Curiosity (7 page)

Will I have
scars
? Henry wonders. Tallo, his nurse’s husband at Halse Hall, had cross-hatching on his back like woven wicker. Not from floggings at Halse Hall, from before that. In fact, he was sold to Halse Hall because of it, because if the back is thickly enough scarred, the slave becomes indifferent to the lash. So Henry’s mother said, in recounting how Henry’s father naively bought Tallo the week after arriving in Jamaica and thought he’d got a bargain. Not that Henry’s father intended to rely on the lash. It was 1799 when he took over the plantation – before the Wilberforce Bill banned the trade from Africa, but England was all talk of abolition and his father was resolved to be a
different sort of planter. A short-lived intention, it would seem, because Henry can remember bare backs in the shed, hands bound to a hook high above. He can remember the sound of the lash, although not the sight of it reaching its mark; just Tomkin the overseer pausing to wipe sweat from his face and neck.

And now
I
have been flogged, he says to himself as they bounce along the Great West Road. The part of his brain that was counting was stunned into silence at about
three
, but Chorley had reported fifteen lashes. Henry stuffs his jacket under him to augment the thin horsehair cushion, and perches gingerly on it, thinking about what lies ahead, living in disgrace in Bristol with this uncle with the skewed wig and a belly that joggles to the rhythm of the coach. They were identical twins, his father and Uncle Alger. His mother always asks, “When you see Algernon, do you remember your father?” and he says, “No, I remember Algernon.” Which is to say, between annual visits to Bristol, he forgets entirely what his uncle looks like, and he denies any resemblance at all between them – his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas De la Beche, a distinguished officer with the Norfolk Regiment of Fencible Cavalry, and this tedious, dyspeptic bachelor.

Alger is drifting off to sleep now, his head tipped back against the cushions. Henry watches his mouth slacken and his head fall to the side. Finding himself suddenly in solitude, Henry opens the curtains a crack. He tries to keep his mind off his backside. He needs to focus on the inner meaning of his situation. The meaning no one will see, until he has the chance to share it with his mother. That he acted in truth against a master who
merited
ridicule, by his deficiencies and his vanity and his absurd self-righteous monologues. Mr. Truepenny invited exposure by posturing as something he was not. He was not a military man; he should never have been a master at a military college. And
they knew this. All the officers at Marlow knew they were wrong to have engaged him, or they would never have reacted with such wrath to a handful of harmless caricatures and a clever enterprise to circulate them. The guardhouse and the floggings and Henry’s expulsion were an effort to deny their error. Henry sits clamped by his pain, keen-eyed, unwavering in his role as a guardian of military standards. But there is still the matter of his leaving the captains’ hall after having given his word, still there, pricking when his thoughts brush against it, like a hangnail. He was already expelled, he simply left before Marlow had fully vented its spleen. An act of self-respect, surely? Lying on a bench on the Thames path, he’d seen it clearly, that he must not fall in his own esteem, whatever others said.

But he will not, now, be a military man, either; he will not have a profession, in the military or anywhere else. They take a sharp bend in the road and he’s pressed into the corner, and grief washes over him. At the loss of the topography class. And the mensuration class, with its chains and compasses and levels. And fortifications. And his abandoned copybook of perspective landscape drawings. He will not now have that expertise, the dignity of any expertise. All he’ll have is his
manners
, his name on a card, and the rumours about him of the failing plantation. A gentleman has his name and his word, and he has given up his word. Wyndham and Chorley will be eager to tell. They’ll latch on to it to separate themselves from him. Although what he did in leaving the captains’ hall has its inner meaning, too. Keeping one’s word was a
fetish
at Marlow. They were always blustering on about it in the middle of something sordid, like the time Harding hung from a tree by his knees and pissed his pants because he’d given his word to do it. His mother will understand his reasoning on this matter: she sees things as no one else in the world sees them.

He’s drifting off when the coach gives a tremendous jolt and his pain jabs him awake. Then he finds he’s too cold to sleep. He puts his jacket back on and, turning his back on his sleeping uncle, slides to the floor and kneels with his head buried in his arms on the seat, a position that takes him instantly back to prayers by his netted bed in the sudden night of Jamaica, night that fell like an eyelid closing. He thinks of lying in his cot afterwards, listening to the Negroes calling on the road on their way back from the cane fields. In the juddering coach, he sinks into childhood dreams, he floats bodilessly above white sand in water honeycombed with sunlight. Sand-coloured crabs skitter sideways all at once to their holes, like corks on a net being dragged along the shore. A mango sucked to its flat, hairy pit lies salted with sand. Belle carries him up the path, her hands cool and dry. Oh, my stout man, she says. She stands in the hot, dark cookhouse in her white apron, she stirs the soup and raises the spoon to her lips. Her face bends over him, the fine net of moles around her eyes. She holds the iron spoon to his mouth, soup the colour of cut grass.

The loud clopping of the horses’ hooves rouses him; the surface of the road must have changed. He turns his head to the side and opens his eyes. Against the curtain of the coach, floating like a moon, he seems to see a little planet earth. The globe with all its tendons exposed, the way he drew it as a boy. Trade routes like veins binding the earth together, ships beaded along the veins ploughing full-sailed to Africa, carrying gunpowder, alcohol, iron. Crossing the Middle Passage with Negroes crying in the hold. Sailing out of the harbour at Kingston, weighted with rum and sugar, bound for Bristol. He drew this as a boy, the world with a web around it, busy ships racing along its veins. He drew it as a boy sitting on the veranda at Halse Hall in Jamaica. Where are all those drawings? Lost. Everything they had was lost on the journey home.

He feels a boot in his ribs, nudging him. His uncle is awake and looking down at him with disgust. “Get up,” he says. “You comport yourself like a heathen.”

“It’s the posture of a Christian, I would have thought,” Henry says, but he lifts himself to his seat. And then, to save his pride, he opens the curtain and looks out. They will still be in Buckinghamshire. Mist shrouds the trunks of great trees in a meadow. He thinks of the messages concerning himself recently carried over this road. To his mother, who is somewhere. It’s almost a year since he saw her. When her husband died, her new husband, he was summoned to Dawlish to attend the funeral. He closes the curtain. “You haven’t said where my mother is.”

“Between houses at the moment,” says Uncle Alger, taking up his vial of peppercorns.
Between houses
. A good answer, and probably true. Between Jamaica and Great Marlow, Henry lived in Hammersmith, Keynsham, Ottery St. Mary, and Dawlish. Between Keynsham and Ottery St. Mary, there was a prolonged stay at a country house in Berkshire, which they left suddenly one day just before dinner, spinning thrillingly away in a brougham with their host in hot pursuit, bareback and crouched like a jockey. Henry watched with glee, his face pressed against the glass as the man gained on them and his intent, pleading face suddenly loomed in the window.
Close the curtain
, Mother was shrieking.
Take no heed
.

“Where is your sash?” his uncle asks testily.

“I traded it for passage on a ferry,” says Henry. “On the Thames.”

His uncle scowls and shakes his head.

Just then a horn sounds and there’s an exuberant shout from the coachman. Henry opens the curtain again to watch the Bristol post race past, a blur of black and red, London-bound. There was talk of it at the inn this morning – it is said to do the journey
in sixteen hours. Alger bends forward and watches in disapproval. “They cover six miles in an hour,” he says. “The human brain can’t withstand that sort of speed. A coachman toppled off last week and died, just short of London.”

“Were you much affected by the heat in Jamaica, Uncle Alger?” Henry asks, just to torment him.

“Never was in Jamaica,” his uncle snaps. “Didn’t fancy the voyage.”

They stop at the coaching inn at Slough to rest the horses. They’re making excellent time themselves, thanks to the lack of luggage. Alger buys him a glass of ale with his dinner and Henry pulls in his horns a little. It’s mid-afternoon before they set off again. Henry opens the curtain and Alger does not protest. He watches the countryside crawl by, admiring giant oaks and the decorative curve of hedgerows, and to the north, the Chiltern Hills, lying in a blue ridge like the view of the Mocho Mountains from the Halse Hall veranda.

At first back in England, his mother liked to recount the early days to him in detail, her own misery as a homesick girl with a tiny baby. She hasn’t wanted to talk about it in recent years. But now the abolitionists are all emboldened by the success of the Wilberforce Bill, and she’s publicly asked the sort of question that would never have occurred to anyone before. After the funeral last year, one of her callers had the appalling manners to bring it up. A Quaker, she must have been, the sort who insists her cakes be made with honey to avoid plantation sugar. “How could you stomach the horror of it, the whip?” she asked. Henry listened with admiration while his mother deftly recalled the caller to the situation of the moment. “The whip is not a pleasant instrument, but the Negroes won’t work without it. Certainly they feel pain when flogged, and they let you know it, but when
you think of it, physical pain is the pain of a moment. It’s
mental
anguish, isn’t it, that lingers and leaves the deeper mark?”

It’s because of the
flogging
that Jamaica is crowding in on him now. Or because of the show he saw with Clement in Piccadilly. The woman on display was not more than twenty, but her breasts lay heavily to her stomach, their tips turned outwards. Her only novelty was in this sort of proportion; on the question of buttocks, he observed, the lewd caricatures of the red-haired chambermaid he’d drawn at Marlow showed restraint. Yet her keepers led her by a leash and by their manner implied that she was dangerous – it was all the most preposterous charlatanism. On her part too, apparently – she was in it for a share of the gate, Bullock said. What would her percentage be? They were charging two shillings. So it was not the low and ignorant who came out in numbers to gawk at this woman; it was people with means. Had they never seen a Negro woman before? By their ignorance, they made her a spectacle. At one point in the show, she squatted on the platform. She happened to be right in front of Henry, her head just inches away – he was close enough to see the swollen pores around her nipples. When she squatted, a cry of delight went up from the crowd. Clement was plucking at his sleeve, and the woman rose up, looking right at Henry. At the nearness of her curly black cap he felt a childhood ache, felt the dry, familiar springs of African hair under his fingers. Her eyes were puffy and yellowed, tired, full of rage and knowing, and they met his with instant recognition. He could not have been more startled if she had called him by name. He felt his lips part to say something, and then he turned and shook Clement off and pushed his way out through the crowd.

Finally he falls sound asleep, and in the yellow light of his pain, he dreams of leaving Marlow. But not alone – he is running away with Wyndham. They follow the dung-strewn towpath, sensing
the rickety fortress of Great Marlow looming behind them, and then the towpath ends and they’re on a peninsula that juts out into the Thames, which is become a glowing lake. They pace uneasily on the bank, listening to the dogs pursuing them. Wyndham is taller than in life, luminously handsome, all his secret qualities made evident; the something soft in his nature is like an exposed heart. He has the coins they need for the ferry, he’s carrying them in a small leather purse, but he’s confused and weeping, and Henry has to wrestle the purse from him and pluck the coins out so they can board the ferry. This they manage to do just as the dogs and soldiers burst furiously out of the woods and onto the bank.

FIVE