Famished Lover (4 page)

“Please don't do that.”

I slid her shoulders free before stopping. I could see her collarbone and slip, the curve of her neck, the quiet freckles on the tops of her fine breasts rising and falling.

“Will and Thomas,” I said. “They were older than me, and everything they did I wanted to do. And Alex was a year younger, the wildest of all of us —”

The outline of her nipples, the right one soft, the left hardened by the cool air. I could see the dark, relaxed join at her shoulder where the flesh of her arm met the slope of her chest, and how the shadow from the window fell across a portion of it. I could feel already the soft shading I would give to that spot.

“Everything Will and Thomas did I wanted to do. They rode horses — we all did — for some of the local farmers, and we ran wild in the woods near our home, and Father packed us all off in a skiff one summer and sent us up the Chemainus River.” To the unspoken question in her eye I said, “Vancouver Island. That's where I grew up. Don't move.”

I got up quickly, found my sketchpad and pencils, then settled back where I was. But already the shadows had shifted, and she had switched the angle of her arm and now it was the fall of her throat that looked so intriguing, especially when she turned her head that way.

“You're not going to draw me like this!” she said in sudden
anger. She rebuttoned the top of her dress. “You were telling me about your brothers.”

I reached across and undid the first few buttons again.

“I'm your wife! You can't go drawing me like I'm some sort of —”

“Gift of nature? Blessing upon my eyes and soul?”

I wanted her so much to be the young woman at the sunlit stream who'd stopped my heart the moment I saw her.

“Thomas and Will,” she said. “And Alex.”

“Thomas was the tallest of all of us. And he had a punch” — I made a fist with my free hand while still sketching, setting out the turn of her chin — “like an iron bar. And he had sharp elbows. When you played football with him” — the lace on her slip, the twist of the strap on the left shoulder but not the right, the shadows of her hair. I started to pull at one of the clips.

“No, Ramsay. We're going to be late.” She sat up again and began rearranging herself.

“Church again.”

“It is the Sabbath.”

I followed her into the main room where she picked up her coat.

“Don't be like this. Put your suit on, please. We have to hurry!”

But instead of following orders I found myself seated again at the table, the newspaper before me. I set my sketchpad on top of it and filled in more lines: the soft mound of her shoulder and rise of her right arm, the tiny hairs near the edge of her hands, the promise of her lips. I was driving her to tears, I knew it, but I couldn't stop myself. “I'm sorry. My church is here. I know you can't understand it, but you are more
beautiful than any god to me. And when you come back —”

She hurried off, leaving the front door open.

Forgive me, forgive me, I thought.

The train bumps and swings to a halt, and we wait, the silent, mumbling mass of us, for the cattle doors to swing open. Please God, I think, let there be water. It's been hours and hours since we stopped for a time in a strange little town — well, it seemed little, though we could see almost nothing from where we sat. We stink like livestock, and the corners of the car are rank with shit and piss.

I stagger to the door and hope I won't fall out and land in a heap on the station platform. It's a few yards away and my feet are a pulpy mess inside my rotten boots, though my arm hardly hurts if I keep it in a certain position. I squat at the edge, dizzy, while the press of tired men behind me builds. A shabby crowd of civilians looks at us in silent loathing.

“Damn your bloody eyes!” Witherspoon yells from our group. “It isn't our fault. Ask your Kaiser Billy about the fucking war!”

He jumps down ahead of me — an enormous man, even with the bend in his back from this hard travel. His hair has gone white just in the last few days. As soon as he hits the ground he turns and offers me a hand. I reach out, and he settles me down like a father helping his young son from a tree. He's bleary-eyed like the rest of us, his uniform filthy and torn, face unshaved. We turn and help the others while the guards look on, stony-faced.

A group of women hand out alleged food — a pail of
dreadful soup and slices of black bread hard as wood.

“I wouldn't feed a dog these rations,” Witherspoon mutters.

We march away from the station, weary defeated men. My feet have no business walking anywhere, but other men are worse off and yet still stagger forward. We're supposed to remain in single file, two paces between each prisoner. Soon enough the fifty of us are strung out like an accordion. I am in the tail, either standing still, trying desperately to stay upright, or running to catch up as the wave of delayed reaction moves up and down the line.

Then, apparently, we lose our way and the head of the line twists back to collect the tail and stagger away in a new direction, off the road entirely and across a ploughed and impassable field.

“For the love of God!” Witherspoon cries. “Get us some bloody transport if you don't know where the hell you're going!”

And I think: they're going to shoot him. They'll leave his body in the furrows to fertilize their wormy food. But even the guards seem exhausted into deafness, and we walk on and on together.

They let us drink for a time from a small brook that runs alongside the endless field. I cup my hands and pull the water to my mouth as if I will never drink my fill.

How I long to rip the clothes from my body and slide my feet in the cooling water and slip away. Somehow I'm certain that one plunge would bring me back to myself and wash away this nightmare. One desperate, deluded act, which I cannot bring myself to try.

Finally I turn away from the creek and sit back on the soft
green grass. The sun beats down with pitiless good cheer. We lounge in shade and no one wants to get going again. Wither-spoon has cigarettes and matches that work. His big face curves slightly to the left, like a rain-softened football kicked too often. “See those soldiers there,” he says, meaning our guards, who are smoking in their own shade not far away, rifles slung on their shoulders, their faces perspiring in the heat of the afternoon. “They're beautiful women and we've caught them by the swimming hole. It's so hot they can't keep their clothes on.”

Some of the soldiers have their collars undone, that's all.

“You're barmy!” someone says.

Witherspoon closes his eyes. “They're undoing their stays. Their breasts are falling free. They're wriggling their bottoms to get out of their bloomers. They can't see us, but we can see them.”

He eases his long body back on the grass and puts his hands behind his head. “God! What a beautiful day!”

Five or six of us keep looking at that sorry group of guards, as if they might be the naked ladies Witherspoon is talking about.

“I have a girl back in Toronto,” Witherspoon says. I'm sitting closest to him and I suppose he's talking to me, but his eyes are closed still and he seems to be addressing himself as much as anyone. “That Beatrice. A kiss to her is like a glass of wine. She just can't get enough.”

A shadow starts to pass over the field, and Witherspoon opens his eyes.

“Who's your girl?” he says to me. “Come on, don't keep her secret. Not now. We need a bloody great harem to get us through these days.”

The shadow deepens rapidly, a huge cloud, I suppose, blocking out the sun. I close my eyes.

“Margaret.” Just saying her name makes me feel as if I'm dropping a coin down a well. So I say it again. “Margaret with the dark brown hair —”

“God, it's a Zep!” someone says. An airship glides over the field, enormous, a giant floating ship of war, and we all stand as if we might have to defend ourselves against it. The German soldiers who've been lounging like us are now on their feet too, being ordered about, and begin struggling with cables to tie the ship down.

“Been out bombing London, have you!” Witherspoon calls. “Bloody murderers!”

We might as well be ants. There's nothing we can do to touch that huge machine.

But then a gust of wind comes up, and not much wind, either, but some of the cables must have been poorly secured, because the airship launches itself again, just as the crew is climbing out of the gondola. A dark shape in the distance falls as the Zeppelin rears over and starts to bounce — that was a man, I think dully — across the field, the remaining cables snapping now and whipping out at the tiny figures running after her.

“Hooray! Run, you fuckers! Run!”

We all yell as the Germans bumble after their now ridiculous airship. If only the wind were stronger! But it's hardly more than scattered puffs. Some minutes later the beast is secured properly, and we are on the march again, tired, filthy, hungry men. The day is cuttingly hot and bright.

Step and step and painful step. But because of Witherspoon and his reveries Margaret now is loose in my imagination.
Margaret with the tiny, perfect nose. Margaret, whose dark eyes linger far too long, and whose lips I kissed, once straight out in public on a bridge when we were both overcome and once in the darkness outside the hospital my last night in London.

My last free night before the seams of the earth split open.

Step upon step. How quickly the day closes in. But I see her suddenly in the fog. She's walking beside me now, gripping the hem of her dress to keep it from the mud of the road.

“I didn't expect you to get captured,” she says in her clever voice, almost kidding.

She can't be here, of course. But her body seems close enough to touch.

“What happened to your boots?” she asks.

My feet. My feet are in shreds.

“You'll have to get new ones. I'd give you mine, but they wouldn't fit. Don't laugh!”

I can't help myself. Suddenly it seems amusing, the idea of me having Margaret's feet, wearing Margaret's boots.

“You have to look after yourself, Ramsay. I'm serious now. Get up!”

For some reason I'm on my side, entangled in a bush.

Her expression is serious. Her hat has fallen off, some of her hair has come undone, and her white hands are clenched in little fists. “Get up!” she says, and kneels down to shake my shoulder. “You can't rest here. They won't let you.”

I pull at her wrist, and she topples onto me. It hardly takes anything, she was balanced so precariously on her knee. I kiss at her, but she tears herself loose.

“Not here! Ramsay, for God's sake! Get up!” A guard
shoulders her aside then. I'm so angry I snap to my feet and yell at him. He raises his rifle to club me, and I glimpse Margaret standing behind him. “I'm all right!” she says.

The guard barks out something.

Somehow Witherspoon is standing beside me, and I recognize it's his hand keeping me back.

I step along, steer my bleeding feet back onto the road.

“Don't be an idiot just for me,” Margaret says from somewhere. I can no longer see her, the fog is so thick. I look around and around, everywhere, nearly twist out of Witherspoon's grasp.

“That was her!”

“Who?” Witherspoon's voice is low, as if he wants me to stay quiet. Of course — the guards are all around, and if they see her too —

“Margaret,” I whisper in his ear.

Sometime later I heard Lillian's feet on the stoop, but she did not come in. I waited and waited, but the door did not open. Finally I pulled on my coat and found her leaning against the iron railing, looking down at the snowbound street, at the other tenements, the mountain in the distance, a cigarette in her hand.

I'd never seen her smoke before.

“What are you doing? You must be freezing!”

She did not turn. “I don't really feel it.”