple pleasure of ordinary days.”

  I drained my glass and she looked back at me as if memorizing my features.

  “What do you think of the new divorce bill, cousin Ramsay?”

  “Well, I —” I stammered. “It’s not being proposed for Canada, is it?”

  “But surely there has been debate here? Should adultery remain the only allowable grounds for divorce? What about cruelty, or insanity, or if one’s spouse has been thrown in jail for life? What about habitual drunkenness or, what’s the phrase — ‘inveterate drug addiction’?”

  Henry cut in. “Everyone in London is talking about this. Because of Edward, no doubt. Certainly there should be no grounds for divorce at all in the first five years. How many young couples would stay together through the early storms of getting used to one another?” Henry and Margaret exchanged a particularly married-looking glance. “Well, it’s no secret,” Henry stumbled on, addressing Margaret directly. “You had some unhappy periods in the early years, before the children, and I was learning the ropes, so to speak, as a young husband. These things take endurance. It’s not all the dance and stuff of fairy tales.”

  The meal was done, and flies were beginning to buzz about the mostly empty plates, but nobody moved while this topic sat among us.

  “Of course we hardly make marriage any easier with our tax laws,” Henry said. “And I should know. A couple of modest means, say two hundred and thirty-five pounds a year, would pay about twenty-two pounds in taxes if their income were split between them, but as a married couple the bill is over twice that. And the wealthier you get, the worse it is. A man making forty thousand pounds would be far better off to split his income and live in sin with his mistress —”

  “Money aside,” Margaret cut in, “how many friends do we know who are clearly mismatched, and have been for years now, and who struggle on unhappily, because that is the way it has always been done? They are in love with someone else, and everyone knows it, and yet it must be tiptoed around because adultery and divorce itself are considered so disgraceful —”

  Lillian got up and started scraping and stacking the dishes closest to her.

  “It all goes back to choosing a spouse with utmost care in the first place!” Henry exclaimed. “So many of our friends married during the war, you’ll remember, when people were throwing caution to the wind. Frances had no idea whether she would see William again. But when he came back he was a different William. We all recognized that. He was a returned man.” Henry took a sip of lemonade and thanked Lillian for collecting his plate. “We are talking about Frances and William, are we not?” he said to Margaret.

  “We married during the war, dear husband,” Margaret said, smiling. “And we are talking in general. Surely there is no need to drag names into the conversation. But now that you have, I should say that William works with Henry at Inland Revenue. Or at least nominally he does, though he’s drunk much of the time, and we happen to know that Frances, who has become a friend of mine, has taken a lover for the last four years perhaps, whom she met through some volunteer work she was doing with the East End poor. He is not a poor man, but a doctor, and a young one at that. Now, if she were to get a divorce, would she have to endure the stigma of confessing to adultery in court? Would the doctor’s family agree to allow him to marry a divorcée? Or should she just continue to plod through a sham marriage until William drinks himself to death in an honourable and publicly acceptable manner? What if he takes forever?” She turned to Lillian. “Let me help you with those,” she said, rising.

  “No, please,” Lillian insisted. But Vanessa got up then as well, and with some prodding both Martha and Abigail joined them, and soon the women and children were off cleaning up and the men were left to smoke in the garden.

  “Your wife is magnificent!” Rufus enthused to Henry. He turned to me. “Isn’t she? She’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, she’s full of unusual and challenging ideas.” He turned back to Henry with a smile. “She must be hard to handle sometimes at home, though?”

  Henry shook his head ruefully. “There is no handling Margaret. My main challenge is in trying to understand clearly what she wants. Once I’ve attained that, then I just do whatever it is, and we’re all happy.” He did not look like a man who was kidding. “For a time,” he added.

  Rufus laughed. “Now there’s a sane man’s prescription for a happy marriage!” he said. “How are things in Inland Revenue these days?”

  Henry eyed him wearily. “I am looking forward to my retirement,” he said. “But at present rate of savings, that will be in about a hundred years. Once Alexander is settled in a good position, and the girls have been and safely -married —” The thought trailed off into nothing. “Of course it’s hard to plan these things with the world as it is.” He looked at me sadly. “I suppose you know more than any of us what things can come to.”

  We were silent for a time, and then the talk swirled with the issues of the day, about Bolshevik trade unions in particular — how harmful they were for business, Rufus said, and how they were pulling us all towards civil war. “You’ll see, in a few years every industrialized nation will be headed by strongmen who will get us back on track. Most sensible people will yearn for it, as opposed to this chaos. Can you believe it — even the busmen in London went on strike for the coronation. It must have been pandemonium in the streets, Henry.”

  “And yet we managed somehow,” Henry said meekly.

  Sometime later the women came out again and saved Rufus and me from fisticuffs. He’d done so well by his wife’s money, and was now moving entirely in such well-shod circles, he seemed to have lost track of the surrounding desperation.

  “I hope you men have been solving the world’s problems,” Vanessa said cheerfully. Then, without waiting for a reply, she added, “Of course if it were up to women we wouldn’t have problems. Except what to wear. That’s always a problem. What do you think — if men worried more about what the
y wore, would we still be bombing each other and erecting huge trade tariffs?”

  “If women were in charge of the world,” Rufus said, standing now, evidently relieved to be onto a lighter topic, “then university courses would focus on flower arranging and hat design, and international trade talks would founder for months as the negotiators gossiped about their children and sweethearts.”

  “And the world would be a better place,” Margaret said pleasantly, as if in apology for the heat of her earlier words. “How about a walk in the fresh country air?”

  We were all standing now. Henry said, “Darling, I should think a nap would do you better. We’ve had a long train journey and you don’t want to overstrain —”

  “I feel perfectly fine!” Margaret said. “Why don’t you have a nap, dear, and I’ll go for a walk with these handsome young men?” She linked arms with both Rufus and me. “And their beautiful wives, of course.”

  “But you haven’t slept the last several nights —”

  “Because you kept talking to me about the importance of sleep! Honestly, we’re here, finally. I don’t want to sleep through it. That’s not what I’ve crossed the ocean for.”

  “Why did you cross the ocean?” I asked.

  “To go on this walk, of course,” she replied.

  I found Lillian in the kitchen, wiping the counter with furious concentration.

  “Everyone seems to want to go for a hike. I thought perhaps down to the river.”

  She didn’t seem to have heard.

  “Does that sound all right?”

  “Are you asking permission?” She stopped and glared at me. She had taken the rouge off her cheeks and donned the tight blue kerchief she often wore around her head for performing housework.

  “I think we should all go,” I said.

  “And who’s going to make supper?” She started to wipe again, some stain she looked ready to start chiselling.

  “Lillian, we just ate.” I was trying to keep my voice soft. “Come with us for a nice afternoon walk in the country.” I stepped behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened until I pulled away.

  “Where is everyone supposed to sleep?” she asked suddenly. “Didn’t you tell them our house is too small? I don’t have enough sheets or beds. And I don’t want to ask them to sleep on the floor.”

  “We talked about this. Margaret and Henry will take your bedroom, Vanessa and Rufus will have my spare room, the girls can take Michael’s room, and I can set up the tents outside, one for the boys and one for us. It’s what Alexander wanted, as far as I know — a wilderness experience.”

  Lillian threw down her rag. “Your cousin just asked me if she and Henry could have separate bedrooms, because he snores and she can’t sleep and gets headaches. What are we, a hotel?”

  “Henry can sleep in the tent with Michael and Alexander!” I said. “He can sleep with us for all I care! What does it matter?”

  “Yes. What does it matter?” she snapped.

  Nineteen

  Michael led the way. He had latched onto Alexander like a burr and the two ran down the trail together through the woods, Michael’s little legs churning beside his teenaged cousin’s loping strides. Martha and Abigail chattered together and waved their hands wildly at the odd mosquito or deer fly.

  “The more you fuss, the worse it gets!” Henry said to them. “Try to stay relaxed. It’s only nature.”

  “But nature is eating us, Father!” Abigail said.

  Soon the girls were running after the boys, Henry not far behind. Rufus and Vanessa had linked arms, and Margaret, who talked with them for a time, drifted back to walk with me. In the shadows it was cool, the ground muddy from recent rains.

  “I’m sorry, you’re going to soil your good shoes,” I said. “I’m sure Lillian has an extra pair for working in the yard. I should have got you those.” She was wearing black oxfords with heels that sank into the mud and left her unsteady.

  “I’ll just have to cling to you,” she said, and took my arm even before I offered it. Walking together like this we slowed, picking our way past the wetter bits.

  “The ground gets a little firmer up here a ways.”

  “I was hoping it would,” Margaret said immediately. “It has felt quite sticky ever since I arrived.” Before I could comment she hurried on. “I’m afraid I’ve upset your wife. Is that why she didn’t come on the walk?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “She has things she needs to do. She wants to impress you all, of course. She’ll be fine once she gets to know you better.”

  The children started clattering about something in the distance, but they were around a bend and I couldn’t see what was going on.

  “I guess we all get better at it as we get older,” Margaret said.

  “At what?”

  “Lying, of course.”

  That nearly stopped me short, but she continued pulling me along. As we rounded the bend I could see the whole group of them hunched around a low spread of plants, touch-me-nots, which they were trying to pop. Margaret rushed into the middle of them and let Abigail drag her from plant to plant.

  “They’re called jewelweed,” Henry said — he was on his knees, the most animated he’d been since his arrival — “because of the way the leaves hold in moisture. And look how they’re crowding out all the other plants. They’re very aggressive that way. But I fear it might be too shy in the season for them.”

  Michael was able to find one or two early performers and laughed gleefully as the seed pods exploded. But most were disappointing, and the mosquitoes punished us for lingering. The boys tore ahead again, the girls right after them. Rufus started to go on and on about our rough childhood days when we would race around the woods, nearly naked and three-fourths wild, as he recalled it. “Do you remember Mother’s enormous dinner bell? As long as we were within range of that, everything was in bounds. We could have been a hundred feet up a red pine, shooting arrows at one another, but as long as we came home on the dinner bell, there’d be no questions asked.”

  At the river the sun hit our faces, and the trail broadened out to show the dance of the water, the folds of the current over and around the myriad rocks and fallen logs, the slightly deeper pools that were still fine for wading. Michael had already led his cousins to one of them, and shoes were off, dresses hiked, trouser legs rolled to the knees. Henry was right in the middle of them, his bowler hat tilted back on his balding head. They were all bent over something of interest, which Michael was poking authoritatively. Rufus and Vanessa sat on the rocks close to the children, and Margaret and I stayed a little way off, our faces turned to the sun that was high over the trees.

  “What have I been lying about?” I asked her.

  “You are a good host and husband pretending I have not terribly upset your wife, but I’m afraid I have.”

  I insisted again that Lillian was not upset, but Margaret turned her head away in a gesture of dismissal.

  “And I suppose you are going to claim that I have not upset you,” she said. “When I have forgiven you.”

  “For what?”

  Rufus got up then and approached us. “It’s rather extraordinary the way you are monopolizing Margaret,” he said to me, only half joking. “Do you still fish in this river?” Without waiting for an answer he sat down between us. “Ramsay suddenly disappeared one summer,” he said to her. “We were living together in Montreal. We both had office jobs. And then Ramsay was gone almost every weekend, fishing! And I kept asking him — where are you going that the fishing is so good? And he would become very vague. But every weekend he would come back . . . without any fish!”

  Margaret laughed so he kept on, regaling her with this old story.

  “One weekend I was determined to get him in with the right crowd. Do you remember Elizabeth Dillingham, Ramsay? She was an artist, too, from an excellent family — very well off. I remember asking you to give up your fishing for one tiny weekend so you could come to the Dillinghams’ dan
ce party. I was even willing to lend you a proper coat and shoes. Elizabeth had bent my ear for ages to make sure you came. Do you remember her at all?”

  I nodded my head slightly. “A bit of a horsey face.”

  “She was so stuck on you. But you were riding the train every weekend to court this mysterious farm girl, all under the guise of fishing!”

  Margaret smiled at my embarrassment, a fine bit of sunlight in her eyes.

  “So the fisherman got caught!” she exclaimed. “Was it a wonderful romance?”

  “Whirlwind.”

  “So that’s why I never heard from you,” she said lightly. “You were here, probably right at this spot, courting your Lillian and forgetting all about me.”

  “You were married at the time, I believe,” I said to her.

  “Yes, and every Guinevere wants a Lancelot to be pining for her, at least a little bit, somewhere far away.” She touched Rufus on the leg. “You’re very bad to be listening to all this. It’s none of it serious, you know.”

  Rufus didn’t seem to know what to make of it. He looked from Margaret to me and back again. Finally he said, “Ramsay fell in love with the land too. I was so glad when you were able to buy your property down here, Ramsay. I’m glad I made those calls.”

  “What calls?”

  “To Father’s connections! He knew you weren’t going to get that reparations money any other way.” Rufus glanced at Margaret as if this too was all a joke, then back at me. “Didn’t I tell you? Father was on his deathbed and made me promise to make those calls. I don’t think he would have allowed himself to go otherwise. He was so concerned about you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Margaret asked.

  “Ramsay applied for war reparations money, but the commission was so stingy he wasn’t going to get anything unless someone made a special appeal.” He turned to me with only the faintest shade of embarrassment on his face. “Of course you know this is how it works, don’t you?”