Sacred Hunger (17 page)

This first suitor of his daughter was no doubt suffering, but it seemed from arrogance as much as love. He had known Erasmus for many years, had seen him from time to time as he grew up. It was with a feeling of surprise now that he met the dark eyes and realized that the youth had become formidable. “How old are you now, Erasmus?”’ he said.

“I shall be twenty-two in December, sir.”

‘allyou have spoken of this with your father, of course?”’

“Yes, sir.”

Wolpert permitted himself a smile. Erasmus was the only son and he knew the extent of Kemp’s ambitions for him. “And how did he take it? With a pinch of salt, I suppose, eh?”’

“He has given his consent.”

“Aye, I dare say so.” Wolpert was still smiling. “Why would he not? But as a distant prospect, no doubt? He will want to keep you by him some time yet.”

“No, sir, he has made no condition regarding the time.” Erasmus had great pride of family and as far as he had pondered his father’s response, apart from his own relief at it, it had seemed to him like a condescension to the Wolperts, something they ought to be pleased at. But now he saw the indulgent smile on the heavy face fade quickly, and for a space of some moments he found the older man’s eyes turned upon him as they might have been on some not fully trusted associate—not unfriendly exactly, but appraising and rather cold.

“How?”’ Wolpert said in a quieter tone.

“Are you saying your father has given immediate consent to the match?”’

“I have said so,” Erasmus returned, rather brusquely.

Wolpert appeared to muse for some moments, then he said, “Listen well to me, my fine young man. My daughter is not yet eighteen years of age. She is too young to be saddled with promises. You may say to her what you like and she may answer you as she pleases—I cannot be present at it, so I can have nothing to say about it. But I will countenance no special arrangements, at least for the time being. You may continue to see my daughter as you see her now, as a friend among other friends. She will be eighteen in some months, then we shall reconsider.”

Rising to terminate the interview he caught a blaze from the young man’s eyes such as might have been reserved for a rival. “I expect you to abide by this on our words and my wishes alone,” he said with an involuntary response of severity. “And I will make both known to my daughter.”

This he did, in gentle terms, and had an impression the girl was relieved at it. That same evening he consulted his wife, who had been aware of the situation for some considerable time, he now discovered, and who had sounded the girl in ways that would not have entered his head. Of the strength of the young man’s feelings there could be no doubt. “He cannot keep his eyes off the girl,” Mrs Wolpert said placidly. “He watches her every movement.” Embroidery in lap, eyes mild, hair tucked under her close-fitting lace coif, she seemed at a long remove from such devouring regards, but managed nevertheless to convey an idea of them to her husband’s mind. Young Kemp’s feelings were written in his eyes. And what eyes they were, full of fire! There was no denying he was a handsome young man, though far from smooth-mannered, and Sarah of course was aware of it, looks and manners both; there was growing up a fashion for wildness…

“If it is a fashion, it cannot be so wild,”

Wolpert said drily. “And Sarah, with what eyes does she look at him?”’

“It is bound to make an impression on a young girl to be the object of so much attention. She is very much aware of him.” Mrs Wolpert paused for a short while, though without looking at her husband.

“I think she is rather frightened of the young man,” she said at last, “though she would laugh at the notion.”

“Frightened, you say? She is not easily daunted.” Wolpert considered for a moment, then he said, “If she is frightened, she cannot have much tenderness for him.”

Upon this his wife favoured him with a look of pity for his understanding; and as usual, in response, he showed himself aggrieved. “Why are these things kept from me?”’ he demanded. “Why am I always the last to learn of a thing? I wager old Andrew knows more of the business than I do. A fine thing for a man’s wife and daughter to plot together to keep him in the dark.”

But he kept wife and daughter and everyone else in the dark concerning the step he took next in the matter. He might or might not be obtuse, he told himself, regarding matters of the heart; but he was certainly not so where material interest was concerned, and his suspicions had been roused by Kemp’s alacrity. The following afternoon he called on a man named Partridge, whom he had used once before, some years previously, on a delicate investigation into the extent of a client’s credit, and whose thoroughness and discretion he had not forgotten.

Partridge was accustomed to describe himself as an attorney. He had a close and cluttered office on the upper floor of a house in Limekiln Lane, invaded by the fumes of a nearby tannery; but most of his business was conducted elsewhere: in registry offices, counting-houses, copying-rooms, the taverns and taphouses frequented by clerks and warehousemen and the small functionaries of business houses. He belied the associations of his name, being lantern-jawed, gimlet-eyed and scrawny, dressed in rusty black, with an ancient, dishevelled goat’s-hair wig.

“Remember,” Wolpert said, “the most absolute discretion is essential, not only as concerns the dealings between the two of us but in all that affects Mr Kemp. I do not want anything noised about, no suspicion attaching anywhere— people are always ready to say that when there is smoke there must be fire. Mr Kemp is an acquaintance of many years, for whom I have considerable regard. There must be no damage to him or to his interests. All I want is the facts of his present situation.”

“You shall have them. Have no worry on that score, my dear sir.” Patridge nodded and glanced aside through his small, smeared window at the tannery yard below, as if witnesses lay out there, among the malodorous hides. “Joshua Partridge is the soul of discretion,” he said. “Discretion is his strong suit. He is noted for it, famous for it.”

“Famous for discretion?”’

“That is not the contradiction it seems, sir. I mean of course among those who have honoured me with their commissions. Without that reputation I could not continue in employment one day longer. In short,” Partridge added with one of the sudden bursts of frankness which characterized his speech, “I should be on the rubbish heap in no time.” He paused for a moment to investigate an ear for wax. Then he said, “I shall require, in addition to the fifty per cent advance of fee we have agreed on, a sum of ten shillings a day while enquiries last. This is to cover all necessary expenses I may incur in the furtherance of my enquiries. In short, sir-“

Wolpert was ready to pay but it was against his engrained habit to pay without discussion. “That is considerably more than I remember paying the last time I had the honour to employ you, Mr Partridge.”

“Sir,” Partridge said, “this is an expanding age, the nation is prospering, our voice is heard in the councils of Europe. As a result of this the cost of everything goes up daily and that must also include gifts, rewards and all manner of pecuniary inducements. Numbers of men are getting richer and greater numbers are getting poorer.

Alas, both classes have higher expectations these days.” The attorney permitted a lean smile to move his jaws. “In short, sir,” he said with a burst, “there has been a leap in bribes.”

Day by day the Liverpool Merchant made progress southwards. Under full sail, propelled by fair winds, she dipped and rose through the heavings of the sea with a profound regularity. On the line of the horizon there would sometimes appear the brief stain of another ship, like a breath on a distant mirror; but most of the time she could feel herself alone on the ocean, the sole trader of the world, instead of what she was, a member of a vast fleet sent forth by men of enterprise and vision all over Europe, engaged in the greatest commercial venture the world had ever seen, changing the course of history, bringing death and degradation and profits on a scale hitherto undreamed of.

That the ship was a mere corpuscle in this nourishing bloodstream was not easy to imagine for the men aboard her. To them she was a universe of routine tasks and routine sounds comthe bell marking the half hours, shouted orders, the wash of the waves, the wincing tune of the timbers as they were exercised by the sway of the sea.

Forces less tangible but equally determinate worked on the men and they were set in relation to one another in sympathy or antipathy, as happens in all communities.

Fourteen days out they began to be sensible of a change in the climate. Hughes felt it high up at the main topgallant masthead, standing by to loose the sail. He was always happiest when alone and high up, past the timbers of the mastheads; only here, apart from corners of the night-time deck, could he be sure of finding no others close by him. He climbed to solitude hand over hand, looking up towards it where it lived in the sky, bare feet sure in the rat-lines, body moving to the sway of the ship.

Most of the crew could work aloft if need be, and men like Blair, Wilson, Libby and Deakin were proficient seamen; but there was no one to match Hughes when it came to working in the tops, no one with his speed and balance in climbing. He could go from deck to cross-trees quicker than men half his age and keep nerve and footing and hand sail in storm and dark when the gail tore at him and the ship bucked like a maddened charger to throw him off.

This sunny morning, leaning to brace in the yard for a free wind, the scent of the south came to him across the water. Some quality of balm had come into the air.

The ship leaned to starboard and Hughes saw dolphins swimming alongside, directly below, close to the surface. The sun struck down to them and in their rapid motions the creatures formed and dissolved themselves, dark grey, silver and blue by turns, then shimmering and streaming into sunlight. And Hughes, who from adolescence had been unsettled by people coming too close, who had once scarred a man terribly in the hysteria of contested space, was happy to be in this clear weather, above the clouds of sails, with these rainbow bursts of dolphins following the ship.

Paris, taking his paces on the after part of the deck, felt the change in latitude as a softer quality in the sky and a gleam of pearl at times on the undulations of the sea. He saw flying-fish for the first time in his life and wrote about them in his journal.

He had found unexpected solace in this daily recording of observation and impression; it had come to seem a contrivance for talking still to Ruth, telling her of things she might not know, submitting his thoughts to her, to share them and in a way to have them judged, as he had delighted to do when they had been together.

The translation of Harvey, too, he persisted with, as a focus for the mind, something, in the monotony of these southward-sailing days, to give him a sense of choice, of independent being, some relief from the oppression of passivity which stalked his days and nights. He felt as subject to external forces as the ship was, or as the sea itself, whose every twitch was determined, whose rages and calms were equally docile. Docile too the vast forces that ruled her and the shores she nibbled at. Paris thought I3I of it as a maze of concentric circles on a single plane, each continuous with the next, like a flattened spiral, with himself a speck on some interior rim. Somewhere beyond and above was that principle of harmony eloquently espoused by Mr Pope in his “Essay on Man”. The couplet ran through his mind now: All discord, harmony not understood. All partial evil, universal good.

The followers of this harmonizing God, in a spurt of partial evil, had killed all his hopes and ruined his life. And now, at some other rim of the maze, there were flying-fish, which Ruth had never seen.

They are, as far as I can judge, some eighteen inches in length, with tails forked like a swallow’s, but one side is shorter. They have two wings, which are not properly speaking wings at all but which I lake to be the fins of the breast enlarged and shaped to this purpose of flight. [It is a large question how this shaping came about.) I did not observe the fishes to flap their wings, but to glide rather. They appear to build up speed under the water and, on gaining the surface, make rapid beats of the still-submerged tail, and it is this which gives them the final impetus they need to rise up into the air. Once airborne thus, they are capable of performing several consecutive glides over the water, the tail propelling them up again each time they sink below the surface.

These creatures are fashioned precisely to their purpose. The fashioning is open to observation, but the purpose remains obscure. Why should these fish alone, among the denizens of ocean, be equipped for flight? Can there be aspiration among fishes? A question I could put to our good captain, if only to see him struggle with the furious contempt it would cause him.

If aspiration determines development, the eagle would be judged superior to the wren… It occurs to me as a legitimate question, whether these flying-fish could replace their fins if damaged. We now know a lizard can do so with its tail; and Reaumur has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that a crayfish can grow a new claw. These are strong arguments against a fixed creation and an unchanging order. If a crayfish can grow a new claw, why cannot a bird? If a lizard was given this particular attribute at the moment of creation, why were other creatures not given it?

Paris paused. The door of his cabin was open and from where he sat he could see the stern of the punt, which was hoisted amidships just forward of the mainmast. It made a beaker-shaped angle with the boom on which it rested, and the beaker filled and drained with exact regularity as the ship dipped her bows and raised them. The liquid, pale cobalt in colour, was not at first associated in his mind with the sea at all; for some moments, seeing this calm filling of the beaker, he was back in his student days, at a long, stained bench with others, testing for acids with litmus, holding up the glass vessel to see the obedient stain. He was distressed now at the memory. Those days were like a time before a fall; the ruin of his life lay between. How wonderful he had thought that suffusion of red… The memory of Wilson’s flogging came suddenly to him, the start of blood across the man’s back, the pattern of drops on the deck, Thurso’s expression of fulfilment … Conviction pierced Paris before he could summon any customary defence: this was not some other point in that maze of circles, he and Wilson occupied the same point. My back, my blood, me sullen in chains, me calling for help…