Martha Peake (13 page)

That glass of wine led him by nightfall to move on to gin, and Harry Peake was no match for a bottle of gin. A bottle of hock, a pot of ale, of these he had shown himself the equal, when he drank for an hour or two and then came home. But the gin, no, with the gin it was different, and it was bad gin they drank in those days, distilled fast, a crude and impure liquour. It masked his soul, or killed it, rather, for the period of the intoxication; and it had the effect then of urging him to renew the intoxication before it had worn off properly, before the fumes had cleared, so it was that much harder for him, when he did become sober, to recover his own self, and resume life in the person he had been.

But he did not become sober for a number of days, nor did he return to the Angel during that time. When he did come back he was in a most pitiable condition indeed. All the money he had had from Lord Drogo was spent, and so was he: his humanity was burnt up inside him, he was nothing but ashes and heat, smouldering with bitterness, now and then flaring without warning, then just as suddenly subsiding into a state of muttering introspection. Explosive energies seethed and roiled within his torched frame, within the ruin he had made of himself in his few days down by the docks.

Martha had heard her father talk often, in his sober years, about what drink did to him. He said there was a demon at work in him when he drank, he said he could see it, a ghastly black creature that sat on top of him, that hunkered slavering on his spine, urging him to fresh
excess, and him a hollow thing in which the demon words reverberated and turned to din without meaning, and nothing left inside him with which to oppose its malign influence. That help must come from Martha. She must never, he said, allow him to drink. It was a responsibility that should never have been placed upon the shoulders of one so young. They were broad shoulders, Martha’s, and she bravely attempted to do what he asked. But in the end the demon was too strong for her.

Each night of his absence she went into the town to look for him. It was nasty perilous work. A man on gin tends to drift eastward, and the further east a man goes, the lower he sinks. She searched the pot-houses and night-cellars around the docks, to which she guessed he would gravitate, given his old deep attraction to the river. She had only to open the door of those places and glimpse what lay within—the thick smoke, the lifted faces, the haunted eyes—for the insults, the compliments, the invitations, the curses to be flung at her like so many darts dipped in filth. In she went however, fixed in her resolve, she moved through the gloom until she was sure he was not there, and then on to the next one.

At last she found him. Emerging at dawn onto a deserted dock, by way of a covered alley with an arched opening, she saw a disused wharf stretching into the river on ancient mossy spiles. A light mist lay on the river, the few ships at anchor were spectral and unmoving in the stream. At the end of the wharf sat a humped figure singing a broken ballad. There was a bottle beside him on the planks.

She approached with some diffidence. Halfway out along the wharf, the damp rotten planks sagging and splintering beneath her feet, he heard her. Wheeling his head about with painful slowness he watched his daughter approach. His eyes were red smears in shadowy caverns, and a hopeless, amiable grin pulled apart his jaw and lent him the appearance of a donkey. He lifted a hand and shouted what might have been “Hail the dawn!”

Martha could not know his temper. She picked her way along the wharf until she was close to him.

“Father,” she said.

Nothing.

“Father, you must come home now.”

A streaming confusion of words from Harry now, an incomprehensible stew in which could be detected scraps of poetry and fragments of thought, but all mixed in with nonsense like chunks of beef in a puddle of vomitus. The tone, however—the tone remained friendly.

“I’ve come to take you home, Father.”

A last few sputtering ribbons of indigestible verbiage. Then silence. He spoke not to her but direct to the river, which was calm and oily where the mist in patches opened upon its surface. The great head sank forward now, and the hands were limply folded in the lap. A bell clanged mournfully from a ship in the stream, its masts and cross-trees visible above the mist. A breeze came up, and the vessels rocked gently at their moorings. The head sank forward, and the great back lifted. He had no coat, his shirt was torn open at the throat and somewhere he had lost a shoe. Then with a shake of the shaggy head he sat up straight and stretched his arms high above his head, and opened his jaws to yawn, and take in a few large gulps of the morning. He turned then toward Martha.

“Home, is it?” he said, absently scratching his chin.

“Home, Father.”

There came now something in Latin, and then, with no small effort, and a good deal of pain, he managed to winch himself onto a knee, and from there, after a heaving pause of several seconds, to his feet. He swayed a moment, like a tree when the saw has come clean through, but the trunk retains a precarious balance on its stump; then flung out an arm, and held on to Martha’s shoulder; and thus crutched by his daughter he began the slow grim lurch through the morning to Cripplegate.

For some days he barely stirred from his room. He was not drinking hard now. He had gin by him, but he took it sparingly; sufficient to maintain the smouldering husks of a morbid vitality. He paced the floor. He read, and at times scribbled furiously at his table, though he destroyed much of what he wrote, setting it afire in the grate. Martha watched him with wary eyes, ever-vigilant, awaiting an explosion she feared could come at any time from this stooped glowering figure with the dead red eyes. She was living with a wild creature of unpredictable temper; when would it show its claws, its fangs, in anger?

Martha watched her father in his decline with a grief and at times a rage that remained, however, impotent, for he refused to tolerate for a moment any attempt she made to interfere with his drinking. Ah, she watched the man; she should have watched the bottle. Had she properly understood the pattern of his drinking she would have anticipated the crisis. For there came a quickening, as he tired of whatever control was employed in maintaining the brooding semi-intoxication of the last several days. Now came a day—it was a Sunday—when she heard, in the early evening, just as twilight descended, and the murmur from the taproom below grew loud, and the first songs were sung to the first scrapings of the fiddle—a sudden shout from his room.

She looked up from her stitching. Muffled curses through the door now; he was in pain. This she had been dreading: that while he was in this gin-sodden condition he should suffer an attack of those torments of the spine which at intervals felled him and left him in a state of wrecked exhaustion. With gin in him, what then would happen when the pain came? Would it drive him into a frenzy, into mania proper; and what was he capable of then?

She put aside her work and crossed the room to her father’s door, and without knocking she went in. There had indeed been a sudden increase in his drinking, and it had been accompanied, so it appeared, by a furious bout of writing. Sheets of paper were scattered
all over the table, every sheet covered with his distinctive flowing hand, and not a few stained with spilt gin. There were papers on the floor, and no attempt had been made to gather or collate them, as though the act of writing was what mattered here rather than the verse generated, if verse it was; as though he were attempting to expel the demon through the medium of ink, and the more furiously he wrote the more gin he must drink to sustain the flow.

But he had been brought to an abrupt stop. He stood swaying over the table, staring at his thumb, from which blood was gouting onto his papers, staring at it with his lips pulled back from his teeth and his eyes wide with horror. He was obstructed even in his attempt to empty his poor teeming brain of its frenzy! Quills he had worn down and thrown aside were scattered on the floor, along with the shavings from repeated sharpenings of their nibs; and now in his sharpening he had sliced open his thumb. Blood spouted everywhere, onto his shirt, onto the table, and onto the sheets of writing, where it mingled with the fresh ink, creating blots and rivers of red and black.

Martha ran to him with a cry of alarm, pushed him back down in his chair, seized tight his thumb and held it aloft. Harry sat there dumbly, staring at his table, as Martha bandaged the wound with a handkerchief. He seemed then to awaken to his surroundings: the papers, the blood, the quills, the bottles, the ink.

“Am I mad?” he murmured, frowning, lifting a sheet of his own writing and trying to read it. He shook his head as though unable to comprehend what the words meant. He looked at Martha. “Am I mad? What is the matter with me?”

My poor Martha, the tears were flowing unchecked now, at this first sign in so many days of his reason returning.

“No, father, no,” she cried, “not mad, no; drunk is all, only drunk.”

“Only drunk,” he said, absently lifting his hand once more as Martha directed him to. “For how long?” he said.

“Some days.”

“Oh God.”

At this point he laid his face on the table, among his sodden verses, and wrapped his fingers together on top of his skull; and Martha stroked her father’s head as he sobbed into the table.

“Is it the ballad?” she whispered; and at the sound of her voice a wonderful event occurred. Her father’s head came up off the table and he stared at her and for the first time in what seemed an eternity
—saw
her. He saw her.

“Martha,” he said, and lifted his bandaged hand to his tear-stained face, so that all his mouth and jaw were covered by his fingers, but his eyes gazed at her direct. And gone, gone, the deadness! It was him.

“Martha,” he said again, and pushing back his chair, opened his arms to her. She clambered into his lap and threw her arms around his neck and clung to him.

“Is it over?” she whispered.

Her father’s face was buried in her shoulder, her head was pressed against his great head, held tight by his fingers. He murmured into her shoulder and her face filled with hope at the thought that it was over, and he was his own self again.

He was very tired. Martha led him into her own room and had him take his shirt off, and washed him as he sat nodding and dozing in the chair, and every moment he threatened to fall asleep and topple onto the floor. She put him into her own bed and then set about making order of the chaos he had created. She stood his jugs and bottles in ranks by the door, and organized the papers strewn about the room. Harry had made no attempt to number his pages or otherwise indicate their sequence, nor was that flowing hand legible as it once had been. Under the influence of gin, letters, whole words, strings of words even, had bled into each other so there was no telling where the one ended and the next began, this difficulty exacerbated by the smudging of ash from his pipe, the holes burned by falling embers,
and elsewhere blots and runnings where gin or blood or tears had mingled with the ink. She would make out perhaps three or four words, a phrase, a sentence, then lose its meaning because she was unable to understand what it led to and where it had come from. It was a wild incoherent screed, and after some minutes of inspection, in which she tried to elicit some meaning from the soiled pages, it occurred to her that perhaps they had no meaning at all, beyond the flickering transient impulses of a mind unmoored and exiled from reason and mastered, rather, by the demon resident in a bottle of gin.