Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  “I’ll have to see about it,” I said vaguely. I was suddenly looking forward to a return to the office and perhaps for a little while sitting in sanctuary on Stanley Street, holding my Dorothy. It seemed like ages since I’d last seen her.

  Then, as if reading my thoughts, there was Margaret, standing a little off from the others, looking at me, waiting to be approached.

  “Are we to meet then only every twenty years?” she said, when I finally walked over to her.

  “You look as if you’re in your twenties still,” I said, “and I’m a hundred and four.” Henry popped suddenly into view behind her, wrestling with the girls’ bags. Margaret kissed my cheek as a cousin will. A cousin who is travelling on with her husband and children, who is holding herself very much in check.

  “You’re a marvellous specimen for such an advanced age,” she said quietly. “You had such a reckless intensity to you back then. Now you seem . . . quite formidably calmer. Are you, Ramsay?”

  All the people around us seemed to begin moving at once, and then in the distance we heard the first rumblings and whistles of the train.

  Gently I stepped past her to help with the mountain of luggage. Suddenly there were too many people to deal with: goodbyes to say to Rufus and Vanessa, to Henry and the girls and Alexander, and all these suitcases to manage, and Margaret’s trunk, and this herd of relatives to move through the station and onto the platform and down the way while the train eased into place. Breathing became harder, tears seemed set to wash me over.

  “I’m sure there won’t be war,” Henry said, grasping my hand. “This is just another tempest. And I have met Chamberlain. He’s very able. I’m sure level heads will prevail.”

  We can only hope,” I said to him. “Safe travels.”

  “And work on your badminton!” Rufus said jovially to him, as if seeing him off, but of course Rufus was going along for the holiday as well.

  “Yes! Yes, we all must work on our badminton. Except for you and Vanessa!”

  The children now were boarding, and I looked around but couldn’t see Margaret anymore. Had she already stepped on?

  “Thank you for your story,” Alexander said to me, somewhat formally. His mother must have put him up to it, I thought immediately, but he stayed gripping my hand and seemed to mean what he said. “It made me think.”

  “Thinking is good,” I said, somewhat stupidly. Where had Margaret gone?

  “Would you fight against Hitler?” he asked.

  I thought I’d seen her, but it was someone else in white.

  “If Nazi planes were threatening someone you loved —”

  He was still gripping my hand. Most of the platform now was clearing.

  “Pray it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “Just remember, you’ll break your mother’s heart if you go to war and Hitler’s planes are not already sounding in the distance.”

  He ducked his head. “It would be too late by then. And I would like to be a pilot,” he said quickly, and stepped on board. The platform had emptied considerably. Michael and I stood together looking at all of them leaning out the window — little Abigail and Martha, with Henry squashed between them and Rufus just behind. The conductor called and the car bumped forward a first tentative lurch . . . and then she threw herself upon me, a flash of white bursting from the train. I had to take a step backwards to keep from falling over. And she kissed me in front of everyone — a hungry, hard, gasping kiss.

  Henry was watching from the train window just a few feet away.

  “This is yours!” she said, and she handed me a scroll of paper done up in a faded old ribbon. “I’m giving it back. But only if you promise to write from now on, faithfully, about everything that happens. Do you understand?”

  We started walking beside the train.

  “Yes, of course.”

  She disappeared back onto the car.

  Michael and I kept walking to the end of the platform, then we stood and waved until the train rounded the corner.

  My heart was running downhill on gravel.

  “What did she give you?” Michael asked.

  I picked at the tight little knot of the ribbon until the scrolled sheet came free. It was an old pencil sketch — of Margaret, a young, very beautiful Margaret.

  “Did you draw her?”

  “A long time ago,” I said. Her hair was piled up on her head in the old-fashioned way, and her cheeks, her throat, her eyes especially, were young and full of life. “I was sick one night when I stayed in London as a soldier, and Margaret sat by me the next day for a while. So I drew her.”

  At the bottom of the paper, in pencil, she had written something new: I believe that the love we hold helps us through the worst of times.

  “Will you draw me?” Michael asked.

  We started walking back towards Charles and the wagon. I looked up again, as if expecting the train to be bringing her back. But the track was clear, of course.

  “Certainly.”

  “Because it has been a long time since you drew me. I’ve grown a lot.”

  Every inch of the sky was immaculate still, without a mark or hint of warning.

  On the wagon Michael stood before me and held the reins. He chattered most of the way about Abigail and Martha. He said straight out, without a hint of embarrassment, that he thought Martha was beautiful. “As soon as I saw her I felt all wobbly,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Like this,” he said, and he half-turned and wobbled my stomach with his little hand.

  “Watch the road, sonny-boy.”

  “Have you felt like that?” he asked me, his voice very serious. “It’s like . . . there’s a dizziness inside you.”

  “Yes. I’ve felt that.”

  Once we made it through town the wind picked up and blew dust into our eyes, and Charles snorted and snuffed. I took over the reins, and Michael whistled between his thumbs and turned his head away from the breeze. I whistled too, and the clop-clop of Charles’s huge hooves and the groaning roll of the wagon wheels turned us into a small moving symphony. Finally we made the Bretton farm. I unhitched the wagon and together Michael and I towelled and brushed down Charles. Michael got him a bucket of water and fed him oats, and I talked with Bretton for a time about the weather. He was sure that the endless prairie drought was moving east, hoppers would take every crop, and soon dust would parch every stream in the area.

  His property couldn’t have been more lush — every inch of it seemed verdant and full of life, with plants growing even out of the fence posts where we were, in the shade by his barn.

  “Pretty serious news out of Europe these days,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  I told him that the Germans had flattened Almeria and were threatening to enter the Spanish war.

  “Oh, that business. I haven’t been following that.”

  On the walk home Michael asked me if there was going to be another world war.

  “I don’t see how we can avoid it.”

  “Will you be a soldier again?”

  “No, not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I did my bit.”

  He wanted me to tell him all about the news of the last few days. He’d been listening, and trying to understand, he said, but he couldn’t follow it all. “There are antichrists and —”

  “Anarchists,” I said.

  “And loyal ones and commentists —”

  “Communists.”

  “But who are we cheering for?”

  I couldn’t answer right away. A pair of red-winged blackbirds swooped beneath low-lying limbs some feet away and then skirted off. “For peace, Michael. Peace is the underdog here.”

  As we approached the lane to the house I stopped him. Nothing had changed, really — the sky was the same as a few minutes before, the road as dusty and worn as ever, the summer weeds and flowers were still slowly fighting it out in the ditches around us — and yet the air felt thicker. I had the beginnings of a dreadful sic
kening in the pit of my stomach.

  Not the dizziness Michael had mentioned.

  “No matter what happens,” I said to him, “if there’s a war or . . . something else —”

  His face was so grave, his eyes so large and trusting.

  “We are in this together,” I said.

  “In what?”

  “This life, kiddo.” I knelt down and hugged him and tried to keep my tears from soaking the shoulder of his shirt, but I was gasping suddenly, shaking with sobs.

  A car came by. It was Blaine Williams, a man from the village I did not know well. He slowed and leaned out his window. “Everything all right?”

  I couldn’t speak. But I wiped my face away from his view, then nodded to him and straightened up in a familiar way. He tipped his hat to us, then drove on.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  “Nothing,” I whispered. “You go on ahead.”

  Michael was only too happy to sprint up the lane by himself. When I got to the house he jumped out from behind a bush with two badminton rackets in his hands.

  “Uncle Rufus forgot these!” he squealed. “And the birdies. Will you play with me? Please!”

  “All right.”

  I glanced through the window and saw Lillian, not in the kitchen, not rolling out loaves of dough or stitching up someone’s torn trousers, but sitting alone in the front room, her spine quite straight, not resting against the back of the chesterfield, not even close. She was staring at nothing, with a face that looked spiritless and bleak.

  “Come on!” Michael said, and pulled at my hand.

  “You go ahead and practice. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “I can’t practice by myself!”

  “Just . . . just a few minutes,” I said quietly. “You go down to the meadow.”

  He caught my tone then, and the stricken expression that must have been on my face registered on his own. One of the rackets dropped from his hand, and he didn’t pick it up. “Go down to the meadow, Michael,” I said more firmly.

  Off he ran. If Lillian heard the exchange her face didn’t betray it. She seemed to be braced and waiting for me to come in and do the unspeakable.

  I looked at the door but my feet didn’t move. I imagined myself taking first one step, then another. I saw my hand on the screen door — the door I’d cut and planed and sanded and hammered together, painted and fit into that space, twice — I saw some ghost of myself walking into the gloom and standing before the sad, sad lady sitting so all alone.

  Lillian, the ghost called — suddenly the voice seemed to surround me. And then my mind was filled with all manner of things that might be said — little, innocent words that could be stitched together in so many ways. Soft and tiny strings of sound to set the world to war.

  I don’t know how long I stood looking at the future, so full of certain pain and fog before there could be any hope of getting past it. Yet finally, without a conscious command, my feet were moving, my hand was on the door, the door fell open, and it seemed impossible to keep from striding through.

  Author’s Note

  The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council in the preparation of this manuscript. Thanks too to Elizabeth Hay, Laura Brandon, Susan Whitney, Kathy Bergquist, Dave Murray, Kate Preston, Helena Spector, Frances Dawson, Michael Dawson, and Reinhard Pummer for their help with early drafts, and to the many other friends and family who likewise offered advice, support and encouragement; to the staffs of Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian War Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the McCord Museum for their help on research matters; to Laurel Boone and Bethany Gibson for their inspired editorial guidance; to my agent Ellen Levine for never faltering; and to my wife, muse, partner and first reader, Suzanne Evans, for everything.

  Like The Sojourn, this story draws on a few threads of family history and mythology. I am indebted to Philip Cumyn’s memoir and family history The Sun Always Shines, and to various family papers and remembrances shared by Joan Matthews and my mother, Suzanne Cumyn, among others. But The Famished Lover is entirely a work of fiction, and, except for references to public figures, the names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination; their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.