Famished Lover (9 page)

“Why don't you cut the fucking crap?” Napier calls out.

My eyes are on Collins, on how his shoulders shudder at this new trouble.

Blasphemy drags the offender out of the ranks and throws the tall man on the frozen dirt. Three times quickly he kicks him in the groin, then methodically, several more times, in the stomach and ribs. Napier lies groaning and spitting blood and we stand and watch, unable to move.

Collins turns his gaze slightly away in the practiced manner of a veteran fannigan.

“The German soldier,” he says softly a little later, when picking up the translation, “Is so much superior to any English mercenary swine. That is why the war will eventually be won by the Fatherland.”

Hours later, it seems, the letters are distributed. Blasphemy hands them one at a time to Agony, who examines each envelope minutely, then hands it to Collins, who reads out the name. Then the soldier marches to the front, salutes the lamppost, receives his envelope and marches back. The name on the next envelope isn't read out until the previous man is all the way back in ranks, even if that next letter belongs to the very same person.

“Crome!” Collins calls finally, and I march out, determined to make a show of it. But my limbs feel stuffed with frozen straw, as if they'll crack away with too much movement.

The halt, the salute. I look steadily past Agony's face. Wait for the proffered envelope before extending my hand. Not
Mother or Father's handwriting.
Hers
. In a second it's as if hot oil has flushed through my system.

I march back, the envelope waving in the cold wind like a talisman to ward off all evil. My first letter from Margaret. I'm dying to tear it open immediately. To hell with it all! A letter from Margaret!

Instead I stand still as a post. Napier remains on the ground, moaning dully, and Witherspoon has received three letters from Beatrice. He is muttering beneath his breath, “Come on, fuck, come on, get this
over with
.”

But only when all the mail is distributed are men allowed to carry the fallen Napier off to the clinic, to read their messages from home.

Finally we march into our smelly compound with the one bare light suspended from the bleak board ceiling, the oppressive rows of rough lumber bunks, the overflowing shit buckets fore and aft. The paper of the envelope is so thin and delicate I am fearful of ripping it to shreds in simply holding it. But I manage to pry it open and then gorge myself on her words like a starved wolf tearing into a carcass, swallowing down whole paragraphs without reflection, just to taste the fact of it: a letter from Margaret has arrived here in hell.

Then slower, slower, I read the words again, sitting on the edge of my straw mattress, up above Witherspoon with his mound of mail, over which he is weeping like a man who has dug up lost treasure. My one blanket is wrapped around my whole shaking body.

Dearest Cousin Ramsay
,

I have written to your father in Victoria and now he writes back with this new address for you which I
hope is the correct one. As soon as we learned that it was possible that you were captured rather than killed, Emily, Mother and I sent off packages in your name to a number of different camps that we know of. You will remember that our foundation has been involved in sending packages to prisoners, but I can tell you that is no guarantee of our knowing anything or being able to help promptly. It is often a nightmare to get packages to the proper men even when we know for certain where they are
.

I can't tell you how overjoyed we were when we learned the news that you had survived. Father paced up and down the hallway bellowing (in his way), “He's alive! He's alive!” when the cable came from your mother. We cried and laughed and Mother spilled the potted plant she was holding
.

So much bad news arrives by cable these days
.

The first word (perhaps you have heard this) was that you were dead. Father was certain you had given your life defending General Mercer. The accounts of the battle in the newspaper were at the same time horrific and so sketchy as to drive one mad for want of facts
.

I am devastated to learn of Thomas and Will. I know your parents have written to you already and so this is not news. But I regret terribly that I never met them, and — as you well know — that this awful war ever had to take place. The losses for all of us are incomprehensible
.

But you are safe! Please know what joy the news has brought us, even though we are concerned for your health and welfare. I am sending under separate cover a package of food and basic necessities. Please write as soon as you can — I fear I cannot believe the news until something has arrived in your hand
.

I am sorry this is such a frazzle. I will compose something more worthwhile at another time. But let me speed this to you with all our love.

Sincerely, your cousin Margaret

p.s. Emily is sending her own letter separately, and I imagine you will hear from Mother as well, and perhaps even Father, who was so taken with you while you were here, Ramsay. He would never say it but I'm sure he now thinks of you as a son
.

I've had many weeks already to absorb the news of Thomas and Will, yet it still doesn't seem real. Now the mention of their names freezes the air in my throat. And then —
He's alive! He's alive!
— I can picture Uncle Manfred in his suspenders, his jowls flapping, eyes bright with excitement.

We cried and laughed and Mother spilled the potted plant she was holding
.

But what about you, dear Margaret?

Please know what joy the news has brought us
.

What about you?

I fear I cannot believe the news until something has arrived in your hand
.

“Witherspoon!” I call down. “Do you have any extra paper?”

Witherspoon lies buried in pages. “My mother-in-law is complaining of the gout. Beatrice is thinking of joining me here. Crome, would you give up your bunk for her?”

“Trade me some paper and the bunk is hers!”

Witherspoon hands up a measly single sheet, and then I borrow the stub of a pencil from Bildersley, who smells as if he is coming apart and will soon be simply a pile of ooze on
the floor. Against my knee I write
Dearest Margaret
, and look in astonishment at the raggedness of the letters.

You mustn't worry about me. I am safe where I am and cannot complain — at least not too bitterly — about the treatment I have received
.

Far too much has happened to be able to write. But please write to me — write anything that comes into your head. Write whatever would make me feel as if I were sitting next to you in conversation on a pleasant day in the park
.

But I must know — how is Boulton? I got a letter from Emily before capture — it seems like a hundred years ago — and she mentioned you are now engaged. Is it true?

My thoughts are yours, war or no war. I feel . . .

I am at the bottom of the reverse side of the tiny paper, the words getting squished further together.

. . . as if there is everything to talk about and no way to do it. Love, Ramsay
.

An envelope costs me my last four cigarettes.

I read her letter again and again, marvel at certain phrases, at the look of the words, the feel of the paper in my cold hands. Of course I think of Boulton, the lucky blighter with his banged-up knee — injured at a meeting of conscientious objectors, of all damned things — going off to his government office every day. What could Margaret possibly see in him?

He's there with her, that's all. He's there and I'm not.

Just before lights out I gaze up at the crowded, smoky, suffocating barracks, at all of us huddled in our blankets, our

ragged clothes, the one little wood stove at the opposite end of the room barely sending out heat. The quiet in this room could fill a church, I think, could trick death for a moment into passing us over as already claimed.

“There's Papa!” Lillian said. For a moment I looked out the train window at the old blue hills rounded like shoulders hunching to the south, at the quiet little station with its fading paint the colour of rotting leaves, and at the dirt road leading up the rise away from the lot where no one waited but a thick man in a straw hat and dusty clothes, sitting high on his tractor. “Papa!” Lillian yelled through the opened window, and waved and laughed when he waved back, arcing his hat high over his head.

I waved and laughed along with them, relieved to be there at last.

As soon as the train stopped Lillian bolted from it like an unbroken horse while I collected the bags. I called after her to be careful, but she might as well have been that horse. “She's going to drop that baby if she keeps running like that!” a matronly woman clucked behind me. She was encased in a woollen suit stiff as armour, and her legs looked as if they could support a piano.

“It's going to be our first,” I found myself saying.

In the lot Mr. McGillis gripped my hand. “It won't be long
now,” he said grimly. “What do you think, Lillian?” His face was pale and faded as an old cedar post, not sunburnt earth-brown the way it normally looked.

“The doctor says three weeks yet,” Lillian called back. She was already in the hay wagon behind the tractor, and hauled up the luggage I handed her. All the tension of the train ride seemed to have evaporated.

I pulled myself up beside her. My father-in-law started us off, the tractor spewing black smoke and moaning like a sick beast.

“What's wrong with it?” Lillian shouted over the noise.

“The bank wants her, that's what's wrong!” Mr. McGillis called back.

We topped the rise, then churned down into town, the old Mill Road winding as always past the tavern, the leaning frame of the general store, past houses huddled together like old men playing checkers, past the river, so brown and slow at the first curve, then so suddenly narrow and swift by the old stone mill, past the bridge and up the hill on the other side, away from the town centre.

“Everything all right in the city?” Mr. McGillis called back without turning around.

“It's fine, Papa!”
“Still got that job, Ramsay?”
“Still employed!” I called back.

Lillian touched my face, then. We were lying back in the hay. We might have been on our honeymoon again, heading to that wretched cabin — but before we knew that Rufus hadn't even seen it for himself, that he'd taken someone else's word for it. Before we figured any of this was going to be difficult, disappointing or bitter for either of us. Her clear blue
eyes were nowhere but on my face, scanning it for something. “I'm sorry,” she said so quietly I had to strain to hear. “I'm sorry I get so angry.”

“You've got an excuse,” I said, patting her belly. “And I should be looking after you better. Maybe we shouldn't have come.”

“But this is exactly where I need to be!”

We followed the road out of town, past fields and wood-lots till we came to McGillis's farm. It all looked much the same as it had the first day I'd blundered onto the place, a little more than a year before. Sam, a greying German shepherd, sniffed his way out to greet us as the tractor and wagon stopped before the swaying front porch, with its worn, cracked boards. Lillian nearly hurled herself off the wagon to embrace him. “Careful!” both Mr. McGillis and I called, but she just laughed and rubbed her face in the dog's old mug.

The screen door still sat ajar, with even fewer traces of ancient green paint than it used to have. The mottled rocker still looked as if it would turn to dust if anybody tried to sit in it.

“Ramsay, walk me down to the stream! Before we do anything else.”

“Before lunch?” In the rush to make it out of the office I hadn't eaten.

“Before anything! Pa, will you come with us?”
I unloaded the luggage and basket and moved it all the few feet to the porch, then dropped it by the steps.

“You lovebirds go ahead,” Mr. McGillis said.

She was Lillian again at a stroke, like some wilting cut flower magically replanted and brought back to life. We almost ran down the trail to the stream. The hot August sun

reached through the tall branches of the pines and poplars and dappled the soft mosses. It was past mosquito season then, past blackflies, a respite. When we broke through the forest shadows to the stream edge the sunlight hit us as if bounding off a new tin roof.

“That's the rock where you were sitting!” Lillian said, and she went over to it and sat down, half-facing the cool waters where the stream pooled. “You had a trout when I came up.”

“Yes,” I said, and approached her as if she were me and I were her.

“Then you heard me coming.” She stood suddenly on the rock. I reached out my hand immediately. “It's all right! You stood just like this. You didn't know whether to concentrate on the fish or on me.”

“Be careful.”

“Then the fish went over there —” She pointed to the spot farther on, where the current picks up.

“Lillian —”
“Then you twirled like this —”

She spun herself and I grabbed for her but felt my shoes suddenly slipping on the wet rocks. It was her grip that held me up — again.

“And I caught you! Just like this!” she screamed. “And that's when you asked me. You just blurted it out.”

The sunlight on the water was so bright it nearly sang, just as it had been the year before. A day almost exactly like today.

“You don't regret it, do you?” she asked suddenly.

“Of course not, darling.”

She looked away, and the greyness of the city seemed to
settle again between us — the knowledge of it at least. I took her hand. “The sun is out. There's enough to eat at home. We're having a child. How could I be happier?”