Sacred Hunger (22 page)

Sullivan dozed under the punt and was discovered and kicked awake by the second mate, whose watch it was. Wilson, ordered forward on lookout, set his saturnine face to the glimmering horizon and thought of ways of broaching the rum in the storeroom. In the darkness between decks Evans and Johnson found each other.

The moon rode clear in the sky now and the ship’s sails were the colour of bleached bone. Moonlight, falling through this high pyramid of sail, made of the deck another sea, with a trailing, glinting weed of rat-line and shroud, and shoals of moonbeams flickering across her as the ship rose and fell. The real sea was unbroken, luminous to the horizon. With the utmost regularity, like a sleeper breathing in the deepest vale of sleep, the Liverpool Merchant dipped into her moonlit reflection and rose and dipped again, as if she could never have enough of her own image, the curving headrails, the full cheeks of the bows, the bosomy wraith of the Duchess of Devonshire yearning up to meet her and endlessly falling away.

From where Erasmus was standing he had a view across to the open farmland rising beyond Wolpert’s estate. The day was slightly fluffed with mist and in this moister air colours were deepened, the distant corn fields flat jade, the hedges of the beech walk, from which the director would shortly emerge, soft emerald.

Somewhere nearby a chaffinch was singing. Though waiting here in ambush, Erasmus felt a little drowsy.

There are moments in anyone’s life when some blend of circumstances, some consonance of surroundings and situation and character, show him in a light peculiarly characteristic, make him seem more intensely himself to the observer, that is: the subject will not be aware of it.

He seems to us then to be immobilized, taken out of time—or he steps, rather, into some much older story.

So the blind mulatto, sitting among shadows, talking of paradise. So—to take an example among many—the first mate, Barton, extracting from a waistcoat pocket his dainty thimble, standing on the moonlit deck, explaining the nature of fear to Matthew Paris. So Erasmus waiting there, near the beginning of the alley that goes down between tall hedges of beech, waiting for the rival he has fashioned for himself to give grievance to his love.

He is there imperishably, wild with his jealousy, vague with the peace of the day. He is always, always to be found there.

He had watched Adams go up to the house for his snatch of repose, as the director was accustomed to term it; Madeira and biscuits were set out for him in a small room adjoining the library. He would return by the same path, ever more offensively free in his manners, or so Erasmus considered. He knew now that this confrontation was the only way. There had been no time for manoeuvring. He was convinced that Adams was plotting to expel him from the cast and bring in another Ferdinand to take his place and usurp his love. I had rather force it to a fight, he thought. I would kill him rather. With this he came awake, experienced an increase of purpose. But the readiness to shed the director’s blood was not new—it had been there already, implicit in his vow.

He saw Adams, in his pale blue coat, descend the steps from the terrace, cross the short lawn below and disappear between the hedgerows. He waited where he was for a minute or two longer, then took the few paces that brought him within the line of the alley.

The other was approaching, the sunlight twinkling on his silver buttons. He was not more than thirty yards off. There was no way now that a meeting could be avoided, short of one of them turning abruptly about and retreating in the opposite direction.

Adams’s face showed small pleasure at the prospect of the encounter. On Erasmus, watching the director approach, waiting these final moments before speaking, the white gravel of the walk, the clipped green walls of the hedges, made an impression of neatness and order almost dizzying.

“A word with you, sir, if you will be so good.” He encountered the insolently languishing dark eyes. This was perhaps the first time he had seen the director’s face completely in repose, the first time certainly they had spoken together outside of the rehearsals.

“Your servant, sir,” the director said.

“I am awaited, as you know.”

‘It will not take long.” He paused still, however, seeking to control his breathing. Adams’s face at close range and in the intimacy of this narrow space had brought back with a rush all his detestation, which for a while had been submerged in the business of contriving the encounter. This suddenly renewed sense of the other man’s physical being, the eyes, the pimple converted into a beauty spot, the smell of attar of roses and ingested wine, confirmed, touch by touch, lechery, treachery, all sins.

“Well, what is it?”’ Adams was impatient. It was hot there, in the enclosure of the hedges. “You might do better to be practising your lines. You have some way to go, sir, yet, before you can be deemed proficient in them.”

“These lines I have rehearsed,” Erasmus said, and even smiled a little. “I am perfect in them.”

Adams failed altogether to catch the emphasis of these words or hear the faint tremor of control underlying them. He was not a man who noticed others much, unless it was in the way of business. Moreover he was at present rendered somewhat distrait with wine, as he might himself have put it. He had observed the unnatural straightness and stiffness of Erasmus’s posture and the fixity of his regard; but these he was familiar with already, they were characteristic of the young man in his role of Ferdinand, mere aspects, to the director, of Erasmus’s general uncouthness and lack of talent as an actor. ‘Well, I am glad of it,” he said. “Is that what you waited here to tell me? But there is more to it than being able to recite your lines.

There is the whole management of your movement on stage. There is the language of the body. This is between ourselves, my young sir, but I swear I never saw an actor so block-like in performance, so little in command of himself, and by God I have seen some inept performers in my time. It is not a matter of the state you are in beforehand. There is Mr Keith, presently at the Queen’s Theatre—he was recently in a trifle of my own—you will not get him to go on at all without a pint of Burgundy inside him, but an immaculate performance, sir, immaculate. Why, I remember Mrs Bellamy, she would shake all over with nerves like a damn jelly but cool as ice the moment she was on the boards. Dead now, alas, a great loss to the stage. But you, sir, if you will forgive me, you are a well-fashioned fellow and you have a good face, but you might as well be made of wood. You can’t walk on with any grace, you don’t know what to do with your hands, you don’t know which way to look. Tell me, have you not thought of resigning from the play?”’

“I may not know what to do with my hands as Ferdinand, but I shall know well enough what to do with them as Erasmus Kemp, if you cannot learn to keep your own hands to yourself.”

This, now that he had finally come out with it, he felt to be well phrased; and the feeling did something to lessen his fury at the director’s humiliating criticisms.

“I beg your pardon?”’ For a moment or two Adams was slack-jawed with astonishment. Then he drew himself up. “Here are rustic manners indeed,” he said. “We have awaked the boorish Daphnis, have we?”’

“You will know what you have awaked, sir, if you persist in your insolent freedoms with these ladies.” Erasmus, who had not understood the reference to Daphnis, felt his rage begin to rise again. “I will make you know it,” he said.

For the first time Adams looked directly into the younger man’s face, something that disdain had hitherto prevented. His own face had whitened, but his voice was firm enough. ‘It is not the ladies you are concerned for,” he said after a moment. “It is the pretty one, Wolpert’s sister. Did she ask you to speak on her behalf? No, I thought not. Are you affianced? No again. Well, sir, in that case it is for the lady herself to make her wishes plain. She has not protested to me.” Adams made the mistake now of permitting himself a certain kind of smile. “Quite the contrary,” he said.

Erasmus took a pace forward and his hand went to the hilt of his sword. “You beastly popinjay and sponger,” he said. “If you touch her again, I will kill you.” His throat was dry and his voice sounded remote and strange to him.

Adams stepped hastily back, the rouge on his cheeks standing out in irregular patches against the pale skin. “Do you offer to murder me?”’ he said.

“For the sake of touches in a rehearsal, where such things mean nothing at all, things I have hardly noticed and can scarcely remember and she no doubt even less? You are mad. Stand away from me. I am not wearing a sword.”

“You will have one in the house. I will wait for you here.”

“Fight without witnesses and risk a capital charge? You are out of your senses. Stand out of my way, I wish to pass.”

“I will wait to hear from you,” Erasmus said, and stood aside at last to let the other pass.

He watched the thin-legged, agitated figure of the director recede, disappear finally. The tumult of his heart quietened slowly, but this brought him no peace. Adams had not behaved as expected. It was not so much that he had shown no smallest trace of guilt or defensiveness; in such a reprobate this was hardly surprising. But he had been taken aback, he had been astonished as well as indignant. Of course, the fellow was an actor…

At the moment that the son was threatening a fellow-being’s life on grounds that to anyone else might have seemed flimsy, a report on the father’s financial affairs, provided by the indefatigible Partridge, was being digested by old Wolpert in his place of business on the waterfront.

‘Time and money, sir,” the scrawny, sharp-eyed lawyer had said, in the course of collecting the balance of his fee. “It generally comes down to that. The right relations between ‘em is as important for the man of business as winds and tides for the mariner. And of the two it is the time that matters most. A man is rich so long as his creditors are patient.”

It was surprising what Partridge, by means of innumerable small and grubby enquiries, had been able to find out. Much of it came as no surprise.

Kemp, in company with others that Wolpert knew of in the cotton trade, had suffered heavy losses in the disruption occasioned by the recent wars with France. On the ceasing of hostilities he had, again like others, imported quantities of raw cotton on credit in anticipation of a boom in prices which had yet to materialize. Some of this he had sold at a loss to meet short-term bills; much of it clotted his warehouses still. The Manchester dealers with whom he had been accustomed to do a large part of his business relied on resale to the manufacturers within a few days of purchase; their profit margins were too low for them to buy at prices over the market. In this pass, Kemp had turned to printed cottons, entering into partnership with the textile firm of Barfield Brothers. For a while, according to Partridge’s informants in Lancaster, they had done well; but printed cottons of Indian manufacture, transported in bulk in the huge East Indiamen, were daily increasing their share of the African and South American trade.

“Unfair foreign competition, sir, as any true patriot would agree,” Partridge said. “These confounded Indian cottons are not only superior in the quality of their dyes but they come cheaper on the market.”

It seemed that Kemp had also laid out money to finance a dyeworks in Warrington, in an attempt to find faster dyes. It was Partridge’s general view, expressed in spidery writing and with all his customary discretion of phrase, that Kemp’s resources were stretched, perhaps dangerously, but that he might have private means (outside the scope of the present enquiry though open to investigation at a renewed fee if required), which might be enough to carry him through to the upturn in the cotton trade confidently expected on all sides.

Wolpert mused on this awhile. He saw in it no great cause for alarm, certainly no grounds for suspicion. If Kemp could wait, he might do very well. Legislation was under way to impose tariffs on Indian cottons and protect the home industry. The bill might be delayed—there were powerful interests opposed to it; but it would go through.

Newcastle was for it and he would play the patriotic card in the House. With Indian competition choked off, there would be big profits for local dealers.

Kemp might be short of ready money. He had built and outfitted the Liverpool Merchant on notes of hand at eighteen months’ date, through merchant houses in Warrington and Preston—a total of some twelve thousand pounds by Partridge’s computation. But this was common practice, especially in slaving enterprises; even banks were ready to offer credit to slavers these days, for the sake of the high interest.

It was a kind of investment that made no appeal to the cautious Wolpert. He sometimes made use of ships returning from the West Indies to carry his freight, but trading in slaves was too risky.

Rewards were high, of course, on a prosperous voyage; Kemp stood to recover his twelve thousand and make as much again in net profit—and that within the year.

It came to him now that he knew very little about Kemp, though they had been acquainted for more than twenty years. A good man in company, fond of a glass, shrewd enough to all appearance, though too flamboyant and hasty for some, with those flushed good looks and that habit of eager gesture. Something extreme in him, a tendency to excess. In the son it was more pronounced, almost fanatical. The merchant still remembered the young man’s statement of love and intention comhe had thought it enough to make his wishes plain—and the blaze of his eyes on being rebuffed. Too much pride there, not enough sense of other people. But that would be supplied by commercial dealing, the best school there was for a study of human nature, so Wolpert thought. Erasmus would not make such a bad son-in-law, if it came to it. He had energy and determination, more of both than his own son. Charles had a good manner and a proper sense of occasion, but he showed small aptitude for decision. He was obstinate though, which was something different. Wolpert sighed. The boy could not be budged on the matter of this actor fellow who was badgering the maids, drinking his way through the wine-cellar and wearying his host each supper-time with chatter about the theatre. I would give something to be rid of that fellow, Wolpert thought. He couldn’t himself say much because he had discovered that the whole thing was in honour of his sixtieth birthday, due the following month…