Sacred Hunger (2 page)

“Not all the way round.” The man still kept his head obstinately lowered. “Only at the leeches we have the lining.”

“Twas that I meant to say.” Kemp spoke sharply—he had not liked being interrupted.

Nothing changed in the sailmaker’s expression but he paused in his stitching. ‘Was it so?”’ he said.

“Aye, the leeches, and some would say the bunts also. There are those as will line you all the middle parts of the foot of square sails and the foremost leech of staysails. I don’t know if you hold with that, sir?”’

“No.” Kemp’s face had darkened, but he could never admit ignorance—it was like a defeat.

“I take my stand on common practice,” he said.

‘Practice is various, sir. What do you think should be done in the matter of the goring cloths, if I might be so bold?”’

Erasmus felt himself flush with rage at this sly pedant who was contriving to discomfit his father. His loved father too he blamed, for persisting. This fellow should not be talked to, but quitted instantly—or kicked off his stool. He moved away to a window and stood with his back to the room, looking out across the faintly glimmering, slate-grey water of the Mersey at the masts of ships at anchor in the Pool. Gulls were wheeling overhead. Their plumage looked leaden against the dull sky and they seemed to hurtle like lead through the air. This coincidence, the justness of his observation, impressed Erasmus and took away his rage. He resolved to write it down later. His love had inclined him, not to poetry exactly, but to a sort of doom-laden note-taking. She is there now, he thought. Less than five miles from where I am standing.

Since falling in love with Sarah Wolpert, his being had become tidal, he could brim with her at any time, the channels were there already, the tracks his obsession had so quickly made. A twitch of recollection, a pang of sense, and the tide of her perfections would come flooding in, the clear pallor of her skin, the slight motions of her hands, the look of her eyelids when she glanced down, the imagined life of her body inside the hooped dress…

He had known her most of his life; their fathers were old acquaintances who had sometimes done business together; but real knowledge dated only from ten days before, from the occasion of her elder brother’s coming of age— Charles was a few months younger than himself. He had gone rather unwillingly, being always ill at ease in a crowd, disliking broken talk, shared place. He was farouche, intractable. But some grace descended on his eyes that night. He had thought her childish and affected until this descent of knowledge—knowledge she must surely have shared: she had given him some looks. But she had looked at others too…

Turning his mind from this he began with a sort of stricken patience to piece that evening together again, the lamplight, bare arms, inflections of voice, whispers of silk. Filigree of a miracle. Again his being flooded with her.

He kept his back to the room a while longer, hearing the voices continuing still. A daub of sunlight from some invisible rift in the cloud lay far out on the water. Below him the tide lapped, muddy and sullen.

Here along the open bank were the yards where Liverpool’s ships were built, theirs among the others, not framed yet, not much more than the spine of her keel, yet to his eager father already freighted and on her way south. Erasmus felt a rush of surprised affection. He had none of this transfiguring enthusiasm. His need to possess the present.

Then there was the supper party, his father’s visionary gleam in the firelight, candle-light, face darkly flushed below the ash-grey line of his wig, heated with talking and wine. Not the same man at all as that sniffer of timbers, the bluffer in the sailmaker’s loft. One of those in receipt of his father’s eloquence that evening was his cousin, Matthew Paris. It was his cousin’s arrival, the looming quality of his presence there, a man newly released from prison—though of course the other guests knew nothing of this—that fixed the evening so clearly in Erasmus’s mind.

He had hated his cousin from the age of ten, because of an incident on a beach in Norfolk. Paris was to be the ship’s surgeon.

The ladies had left the table, headed by his mother, who was always prompt to rise, as far as her habitual languidness could show it, to escape from the oppression of loud male voices and spirituous breath.

The voices grew louder with the ladies gone.

Light played over the long, beast-footed sideboard, flickered on the heavy brass clasps that held its doors, on glasses and decanter, on the triple-headed silver candlesticks that had belonged to his mother’s mother. These, and the gilded mahogany clock above the fireplace and the ebony book-ends carved as ravens holding the big Bible with its purple silk marker, were things he had grown up with, as was his father’s voice, which had never to his recollection sounded the faintest note of doubt or misgiving.

It was confident as ever now, while the two different sorts of flame, ruddy and pale in concert, danced assent to his views of the profits to be made in the Africa trade, the voice warm, insistent, with sudden rising inflections, telling his guests assem-was too urgent. Lately the sense of this difference between them had complicated his feelings with a kind of sorrow, though whether for himself or for his father he could not have said.

He turned back into the room, where silence had now fallen. Some accommodation had been reached—his father’s face was florid and calm. The sailmaker he did not look at. He saw the sheet of canvas over the bar stir and creep a little in some current of air. It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory. New shackles were being forged here, in the light-filled loft, amid smells of oiled canvas and raw hemp and tar, the creeping fringes of the sail-cloth, his feelings for Sarah Wolpert and for his father. bled there that this very time, this year of grace 1752, was the best, the most auspicious possible: “Now that the wars are over, now that the Royal African Company has lost its charter and the monopoly that went with it, now that we can trade to Africa without paying dues to those damned rogues in London…”

Paris there among the others, silent—he hardly spoke at all; but more physically present than anyone else, solid among shadows, with his big-knuckled hands and awkward bulk and long pale face and the aura of shame and disgrace he brought with him.

“The trade is wide open. Wide open, I tell you, gentlemen. The colonies grow more populous by the year, by the month. The more land that is planted, the more they will want negroes. It is a case of first come, first served. And who is best placed to take it on? London is away there on the wrong side, with the Thames up her arse.

Bristol’s costs are twice ours here. I tell you, if God picked this town up in the palm of his hand and studied where best in England to set her down for the Africa trade, he would put her exactly back where she is, exactly where she stands at present.”

He thumped his fist on the table so that the glasses rattled and sat looking round the faces, challenging contradiction.

“Why should God want to do Liverpool a kindness?”’

The source of this levity Erasmus could not afterwards remember, but he remembered the frown of displeasure that came to his father’s face.

“It was a manner of speaking,” Kemp said.

“I am not the man to take God’s name in vain.”

Though profane by thoughtless habit, he was a church-going man and devout, especially now, with his ship on the stocks and his thoughts on the hazardous business of capturing and selling negroes. God is polycephalous, as the diversity of our prayers attests; his aspect varies with men’s particular hopes, and Kemp’s were pinned on fair winds and good prices. “I tell you,” he said, “sure as I sit here, the future of Liverpool lies with the Africa trade. It is patent and obvious to the meanest understanding. The trade goods are all in our own backyard, the cottons, the trinkets, the muskets, everything we -“

“For my part, I’ll stick to what I know.”

An old man’s voice, drink-thickened and truculent. Old Rolfson, who died of a stroke not long after, on the steps of the Exchange, leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds, most of it made provisioning the army during the recent wars.

“And what may that be?”’ somebody asked him.

Jocular, not very friendly. “We have peace now, Isaac, your contracts are finished. Fortunately for our brave army. I make no doubt your victuals killed more of them than the French did.”

There was laughter at this, which the old man heard through with a sort of malevolent composure. He was making to speak again, but someone on his right got in first.

“He means the Spanish trade, don’t you, Rolfson?”’

“A contraband trade?”’ Kemp waxed scornful. “So you’d found this city’s fortune on smuggled tobacco? I am talking about a commerce that will be worth millions. A lawful commerce—it is sanctioned by the law of the land. Merchants trading to Africa can hold up their heads with the best.”

In later times, when commercial enterprise came to be a virtue in itself, and a good return on capital was blessing enough, the need to invoke legitimacy was not so much felt, but the men seated around this table still felt it strongly. Kemp had made his assertion with triumphant authority and it was greeted without demur. He waited a moment, then continued more quietly: “Those that get in now will be the ones best situated. I’d be surprised if there are more than twenty Liverpool ships in the trade at present. In the next ten years you’ll see that go up to a hundred. Why, my tailor is in it.

He was telling me just the other day. He has bought a tenth part in a thirty-ton sloop that will carry you seventy-five negroes to the West Indies.”

“That’s no more than a fishing-smack.” Paris this, his one remembered contribution to the talk. The voice rather deep, vibrant, softened by the growling inflections of Norfolk. “Hardly longer than a pitch for quoits,” he added after a moment.

Incredulity in the tone, though what he was questioning—the size of the vessel, the number of negroes— Erasmus couldn’t determine.

His father, it seemed, had heard quite a different question.

“Aye,” he said, “that is the beauty of it.

Ten men can sail her. One prime slave will make you a profit of twenty-five pounds in Kingston market—enough to pay ten men’s wages for two months at sea.”

Kemp looked smiling round the table. “And look what is happening to sugar,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you gentlemen what raw sugar is worth on the home market nowadays.” He raised a hand and made a rapid sketch of a triangle in the air before him. “Three separate profits,” he said.

“One in Africa, one in Jamaica, one back here. And each one better than the last.”

With the exception of Paris, these were all Liverpool men. There could scarcely have been one of them who had not a full understanding of the Triangular Trade, as it was called—cheap trade goods to Africa for the purchase of negroes, these then carried to America or the West Indies and sold there; rum and tobacco and sugar bought with the proceeds and resold in England. Most of them were involved in the trade to some degree, as manufacturers, brokers or wholesalers.

Kemp was telling them what they already knew. He was aware himself that he was doing so. But he was in fear, and needed these days the temporary sedative of approval to take the edge off it, as one might need a drug, and he was ready to spend his best efforts to obtain this. There were those who afterwards recalled the garrulity that descended on Kemp towards the end of his life, and gave it out that they had always seen the weakness, known he was not sound by the way he sought to involve you in his purposes, get you on his side, working for it, casting round his energetic glances, gesturing with his hands like a confounded Frenchman. Kemp could not keep his own counsel, they said, and that will bring a man to ruin sooner or later.

These were people who added to their satisfaction at another’s downfall the gloss of worldly wisdom.

In the period after his father’s death, Erasmus was sometimes aware of it hanging in the air of conversations, in silences, in shifts of subject, too elusive for a cause of quarrel—he would have fought any man of whatever degree who spoke in disrespect of his father’s memory.

This evening he had not seen anything amiss. Drink had made his father eloquent, but there was nothing wrong in that. He had been proud of the way his father had stared that old ruffian Rolfson down, and dominated the table. He had thought him right in everything he said. It was true that the presence of Matthew Paris had been disturbing; it was hateful to have a jail-bird for a cousin and to be obliged to sit at table with him. But Erasmus had drunk quite a lot too; and something had happened earlier that day which occupied his thoughts and possibly blunted his observation. In the afternoon he had taken his courage in both hands and ridden over to the Wolpert house, ostensibly to see Charles. And there, without quite knowing how or why, he, who had always hated acting, had allowed himself to be enrolled in the cast of a play.

It had been on the morning of that day—the day of his involvement in these theatricals—that his cousin from Norfolk had arrived, about whom there hung the shadow of failure and disgrace; terrible blemishes to Erasmus, like deformities. If people stayed in their places, he felt, they would not incur such misfortunes. Even Paris’s sufferings, of which he had heard his parents speak, his broken career, the loss of his wife, these seemed shameful too. He had felt, from the first moment, oppressed by his cousin’s presence, as if literally in shadow, as if this meeting existed in shadow time, along with certain other incidents of darkness occurring then, while the ship was being built, which he afterwards remembered.

“This is your cousin Matthew. Do you remember him?”’

Erasmus saw a tall, ungainly-looking man with a face deeply marked below the short, bobbed wig.

He was dressed in a suit of black cloth and his necktie came down in two straight folds like a parson’s.

“No, I don’t remember him at all.”

He spoke with his eyes turned towards his father, as if talking of some person not there in the room.