Sacred Hunger (50 page)

She has been here all this time, he thought, here in this one place…

“Well, you have taken long enough,” she said pettishly. “Is your father there? It is too late now in any case, I have given up all thoughts of it.”

When he failed to answer, she looked up at him sharply. Then her eyes widened and she started forward in her chair. “What is it?”’ she said. “Where is your father?”’

“Something has happened,” he said and his voice broke on it, not in grief yet—the death was all horror still—but in distress at not knowing how to tell her, not knowing how to speak of it to his mother, who had always had to be shielded, humoured.

For a while he was silent, thinking of words to say.

“Mother,” he said at last, “you must prepare yourself-“

With a speed that took him by surprise she had flung down the cards and was out of her chair and standing close. Her head came lower than his chin but he felt no difference in height now, so fiercely did she look at him. “What is it?”’ she said again.

“Why don’t you speak?”’ Her voice rose.

“Has there been an accident?”’

Still with an instinct of concealment or protection he said, “I locked the office door. No one can get in.” It sounded like a boast. Then he felt the sharp clutch of her hands on his arms and he began to tell her but in his desire to be gradual he lost his way in the story; like a child, he grew enmeshed in the nightmare preliminaries, the clues that had led him to that hanging shape, the leaning flame, the half-opened door, the shadows that had seemed wrong, misshapen… “He was there, in the dark,” he said, looking away from her in shame, his own, his father’s.

“You say you locked the door? Did you bring away the keys?”’

The sharpness of the question brought his eyes back to her.

The patches of paint on her cheeks looked grotesque now, clownish, against the drained pallor of her face. But her eyes were regarding him closely and her mouth was compressed in a firm line.

“Why, yes,” he said, “I have them with me.”

‘His own will be there with him, if he had locked the door. And the watchman?”’

“Watchman?”’

“Yes,” she said with sudden angry impatience, “the watchman, the watchman. Gather your wits.

We must be quick if we are to keep this hid. The watchman, does he have keys?”’

“Only to the storerooms below.”

“We must have your father brought home tonight, but it cannot be done by any of our own people, it must all be done through Dr Banks. We must see him tonight, at once.”

“But what use is that?”’ He was bewildered.

“I have told you he is dead,” he said. “Would I have left him otherwise?”’

“For the certificate,” she said, and he saw that her lips had begun trembling. “The doctor must sign to a cause of death. Do as I say, Erasmus. Go and see to the coach. William will be there still, he has been waiting all this while to take your father and me to the Mansion House. He will not have stabled the horses without permission.” Her voice softened to a full tone of pity for him which he was never quite to forgive. “You must come with me,” she said.

“My poor boy, nothing will be required of you, but I must have someone… I must have a man with me at this hour of night. Go now. I will change my clothes meanwhile.”

Mutely, as if in a dream, he obeyed her.

It was gone eleven when they drew up outside the doctor’s house, a large mansion in the newly opened and fashionable Bold Street. Henry Banks was now one of the leading physicians of the town but he had been doctor to the Kemps since the early days of his practice.

He received them almost at once in the small parlour he used as a consulting-room, apologizing for his evening attire of robe and skull-cap—he had been on the point of retiring for the night. He was a tall, high-shouldered man, deliberate and impressive in manner, with shrewd, equable eyes in a long face.

“You will take something?”’ he said, glancing from one to the other. He had recognized the hush of shock about them from the moment they entered the room. “A glass of cordial, perhaps, something to warm you? The nights are cold still. You will not? Well, then, tell me how I can be of service to you.”

At this, Elizabeth Kemp began for the first time to weep. Between bouts of tears she spoke of an accident, a terrible misadventure, she did not know which way to turn, she was sorry it was so late, they were keeping him from bed and she knew he was a man with many calls upon him, but by the time they had got the coach out …

The doctor listened with sober patience, saying little, making no attempt to prompt her or check the weeping, evidently content to let her come to the business in her own time. But Erasmus could not contain himself. This foolish prevarication of his mother’s, this flattering of the doctor, seemed shameful to him. His father was lying there, dead and disgraced and staring in the dark while she wheedled and dabbed at her eyes.

Even the tears… He had to take the initiative, speak for both of them.

“My father has done a violence to himself,” he said harshly. “By misadventure, of course, but it could be taken as design and it is that we want to avoid.” He paused, clearing some obstacle in his throat. “We are come to ask if you will certify to natural causes.”

“Natural causes?”’ The doctor looked sharply and coldly at Erasmus. “He is dead, then? And in circumstances of violence? No, I do not wish to know the manner of it. You must save that for the proper authorities. There are people appointed to examine into such things. Did you seriously think I would compound a felony, a man in my position? You would have done better to leave things to your mother.” He turned to the mother now and his expression softened. She had been coming to him with ailments largely imaginary for upwards of twenty years and he had grown fond of her. “My dear,” he said, “I am deeply sorry to hear of this accident, but really cannot see, under the circumstances -“

‘My son is overwrought,” she said quickly.

“He does not know what he is saying. ‘Twas he that discovered my poor husband. He is little more than a boy and has got the matter quite wrong.

Please forgive him. We came only to seek your advice in this terrible pass we are brought to. I am a mere woman and have small knowledge of the world and my health is far from good, as none knows better then you…”

In fact she looked less sickly, more animated, at this moment than Erasmus could ever remember seeing her. The crisis of his intervention had driven away her tears, leaving her eyes brighter, and a glow had come to warm her cheeks. Sitting upright in her plain cambric dress and trimmed hood, her hands clasped together, she looked more than well, she looked handsome; and Erasmus sensed that Banks thought so too, for all the fellow’s grave airs.

She paused a moment now as if in reflection and when she spoke again it was in a different, more considering tone: “My husband, as you will recall, was a high-blooded man and rather short in the neck and suffered from dizzy fits sometimes and rushes to the head.”

Banks nodded slowly. “That is so,” he said.

“He had a sanguine constitution of body. I remember letting him blood on occasion.”

“Well, it is my belief that he consulted another doctor for this condition at certain times, for example when you yourself were away from the town or otherwise not available to be visited.”

The doctor regarded her for a moment in silence.

Then, still without speaking, he looked down thoughtfully at the signet ring on his right hand. Absently, he turned it this way and that for some little while. Erasmus glanced at his mother in surprise—he had not heard before of a second doctor and was about to say so when he was checked by her slight warning frown.

The doctor looked up. His face was quite without expression. “Yes,” he said, “I am sometimes away. To take a second opinion would have been quite a reasonable thing for Kemp to do under the circumstances.”

‘Well, now, the difficulty is,” she said, “I am so silly and not used to remembering and I cannot for the life of me bring to mind this doctor’s name and I do not know how I can find it out on such short notice. I thought you might know it. You know so many things and have a wide acquaintance among the practitioners of the town…”

There was another silence. Dr Banks looked straight before him, tapping his long fingers softly together, his face composed in its habitual gravity of expression. “I could support the condition of high blood pressure,” he said at last. “That is, if asked, I could confirm that Kemp received treatment from me for that condition—if asked, let us say, by this other physician your husband had been seeing. That would not be to certify cause of death, you understand. But in the event of a certificate being signed by someone else, it might lend credence. Yes, I should say pretty certainly it would lend credence.” He got up on this and went to his desk, where he spent some time searching in a drawer and a further brief time writing. When he came back to them he held a slip of paper in his hand. “The doctor your husband may have consulted in my absence is this one,” he said. “The address is written here too. He is flexible in his hours, I believe, and can be visited at any time.”

She had risen to take the paper from him and for a moment she clasped his hand and lowered her head over it and the tears came again. Different now, impeding her thanks. The doctor too knew the difference in the tears and this time used words of comfort to her as he supported her towards the door. “Kemp did not lack for friends,” he said. “There will be those that you can turn to. And you have this fine son as your support.

If there is anything more that I can do, I trust you will not hesitate to ask. You will understand that I cannot examine the poor fellow’s body or have anything more to do directly with the business. If any should ask why I was not called in, you may say I was indisposed. But it is unlikely.” He smiled at them in farewell. “The proceedings are quite regular, the man whose name I have given you is a qualified medical practitioner.”

It was only when, long past midnight, they had run the qualified medical man to earth in his ramshackle and evil-smelling quarters above a tavern, that things began to fall into place in Erasmus’s mind. He had listened in silence while his mother bargained with the gaunt, unsteady fellow, whom they had roused, still reeking of spirits, from his sleep.

Ten minutes’ talk and twenty-five guineas secured for William Kemp an official death from heart failure, the due period of mourning, burial in hallowed ground. From the widow and the son was lifted the spectre of scandal and disgrace. Five guineas more obtained the services of two silent, out-at-elbow ruffians and a covered litter. The merchant was brought home in the dimness of the new day, wrapped in a length of good-quality blue cotton baft from his warehouse.

She had bargained with that scoundrel—Erasmus could scarcely believe it. “Not for the sake of the guineas,” she told him, “no price can be put on your father’s reputation. But these people expect it.”

It was her own unexpected knowledge of what people expected that he held against her—that and her resourcefulness when he himself had been floundering. And she had deceived him, she had kept him in the dark. He writhed inwardly when he remembered how she had apologized for him to the condescending Banks.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Mother?”’ he asked her once. “Why didn’t you say what was in your mind to do?”’

“My poor Erasmus,” she said, “I thought the less you knew the better. You had already lost your father that night.”

And with this—as he saw it—typical failure of logic on her part he had to be content. The worst of it was that despite his superior logic and the sense of rectitude to which he clung as if it were a mark of loyalty to his father, he knew in his heart that he had been given that night a lesson in the conduct of human affairs that he would never forget.

The feeling of having been somehow duped poisoned his grief in the days that followed. Forof course his father too had deceived him. With sick incredulity he tried to imagine what his father had felt during the last hours of his life, tried to make the actions of that stranger somehow congruous and explicable. He remembered how his father had avoided his eyes when they had parted that afternoon, an unusual thing—both father and son were direct in their regard. He must have known then. He would have had the rope ready, he would have marked the iron hook in the beam. Perhaps he had known for much longer.

.. But this was more than Erasmus could bear steadily to contemplate, the loneliness and treachery of it, sitting at meals, discussing business, with the intention of death constant behind the changing face.

Below his feeling of betrayal was a horror that never left him at the secrecy of the business, the deranged ceremony, locking the door, setting the candle on the table. Somewhere in the midst of this madness his father had removed his shoes so that the last steps of his life would be silent…

Erasmus was freed from this stricken state, though not yet enough to weep, by the sight of the face in its open coffin on the eve of the funeral. Once again it was by deception that Elizabeth Kemp revealed her love and fulfilled her duty. Alone she had bathed the body and shrouded it. She had waxed away the dark mottles below the skin, and shut the outraged eyes. She had closed Kemp’s mouth over his swollen tongue and held it closed with a binding of linen.

Death itself is never false, she had merely falsified appearances for the sake of the living. But to Erasmus, kneeling alone in the silent room, it seemed that he was seeing the truth of his father’s face for the first time. The inessentials were gone, the changes of expression, the high colour and the hectic regard, erased by this draining of the accidental blood. Now it could be seen that his father bore the face of a zealot who had been proved right after all. It came to Erasmus, with inexpressible pain, that all he could remember of his father’s life, all his gesture and assertion, all the peculiar vividness of expression that had belonged to him, had been no more than botched rehearsals for this final waxen immobility.

This pity for his father brought him close to tears. In the determined intensity of his efforts to hold them back —he had not so far wept—his gaze took on a preternatural fixity, blurring the face before him, giving it for the moment a look of merely momentary repose. The eyelids seemed to quiver and the nostrils to distend slightly, as if at the scent of something savoursome. Erasmus was carried back to the winter morning at Dickson’s shipyard, more than a year ago now, when amid smells of cut wood and wet sawdust his father had crouched and advanced his connoisseur’s nose to the fresh-cut timber of the ship’s mast, and pronounced it first-rate. Another smell too there had been, coarser, the odour of decay. Not that day but somewhere near it, the time the ship was building. Eyes from which the light was fading, a startled movement in the half-dark, a mute plea for a death unwitnessed… Another man, adding the rank smell of his death to these milder ones of clean linen and essence of violets… Erasmus rose too hastily and felt a wave of dizziness. In the desolate clarity that came with its passing he understood that his father had been sniffing at his own death, his own decay, that day at the shipyard—it was the ship that had killed him.