Famished Lover

The Famished Lover

Also by Alan Cumyn

FICTION

For Adults

The Sojourn

Losing It

Burridge Unbound

Man of Bone

Between Families and the Sky

Waiting for Li Ming
For Children

After Sylvia

The Secret Life of Owen Skye
NON-FICTION

What in the World is Going On
?

ALAN CUMYN

Copyright © 2006 by Alan Cumyn.

All rights reserved. no part of this work may be reproduced or used in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of
the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency
(Access Copyright). to contact Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.

Cover photograph: orsillo, istockphoto.
Cover and interior design by Julie Scriver.
Printed in Canada.
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cumyn, Alan, 1960-
The famished lover / Alan Cumyn.

ISBN 0-86492-448-8 (bound). — ISBN 0-86492-463-1 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS8555.U489F34 2006      C813'.54      C2006-903465-6

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council
for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing industry
Development Program (BPIDP), and the new Brunswick Department of
Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.

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For Laurel

“I'm sorry it's so cold,” I said to Lillian, my young bride, who was snuggled beside me under the bearskin blanket. We clung to one another at the bottom of the old sleigh that took us from the train station at St. Simone, a tiny smudge in the woods north of the little chapel in Mireille where we'd been married some hours before. It was late in the afternoon, late in the year, and the steely grey of the sky was edging into black.

“It's not so cold,” she said.

Her face was moulded to my shoulder, and silky wisps of blonde hair, escaped from formal arrangement, brushed against my cheek. Her breath warmed my neck, and indeed we were out of the wind and our trail was taking us further and further into the woods, the upper boughs of the tall, rigid pines dusted in snow. Yet I felt chilled through, as if not the thickest fur in the world could warm my bones, and I was strangely wracked with hunger, as if we had not just feasted with our families. No, it was more as if I had not partaken — of real food, of love, of life — in decades and now, at the edge of the banquet, could not control my trembling.

Our driver was a burly, bearded man who muttered to
himself in French and seemed able to guide his horse, a snorting, solid, slow-moving beast, with only the slightest of gestures. We were on our way to a honeymoon cabin procured by my younger brother Rufus, who was friends with half of upper-crust Montreal and who often had the loan of this country place or that.

“I haven't actually seen the cabin,” i said to Lillian.

“Yes, I know, you explained it . . . dear.” She stumbled over the novelty of the word. As I looked at her fair face and hair so close to mine I wondered how to render it — not from a distance but from these few inches. What would such a painting look like? A curve of cheek, her eyes so young and pale and blue, those hints of hair edging off the canvas, and in the background so much grey and black and old, hard brown — the timbers of the sleigh, the bristly hairs of our bearskin, the darkness of the forest beyond.

I kissed her again, for the hundredth time perhaps, but I could not stop trembling.

“Rufus has made all the arrangements, so I suppose it will be all right.”

“Whatever it is, it will be all right.” Just then her voice made me think of someone playing the part of a mother in a play in which all the actors were children. And for the first time — I had no idea why it hadn't occurred to me before this, in the months of our courtship — I realized that I was old enough to be her father. If not quite in actual years, then in grains of life slipping through the tightened neck of experience.

I sat up to look around. The wind felt unjustly cold on such a day. But I had faced down colder winds than this.

In the distance I saw not a cottage but a clearing with a
lonely, tall stone cross. And as we passed I could not help but read the carved and familiar list: Ypres, Amiens, St. Eloi, the Somme, Vimy, Mont Sorrel.

I ordered the driver to stop, threw myself off the sleigh before it finished moving and walked briskly towards the monument.

“Ramsay, what is it? Where are you going?” Lillian asked.

“It's nothing!” And I thought: why have they put this memorial on a backcountry trail where no one will see it? But also: they're everywhere now. A man can't even get married and run away to the wilds for a few days without stumbling into one.

I had to dust off the names from Mont Sorrel: four local boys, two named Hughes, a Duncan and a MacDonald. No regiment listed. I tried to think of the men I knew. Their faces swam before me, in the barns and other cozy spaces of our off-duty hours, and in the dugouts and the trenches of our time in hell. Their odour — mud, tobacco, body stench — rose to my nostrils, and I might as well have been back there, just for that moment. Did we have a Duncan, a MacDonald and two Hugheses?

It had been thirteen years. But it's an awful thing to forget even the smallest part of what you swear will line the remaining days of your life.

I suppose I stood for some time in my own stupor. When I turned, Lillian was waiting a few yards off, her red, ungloved hands folded across the front of her dark coat, the silly dessert tray of a going-away hat askew on her head from the long ride and our snuggling. The driver and his horse had both twisted round to stare at me, at the tears freezing to my cheeks.

“Were
you
in the war?” Lillian finally asked.

We had not yet talked of it, and here we were embarking on a life together.

“It doesn't matter,” I said, and I walked past her quickly. I clambered back onto the sleigh and then, remembering myself, turned to pull her up. But she was already halfway in, and her face had that look — of someone not to be diverted from a path of inquiry. “Drive on!” I said,
“Allez! Allez!”
even before Lillian was seated. I steadied her against the lurch of the sleigh.

“You're crying,” she said, facing me, not so much in accusation as in wonder. “Ramsay, tell me.”

“I knew some men who got caught up,” I said vaguely. “Sometimes I think of them. But not today. Today is for other things.” I took her cold hands. Where had she put her gloves? There, on the floor of the sleigh. I picked them up and helped her on with them. They were so fashionably tight I could not imagine them providing any warmth.

“But you will tell me,” she pressed. “We're not going to have the kind of marriage where people keep secrets?”

I kissed her and kissed her, and the miles slid by, and it was almost, almost enough.

From a distance the cabin looked derelict, a pile of logs thrown together ages ago and forgotten by whatever pioneer family had abandoned it in the purgatory of rocky fields, fly-infested summers and unendurably bitter winters.

“That can't be it,” I said. Rufus would never have steered us this far wrong — he had such a sense of the lightness of things, that's what Rufus was good for. Some weeks earlier, when the stock market had spiralled so unbelievably, Rufus was somehow able to pull out his own holdings and maintain
a good semblance of their worth, and he'd even protected a few of my investments as well — the very ones he'd urged me to buy in the first place, when all around us were profiting so handsomely and living so well.

No, this pile of crumbling logs could have nothing to do with Rufus. Yet our sleigh stopped and the driver clambered down to grab the bags.

“Oui, oui, c'est ça,”
he grumbled. Even the horse snorted in apparent affirmation. The driver wrestled our bags along the path — untrodden till now, covered in snow — then shouldered open the low door and disappeared into what looked like the mouth of a cave.

“Oh, for God's sake!” I said.

Lillian turned to me, startled. “Ramsay, please don't swear.” that word especially,
swear
, came out like steam forced through a pipe. She looked at the ground, her face burning, as if her husband had publicly admitted embezzlement or adultery.

Was this the woman I'd married?

Our driver re-emerged. I was set to demand he take us to the real cottage, the charming, rustic place that Rufus had talked up so glowingly. But Lillian walked away from me, her shoulders inclined into the wind. She disappeared into the shack.

In my haste to catch up with her I slipped on some ice and was caught by the driver, who'd been drinking on the journey, I now realized — he smelled like whisky. I almost asked him for a swig. He smiled maddeningly, as if he wanted to stay and watch us. Just to speed him on his way I produced a dollar from my pocket and pressed it into his hand.

Then I plunged into the cabin after my bride. I was acutely
aware that I'd not carried her over the threshold. I was no traditionalist, but it would have been nice to have the moment of laughter. All summer, it seemed, had been full of laughter, of weekends by the stream on her father's farm, of fly-fishing those blessed waters, and capturing on canvas the rocks and trees and the sunlight on the pools, and gazing at the lovely Lillian as she emerged from the trail with a loaf of bread just pulled from the summer oven, wrapped in a towel, with a knife and home butter for us to share.

I'd married the farmer's daughter — not a stranger at all.

And perhaps the cabin was not so bad. Though ancient, much of the original mortar remained between the cracks, and the thick walls seemed to stop the worst of the draft. The one main room was dominated by a wood stove. An old pine table with splintery chairs sat beneath a drying rack for laundry that lowered from the ceiling. At the far end was a loft for sleeping, connected to the ground floor by a plank ladder.

Already Lillian had a fire burning, and now she was taking off her long coat and looking square at me. Her thick blonde hair was still mostly pinned back in the fussy arrangement concocted for the ceremony, but she'd abandoned her hat, and now I noticed her neck was red in places — from the rubbing of my moustache, I realized.

There will be things for me to learn, I thought, as a married man.

I crossed the floor and let my own coat fall onto the table, then held her to me. Her shoulders were wide and strong, and I felt her burning in my blood again, like a fire in the fields.

“I'm sorry I lost my temper. If I'd known how filthy and old and rundown this place would be —”

“It's not so bad.”

“But it is! Don't you see? I've lived years of my life in awful places. No more, and not for you, certainly. I may never be rich, but we're going to live in comfort at least, surrounded by beauty . . . ”

She was looking at me then in what already felt like the old way, her heart bursting just to be with me. A man can wait decades to be looked at like that. It can be the hardest thing in the world to win for yourself, and yet I'd won it at last.

“You're still trembling,” she said. “Stand by the fire. I'll make us some dinner.” She hurried over to the pantry. “What's to eat?” She started taking things off the shelves. “Here's some beans.” She shook the container — it sounded as if it couldn't have held more than a half-dozen. “And what's this, flour?” She took off the top. “Oh!” she said, and clapped it back on. “Mice must be running all through here.” She opened up the larder and we both stared at the empty shelves.