First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (22 page)

That was my last trip south. The tropics had always attracted me, the way the beauty and the corruption existed side by side. I was afraid now I would no longer be able to find the beauty.

In fact, I’d lost my taste for any kind of travelling. From then on, I stayed home in Camberloo. I stopped using my car. My world became the few miles around my apartment. My appearance changed as the years passed. In bodily terms, I matured. My hair thinned, my waist thickened. When I contemplated myself in the mirror after a shower, I used to think how much I looked like the man in the photograph in my bedroom. This plumpish man of average height was the reflection my father used to see.

At other times, when I inadvertently caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror in a store, say, or a restaurant, I looked like a man afraid of something. I began to wonder if that was how others, such as Lila and her clients at the Xanadu, saw me: a plump, frightened man. I worked hard to erase that image. I practised in front of a mirror and tried to stay
in control of my appearance at all times. After a while, I believe I succeeded.

If I were to sum up those years, I’d say I began to feel detached and secure. Most of the time, I actually looked on my detachment as a kind of victory over the world. Few things surprised me; nothing much excited me. If it hadn’t been for the nightmares and insomnia, I could easily have been convinced I was as happy as anyone had a right to be.

O
N A LATE AFTERNOON
in mid-December in my tenth year in Camberloo, someone knocked at my apartment door. Outside, there was snow on the ground—the brittle sort—and a bitter north-easter was blowing. I was reading and at first ignored the loud knocking. It got louder. Reluctantly I got up and opened the door.

An elderly, bearded man in a dark blue knitted hat and a pea-jacket stood there. He had unmistakable eyebrows. It was Harry Greene.

“Harry!” I could hardly believe my eyes.

“Andy. How are you, my boy? God’s rope!” he said, as fiercely as ever. “What a cold country you live in!” He held out his hand and I took it, and brought him inside while he chattered on.

“I can’t believe a lad as smart as I thought you were would want to settle down in such a freezing part of the world.” He sat down but wouldn’t take off his jacket. “I’m too cold,” he said. “I’ve only half an hour and my taxi’s waiting for me outside: I’m on my way to join a vessel on
the west coast. I’ve a few hours between flights so I thought I’d drop in and see how you were doing after all these years.” He took off his knitted cap. His grey hair was as wild as ever. He glared at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “So, how are you, Andy? Sure now, I wouldn’t have recognized you.” With my plumpness, my thinning hair, I could easily understand that.

I gave him a glass of rum to warm him up. He himself looked no older than before. Perhaps it was the unruly grey hair and the grey beard that had made him look older on the
Cumnock
than he really was.

“Andy, my boy,” he was saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t come and visit you when you were in that orphanage. Another berth on a long voyage came up and I couldn’t refuse it. ’Tis bad to get a name for turning down berths.”

“That’s all right, Harry,” I said. “It was so long ago I can barely remember it.” I changed the subject quickly. “How did you know I was living in Camberloo?”

“Ah, sure now, I made a few inquiries, that’s all. A sailor has to be good at navigating the perils ashore. And here I am.”

I told him I’d come to Camberloo at Doctor Giffen’s invitation and that the Doctor had since died. Then I gave him a brief run-down of my life after that. I told him everything was fine.

He was watching me carefully. He nodded when I’d finished. Then he looked over at my bookshelves.

“So you’re reading a lot?”

“Well, I still read,” I said.

“Novels?” he said, with one of his ferocious looks. “In spite of my warnings.”

“Well, mainly,” I said.

“We had a passenger last year who was a novelist,” Harry said. “He told me he thought I was right to avoid
reading fiction. He said he himself couldn’t see people at all for what they were: he was always turning them into characters. He said he couldn’t even enjoy a sunset: he was too busy thinking of a way to put it into words.” He shook his grey head. “Now, what use is that to anyone, Andy?”

I smiled to keep him happy.

“And now you’re on your way to another ship,” I said. “I thought you’d be retired by now.”

“Retired?” he said. “God’s oars! Sure I’m not seventy yet. I think my heart would stop beating if the sea wasn’t tossing it up and down, shaking it like an old clock.”

“And Captain Stillar? Is he still at sea?”

That stopped him for a moment.

“Ah, sure now you wouldn’t know about that,” he said, his voice softer. “He’s been dead these past ten years. I still have a few of his paintings. I take them with me on voyages. To remind me of him, I suppose.”

The news of the Captain’s death was more of a blow than I would have thought. He was such an enigma, and I’d always marvelled at the idea of him somewhere on the rough seas of this world, painting his hideous, beautiful women.

“What happened to him?” I said.

“Well, to start with, his eyes went bad. He got to the stage where he was like one of those old captains you read about who have to rely on the First Mate to make landfalls and steer them into tight moorings. But that’s only in novels. He failed the annual physical exam and lost his Captain’s ticket. The
Cumnock
was sent to the breaker’s yard and Captain Stillar was beached in an old sailors’ home in Glasgow. I visited him a couple of times, but I couldn’t stand it, he was so depressed. He could still see well enough to paint, so I said to him, Why don’t you get on with your painting? He said he’d tried, but he couldn’t.
He said if he couldn’t sail, he couldn’t paint, and that was all there was to it. He died not long after. ’Twas just as well, I suppose.”

We both sat silent for a while. He finished the rum and I poured him another.

“What about you, Harry?” I said. “How are you doing?”

“No change, Andy. Sure now, there’s not a bit of change in me. Old sailors don’t change much. But what about you? Come on now, tell me. Do you have a girl?”

I told him I had no girl, but everything was fine. By the way he was looking at me, I was beginning to wonder how long I could keep him at bay. If only I could think of the right questions to distract him.

“Have you been back to St Jude?” I asked.

“We’ve sailed past, but we don’t call in there any more. ’Tis a barren place altogether now. No one lives there.” His eyebrows lowered fiercely as he looked at me. “God’s rope! That must have been a terrible thing for you to go through,” he said.

“And are you still reading as much as ever?” I asked him quickly.

“God’s rudder!” he said. “I’ve read some great things lately.” He immediately forgot about everything else. “Do you remember Morologus? I know I told you about him, numerology and that sort of stuff. Ah, if only ’twere true.”

I filled his glass again while he talked.

“He has a theory that the path of your footprints all through your life spells out some great message. Now, wouldn’t that be a grand thing to see? On the other hand, how could you keep track of every step you’ve taken? You’d have to have someone following you around when you were a little baby, making notes. And when you got older you’d have to log every day’s course just like a ship’s captain. In fact, now I come to think of it, a man could plot out
his course in advance to spell out a message he liked, eh, Andy? Though I think that would be cheating.”

He slapped his thigh and drank his rum in one gulp.

“But then, maybe I don’t always understand Morologus. He gets most of his ideas from the ancient Greeks. So I’ve had to spend a lot of time reading them.”

Now he began to tell me about some of the books he’d been studying in his attempts to grasp Morologus. If I hadn’t known him all those years before, I might have found it incredible that an ordinary sailor should be such a scholar. The names fell from his tongue with great familiarity: Xenophones of Colophon, Hermes Trismegistus, Megasthenes (“sure now, he wrote about all the strange religions of his day—and some of them were very strange, Andy”); Ptolemy, Zeno, Themistocles (“he was a man who didn’t like going to bed at night: he said sleep was a kind of death and dreams were a doorway to the afterlife”), Plato, Heraclitus, Empedocles of Agrigentum, Anaxagoras (“he believed in an infinite number of inhabited worlds: Morologus spoiled the idea a bit with his notion of the Second Self”), Origen, Zarathustra and—most of all—Pythagoras (“’twas he who first figured out that numbers were at the root of all human understanding”).

Harry talked and talked about his studies. I remembered how it felt as a boy on the
Cumnock
and I sat back and relaxed. There was no more pressure on me. Every question he raised, he answered himself.

And time rushed by.

“God’s oars!” he said eventually, looking at the clock on the wall. “Sure now, Andy: you always knew how to get me talking.” He stood up. “I have to be on my way. My plane leaves in two hours.”

I tried to coax him to stay longer, knowing he couldn’t. On the one hand, I wanted him to stay; on the other, I
didn’t: if he had time, he would find out too much about me. Walking down to the front door with him, I felt sad: Harry Greene was the last remnant of whatever childhood, whatever innocence, I once had. Yet I wanted him to go.

His taxi was waiting at the entrance with its engine running. The snow was heavier than before. We stood in the lobby for a few moments looking out.

“What an awful place,” Harry said. “How can you stand this northern weather? This trip, I’m headed for Aruvula again. You remember it? Where Captain Stillar found his wife all those years ago? I think he’d be very disappointed with it now: all the old customs are gone. You don’t see a tattooed woman any more. Except in his paintings.”

“What happened to all his paintings?” I said. “I mean, aside from the ones you have?”

“He asked me to burn them all after he died. They were in a storage room, heaped on top of each other. I kept a few aside for myself. Sure now, I don’t think he’d have minded. I took the rest down to the shore line, like he asked me, and I made a big bonfire of them. They looked weird, writhing in the flames as though they were alive.”

We went outside and he got into the taxi. He told the driver to wait, and he opened the window. His breath tromboned into my face.

“Do you remember, Andy, I said I’d give you the directions to Paradise some day? I haven’t found them yet, but I will. I haven’t given up. I just have to keep working at my Morologus.”

“Don’t worry about that, Harry,” I said, smiling at the idea of it.

He knew what my smile meant.

“Oh well, you never know. If I do find them, I’ll send them to you right away.” His fierceness was gone, and he looked sad and old. He reached out and took my hand.

“Sailors are no good at goodbyes, you know that,” he said. “But I want to tell you you’re the nearest I ever had to a son. I always think of you.”

He let go of my hand, raised the window and the taxi pulled away. I went back into the lobby and watched the taxi move out of the driveway and into the white street. The snow was thick and heavy, and the bottoms of the windows of the lobby had little snowdrifts in them, like in an old-fashioned Christmas scene.

The taxi slowly disappeared down the street and with it went my sense of what I once was. As though I’d caught a brief glimpse of myself on the far bank of a river, and the figure was receding into the distance forever. I slowly climbed back up to my apartment, and it, and my life, never seemed emptier.

T
HE YEAR AFTER
Harry Greene’s visit, I made a journey to Stroven. I don’t know why I did: perhaps some homing instinct. And I don’t know what I expected.

I left Camberloo at the end of March. Snow still lay on much of Ontario, but spring was beginning to creep up from the south. The flight was an overnighter, so when the plane banked over London, it was about eight in the morning and the landscape was snowless. The traffic far below glinted in the occasional sun like endless columns of beetles.

I rented a car at Heathrow and set out northwards. The sun had put in its brief appearance for the day. Now rain
took over, a steady rain under low grey skies. I was in no rush, so I kept to the slow lane of the motorway. The rain and the steam on the windows made it impossible to see much of the passing countryside. I stopped occasionally at service centres for gas; and for sandwiches that tasted like the wrapping paper they came in.

Around dusk I crossed the Border and started to think about a place to spend the night. I got off the motorway and onto a narrow, winding road into the blunt hills of the Uplands. I stopped at a roadside hotel—the Cutty Sark Inn—a squat building with a whitewashed front, and I took a room, ate supper and went to bed. I dreamed about driving.

I got up the next morning at first light and looked out my window. I should have been able to see the hills, but the fog was so thick it was hard to see beyond the parking lot. I stood for a long time, looking, remembering my childhood. After a while, I dressed and had breakfast. By the time I’d finished, the fog had cleared enough that I checked out of the hotel and headed north-east again.

The next two hours’ driving was not easy. I could see fifty yards ahead through the fog but the road was so winding, and with so many ups and downs, I felt quite tense trying to anticipate them. Sometimes a car or a truck would materialize—as though it had just this moment been created—and howl past.

By noon, the world began to take shape and soon I could see clearly in all directions. I was deep among the hills and getting very near to Stroven. I knew the road now: it was the very same road the bus had rumbled along with me as its passenger, that morning long ago.

As I came nearer to Stroven, big yellow road signs appeared:
DANGER … ROAD ENDS … NO EXIT
. I came to a portable hut with
GUARDHOUSE
written over it, beside a
military escutcheon—“Army Engineers.” I could see that beyond the hut the road was unused; weeds were taking over again. I parked. A young soldier, looking a bit startled, opened the door of the hut, adjusting his army beret. Perhaps he’d been having a nap.