The Flying Goat (9 page)

He was finished with it that very time ashore. He got his master's ticket in London that November and in December the owners of
The Mary Porter
gave him his first command. The ship was another square-rigger, older than
The Mary Porter
, and I forget her name. ‘And where will you be bound for?' I said.

‘Singapore,' he said, ‘and pick up fresh orders there.'

He sailed in January, and the day before he sailed he let me look at the model of
The Mary Porter
again.

‘Shall you be able to finish it now?' I said.

‘Finish it? Easy. All I got to do is get the sails
made and hoisted and I can do that with one hand tied behind my back.'

‘When'll you be home?' I said.

‘Home? Never tell,' he said. ‘But you know what I told you, don't you? You be a good boy and I'll bring you a nigger gal. That's right, ain't it? You be a good boy and I'll bring you a nice fat blackie. She'll make your hair curl.'

‘Ephraim,' my aunt said, ‘give over, do.'

That time Ephraim was away nine months. My aunt did not know when he was coming home. She never knew. She would be sitting there in the back room, wondering if Ephraim were in the Bay of Biscay or the Indian Ocean or even at the bottom of the ocean, when suddenly the shop-bell would ring and a voice would shout, ‘Shop, missus!' and it would be Ephraim home again.

But when he came home that following November, from that first command, he came into the shop without a word. It was Saturday afternoon and I was there in the back room with her. When she heard the shop-bell ring she got up and went to the glass-panelled, curtain-screened door that divided shop from living room and she opened it. She opened it and then she just stood there. I heard her
say ‘Ephraim', and nothing else, in a not very loud voice. Then there was a silence, as though of completely stupefied astonishment. Then she went slowly forward into the shop. As she went forward I moved forward a few paces too. Through the still open door I could see Ephraim. There was someone with him. For a moment I could not see who it was, because aunt Franklin was standing there. Then she moved and I could see who it was. It was a woman. But for a moment I did not realise what woman or what sort of woman. Then suddenly, even in the bad light of the shop, I could see the colour of her face. It was black. For about ten seconds my heart stood still and I knew that Ephraim had brought home a black girl from the South Seas.

If I had any illusions about Ephraim having brought home that girl for me I know that they didn't last long. After about a minute Ephraim came slowly out of the shop into the back room. He was alone and he shut the door behind him. He did not seem to notice I was there. All he did was to put his hands on my aunt Franklin's shoulders and say: ‘Mother, it's all right. She's all right. Honest, she's the only gal I ever wanted. It'll be all right.'
But I knew, somehow, that it wasn't going to be all right. My aunt did not speak and she was crying.

Then, after a few moments, Ephraim noticed me. ‘Hullo, son,' he said. ‘You run along now and come in another day. And don't go chopsing all over the place either.'

I knew what that meant. I went away and I kept my mouth shut. But I remember, as I went out through the shop and passed the black girl still standing there looking at Ephraim and his mother through the lace curtains of the glass door, that I was suddenly frightened. Then it passed. She looked as completely scared as I was – scared and forlorn in the cheap high bandeau hat and blue serge costume that Ephraim must have bought her up in Glasgow.

That was my first picture of her, scared and forlorn and out of place. I did not see her again for more than a week. Then I saw her walking out with Ephraim in the High Street, and I saw then that she wasn't black, but brown, a soft, coffee-cream brown, with large, gentle eyes like ripe black grapes, and I thought she was lovely. Neither she nor Ephraim looked at me. They did not seem to look at anyone. They walked down that crowded Saturday
evening High Street as though they were walking along the empty sea-shore of some remote New Guinea island, completely oblivious of everyone, infinitely happy.

But if they were oblivious of everyone there was no one in the town, from my aunt Franklin downwards, who was oblivious of them. People were all talking about the scandal of Ephraim Franklin bringing home a black girl and they all called her a nigger. Somehow it was a terrible, outrageous, wicked thing, and one day when I went into my aunt Franklin's shop I heard my aunt and Ephraim quarrelling in the back room, she arguing from just that standpoint, how terrible it was, how wicked it was, and he trying to soothe her: ‘Mother, she's only human, she's flesh and blood, she comes of very high class. It'll be better when she can speak English. You'll git along better then.' But this remark seemed to upset my aunt still more. ‘That's it, that's the trouble. I shouldn't care if she could only speak to me!'

I went out of the shop, that day, without going into the back room, and I did not go back any more for a fortnight. When I went back Ephraim was not there. He had gone to Greenock, I think, to see
the owners. I think there had been some trouble, perhaps about the black girl. At any rate, when I went into the back room neither Ephraim nor my aunt was there. The black girl sat there all alone, in a plain blue, ready-made frock that didn't fit her. It was a dark December day, with raw rain, near Christmas, and she was trying to keep herself warm by the fire. I don't think she could have been more than eighteen, perhaps even less than that, and now, instead of looking scared, she looked pleased to see me, showing the pleasure in a sudden pure white smile. ‘Hullo,' I said, and to my astonishment she said ‘Hullo' too.

Besides ‘yes' and ‘no' that was her only word of English. She kept repeating it. ‘Hulloyes,' she would say, all in one word. Her voice was quite high, but smooth; it prolonged her three words of English to double their length, until they had a dreamy, mooning, regretful quality. I don't think she really knew what any of them meant, any more than she really understood anything much about that gloomy little shop, with its dead fish and animals, and the still gloomier little room behind. It must all have been sepulchrally strange and foreign to her, not quite real, with the lead-coloured
December light shining on the dead glass that covered the dead animals, and the dead light itself gradually being watered away by the dark December rain beyond the windows. It must have sent her thoughts flying back to wherever it was she came from, and it must, I think, have made her unhappy, because now and then you would see her look far beyond windows and rain and dark sky with a look of unconscious pain.

But there were two things in that room that she did understand. One was a case of butterflies; they were tropical and I think perhaps, at one time, Ephraim had brought them home for his father. The other was Ephraim's ship, the model of
The Mary Porter
.

Ephraim had brought home the ship for the last time. It was finished and it stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. It stood raised up, on a wooden support, in front of a pier-glass. The glass was tilted so that, just now and then, you had the illusion of the ship, with all her canvas set, waiting for a breeze in the dead calm of some tropical latitude where sky and sea had fused to a sheet of glass.

And she understood that ship. She must have seen its original over and over again. It would
provoke her into long moments of reflection, not painful, not really happy, but full of something inexpressible.

Nothing happened about the ship that afternoon. Soon after that first ‘Hullo' my aunt came in with a bucket of small coal and kindling sticks that she had been chopping in the back-yard and as she set down the bucket by the fireplace she looked old and yellow, like a woman who has just come through an illness. She muttered something about not being so young as she used to be and another remark about some people who were young enough to do things but never lifted a finger, and I knew she was bitter against the black girl. Then I had an idea. ‘Let me come round every afternoon through the Christmas holidays,' I said, ‘and get your sticks and coal in.'

So I began to go round every afternoon, and sometimes Ephraim's black girl would be sitting there, by the fire, doing nothing except staring at the ship or the sky or the butterflies. And sometimes Ephraim himself would be there and they would be talking together, in her language, softly, this barrier of language cutting them off from my aunt, who would sit silent and apart from them, her yellow face bone-hard with an extraordinary bitterness and jealousy.

Then on the last day but one of December I went there and Ephraim had gone. He had sailed that day for Singapore, master of a ship named
The Border Lass
, for different owners I think, and he had left the black girl behind. He had left her because, I think, neither the new owners nor the old nor any others would ever countenance the sailing of a white skipper with a coloured wife. How he had ever brought her in the first place I could never fathom. Why he had brought her was something which troubled my aunt still more.

And even I, a boy, could see what was going to happen. It would be nine months, perhaps longer, before Ephraim came back. And in the meantime? I could see nothing but tension: the tension of the long winter days in the gloomy room behind the shop, the girl with her three words of English able to express almost nothing of what she felt, my aunt expressing what she felt by jealousy and silence. I could see all this, but how it was going to end was beyond me.

Then something happened. Every Thursday afternoon my aunt shut the shop, and sometimes she took the train into the next town, to see some friends. One Thursday when I went round to the
shop to get in the coal and sticks she had shut the shop and gone, leaving Ephraim's black girl alone in the back room.

‘Hulloyes,' she said when I went into the back room, and smiled.

‘Hullo,' I said.

I put the bucket of coal and sticks down by the fireplace, and then I didn't know what to say. Then suddenly she looked at the ship on the mantelpiece and said, ‘Ephraim?'

‘Ah!' I said, ‘Ephraim on sea. Yes. Understand? On sea now. All right.'

She didn't understand. She just looked at me with a large bewildered smile.

‘Ephraim on sea,' I said. ‘Understand?'

No, she didn't understand. So at least I got the ship down and knelt on the hearthrug and began to rock the ship backwards and forwards and up and down. She would be just about like that now, I thought, in the Bay of Biscay. The girl understood. She knelt down on the hearthrug and began to push the ship backwards and forwards across it, steering it. The way she pushed it was different from the way I pushed it. She pushed it softly, sleepily. I could see she meant it to be in calm latitudes.
‘Kimusa,' she said. ‘Kimusa.' Now it was I who didn't understand and I shook my head. So she reached up and got down a book from my aunt's little bookshelf made of boards and cotton-reels that hung by the fireplace and put the book down on the hearthrug. Then she sailed Ephraim's ship close by the book and pointed to the book again and said, ‘Kimusa.' Then suddenly I tumbled to it. Kimusa was an island, her island. I nodded and she smiled again. She was quite excited. She sailed the ship close to the island and suddenly I saw what she was trying to tell me: that this was Ephraim in
The Mary Porter
, off Kimusa, in the South Seas. She was talking rapidly now, smiling, very excited. And then she jumped up and pointed to the butterflies, fluttering her brown hands. And in that moment I could not only see it all but feel it all. I felt for a moment as if I were Ephraim Franklin, standing off that island in the New Guineas, with the tropical heat and motionless sea and white sand and palms and the almost savage blue butterflies like those Ephraim had once caught for his father. Looking down at the ship and hearing her excited, almost childishly excited voice, I felt it all as a boy would feel it and was momentarily lost in wonder.

When I looked up again she was crying. And that was the oddest thing of all. I could understand her crying, but what I couldn't understand was the colour of her tears. They were white. And I couldn't get over that. I had somehow expected that they couldn't be anything but black. And while these white, so ordinary-looking gentle tears were rolling down her brown face the outside shop-bell rang.

I went and unbolted the shop door and it was the telegraph boy. I took in the telegram and came back into the room and put the envelope on the mantelpiece, not opening it. Then the girl and I went on playing with the ship, getting down more books, making more islands, sailing the ship dreamily among them, she laughing sometimes and then crying, overcome with joy at having found someone to make friends with at last.

Half an hour later my aunt came home. The mantelpiece was by that time empty of everything – all books and vases were islands – except the telegram. My aunt went straight to the telegram and opened it and read it. Then she stood utterly still.

And suddenly I knew it was about Ephraim. I did not know what to do or say. My aunt sank down into
a chair and looked straight in front of her, saying ‘Ephraim' and holding the telegram in her shaking hands.

When the girl heard my aunt say ‘Ephraim', she got suddenly very excited. ‘Ephraim yes?' she kept saying. ‘Hulloyes Ephraim, yes?'

‘Ephraim's dead,' my aunt said.

‘Ephraim yes? Ephraim?' the girl said and she began laughing.

‘Don't laugh!' my aunt said. ‘He's dead. Stop it! He's been drowned. The ship went down. Everybody's drowned.'

The girl, not understanding, still so excited by the mention of Ephraim's name, kept on laughing.

My aunt began to cry, dryly, bitterly, without hope. She gave me the telegram. ‘Tell her, make her understand,' she said. ‘Tell her.'