False Colors (35 page)

And I could not have been more vile to him.
Alfie’s spirits expanded like a hot air balloon around a flame of happiness, filling his mind until there was no room for guilt, making him lighter than air.
Not a false friend at all! Not the wretch I have believed him recently, but the paragon I thought at first!
He had to think. He’d been a fool—no surprises there—but now, when he had wrestled back this glee, got out of this stuffy, creaking box of a carriage, he must some way, some excuse to seek John out and finally put this right.
“Forgive me, madam. Could we go back? I have suddenly remembered something I must do.”

John looked up as the street door slammed. Footsteps rapped smartly on the club’s pretentious marble entrance hall, softer on the teak sweep of stairs. Nausea rose under his breastbone, his fingers prickled with sudden cold, and he looked down at his cards abruptly, before he started to tremble. A few seconds later, the cocked hat of an officer of the marines rose into view, gold loop gleaming.

“I…I’ll stick,” said John to Captain Gillingham, as he folded up his hand of cards. The new arrival was not Alfie. No new arrival for the past fortnight had been Alfie. He tried not to loathe the marine, from his death’s head buttons to his boots, for the fact, but it was more of a struggle than he would have wished. Where Alfie was staying these days, he had no idea. The club had seemed the most likely place they might meet by chance. But enduring the close quarters, the din, the smoke, and the crowding presence of far too many strangers was proving…difficult. And he still had no idea what he meant to say to Alfie if he should arrive.

“I do believe your mind’s not on your play.” Gillingham dealt himself another card and smiled. Placing the cards face down on the scuffed, cheaply made table, he fished an ivory snuffbox from his pocket and offered it to John.

From further in the room, deep within the cloud of pipe smoke, a roar of laughter rolled over them both. The sound of crockery breaking into shards made John think of knives. The tremble in his fingers spread to his cards. He slapped them down quickly and clenched his hands together in fists, restraining their treachery. But his legs weakened and shook—the buckle on his shoe squeaking as if deliberately to alert every onlooker to his cowardice. He bit the side of his cheek, grinding it between his teeth as he fought not to do this.
Not again!
But when three dark figures lurched from the billowing fug, knocked into the card table by his side, and turned to laugh, arms raised in drunken, expansive gestures, John scrabbled back further into his chair, cringing.

“The little girl’s scared!” hooted the man at the back, a horsemarine by his coat, and his two friends chortled. John’s terror transmuted instantly into incandescent rage. He leapt up, shouldered aside the other two, and grabbed the marine by his stock. The man’s eyes widened, and he swayed drunkenly in John’s grip. As he did so there came the rustle and soft thud of Gillingham struggling to his feet behind John. Past the marine, Captain Davis of the
Leopard
and his first lieutenant, Hawkins—who had been sitting together pouring over paperwork by the window—also stood, took three indignant steps closer.

“John,” said Gillingham, gently, “the man’s blind drunk and doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“Nevertheless,” Davis fixed all three marines with a look of contempt, “if you insist on satisfaction, I would be honored to be your second.”
Their kindness astonished him. He pulled slightly against the knotted fabric, and when the fellow braced to pull back, he let go suddenly. The mocker measured his length on the floor, falling with a splash into the widening puddle of piss and wine, where guests, Christmas-merry, had missed the chamberpots. John pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his hands, thankful it would be taken as a gesture of defiance, and not as evidence of his cold sweats.
“I don’t think he’s gentleman enough to deserve a challenge.” Hawkins smirked, nudging the fallen man with a foot. At his arched, mildly inquisitive look, the other two drunkards shook themselves and made a break for the door. “Your servant, sir,” he said to John, watching them go.
Absurdly, at this gallantry, the feeling of being rescued, John wanted to cry. He managed to smile instead, though it felt watery. “I can’t say…I am very obliged to you, Captain. Lieutenant.” A jerk of the arm successfully indicated seats. “Will you take a glass of wine with us?”
“Not today, thank you.” Davis’ courtesy would have graced any royal court. “Need a clear head to do the books. We’ll bid you good night.”
Resuming his seat, John found the pack of cards scattered on the floor. As he leaned down to pick them up, Gillingham said quietly, “I own I am relieved. A wound doesn’t heal without it suppurates first. After your treatment on Tobago I expected this earlier.”
John bent his head over tidying the pack, easing all the edges into order. “I have…had distractions.” The driven energy pulled from him by the needs of Alfie’s court martial, terrifying though it had been, seemed almost attractive now that it had waned. The comfort of shipboard routine too had now been lost, and his ghosts risen up to take its place. “My friend’s…trouble. And then the voyage. But now I have nothing to do but think.”
“Well, the
Otter
at least made you a rich man. You could wager me some of that scarcely touched prize money.” Gillingham topped up his own glass, then John’s, from the bottle of Margaux that stood by his chair. “If
vingt-et-un
is insufficiently absorbing, I can ask Davis and his premier to take us on at whist. Let go that penitential rigor of yours a while and celebrate. It
is
Christmas, after all.”
Cupping the glass between his hands, John watched the room, paneled walls and candelabra, regimental crests and paintings of nude nymphs, float—in reflection—upside down over the bloodcolored wine. The laughter had not ceased, and now a cracked, off-key voice sang;

“It was pleasant and delightful on a bright summer’s morn
When the green fields and the meadows were covered with corn
And the blackbirds and thrushes sitting on
every green spray
And the larks they sang melodious at the dawning of the day.”

“And the larks they sang melodious…” Gillingham joined in, his voice reedy and unpracticed. “And the larks they sang melodious…. Come on Lieutenant, a little jollity won’t kill you. And the larks they sang melodious at the dawning of the day.”

Summoning up a wan smile, John drained his glass. After being called a little girl, nothing in this world would entice him to sing ever again. His skin crept at the thought. But still, unwelcome, unwilling, bringing with it a yet deeper twist of misery, came the memory of himself in Alfie’s cabin, soaring unselfconsciously on the music of Telemann.
“By God, you’d be a sensation in Italy, sir. The girls’d be running after you down the street.”

“I think I’ll go home,” he said. “I find I’m in no temper for more company at the moment. I have bought a little house near to the harbor, and I must provision it against the shops shutting.”

Outside, he dared the markets, and walked from shop to shop ordering food he had no real mind to eat; chicken, pies, plum cake and gingerbread, a basket of oranges and a pineapple that would have cost him a month’s wages back home in England.

A brief flurry of delivery boys filled his house with the thunder of boots and the pipe of their voices, riotous and cheerful as the midshipmen’s berth at sea, but it ended before the sun set, leaving him marooned. The thought of finding an employment agency and interviewing servants—
at this time of year!
—was more than he could face. So he ate a cold dinner, lit his solitary candle, and brooded over the problem of Alfie Donwell.

Would it have killed Alfie to think well of him? Perhaps Alfie did not know to what lengths John had gone to save him and could not therefore be expected to be grateful for them. Indeed, ensuring he didn’t have to be grateful was the whole purpose of not telling him. But still, who would have thought he could be so resentful, could play a low, vile,
cruel
trick as to raise John’s hopes in order to deliberately humiliate him? Had he now added malice to his scarcely repressed violence?
Barbaric, intolerable, infuriating man! Why could he not give me a chance to explain?

Yet that was unfair. Alfie had every reason to believe himself ill used, and had dealt with it for the most part with dignified avoidance. What if that vehement, glorious, intolerable encounter aboard ship had not been cruelty at all? What if it had been a chance for them to begin again—one of Alfie’s blind charges into the unknown that went wrong as they so often did? What had he said?

John rubbed at the headache that twisted like goat’s horns across his brow, Alfie’s voice, dark and rich as chocolate, more real than the bare walls around him. Perhaps that was the key? Perhaps the man—in some freak of antic superstition—had meant it literally?

He took his candle upstairs and went to bed. Perhaps it was worth enduring until the new year before he gave up hope entirely.

The week passed in austerity. John struggled with a thousand domestic chores he had scarcely conceived existed before. They passed the days, making it possible for him to deny that he was just marking time as he waited to be forgiven.

New Year’s Eve dawned like every day in Jamaica—sunny, breezy, hot. John slept till noon, pulled on breeches, and breakfasted in his shirt sleeves, on bread gone hard as ship’s biscuit. Time had become a thin wire, puncturing his chest, passing through his lungs and out through his backbone. He moved along it by slow inches. By tomorrow he would know if Alfie had been speaking of a literal new start in a new year. But tomorrow lay inaccessible at the end of this interminable day.

At three o’clock, disgusted with sitting in the kitchen, bare feet on warm tiles, door open on the weedy courtyard of back garden, where tendrils of pumpkin were even now choking the life out of a stand of English roses, he finished dressing and repaired to his writing desk. Drawing up the chair, he took out paper, pen, and ink, and began writing.

This is late in coming to you for this Christmas, but I hope it will find you before the next. I am enclosing your prize money, which I am in the fortunate position to be able to pay out of my own funds. Please do not mention it to the other
Meteors
as I cannot do the same for all, but I hope this will enable the new year to find you and Evie settled in your own establishment.

If, for any reason, the thought of an innkeeper’s life no longer appeals, I am also in need of a reliable servant, or two. Livery could be arranged.

Sealing the letter, he walked down to the officer’s club and confided it to a lieutenant due to sail for Gibraltar in a week. He refused drinks, smiled wanly over jokes about his tea-total and killjoy Methodism, and returned home, buying a copy of
The Life of Sir Thomas More, By His Great Grandson
on the way.

Alone in his front room, John opened the book and read the first paragraph before drawing out his watch and sitting, fascinated by the white face, the slowly moving hands, the tick. How slow midnight was to arrive! How obvious it was to him now that he had been deluding himself. This evening was no different from any other. By half past eleven he knew no one was coming, and it only remained to try and be glad of it.
One more day of not giving in to sin.
One more day of the virtue that used to come so easily, and now was like being slowly eaten away from within.

The truth was, simply, that John was not
lovable
as, with all his faults, Farrant had been lovable.
He got up to close all the curtains, pour himself a drink. His father’s contempt floated on top of the brandy.
Who could love such a cold fanatic as myself?
His own parent had not managed it.
Lighting a candle, John returned to his desk and brought out his faithful diary. His ears hurt from listening too hard for a knock on the door, so instead he repaired his quill and filled the silence with the scratching of thought.

It occurs to me now, when I contemplate sin, that perhaps my father had something of the right of it after all. If the Lord came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly, does it not follow that whatever kills that life, whatever constrains, dries and desiccates that life is a sin?

It must have been a chill household for a man to rejoin, who was used to roaring parties, mirth and splendor. I can imagine, now, how hard it must have been for a sensualist to depart from the theatres and concerts of the capital to our cheerless disapproval.

I wonder, when it is too late for the realization to do me any good, whether my father might perhaps have desired my affection. Was he such an unnatural father as to have taken no pride in his son, had the son only allowed it?

Too late, as usual, he saw again the outpouring of noisy life, light, and color as his father burst into the tall white hall of their country home with his entourage of actresses and hangers-on. Even now he could not excuse the whores and mistresses, but found it hard to praise his own recoil—the clenched fists and look of scouring contempt with which he had greeted his father every time.

Might he have been less cruel, if I had looked down upon him less? My virtue does not show in so white a light as I had once supposed. Critical, offensive, sanctimonious. No wonder….

John’s watch chimed the hour with a sweet little silvery voice. John stilled, the sound piercing him like a fountain of pins. Bowing his head into his hands, he swallowed, rubbing his eyes. Damp under his fingertips seeped through his eyelashes. He sniffed to clear a nose that had unaccountably become blocked. His breath caught in his throat with a soft “ah,” and at the sound he dipped his pen again, angrily, drew it back to hover over the page.