Sacred Hunger (49 page)

She would love and respect him too much ever to require it.

In the light of these triumphant feelings familiar sights seemed new this afternoon. The beeches bordering the avenue, in full leaf now, were a fresher green than he could remember, the singing of hidden warblers more deliberately sweet. In the parkland the chestnut trees were candled with blossom and the terraces below the house were vivid with geraniums.

He was early, which meant he could take his tea alone with Sarah and her mother, old Wolpert and Charles being out at business still and the younger brother, Andrew, in the schoolroom under the eye of his tutor.

Afternoon sunshine filled the room, entering through the tall French windows. In this radiant light Erasmus looked round him and felt the same triumph, the same sense of newness in familiar things. The water-colours on the walls, the needlework over the chimneypiece embroidered by Sarah’s maternal grandmother, now dead, Mrs Wolpert’s beaded work-box on the low table beside her, the fine set of moulded beakers on their glass shelf, all possessed a special effulgence on this day. It was in this room, he remembered suddenly, that he and Sarah had once come face to face, during rehearsal of the play. He had been looking for his book… He had failed in address that day, failed miserably, but she had known—he remembered the wave of colour that had come to her face. Afterwards she had seemed to disregard everything in her eagerness to play Miranda. How he had hated that transformation, all that posturing and make-believe.

And the nonsense of an enchanted island where divisions could be healed and enemies reconciled… He would never allow such a thing to happen again. He caught Sarah’s eye and saw that she was happy.

Most of the time they spent discussing the arrangements.

Flowers had been ordered—carnations, red and white. Invitations had been sent out long ago— there were more than a hundred on the list of guests.

There was to be a ball, with an orchestra of five.

If the weather stayed fine supper would be served out of doors on the terrace.

‘We can dance out of doors, too,” Sarah said.

“We can dance on the lawns.” Her face wore its usual delicate composure, in which there was always something impervious, or perhaps obstinate; but her eyes were bright with excitement.

“Outside on the grass?”’ Erasmus laughed a little at the extravagance of it. “That’s an odd notion. Have you forgotten that there is a perfectly good ballroom inside the house?”’

“Yes, but don’t you see, it would be something different, it would be something to remember. People would remember my party for ever. Everyone dances in ballrooms.”

This, Erasmus felt, was precisely the point, but he merely smiled and shook his head, glancing indulgently at Mrs Wolpert. Better to say nothing, she would forget the idea soon—or so he hoped.

However, she was exalted now and took it into her head that he should see her new dress, the one she was to wear for the ball, and not merely see it, but see it on—a suggestion that her mother objected to immediately on grounds of propriety and some alarmed superstition. But Sarah insisted, demanded to be allowed, drawing herself up and raising her delicately moulded chin in the determined way she had when her mind was wholly set on something. In the end the mother gave in, as she generally did when the girl was wrought up in this way; she had learned to recognize the signs. And on this occasion she received no help from Erasmus, who remained silent, divided between his sense of correctness and the desire to view his love.

Sarah was away half an hour or more. When she returned, making an entry through the wide double-doors, Erasmus saw at once that she had done her hair differently, in a braid over the top of her head, and that she had added something to the natural glow of her cheeks. The dress was of silk, a soft apricot in colour, with narrow stripes in a darker shade and a vine pattern of flowers and leaves between, the skirt full, with a short train, and arranged over a hooped petticoat of cream-coloured quilted satin. High-heeled shoes with brocade straps completed the effect.

Sarah paraded before them for some time. She was flushed but serious, as befitted the occasion. For a while there was no sound in the room but the beguiling friction of silk.

Having helped in the choice of material and seen the dress fitted at the dressmaker’s, Mrs Wolpert had not many words to say now. She was still far from approving the exhibition and wished it over quickly.

Erasmus was silent for so long that in the end Sarah stopped and looked at him in a way that was imperious, yet somehow supplicating too. “You look beautiful,” he said then. “It is a beautiful dress.” His own voice sounded husky and strange to him, so great was the sincerity with which he delivered this verdict. He could hardly believe, even now, that this radiant creature would so soon be promised to him.

But even as he spoke something changed in his expression. Another, even so young, even in the joy of possession, might have felt something akin to compassion for what had been patient and somehow helpless in the girl’s display, some quality of subjection in it, in the very vanity itself. But this was a reach of feeling quite beyond him. He had felt the joy—it had taken him by the throat. But below it an obscure feeling of offendedness had grown within him. Though she had looked at him and posed for him, he had begun to feel that this show was not for him only, he was sharing her with other spectators somewhere beyond the room. She was on stage again.

Displeasure at this did not last long, once he was able to assign it to weakness on Sarah’s part— her weaknesses he was confident he could deal with. By the time he took his leave he had quite recovered equanimity. Sarah, restored to her house costume of light blue lutestring, accompanied him to the end of the drive. Walking beside her, leading his horse, he felt unmixed happiness. At the gate they kissed and he held her close. He felt her press against him and the blood rose to his head and obscured his sight for some moments.

She had heard the change in his breathing. “My own love,” she said.

“Until Saturday then,” he said. He watched her walk away, keeping his eyes fixed on her until the curve of the drive took her from his sight.

It was nearly six o’clock when he reached home. His mother heard him crossing the hall towards the staircase and called out to him. He found her alone in her small parlour, the tea things still before her.

“No one cares a fig for my convenience,” she began at once, before he was properly in the room.

“That is always the last thing to be studied; my poor father would turn in his grave if he knew, well, I believe he does. I have so long been used in this way, it would be strange if he didn’t, but this goes beyond the bounds.”

From his mother’s hasty, indrawn breaths and the bridling movements of her head, Erasmus saw that she was in one of her states. “What is the matter, Mother?”’ he asked, and there had unconsciously come into his voice the tone his father habitually used with her, breezy, affectionate, patronizingly brisk.

“I have not even had the resolution to ring for the tea things to be removed,” she said on a calmer, more plaintive note.

‘Well, I will do that.” He saw now that her hair was powdered and set in the rather elaborate coiffure known as French curls, and that she was dressed for going out in a brocade gown in pink and gold, with a lace stomacher. “That is a handsome gown,” he said, in the same tone. “You are altogether very elegant this evening, Mother.”

“Well, but your father is not come home, he will have forgot it.” Vexation had paled her, so that the rouge on her cheeks showed too prominently. “I have had that fluttering,” she said, on a note of warning, laying a white hand over the brocaded bodice of her dress. “Had it not been for the tincture of hellebore your cousin Matthew recommended, I don’t know what would have happened, and now I can’t be sure the apothecary is making it up in the exact same proportions, and Matthew is not here to advise me. I think it a great pity that my nephew must stay away so long and spend his talents on rough seamen and black people.”

“Well, I hope you do not blame father for that,”

Erasmus said, smiling. “You know he has much on his mind these days.”

“How should I know it? He does not talk to me of what is on his mind. He promised to be home today in time for tea. We were to have dined early and gone to the Mansion House Gardens that are newly opened and a great draw to all the fashion of the town, to listen to the band.”

“He cannot be much longer now,” Erasmus said.

He stayed with his mother and entertained her with the description of Sarah’s dress—she entirely shared Mrs Wolpert’s feelings about the propriety of the proceedings. They played some hands of whist together.

Cards always calmed her nerves. She was a shrewd and accomplished player with a strong desire to win, which sometimes led her into cheating. Light in the room began to fail and the parlourmaid was summoned to light the lamps. Still the merchant failed to arrive. When the clock struck eight Erasmus got up. “He must have overlooked it completely,” he said. “If something had come up in the way of business to detain him, he would have sent word. I will go down to the office and see.”

It seemed too much trouble to have the mare brought out and saddled again. There were always chairmen waiting outside the Lion at the corner of Red Cross Street.

Almost at once he found two men with a sedan that passed his inspection as not too impossibly verminous.

On the way he thought of little. The slight rocking motion of the chair and the whoops of the foremost man to clear the way made drowsy rhythm in his mind and he fell into a state between musing and dozing.

He paid off the men at the end of Water Street beside the Ram’s Head and walked through the alley behind the inn on to the waterfront. There was a wind rising from across the estuary; he heard the rattle of a loose board somewhere and the creaking of the ropes that held the heavy inn-sign. A barge with a lantern at the stern lay some way out on the water.

There were no lights on the ground floor of the warehouse and the doors that gave on to the street were locked. He went round to the side of the building and ascended the short flight of metal stairs to the watchman’s shed on the landing. He found the man sprawled on a ragged quilt, open-mouthed and oblivious in a thick fume of gin. After locking up below he had obviously deemed his watch over for the night and settled down to the bottle. Erasmus considered kicking him awake, but even that degree of contact was distasteful to him. It would be the brute’s last sleep in the service of the firm, that much at least he promised himself.

From behind the shed a gallery ran the length of the building, giving access to a number of rooms that looked over the warehouse floor on one side and the waterfront on the other. His father’s office and his own smaller, adjoining one were roughly halfway along; both father and son were accustomed to enter and leave the building by this route and each had his own set of keys.

He had taken the small, half-blackened oil lamp from the watchman’s hut to light his way. The gallery itself was in darkness but he could make out a faint crack of light beneath the door of his father’s office. He knocked, waited, tried the door comx was locked. He used his key to open it. There was no one in the room. The stub of a candle in a tall holder on the table burned with an unsteady flame, sending blurred ripples over the polished surface.

Erasmus stood still for some moments, aware of nothing but a sort of mild puzzlement. The room was quiet, at once familiar and strange at this late hour, with its odours of melted candle wax and old papers and the stealthy reek of river water that entered all these buildings in the cool of the night.

He saw now that the flame of the candle was not guttering as he had thought at first, but leaning over in some current of air. This it was that accounted for the tremulous waverings of light over the table and near the wall. Glancing beyond the table, he saw that the door of the small stock-room at the far end of the office was standing half open. Perhaps his father had gone that way for some reason—there was a passage beyond it which led back on to the gallery further along. Still holding the lamp he took some steps round the table and approached the door. “Father,” he called, not very loudly. “Are you there?”’

He held the door open. Shadows were somehow too long in here. There was his own flickering shadow lying before him, but it extended further than the candle-light could have thrown it. There was another, cast by the lamp. He was holding the lamp too close to his face. He raised it and went forward a little, no more than a pace or two, but enough for him to see the dark bulk hanging above him and to take in, with the helpless particularity that accompanies shock, the exact look of the overturned stool on the floor and his father’s shoeless feet which by some accident of balance dangled one distinctly lower than the other.

Some words broke from Erasmus but he could not afterwards remember what they had been, nor what had been the sequence of his actions after the first one: with the same instinct of secrecy that had possessed his father, he had run to lock the outer door. Everything else, everything surrounding this one deliberate act, was improvised, maladroit, violent, climbing on to a chair, sawing awkwardly at the rope above his father’s head, clutching at the body in absurd scruple that it might be further damaged by a fall, falling with it, heavily, when he could not take the weight. Lying half-embraced there on the floor, he had fumbled to loosen the knot, not in the hope of restoring life—he knew there was no life left in the body—but as if in hope that the relief of it might close his father’s eyes at last. But it did not, and he could not touch the face.

He left the way he had come, locking the door again carefully behind him. The watchman was snoring still in his hut. He took a sedan from the inn and gave directions to the porters in clear and collected tones. The necessity for concealment acted on him like resolution and kept him in a semblance of calm.

Only when he was home again did this begin to break down. His mother, still in her brocade gown, sat in the parlour where he had left her, playing patience.