First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (9 page)

“I’ve spent many a night at the Hochmagandie myself when we’re in port. I have … friends there.” He glanced at me and I couldn’t help thinking he meant those women in the bar. “Captain Stillar’s a regular visitor, too,” he said. “I suppose you know that.”

I didn’t say anything, especially not about seeing the Captain through a crack in a door.

“Yes,” he said. “It has to do with his painting. Sure now, didn’t you know he was a painter? Come and I’ll show you.”

I followed him out of his cabin and we went for a long walk below decks, along a maze of passageways and narrow stairwells, moving ever forward, till we arrived outside a storage compartment low in the bows of the
Cumnock
. Harry Greene slid the door open and flicked on overhead lights that were very bright.

The compartment was quite large but had no portholes. In the middle was a metal table riveted to the steel floor, and on it were tins full of tubes of paint and dozens of brushes. The metal floor was stained with paint. An easel with a cloth flung over it was also fixed to the floor near the table. Along the walls, behind a rope lattice, dozens of canvases of various sizes were stacked facing the hull.

Harry Greene seemed very familiar with the room. He pulled one of the larger canvases out and turned it over.

“Here, have a look at this,” he said.

It was a painting of a woman whose body was made to look like a lizard.

He pulled out other canvases and let me see them.

“Look,” he said. “Always the same subject.”

He was right. The women were of every shape and size,
and on their bodies the Captain had painted that lizard image, like a transparent costume.

Harry Greene talked while I looked at one painting after another. I must admit I couldn’t help trying to make out the bodies under the paint.

“It all began with his wife,” Harry said. “She was a woman from Aruvula. ’Tis an island in the Pacific near the Oluban Archipelago. He used to call in for a cargo of copra and that’s how he met her. He only knew her for a few weeks, then he married her and brought her back home with him.”

While he was talking, I was figuring out the Captain’s method. First, he’d paint the naked body of a woman onto the canvas in a very lifelike way; then he’d paint the lizard on top of her the way he did with real women in the hotel.

“I saw his wife only one time,” said Harry. “She was wearing a long dress with long sleeves, and her face was covered with a veil. Under it I could just make out the tattoo. Sure now if you didn’t know better you’d have thought ’twas some kind of skin disease. All of the women of Aruvula are tattooed with the lizard.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Well now, I don’t know for sure,” he said. “But I think ’tis because they believe there’s something immortal about the lizard. You can cut off its tail and on it grows again.”

He went back to the topic of the Captain’s wife.

“Now, a tattooed woman was fine in Aruvula,” he said. “But in Scotland, ’twas unthinkable. ’Twas worse than a deformity. ’Twas perverse. So she had to keep herself covered all the time. Not that she had to do it for too long. During her very first winter she caught pneumonia and died.”

I was looking at some of the smaller canvases. They were no bigger than a book-cover, but were very exact.

“At the end of each voyage,” Harry was saying, “he goes to the Hochmagandie and hires women as models. When he’s back at sea, he does the canvases.”

He lifted the corner of the cloth draped over the easel and glanced under.

“I’ll give you one guess,” he said. He held the cloth up so that I could see for myself.

The painting was only partly done. The Captain hadn’t even begun to add the lizard. A thin, naked female stared out at me with unflinching eyes. It was the girl I’d seen that final night at the Hochmagandie.

Back up on deck, we stood for a while. The air was barely less stifling than below decks.

I was thinking about the Captain, and how he must have loved the woman a lot to be so obsessed with her memory.

“He must really miss her,” I said to Harry Greene.

He shrugged.

“Sure now,” he said, “in these matters of love you can never be certain. What if I told you he went back to Aruvula just a year after her death, and tried to find another girl to marry?”

He saw how shocked I was.

“ ’Tis the truth,” he said. “He did just that. The chief and the elders told him to go away from the island and never come back. So that’s why I say you can never be sure about love matters. I think maybe he loved that lizard tattoo as much as he loved her. In some of the paintings you can’t tell if ’tis a woman who looks like a lizard, or a lizard that looks like a woman.”

The whole time we’d been in the studio earlier, I’d been afraid the Captain might walk in on us.

“Does he know you look at his paintings?” I asked Harry.

“Of course,” he said. “Indeed, he always asks for my opinion of them.”

That just reinforced for me what a strange man the Captain of the
Cumnock
must be. Harry knew what I was thinking.

“Oh now, Andy,” he smiled at me. “If you can’t find a little bit of madness in a man, you can’t trust him.”

I didn’t know what to make of that.

“Is he a good captain?” I asked.

“God’s oars!” he said. “He’s the safest captain I ever sailed with, for he avoids bad weather like the plague. He can’t paint when the sea’s too rough.”

L
IKE MOST YOUNG
people, it was hard for me to appreciate that adults hadn’t always been adults. I wish I’d asked Harry more about his own boyhood: at the age I was in elementary school, he would have been serving his time as a cabin boy on a sailing ship to Patagonia. For education, he’d lived among strange people and visited the remote corners of the world. He’d battled the great storms off Cape Horn.

I know he’d have been only too happy to tell me about his life then, but I didn’t ask. I did ask him another thing, though—a very personal question—not long after he’d shown me the Captain’s paintings. We were on deck one muggy night, leaning on the rail.

“Are you married, Harry?” I’d been thinking about that, and about what kind of woman his wife might be. I wanted
to know if he had children. My curiosity was tainted with a certain amount of jealousy.

He didn’t answer right away, and from the fierce way he looked at me from under his eyebrows, I was afraid I’d offended him—maybe crossed some border of intimacy. But he was only thinking, and soon he began to talk quite freely.

“No children. But, indeed, I was married once. ’Twas a long time ago. I’d just come back from a voyage to the Macarenes.…”

 … he turned twenty-five the day after they docked. He took his usual room in the Sailor’s Mission, down by the docks. But then something unusual happened: he became very ill. He couldn’t keep down food, and could barely move his arms and legs. The doctor hoped it was only a severe case of dengue fever—“Break Bone Fever,” as the sailors called it. Those giant mosquitoes on the Macarenes had surely infected him.

Whatever it was, Harry could tell from the way the doctor looked at him that he was afraid that what he had might be deadly.

A woman who was a part-time nurse at the Mission, and who had a spare room in her house, said she’d take Harry in and look after him. He would either recover or die there.

Her name was Heather.

The house was big and old, with dark wood panels on the walls. It was a gloomy place except for a red-and-yellow parrot called Daisy. Heather’s father was a sea captain and he’d brought the bird for her from a voyage to Rio. Its cage was in the kitchen and she’d taught it to say “Hello!” and “Goodbye!”

Heather herself was a small woman, full of energy, with
frizzy ginger hair she tried to contain in a bun. She would sit patiently by Harry’s bedside for hours each day, devoting herself to his every need. No one had ever paid such attention to him. Inevitably, in the process of recovering from one fever, he fell helplessly into another. Love.

Soon, he was able to get out of bed and limp around the house. Then he could climb the staircase, and after that, he could walk the length of the street without feeling too tired. All the while, he was falling more and more in love with Heather. She had saved his life and she loved him back. He was sure of that. He could see it in her eyes.

After two months of this convalescence, he told her his feelings. He asked her to marry him, right away. She seemed to hesitate, which he took for modesty. He pestered her, she gave in.

Her reluctance to marry him should have worried him, but he was too thrilled at feeling well again, and maybe at being in love.

The wedding was a small one. Her father was on a voyage at the time, so he wasn’t there. The following week, Harry Greene himself was offered a berth on a ship headed for West Africa. Heather didn’t object. It was good, she said, for a man to follow his profession. He said he’d take Daisy with him to keep him company and remind him of her. She agreed.

The voyage lasted two months, and all through it, Harry never stopped thinking about Heather. Whenever Daisy said “Hello!” or “Goodbye!” in Heather’s voice, he thought his heart would burst with love.

Those were the two longest months of his life. But they passed, and one day in June, the ship sailed into Glasgow heavily laden with mahogany and Harry Greene’s love.

The house was empty, with a For Sale sign on the lawn. Harry Greene looked through the windows. All the furniture was gone.

At the Mission, they said she didn’t work for them any more. They gave him her new address.

A taxi took him to a district where the City melts into the country, and where, in summer, marauding bands of wild flowers ambush the cultivated lawns of the houses. Harry got out of the taxi at the end of one of the little streets and walked along it.

He saw her before she saw him. She was standing on the lawn of the only old house in the street—the original farmhouse, fieldstone, ivy-covered. He almost called out, but instead, he stood behind a hedge and watched.

She wasn’t alone. She was talking to someone who was sitting in an old wooden lawn chair. Harry could see him clearly—a young man in a housecoat, his face lined and grey from illness. She was looking at him with great tenderness.

All at once, she stiffened. She turned towards the hedge where Harry was standing. She looked and looked.

“Harry?” she called.

He came out from behind the hedge, and she walked slowly to meet him. She didn’t smile and she made no attempt to touch him.

“I heard your ship was due,” she said.

They talked, standing there by the hedge.

Harry wanted to know what had happened, why she had deserted him. She said it was difficult to explain. There was nothing personal in it. She had loved Harry, very much, especially when he was most sick—especially when she thought he might die.

Harry couldn’t understand.

Heather said she herself didn’t understand. She seemed
only able to love a man, she said, if she could see the grave in his eyes.

Harry pondered that for a while.

“So you don’t love me any more?”

“Only if I close my eyes,” she said, “and remember how you were when you were sick.”

At that point, the young man in the chair called out to her in a feeble voice. Heather’s eyes were suddenly full of love and concern, and she went to him. Harry watched them together for a moment, then he slowly walked away.

“Well now, after that,” said Harry Greene, leaning on the rail of the
Cumnock
, “I took the first berth I could get and I was gone for a year straight. When I came back from that voyage, I heard that Heather was dead. ’Twas her new lover infected her with whatever he had. I’m sure she didn’t mind at all.” He shook his grey head. “One of those books in my cabin talks about the cold love of a saint. I can’t help thinking Heather was some kind of saint. If I’d pretended to be sick all the time, I’m certain she’d have loved me forever.”

The parrot, Daisy, had interested me as much as Heather. I asked him what happened to it.

“Sure now, I took Daisy with me on all my voyages after that. I could still hear Heather’s voice saying ‘Hello!’ and ‘Goodbye!’ long after she was dead. Then, one time we were sailing off the coast of Brazil and that bird took off, and didn’t come back. I’m sure it could smell home.” He laughed. “Come to think of it, I missed that bird more than I did Heather.”

We’d been at the rail a long time and the night was dark and warm.

“So, Andy,” he said, “that was my only attempt at being a married man. Did I tell you that old Johannes Morologus
says there’s mathematics even in love? According to him, people like Heather and I are the same as two parallel lines—they can run alongside each other, but they can’t ever meet.” He sighed. “Ah, the love of a woman. ’Tis a great thing … for many reasons you’re too young to understand.”

It was much darker now, and I was glad the darkness hid my face.

“A woman’s love isn’t hard to win,” he said. “All you have to do is talk to her. So says a French book I read a while back. The author claims words are the brain’s love juice. He says when you talk to a woman, it doesn’t matter much what you say, you’re making love to her.” He laughed, then was serious. “I’ve never married again. I wouldn’t think of giving up my voyages and my books. How could any woman put up with that?”

After he said that, his hand thumped down on the railing.

“God’s rope!” he said. “Do you know, Andy my boy, this is the first time I’ve ever told anyone about my marriage? Sure now, you have a way of getting me to talk.”

As though he really needed much encouragement, I thought.

He reached out and squeezed my shoulder in the dark.

“Now, I’ll let you in on something else. We have more in common than you know. The house in Stroven—the one you talked about—the house you were born in. Do you know who had it built? ’Twas Heather’s father. He lived there when he retired from the sea after her death.” He was speaking now in a quiet voice he used when he was confiding in me. “And I went there once to visit him. Yes, Andy. I’ve actually been in the house you were born and brought up in.”