Famished Lover (10 page)

“I don't know, Ramsay,” she said quietly.

I threw a rock in the water and waited a decent time before suggesting we head back.

At supper that evening Mr. McGillis scraped his bowl like a fannigan and sopped up the last dribs with Lillian's biscuit, murmured and slurped and smacked his lips. Then he spooned out more for himself before either Lillian or I were even halfway through our first helpings. “You found your mother's recipe,” he said.

“It's just tomato soup,” Lillian said. “And it's my recipe.”

“Well, it makes Maisie's taste like bilge water.”

“I'm sure hers is perfectly fine. And you'd starve if she didn't feed you. Any meal I've ever had with her was absolutely fine.”

“The woman has her notions,” Mr. McGillis said darkly. He paused for a moment and let his eyes lift from his bowl. “She considers herself the only one doing the Lord's work. She'd elect herself chief apostle if she could and send all the rest of us down to hell.”

“Well, she hasn't charged you a cent for all the meals she's cooked since I left,” Lillian said.

“Yes, that's right. She hasn't charged a cent. It's all going into her heavenly bank account.” Mr. McGillis turned to me. “I try to keep the Lord in my thoughts as much as the next, but some take it straight up the flagpole and try to live there.

This Maisie Campbell doesn't want me to have any other book but the Bible in my house. She spoons out the stew, then tells me how soon I'm heading down into purgatory if I don't start cleaning up my —”

“Papa,” Lillian blurted, “Ramsay and me want to move in with you!”

I dropped my spoon.

“I'm sorry, I just have to say it, it's so obvious. We could save a lot of money even if Ramsay takes the train, and I'm already cooking for Ramsay, and I will be for the baby, so I might as well cook for you. And there's lots of room. I could work the garden and help with the —”

“Lillian!” I said. “Who decided all this?”

“I'm just saying it!”

“Children,” Mr. McGillis said.

“I don't want my baby growing up in those sickly rooms!” Lillian said to me. “I can grow vegetables a lot cheaper and a lot better than what I can buy in sorry old Montreal. And it's easy to keep a few chickens and a pig, and there's so much room here. You said so yourself! Maybe Frame would let you do some of your work from here.” Lillian's face looked pinched and red, as if she were determined to head-butt her way through every obstacle.

“Children,” her father said again.

“It all makes sense and I know I'm right. It's what you want, I know,” she said to him. “This farm is too much for one person.”

“This farm is not mine anymore,” he said. We sat stupefied, as if a sudden wind had blown off the roof and opened us up to the evening sky. “I'm sorry. I knew you'd be upset,
so I wasn't going to tell you right away.” He broke off some more biscuit, lathered it in butter, then wiped his bowl clean again. “It's the bank, of course. The money for that blasted tractor, but also some more that I borrowed to build the new barn — which, you're right, I never did build. Instead I gave it to Peter Grimsby to invest for me in a surefire thing. Which sure did fire, it surely did.”

Lillian hit the table with her palm. “What are you talking about?”

McGillis's eyes looked like swamps in the cold light of morning. “The farm is gone,” he said. “I'm out at the end of the month. Don't worry, I'm not coming to Montreal to crowd up your little place. Maisie Campbell has offered to room and board me. All I have to do is listen to her. It's a sentence I deserve.”

“Who's Peter Grimsby?” Lillian asked.

McGillis drank down his water and tore off some more biscuit and the evening unravelled like a ball of barbed wire as we disentangled each cutting truth. He'd laid it all out in the beginning, but we had to go over it again and again — the explanation of Grimsby, of the loans for the tractor and the barn, of the mishaps and miscalculations, the risks, the sudden collapse of the house of cards. For all our questions and his explanations, for all the tears and trouble, it always worked out the same.

“So you see, I'd love to have you come and live here with me,” he said sadly. “But that's not God's plan, now is it?”

That night we lay awake in the small bed in Lillian's old room.

The mattress was just large enough for us to spoon together on our sides, Lillian holding herself rigidly, her back to me, staring holes in the wall.

“We'll be all right,” I whispered. “I have work, we're not in debt. We won't live for long in that crummy flat. We can buy a place out here — maybe even this property. The bank will own it, but I don't know that a lot of people have extra money these days. It'll just go to weed for a time, that's all. And if we can't buy this place, then another nearby.”

She was shivering now, her body somehow cold in the heat. “I know this is hard news. But there are ways through it. With a few breaks, if we keep working . . . ”

“I wish the baby wouldn't come,” she said suddenly, in a wounded voice small as a bone in the throat.

“You don't mean that.”

She willed herself still, still in the grey shadows.

“Of course the baby's going to come. Now we have something to work for. I didn't see it before. But you were terribly right. We'll make it back here. It's a perfect spot to love and grow. Now we both know it. And that's a step right there. Do you understand?”

She didn't even seem to be breathing. I placed my hand on her belly and felt, with relief, the soft kicks and turns within. I kept talking gently, holding her until the shadows were too long to contain and I could not fight anymore the pressing silence of sleep.

Letters, food, work. Hunger, love, sweat. Fatigue and hatred. This bloody cold bunk rife with fleas and mould and rot. And the ragged edge of want cutting at the throat like a rusty razor sewn into your collar.

Just little cuts. But every tiny movement worn with blood.

Dear Margaret
,

I am enclosing a charcoal sketch of our barracks. If for some reason it is deemed a military secret, here's what you'll have to imagine. The wooden bunks ranging in rows are so crowded together there is barely floor space for a man to stand. The sleeping pallets are filthy, ragged and losing their straw. One thin blanket is folded in precisely the same way on the foot of each bed. The window has cracked or broken panes. There is a single, dull bulb hanging from the wooden planking of the ceiling. In the far corner is a small wood stove that throws no heat and in the foreground a bucket too small for the night sewage. What I could not show: the stench of an open toilet, unwashed men, rotting linen; the despair of endless days; the sanctuary of night and sleep; the unspeakable joy of receiving mail
.

Unspeakable joy? For a few moments, perhaps, while the envelope is being held, while all is possibility still and not actual words on tangible paper. Father writes with his curt list of practical advice — the importance of staying clean, of maintaining one's sense of perspective, of remaining realistic about the future course of the war.
For it will not last forever, and there will be rational life again, perhaps in just a few months. But I know how fast a collection of hard men lumped together
in rough circumstances can turn rancid. So you must keep your head above, no matter how dismal the surroundings
.

And Mother writes her few words at the end:
Loving and hope from all of us dear, dear Ramsay
on pages wrinkled from tears. And young Rufus says,
You must know from the news that we are whipping their hides daily, and I'm sure you'll be home soon! In the meantime I am using your bicycle to deliver groceries to which I'm sure you won't object
.

And this from Margaret's sister Emily:

We think of you constantly, especially Margaret, though she would never say it. She seems so set on martyring herself in marriage to Henry, as if that act alone could bring the world closer to peace, though of course it is breaking her spirit, and if you were here . . . Well I don't want to say too much, although as you know discretion was never my forte. But if the war did end soon — not that it will, but if it did — and you came right away, then I'm sure the sight of you would shake her back to her senses. For something did happen between the two of you when you were here, didn't it? Margaret will not say a word to me, even in strictest confidence, and yet after you left she moped about so, and when the news came that you'd been killed — well, you've never seen such a fit of carrying on. When Lord Kitchener died at sea we got the barest comment from Margaret over breakfast. But when your black news arrived — if the house had been bombed by Zeppelins she would not have been more upset. She loves you, Ramsay — I'm telling you plainly because she never would
.

Witherspoon, who makes it his business to keep up with my love life, reads over the letter, his hairy legs swinging from the edge of my bunk, his big eyes squinting in the poor light to make out Emily's cramped words.

“Sisters,” he says. “Very tricky waters. But let me see if I've got this straight. Emily is the older, ugly one, right?”

“No — she's younger, maybe even prettier. In a conventional way. She has reddish, curly hair and thinks herself a bit of a painter too. I'm afraid I criticized her work before I realized it was hers. It was hanging on the wall, one of those fussy landscapes the eye passes over.”

Witherspoon digests this information without taking his eyes off the page. “So she hates your hide,” he concludes finally. “Now, where's your latest from Margaret?”

“Actually, I think Emily fancies me.”

“That's why she's telling you all about how Margaret loves you?”

Witherspoon is hard to resist like this. His dark eyes press in, and for a moment he makes me feel as if talking like this might somehow bring the better world right to the gates of the camp.

“The last night I was in London, she threw herself at me”

“Somewhat.”

“Somewhat?” “She crept into my bed in the middle of the night. I had to kick her out.”

“You threw the young, pretty one out of your bed the night before returning to the front? Because she wasn't Margaret?”

Trust Witherspoon to frame the stupidity of it.

“Would you sleep with Beatrice's sister?” I ask quietly.

“At the moment I think I'd sleep with Beatrice's dead Aunt
Gertrude!” he says gleefully before returning to the letter at hand. “So, Emily is in love with you and is jealous of her older sister. Why would she write to say how much Margaret is pining for you?”

“Because Margaret
is
pining for me.”

“No! No, no, no,” he says, shaking his head. “That's too simple and straightforward and honest. We're dealing with women here. Sisters at that. Emily is writing to torment you because you kicked her out of bed your last night in civilization. And she wants to punish her sister for being happily in love with what's his name.”

“Henry.”

“Henry the civil service shirker, who's not only going to have body and soul together after this war, he'll be employed too and miles ahead of any poor returning sod. Emily can't even get herself a Henry, so she's poisoning her sister's well and persecuting you at the same time.”

Witherspoon wipes his hands with the satisfaction of a great psychological detective. “But,” he continues suddenly, “The young, pretty Emily obviously also still cares for you a great deal, and one encouraging letter from you and she'd agree to marry you in a heartbeat. You'd have someone in the flesh, beautiful, charming, passionate, an artist at that, waiting for you at home when you get out of this hellhole. Instead of pining for her older sister who's marrying what's his name anyway.
And,”
he says, his eyes darkly lit with this last thought, “you'll have someone to dream about while you're here. She'll send you gushing letters and marvellous parcels stuffed with chocolate and bully beef and good English cigarettes. And when you get back to London you can see whether you still like her or not.”

Witherspoon slaps my leg in self-satisfaction. “How did you leave things with this Emily? I hope you apologized over breakfast or something. She isn't really furious with you, is she? Can it be overcome?”

“I painted her portrait.”

“Excellent!”

“Her nude portrait,” I say quietly.

Witherspoon laughs suddenly, and others now stir and stop what they're doing to listen in. Card games pause, other fannigans hesitate in their cigarette-rolling, their letter-writing, their mumbling to themselves as they stare off into the gloom or pore over the same tired novel they have read and reread time and again.

“She posed for you in the nude?”