Collector of Lost Things (26 page)

I held her hands to soothe her, she was so nervous with energy—I could feel it in her wrists and in the way her fingers would not keep still.

‘Tell me,’ I asked. She lowered her eyes, taking breath.

‘The bird is ill,’ she said. ‘I think it is dying.’

P
ERHAPS IT SHOULD HAVE
died, that night. Perhaps, with the bird’s death, other things more precious might have been saved. Things that were slipping away from me, although I failed to see them at the time. It is difficult to look back, with the knowledge of what happened, and place your finger upon the moment when an outcome might have been averted. A journey is made of right and wrong decisions, always, and I think we acted then as we should have done. We tried to save it, we tried our best.

As soon as it was light, French, Clara and I went secretly to the anchor locker to decide the bird’s future.

‘The bird may have been ill even from the start,’ I suggested, wanting to initiate a frank and straightforward discussion. ‘Remember how it was discovered, cowering in the crack between the rocks?’ French looked back, dubious. I felt uncomfortable with his presence—he was too angular a fit for such a room. Too tall and too brisk for shadows and corners and low beams. I continued: ‘There has been a distinct deterioration in the last two days.’

Clara was about to speak, but stopped herself to listen to footsteps pacing the deck just inches above. When she spoke, it was in a hushed voice. ‘I know very little about birds, but it seems listless and unresponsive to anything we’ve tried. It seems as if preparing for death.’

Behind the packing crates the auk lay slumped, like a parlour goose, its neck turned to one side as if half-wrung.

‘Can we do anything to make it more comfortable, at least?’ I asked. ‘It was a proud and inquisitive bird. Is it eating?’

Clara shook her head. ‘It has not eaten for two days.’

‘Then we must release it,’ I said.

French placed his hands on the beam by his head and contemplated them. ‘It’s too weak,’ he said, carefully. ‘Release it now … and we’d watch it drown. You don’t wish to see that, do you?’

‘None of us want it to die in captivity, Mr French,’ I replied. ‘That is what we promised when we found it.’

‘Oh I remember the promise and all that,’ he said. ‘But the circumstances have changed.’

‘Our principles do not need to change.’

He narrowed his eyes and began to gaze at a fingernail. With a sigh he said: ‘I don’t know the point of principles, when we have a dying bird on our hands.’ He pushed the toe of his boot towards the auk as if trying to stir it into action, but stopped short of actually touching it.

I was instantly reminded, purely by his attitude, of the moment when he had killed the greenfinch. How he had reached into Martin Herlihy’s hands and taken the bird and wrung its neck. The force of the memory struck me. How had I been so foolish to trust this man?

‘So what do you suggest?’ I asked, a little aggressively.

French regarded me, watchful but patient, in no hurry to reply, the attitude one sees in a hunter who is happily concealed.

‘Might it be melancholy?’ Clara asked, sounding brighter. I appreciated her efforts to keep the situation positive. ‘It’s a wretched place in here, next to that chain and oils. Perhaps it has given up hope?’

French sighed with impatience. ‘A bird has no concept of hope, Clara, it does not understand such a thing,’ he said.

‘But what makes you so sure?’ Clara replied, with some steel. ‘They say swans die quite regularly soon after their mate has gone. I have heard of that often. In Norfolk they say kill the cob swan and you kill the lake too—the whole place loses hope. That must be from the swan having a broken heart.’

French shrugged to show he had no wish to be drawn into such talk. ‘I know little about swans or the things that might kill them. Eliot is our expert in this matter.’

‘Do you mean with swans, or with affairs of the heart?’ Clara asked, recklessly responding to French’s provocation. Unexpectedly, I felt my cheeks reddening. I looked down at the links of the great chain by my feet, feeling surrounded by their entrapment. I became aware of French watching me with an expression that—at the edge of my vision—was now curious. After a few awkward seconds he brushed the dust from his hands and straightened his waistcoat.

‘If you will forgive me,’ he said, in the voice of an officer, ‘it is a great risk for me to be down here, and I have many duties to attend to.’

Clara nodded, grateful. ‘Quinlan,’ she said, ‘I will continue to nurse the bird until the end.’

He smiled, an oddly shaped smile that was close to a grimace, before bowing his head in a formal manner and smartly leaving the room.

It was as if a hotness vanished with him. He carved a particular presence, demanding attention, reluctant to relax, wherever he was. I looked at Clara, glad to be alone with her, but needing her as an ally.

‘On first name terms?’ I asked.

‘Was I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps it makes sense, to be friends with someone you are unsure about.’

‘He is unknowable,’ I sighed.

‘He behaves strangely in front of you.’

‘He does?’

‘Yes. And you are right. We should be watchful of him.’

Perhaps it was an unusual motion of the ship that prompted it, but all at once I had a startling image of lily pads floating on a dark lake fringed with trees. They were rising and settling among themselves, although in the water beyond them nothing moved any more. I shivered, needing to escape.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘You’re very perceptive,’ I replied. ‘Someone crossed my grave.’

She closed her eyes. I saw the shape of her pupils through the lids, as if she was still watching me. She sighed, opening her eyes and crouching to be with the bird again. As she stroked its neck I watched as the auk relaxed, opening its beak in quiet appreciation.

‘I won’t let you die,’ she promised.

The first icebergs we saw were blocks that drifted towards the ship, some large enough for several men to stand upon, but most much smaller. They floated on the black water of the fjords with an unnatural calm and unknowable purpose, the ice shining with a brilliant white gleam, and glowing pale blue beneath the surface. They had a beautiful and lonely character, drifting one by one out to sea, already weathered into strange but recognisable forms: necks and bodies, occasionally an outstretched limb that would wave, eerily, in a frozen greeting. At the bow a large wooden arrow was pinned to a weathershield that could be swung from side to side to let the helmsman know of obstacles. But mostly the man on ice watch leant against the boarding with his hands in his pockets, and the smaller blocks of ice were allowed to knock into the prow below, sending them spinning and revolving along the side of the ship.

I went to stand alongside him. Just a few feet below us the bird was still wedged with its head in the corner of the locker, the way animals tend to huddle when they sense death is near. Perhaps death materialises in the air, first, before making its approach, and to face a corner is to turn a back upon it? It felt appropriate to stand at the bow, in a form of vigil, a few feet above the great auk, and wait for what might happen. I filled my pipe and offered my tobacco pouch to the sailor on watch, before asking his name.

‘Ralph, sir,’ he replied.

‘You are from Ireland, also?’

‘Sligo.’

‘From a farm?’

‘Na. Me brothers are turf men. But it’s bad country, sir, it’s real bad country.’

‘The blight?’

‘Aye. It’s bad.’

‘I have heard.’

He sucked on his pipe, hard, wincing in the sunlight.

The ship was rounding a rocky promontory, following a wide sea channel between the coast and islands. Lit by a low sun, the coast of Greenland was intensely rich in its colours of loose brown earth and low-cropped meadow. Treeless, and virtually without sign of man, it was like a country which had been born overnight.

‘What is that?’ I asked, pointing to a distant area of the channel that appeared clogged with broken ice.

‘Ice field. It come from the glacier.’

‘Will we steer through it?’

‘Aye,’ he replied, patting his arrow in explanation. Above me I felt the sails loosing their hold of the wind as the helmsman prepared to tack. ‘There’s bay ice, sludge ice, field ice, all sorts of ice. This gut of sea is shorter by fifty miles.’

‘Is it harmless?’ I asked.

‘All things are harmless till they ain’t,’ he replied.

The ice field resembled shattered glass flung across a darkened mirror. It was a peculiar and unnerving sight. And fairly soon we were among it, first individual blocks, then into more concentrated drifts. Blocks as small as a man’s fist bobbed furiously as the ship struck them, as buoyant as cork. Occasionally, much taller bergs passed, some as high as the lower rigging of the ship, sharp edged and cruelly solid in appearance, and it was these that Ralph alerted the helmsman to.

‘The captain told me at length about the ice beams he has had fitted, beneath us,’ I said.

‘As long as he don’t want to test them, we’ll be right.’

‘Is he known to be a cautious man?’ I asked.

Ralph shrugged. ‘Can’t say, sir. But if you was in trouble, the only one I’d risk my life on would be Mr Talbot.’

The glacier emerged beyond a promontory, its front edge a jagged collection of filthy white cliffs, perhaps two hundred feet high, with deep cracks and fissures stretching from the sea at its base to the very top. It filled the space between the mountains like a great tongue stretching tens of miles inland, roughened and misty across its surface, and ancient and brittle where it met the sea.

As we passed, keeping our distance by about a mile or so, I marvelled at how strange it was. A thousand frozen rivers, congealed and piled, serpent-like, a back and spine that twisted and nestled into its own valley. It seemed capable of rushing towards us, a giant scythe that would sweep us away. Sounds of cracking resounded across the bay, as loud as cannon shots, every couple of minutes, making me feel that it was intensely, unnervingly alive. The air began to cool as the ship sailed closer. It was the very breath of the glacier, I realised, cooling the area as if we were entering a vast stone cellar.

I watched in disbelief as one of the cliff edges slipped, a solid curtain of ice, sliding in a vertical plane straight into the sea. The section vanished, in perfect silence, among the litter of ice in front of the glacier, before rising again like a launched ship, while a great rolling crack of thunder swept across the bay.

Gradually, as if time itself beat twice as slow in this frozen place, a bulge of water began to swell, stretch and roll across the channel, raising the floating blocks of ice as if the sea was merely a piece of silk being lifted by a breath from beneath. The wave rolled slowly towards us and, perhaps a minute after the ice cliff had fallen, the entire ship rose as it passed underneath. I felt as if something beyond my experience and scale had drifted through each and every one of us, as the shadow of a solar eclipse is said to cross the land, a glimpse of the mystery that lies at the heart of our world but beyond our view, revealing itself and disappearing, the ship, crew, even the dying auk beneath us. We all felt and were touched by its passing.

The following morning, having cleared the ice field, the
Amethyst
was in open water. A hunting party had assembled on deck after one of the spotters had seen a colony of walrus. I decided to accompany them, not wanting to miss the opportunity of seeing such exotic creatures. Even Bletchley, after being sullen and withdrawn for nearly a week, was standing among the men, donning his hunting attire and fox-fur hat with the tail hanging down the back of his neck. His face looked scrubbed clean and raw.

‘Walrus,’ he said to me, as if it was a magic word. As if out to prove his determination, he marched to the side of the ship and took a wild shot at a group of black guillemots that were rafting alongside. He missed. Instantly, the group dived, and we watched their white-tipped wings and red feet kicking underwater, a chain of pearls escaping each of their beaks.

‘They have nowhere to go so must come up,’ Bletchley said, eagerly reloading his rifle, the boast of the hunter he had once been. But when they surfaced, he didn’t take a second shot.

We rowed in both whaleboats in a wide arc that took us downwind of the walrus colony.

As the water shallowed, one of the men passed me a bucket with a glass pane fixed into the bottom. ‘You might want a look,’ he said, pointing over the side.

I leant over and pressed the bucket into the water and gained a vivid view of the seabed, perhaps twenty feet below. Strange creatures covered the stones, moss-fringed molluscs at least eight inches long, next to soft corals in bright yellows and reds and an abundance of hydroids, sponges and starfish, the spokes of their limbs nearly as large as a pram’s wheel.

‘It’s so colourful,’ I said, enthusiastically, privileged to have this view of quite unexpected beauty. ‘The starfish are giants.’

I continued to gaze as the occasional cuttlefish swam underneath with a languorous fanning of its rippling tail fin, aware that I must be the first person to have seen this particular sea garden.

The smell and sound of the walruses began to reach us. Strange bellowing and grunts and snorts, much deeper than the familiar barking of the seals; and their scent was more pungent. As we approached, the animals lifted themselves, humping their way across the stones like sacks of flour coming to life. There were several hundred, dun-coloured and massive, lying in a disordered collection across the gravel bank. Tusks rose in the air, and the sounds of groaning and bellowing increased at our arrival, as if those tusks were the raised bows of an orchestra playing an infernal overture.

The mist we had seen at sea rose from the backs of the walruses, added to by their breath which stank of a deep musky animal odour, like that smelt in a cattle shed but here with a horrid addition of fish and weed and the excrement that smeared the stones.