Sacred Hunger (25 page)

He is famous in London among people of the theatre there.”

“Famous as a parasite and poseur, I make no doubt,” Erasmus said, forgetting everything in the immediate promptings of his jealousy. “He would be famous anywhere for those qualities.” He paused a moment. He knew she had praised Adams only in order to wound him. He said with bitter accusation, “He touched you.”

There was too much force of feeling in this for the loneliness of the place, and he saw the consciousness of it reflected instantly in her face. On the way here the boisterous behaviour of the wind had kept them separate. Now this magic calm, like a descent, a hush imposed on them from above, brought a greater closeness than being alone in a room could have done.

In a room there is walking to and fro, there is looking at objects, there is glancing at the different world outside the window. Here there was only one world, at once vast and narrow, and they were enclosed in it, with nothing to look at but further evidence of the fact.

All movement and sound further off-the violent agitation of the trees on the skyline, the distraught cries of lapwings plunging in the wind—deepened the silence they were sharing.

“We must go back,” Sarah said. Only rage with him could have brought her this far; and all rage had gone, short-lived as always with her, succeeded now by apprehension at the passion she saw in his eyes and a sort of pity for his tenacity. All his being was there together—he never flickered, never faltered, he had no reserve. She was swept by a sense of his physical splendidness and the doggedness of his desire for her. This, though not quite an acknowledgement of his merit, came the more keenly for her recent upbraiding of him. An instinct of subterfuge, a desire to reduce the level of feeling, led her to say, almost as if in commiseration, “Of course, I know he did not have a high opinion of your acting, but I often heard Elisabeth say he was too severe in his judgement, and Mr Parker said so too.”

“Good God,” Erasmus said violently, “I don’t care what he thought of my acting. Do you think I would have killed him for that?”’ He paused for a moment. His throat pained him with the sudden onset of his love. He knew, with the perception of the stronger, that she was improvising now, that she was spent, in retreat. ‘He touched you,” he said. “He touched you and I mustn’t, that is why.” The injustice of it released him. In vibrant tones he said, “And yet I have more right. I love you. I cannot rest for thinking about you.” He moved towards her awkwardly, clumsily. “You are my life,” he said. He was half blind with the force of his feeling and the terrible exposure of the declaration.

She started back a little, then stood still. The flush his words had brought faded, leaving her paler than before.

Her breathing had quickened, but her eyes rested on him steadily. “Elisabeth,” she said. “She will be watching us.”

“I don’t care who is watching,” Erasmus said.

Not to deter him, but for the sake of saying something in face of the advance upon her, she was beginning to speak of Elisabeth again when she felt herself taken in a strong embrace and urgently kissed on the mouth.

Briefly, but with an unmistakable warmth, she returned the kiss. She felt a strange leaping motion within her as she was pressed against him. For some moments there was a sense of precariousness, as if she might fall if he let her go. Then she pressed her hands hard against him and broke free.

Neither of them said anything for some moments.

Erasmus’s breathing was clearly audible to both. He glanced away from her, back the way they had come. The lake, scene of his tribulation, was not visible from here, but he could see a section of parkland and the upper part of the long-fronted house. It looked unbelievably distant. He felt the warmth of Sarah’s kiss still on his lips. ‘We had better go back,” he said, looking steadily and unsmilingly at her.

Now it was she who seemed disposed to linger.

“Look at the sheep there,” she said. “They have found a place out of the wind.”

Slightly above them, a little further into the fold between the hills, enveloped in the same hush as themselves, sand-coloured sheep were grazing together, their fleeces unstirred by the wind which only a few yards beyond them was sweeping the grass.

“They have found the one sheltered place,” she said. She knew that this was a moment she would remember all her life. “Just like us,” she said. Wonder at this caused her to meet his eyes, this time with a gaze protracted.

“Say you will marry me,” Erasmus said.

“Say it.” It sounded harsh more a demand than a plea. “You will kill me if you don’t.”

“We must keep to what my father said.” Sarah was pale still, but she was smiling and her face wore an expression he had not seen on it before, of promise or perhaps only a new boldness, he could not determine. “We must wait till I am eighteen,” she said.

The Liverpool Merchant crept nearer to the coast through repeated, violent squalls of rain, a suitor drawn by obstinate attraction to brave all rebuffs of the beloved. From time to time the distant arc of the Sierra Leone mountains was glimpsed, only to be lost again in the low banks of cirrus constantly building to eastward. After three days of this, the weather clearing, they came to anchor in eleven fathoms. At daybreak the following day they weighed again but now, after all the bufferings they had suffered, there was not wind enough to overhaul the ebb and so they languished under full sail until a fuming Thurso ordered the yawl hoisted out to tow athwart the tide. Late in the afternoon a sea breeze sprang up and with it they gained upon the tide enough to make anchorage that night in nine fathoms, just south of the Bananas, leeward of the shoals and near enough shore to hear the incessant crashing of the breakers—as near as any merchantman of the time dared go.

Early next morning, from the deck, Paris had his first steady sight of Africa. Beyond the stretch of sea and the boiling of the surf, a low, forested horizon, pale green, unbroken, giving an immediate sense of subterfuge, of a deceitful sameness.

There were no mountains in view now; they were concealed behind the wooded promontory of Sherbro. The sky was pale crimson in the aftermath of sunrise, as if with the glow of some distant conflagration. The land itself, where the creatures dwelt that they had come for, was hidden behind the green wall.

Flecks of white wavered above the line of the shore —sea-birds of some kind. It was not a single line, he now saw. There was an interplay, bands of colour or light, sea-water paling as the depth lessened, the mist of the breaking waves, the wet shoreline, the haze of green where shore and forest met. The zones lay side by side, blending at the edges but quite distinct. Some memory tugged at Paris, an obscure sense of recognition.

Perhaps it is merely the fact of arrival that seems always the same, whatever the look of the place, he wrote a little later in his journal, seeking by compulsive habit now to confide his sensations. That is, if this can be called an arrival. To arrive, in any happy sense we give it, is to be restored to oneself, to be taken back into community, for whatever that holds of good or ill. But we carry our community with us, like all ships, and it is one that seems unwelcome to the land; we have had this battering of squalls in these last days; and now there is this fearsome surf, which does not let us approach nearer, and the barricade of forest beyond it.

Meanwhile, we continue to make preparations, and beautify ourselves as if for a bridal. The booms have been lashed up to the masts, the decks cleared and scrubbed and scrubbed again and the ship’s complement of cannon run out—Thurso means to announce our presence here with a salvo. There are men fixing the awning on the quarterdeck and others busy fitting out the yawl. This yawl, or longboat, as I learn from Barton, is very essential to our purpose here, where the ship is prevented from coming in close. They have furnished her with spars and sails and the gunner is to mount a swivel cannon in the bows. Being flat and high-built she can bring stores aboard through the surf; but her chief employ is cruising the coast for slaves and getting downriver to the small trading stations.

Amidst all this activity there are two men conspicuously idle: these are the hulking, one-eyed man Libby, and the little man named Blair, more likeable, but a great boaster and violent in his disposition. These two have been on deck since yesterday in leg irons, on the captain’s orders, for fighting on board ship. Both their faces show the marks of it. I feel a tension among the men these days, which seems to mount with the pace of preparation and the expectation of having slaves aboard; or it may be no more than the nearness to land after these long weeks at sea. Enmities flare up among them, violent disputes and sometimes blows; these two now are sitting together against the windlass in an enforced proximity that must be in the highest degree - It was at this point that he heard the sudden thunder of the ship’s cannon. He left the sentence unfinished.

Almost before the reverberations had died away he had closed his journal and was making his way above. There was no sign of either the captain or the first mate.

Among those on deck the discharge appeared to have aroused small interest. Curls of blue smoke lay over the deck and there was a sharp smell of burnt sulphur. Wilson, Sullivan and Gavana were still at work on the quarterdeck awning. He saw Deakin and Galley wringing out swabs at the starboard head—these two had struck up a friendship, he had noticed. They generally worked together now, the big simple one, whose face wore often a shy and vacant smile, following the smaller like an enlarged shadow. Paris made his way forward towards them.

“That was loud enough to wake them,” he said, nodding towards the indifferent line of the horizon. Nothing changed in Callcy’s face or posture but he saw Deakin straighten himself and come to a position of loose attention. He was wearing only a singlet and wide-bottomed nankeen trousers. His body was narrow and sinewy, straight-shouldered, deeply burned by old suns.

“That will let them know we are here, I suppose, if anything will,” Paris said, giving to the words the tone of a question. He had from the beginning, almost, used his ignorance—of the sea, the routines of the ship, the procedures of trade—to incline the men to talk more freely to him, break down their sense of the difference in station that made them distrustful.

“Yes, sir,” Deakin said. “Well, that is, they already know we are here, but by the cannon they know we are ready to trade.”

The voice was level and flat, rather toneless, conveying a sense, odd to Paris, of dissociation from the mind behind it. With the almost helpless acuteness of perception that descended on him nowadays in any exchange with his fellows, Paris met the blue, rather deep-set eyes. Deakin’s regard was very steady and direct, though without insolence. There was something stark in it, as of a secret to be communicated, some unique idea that had been long suppressed.

“To trade for slaves, that is?”’ Paris spoke carelessly, at random almost, seeking to recover distance, to dispel his too-intimate sense of the other’s being. He glanced at Calley, who was looking down, licking slowly round his mouth with a blunt tongue. “Not other trade?”’

“Aye, there is ships come in here for all manner of things.

Camwood, pepper, palm oil, elephant’s teeth. The slavers take teeth often enough, and they will take gold dust further down the coast, but mostly this is to spend for negroes, when they get the chance. It is slaves that make the trade nowadays.

That is what they say who have done the voyage regular.”

“And you have not? But you have made the Guinea run before, haven’t you? This is not your first time on a slaver?”’

“Once before, yes.”

“And how did you find it?”’ He at once regretted this question, which he thought must seem frivolous. It had been the result of processes too complex for explanation, even had they been clear enough to him: his own sense of impending ordeal, brought out by the crash of the cannon; curiosity about a man obviously decent, for Deakin seemed that to him..

.

“Find it?”’ Deakin repeated wonderingly. It struck him as a strange question. His life was a pool not so easy to fish in. Only one of higher station could so carelessly try to do it. He met the gaze of the man talking to him, noted the strongly marked brows, the furrowed lines running to the corners of the mouth. The surgeon’s eyes were a strange colour—they looked silver against the sun-darkened skin. Neat and quick in his own movements, Deakin had noticed from the first the surgeon’s ungainliness of posture and movement. He seemed not fully at ease with his own body now, as he stood there in the full-sleeved white shirt and dark breeches. “When I was younger,” Deakin said steadily, “when I was first going to sea, I made a voyage on a slaveship. The negroes rose on us while we lay at Calabar with the crew all drunk. They knocked the brains out of the first mate and two of the men on watch. We had to kill twenty-three before we could get them below. They all but took the ship.” He was silent for some moments, then he jerked his head towards his companion.

“Dan’l has never been on any kind of ship before,” he said.

“He is learning well,” Paris said. He had noticed Calley’s devoted application to the ropes.

Calley was flustered at being so suddenly the centre of attention. This man expected something of him and so did his admired Deakin. “I used to work in the market,” he said. ‘Porterin”. You gets a saddle to put on.” He looked with a mirthful expression at Paris.

‘allyou have to harden your heart against them or you cannot do it,” Deakin said. He was still struggling with Paris’s question. “A man doesn’t expect to like things,” he added, half to himself.

“At all events,” Paris said, “here you are.”

“Yes, here I am. Dan’l and me must get on, sir. We are wanted to lend a hand with the longboat. You see, they have heard us.” He gestured towards the land.

In some indeterminate zone between the bright surf and the wall of forest Paris saw pale feathers of smoke rising. They uncurled slowly in the milk-blue haze.

“That is their fires, is it?”’ He watched with some fascination these thinning puffs from a hidden continent.