Famished Lover (26 page)

“Mrs. Crome did not get out of bed all day.” Maisie's words were curt and clear. “And her father has been no help.”

“You've been awfully kind.”

Her chin quavered and her stare was so relentless that I believed she could see every falsehood hidden in my bones. “Christ's mission is to help the less fortunate,” she said finally, and focused again on her knitting.

I stepped down the hall and blew out a bitter breath. Then I passed through the kitchen and into the room where Michael, on his little cot, was clutching his blankets to his throat. His face looked peaceful, his fine brown bangs drooping lower than his eyes. He had Lillian's fair skin, but there was some of Father too in the sharpness of his chin.

Lillian was lying in the big bed, silently watching me.

“You're awake,” I said. “I'm sorry I'm late.” I launched into a stumbling explanation about the trains and the house.

“Yes,” she said in a lost little voice.

“Are you feeling all right?” She didn't answer. “You should have a look at the house,” I said finally. “It's coming together.” I sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand, which was so warm I wondered if she had a fever. The movement seemed to perk her out of her gloom for a moment. She reached up with her other hand and felt my cheek and smiled in her old way. “It won't be as large as we'd originally planned, of course. We'll leave the upstairs for later and concentrate on the main floor. If I can put in some good weekends of work, and if the others keep helping the way they have . . .”

She was staring off at the shadows in the room. Finally she said, “We did go over to the house. Yesterday. And Michael was playing in one of the piles. In the rubbish. And we saw . . . parts of the paintings that you had piled there. Some parts . . . Michael saw.” She turned her gaze on me now. “I saw new paintings there! New paintings of
her
!”

“Lillian.”

“God is punishing us for your sick thoughts!”

Michael groaned in his cot, and I could hear Maisie Camp-bell's footsteps in the kitchen.

“Please keep your voice down.”

“I
won't!
” Tears now streaked her face.

“Don't be jealous of Margaret. For God's sake!”

“Your language, Ramsay!” she said bitterly.

I got up and opened the door. Maisie Campbell stepped back.

“It's all right, Mrs. Campbell. Everything is fine. Good night now.”

I kept the door open until her feet were disappearing down the hallway, then I closed it again softly. Michael yawned and rolled partway on his side, then settled back into sleep. I sat down again on the edge of the bed.

“You said you would not hurt me.” Lillian looked hard at the wall. “Yet you paint that woman again and again. Do you do them at work? After your advertising pieces? Are they going to fire you, Ramsay? What about Michael and me?”

I hardly knew where to begin, what lies to tell to counter which nightmare concoctions of her overworked imagination.

“You still love her,” she said, before I could begin.

Mrs. Campbell's footsteps were in the kitchen again, soft but unmistakable.

“Let's . . . just get through the next months,” I said. “The paintings are gone. We have a house to rebuild. Margaret is . . . larger in your imagination now than she is in mine.”

I could hear Maisie Campbell breathing again outside the door.

“But why do you keep painting her when you know how much it hurts me?” she whispered finally.

I tried to keep my voice steady. “Beauty is like . . . food and air to me. If I paint a woman's beauty I am breathing, I am
having dinner.” The tears came harder. Of course I could not tell her anything more.

“The past died in the fire,” I said. “I won't be painting her again.”

She could see it in my face and did not press for answers. I was sitting in the studio trying to render a girl in a bathing suit. The girl was long gone, and the bathing suit would not shape properly. I'd returned to sketches and fiddled with colours, and the closer I seemed to get to a version of reality the less right it all looked.

“I gather you are regretting your misdeeds,” Dorothy said.

She stood away from me with her jaw set and her eyebrows knit together with the hardness of the moment. I looked away and stared at the floor, as if some message might be there telling how to keep from blowing us all apart.

“Does your wife know? I'm afraid I don't even know her name.”

“Lillian doesn't know. But if she finds out —”

“Come for a walk with me.”

We climbed the hill from the office, walking all the way to the forest trails on Mount Royal. The winds were particularly cold, the skies impenetrably grey. Her body was crushed to my side, with no words passing between us. Parts of the trail were slippery. An old man looked up at us from a bench and then returned to his bottle, which was almost empty. Otherwise there was no one: we seemed alone in a wilderness.

Yet through the leafless branches we could also see the
tops of the towering buildings down below us. I did not have a sense of the time except for the oppressively general feeling that the hour was late, that doors were closing and bridges burning all around me.

“I do love you,” she said finally. Her large grey eyes were impressively clear. “I would never have thrown myself at you otherwise. You must understand that. But I will not compete with your wife and child.”

We were stopped and looking at a frozen log that had rolled somehow onto part of the trail.

On we walked until the darkness began to gather and I felt an unspoken question: train or city? For a moment the privacy of her apartment beckoned enormously. I could see myself in her bedroom. I could see the two of us wrapped in the luxury of endless stretches of time.

“I have to make my way home,”

I said. “Of course you do.”

I kissed her neck and throat and then her mouth. She closed her eyes then, and I lifted her a few steps off the trail and leaned her against an oak that must have stood five hundred years. Even in her winter coat she felt lighter than leaves. She wrapped her legs round me and we embraced and an airplane roared above us, but I did not open my eyes. Then a horse trotted by pulling something and after that a dog, and later I heard children's voices on the trail just steps away.

If we close our eyes, I thought, they will not see us. If no words are spoken then it is not so. Time will slide us through this moment and there will be no need to choose.

London. Stokebridge Street. Once upon a time I stood as a young soldier gazing at this lovely semicircle of row houses. Battle mud was still on my puttees. I carried a pack and rifle, for God's sake. I'd travelled all day and slept out in the park like a barbarian, full of the juice of life, then walked the King's Road all morning to get here.

Now I am hardly standing. No bag to carry. A half-dead fannigan in someone else's ill-fitting uniform, rustled up to replace my German rags. Standing at the gate of number thirty, the perfect middle of the arc. My hand is on the black metal gate. I am pushing at the latch. Inside will be Margaret and her sister Emily and my aunt and uncle. Their warm fire. I will see them and my sentence will be over.

I am pushing at the latch but it will not budge. It's frozen hard. I hit it with my hand but it will not move. And I am seized with the absurdity: I walked out of Germany but I can't unlatch Margaret's gate. My strength is gone.

The door opens and I stumble back some terrible steps. A woman emerges, dressed in black. Even in the veil I know her as my Aunt Harriet. With her is Henry Boulton, the weedy man in a mourning suit. He is putting on his top hat and holding Harriet's elbow as if she cannot walk. I know immediately that Margaret is dead. I have come too late.

She has died in the Spanish flu that is taking so many of the healthy and the young.

I stare, stunned, as Uncle Manfred emerges from the door, struggling with his own top hat. And Emily, the sister — my cousin Emily, whose portrait I painted, who has written me throughout the nightmare — walks out veiled as well and shuts the door behind her. Boulton gets to the gate and unlatches it with a smallish nudge of his left hand. That's how
weak I have become, I think — even Boulton can dislodge what I could not move.

He holds the gate open for Harriet, who steps as if not far from the grave herself. And Uncle Manfred grips Emily's arm — I can't decide who is supporting whom.

They are going to Margaret's funeral. The realization burns inside me. For there is the taxicab waiting, its engine puffing. I didn't even notice it before. Boulton holds open the black door and helps Harriet in.

They've not seen me. I'm standing only steps away, but I'm a fannigan ghost.

Now Boulton is helping Emily up the vehicle's step.

“Emily,” I say softly.

She turns and looks at me, confused. “Did you know her?”

It's Margaret. Not Emily at all. She looks deep into my face, my eyes, in that way she has that breathes life into everything.

But not this time.

“Did you know my sister Emily?” she asks again.

Not the least spark of recognition, even when she lifts her veil and looks full bore into my soul.

I hurry off blindly. God knows where. If I ran my frame would shatter into a thousand shards. I can barely shuffle my feet. But no one comes after me. I do not hear my name.

We could not stay with Mrs. Campbell forever, of course, and eventually the prospect of having her own home again spurred Lillian on. She did much of the inside finishing during those days while I was off in the city. If there was no paint she cleaned; if there were no tiles she found old rugs and beat them into newer ones; if the furniture was incomplete she banged together crates and odd ends of scrap to make a dresser, a table, something for a child to sit on. And if she was not happy then at least she was not immobile in bed, staring off at nothing. I moved myself into the spare bedroom on the main floor, ostensibly because she slept so poorly now and I had to rise so early to catch the train. I remember my father telling me that separate bedrooms were the salvation of many a marriage — a truth I had not understood until now. Lillian had the farm, the garden and Michael at home, and I had my studio, where I confined my ghosts behind a door that locked, with cornering windows overlooking hills and fields, trees and sky. It was a truce of sorts, a truce that held as days played out and years stole by in a house of sorts, cobbled together from the remnants of past errors.

If you do not choose, that itself is a choice, and sometimes love, like a wild weed you fail to keep from your forgotten garden, roots itself and grows as fast as a child and for a time seems to lend its beauty to everything else, even though you'd meant to kill it in the beginning. Which is to say that what I should have put an end to in the city I didn't. For Dorothy came alive then too. It was as if she'd been waiting for me for ages, and now that the terrible effort of patience was done she couldn't contain all that she'd been holding back. She burned in her glances and I did not shy from them. A man too waits a whole life for a partner whose gaze sets the sky alight. There were days when I worked in a kind of fever, when the lovely feminine flesh that life had conspired to lay before my eyes fed me, fired me for hours. And I would look across and really begin to see, to know my Dorothy.

Her face was smaller than my hand, unremarkable except for narrow-set, wary grey eyes that looked as if they knew everything, or at least everything they wanted to know. Her skin was pale. It reminded me of mushroom flesh from the darkest, wettest corner of the forest. When she smoked, which was most hours of most days, her wrist would bend as if under the weight of the cigarette. I would hold her hand sometimes just to look at the enormous difference: mine so thickly ribbed with work veins, my skin brown and ill-used, every nail cracked and beaten up. Her hands were as delicate as paper.

Sometimes when I was with her I was nearly overcome with the feeling that I could crush her in a moment, like crumpling a leaf, and she would simply watch with her large eyes and let the rain blow hard against the window.

For it always seemed to be raining: cold, harsh, bitter
Montreal rain that was likely to freeze against the glass, to turn her street into a ruinous obstacle course. So often cars furiously spun their wheels halfway up the hill, angled sideways like horses helpless in mud. The tires whined as bystanders hopelessly pushed, trying to get any sort of grip on the pavement with shoes or galoshes.

I would fight my way up Stanley like a hardened, desperate salmon, then through the doors and up those five flights. The initial staircase was wide and well lit, an inviting boulevard, but after the second and especially third floors, the stairs narrowed and the light cheapened. Like everything in those hard days it was strained through a lens of absolute necessity. Even the handrails narrowed, and the broad, generous oak of the first floor turned into mean, skinny iron painted black, cold on fingers already chilled in the freezing rain.