Sacred Hunger (3 page)

“You were too young when we last met,” Paris said. “There are ten years between us, I think.” His voice was deep and soft, with a husky vibrance in it, strangely distinctive.

Erasmus felt a slight prickling sensation at the nape of his neck. He was amazed at this nonchalance. On their last meeting Paris had lifted him, helpless and raging, away from a dam he had been trying to build against the sea, lifted him clear and swung him and set him down yards away.

The mortal offence of it, the violation of his body and his will, were as vivid now to his mind as they had been thirteen years ago.

“I am glad to see you, cousin,” he said. “You are very welcome here.” Glancing aside again, he saw that his father was smiling and nodding in a way he had when highly pleased.

“I am glad of this opportunity to renew my cousin’s acquaintance,” Paris said, with a slight inclination of the head. After this he stood silent for some moments looking from one to the other, from chuckling father to stiff son. “After so many years,” he added heavily. He had felt his cousin’s hostility.

Suddenly, again, he wondered if he could go through with this visit, had to suppress an impulse to quit the room. Father and son aimed the same level brows at him, had the same staring regard.

“What I haven’t yet told you,”

William Kemp said to his son, “because it has only now been finally agreed between us, is that Matthew here will be sailing with the Liverpool Merchant as surgeon.”

“Will he so?”’ Erasmus had not imagined anyone related to him going with the ship. And that it should be this person, whom he had always hated, who had now compounded his offence by being convicted of sedition—he had brought disgrace on them all—this was a thought intensely disagreeable to him. “You did not tell me you had this in mind,” he said to his father.

“In case it came to naught when we were building upon it. Matthew is more than qualified.

He studied three years in Surgeons” Hall in the City of London. Then he was assistant something or other at the Westminster Hospital, what was it…?”’

‘Assistant lithotomist,” Paris said gravely. “That was before entering into private practice in Norwich.”

“And he is, er was, a member of the Royal Company of Surgeon Apothecaries. And he has writ a treatise, entitled Syllabus of Anatomy, which has been published by Blackie and Son of Paternoster Row in London. I trust I have these details right?”’

Early in this recital Kemp’s face had commenced to glow. There was nothing like a qualified man.

Each item was a rivet, a strong bolt for the ship’s timbers. “Ah, yes, I almost forgot, he obtained the Bishop of Norwich’s licence as a physician and ran his own practice, with his own premises for retail transactions. Is that not so, Matthew?”’

“H’m, yes.” Those who knew Paris would have recognized the quality of his hesitation now, and the sudden prominence of his cheekbones. He had enjoined humility upon himself, or, failing that, caution; but he had felt both receding during this catalogue of his virtues. That he was taking his uncle’s charity did not oblige him to take his commendations too, though he was amused in a way to see these enlisted as commercial assets. But it was the unexpected reference to this cleric who had so damaged his life that caused him to break his promises to himself. “Aye,” he said, “you must have your piece of paper with the bishop’s scrawl upon it, there is no doing without that. Though why it should be so I cannot see, as the man knows even less of medicine than of theology. His scrawl was on the paper that sent me to prison too—he knows something about prisons, at least. He owns Norwich Jail at present; not the building, of course— that belongs to good King George. No, the revenue from it, which is quite considerable, you know: people will pay for their comforts inside prison just as they will outside, if they have money.”

Some moments of silence followed this. Erasmus could not fully credit what he had heard. That Paris should so gratuitously refer to his experience of prison struck him as in such execrable taste that it almost deserved pity. It was as if his cousin had made some terrible blunder which he needed to be saved from. And it was with some sense of coming to the rescue, some urge to cover the offence, that he cast around now for a new topic. “What is a lithotomist exactly?”’ he said at last.

“Lithotomy is the operation of cutting for stone in the bladder,” Paris said, in his deep, unhurried voice. His face relaxed in a rueful, slightly lop-sided smile that narrowed one eye more than the other. “As for the premises your father speaks of,” he said, “it was a shop.” He raised a large hand in a gesture of repudiation. “My wife and I kept an apothecary’s shop and had rooms above it.”

The words were merely modest in intention; but they gave Erasmus what he needed, a reason for legitimizing his dislike, giving it official status, so to speak. Antipathy for a fellow-being, like love, is a story that we relate to ourselves, varying in the elements that feed it but always the same in its need for a formal opening, so that it can become properly conscious of itself and not remain for ever inchoate, mere vague repugnance or resentment or prejudice.

This opening Erasmus found in the twisted smile, in what seemed a sardonic belittling of his father’s enthusiasm; andwiththe opening once found things proceeded apace, as always: what right had this pauper, this recipient of charity, to correct his benefactor, to choose the way he was to be regarded?

A little later, in the drawing-room, where his mother joined them for tea, he found himself adding his cousin’s strangely unfashionable shoes to the count against him.

They were large, black, square-toed, with big square buckles—this at a time when buckles of any sort were quite out—and they creaked slightly.

They somehow completed the suggestion of the necktie, with its two straight folds, and the black, low-crowned hat he had seen hanging in the hall, of some country preacher, a hedge parson dressed up for a visit.

This seemed like hypocrisy—it was for denying Holy Writ that his cousin had been imprisoned…

In the smaller space of this room it was impossible not to feel a kind of force emanating from Paris. This lay not so much in any distinction of bearing as in the potential for damage that seemed to invest him, conveyed by something awkward in his movements, something constrained or perhaps not fully coordinated. Sitting there in his thick black suit, impassive now that grimace of a smile had faded, with his pale eyes and long, furrowed face turned attentively to his hostess, the stranger looked somehow as if the space wasn’t enough, as if he might break into disastrous action.

It was the chief fear of Mrs Kemp, as she afterwards confessed, that her nephew might break something.

“I was on the edge of my seat the whole time Matthew was in the room,” she said. ‘So unsettling.”

Her voice, as always, threatening to expire before the final syllables were reached.

She had joined them for tea, in this room she loved best in the house, with its pale green brocaded chairs and little oval tables, its lawn curtains admitting a discreet view of the street and the opposite house fronts, its cabinets of things she had had from her mother, things precious to her, tea-sets, Dresden figurines, the prized collection of china pomanders and pill-boxes—all well within reach of her nephew’s arm.

She was fond of Matthew, who was her sister’s son, and had always followed his career with interest, in spite of seeing him only rarely. She often spoke of him, a fact galling to Erasmus, though his pride would not allow him to show it. Her pity and distress at her nephew’s misfortune she disguised in accustomed weariness and these exaggerated fears that he might break something. With a husband and a son always ready to correct her errors of feeling, she had learned disguise long ago.

“Yes,” she said in her expiring tones, “I was prepared for the very worst.”

And yet the movements of his hands were precise enough, his management of shallow saucer and small-handled cup and diminutive spoon beyond reproach. It was an uneasy constraint of body, not any evident clumsiness, that gave others a sense of possible disaster. And it was obvious that he was strong.

“He quite wearied me out,” Mrs Kemp said.

“And then, of course, knowing that he had not been long out of prison…”

“You think his capacity for wreckage was thereby increased?”’ Kemp asked. Though not given to regarding himself with any degree of irony—and perhaps because of this—he had stores of it for his wife.

“Well, it restricts them, doesn’t it?”’ she said in a reasonable tone. “My nephew has been kept within close bounds. Now that he is restored to society, it would not be surprising if he felt a need to move himself about.”

It astonished Erasmus—who had never understood his mother—that she seemed so little sensible of the disgrace her sister’s son had brought on the family. From her manner of speaking about it Paris might as well have just emerged from some illness.

“You can say what you like,” she said. “I thought him charming. And his manners, for the occasion, a good deal better than those of some”—this last a rebuke, more direct than she usually had energy for, to her son for his brusqueness, which she had not failed to see.

The manners were a source of amazement to Paris himself. A man whose heart feels dead within him, whose desire it is to disappear from the face of the earth, who is about to take employment on a slaveship as a first step to this, still balancing his cup, passing the sugar, writhing politely on a hard chair.

However, such is our nature, what begins as social pretence quite often becomes a reality of feeling. He saw his aunt’s face near his own, marks of sympathy in it as well as petulance and hypochondria, and he found himself drawn to her. The lines of strain on his face softened as he observed her fussing to settle her skirts, watched the play of her scented handkerchief as she leaned forward to converse with him. Nor was it wholly fear for her pretty things that kept Mrs Kemp’s attention on her nephew. It soon became obvious, both to the husband and to the son, that Matthew Paris, in his wincing shoes and subfusc suit and bob wig, was making a distinctly favourable impression.

“So you are going with the ship?”’

“As surgeon, yes.”

“It will be very comforting for us to know that.”

“I am glad you take that view, aunt.”

Paris spoke with a sort of solemn courtesy.

‘However, I am not entirely clear how you mean it.”

“Why, sir,” she said, with a little air of wonder at his failure to see, “naturally we shall all feel much better with a member of the family on board.”

It now appeared that Paris possessed a different smile from the wry one they had seen: it came to his face slowly, lighting it with an expression of great sweetness. “Ah, yes, of course.”

He was touched by the sentiment as well as amused by what seemed a lapse of logic. Of late he had become very sensitive to kindness, and it was this that the pale, languid woman, who hardly knew him, who seemed half extinguished between husband and son, was seeking to show. “You may rest assured,” he said, traces of the smile still remaining, “that I shall be mindful of my responsibilities.”

“Good heavens, woman,” Kemp said with a certain testiness, “he is not going as a member of the family, or at any rate not primarily, but as a qualified medical man to ensure the best possible condition of health for the negroes.”

“And crew,” Paris said mildly.

“Eh? Oh, aye, the crew too, naturally.

Matthew has studied at Surgeons” Hall,” he told his wife. ‘He was resident surgeon at one of our great hospitals, he has writ books…”

“Yes, my dear, you have told us all that. And besides, I knew it before.” Mrs Kemp turned again to Paris. “I have sometimes a kind of fluttering here, below the heart,” she said. She laid a white hand among the lace trimmings that rose above her stomacher. “When I get at all agitated or beyond myself. Do you know of anything for it?”’

“For palpitations,” Paris said with restored gravity, “I have always found tincture of hellebore to answer very well. I can make one up for you if you wish. And a draught of warm cinnamon water, taken night and morning, is generally soothing to the nerves.”

Erasmus saw his mother, thus encouraged, preparing to launch on a more detailed account of her symptoms. “Have you been to sea before?”’ he said to Paris.

“Not what one would call going to sea. I went out with the fishing boats sometimes when I was a boy. At Brancaster on the Norfolk coast.” Paris paused as if in some doubt. His eyes, Erasmus now noticed, were pale green in colour, not blue as he had thought at first; they were set at a slight downward slant, giving his face in repose an expression of mingled obstinacy and melancholy. After some further moments of hesitation, he said, “It was there we last met, all of us—both the families, I mean. You had come on a visit.

We went down to the sea one day. There was quite a party of us, I remember—some other people too, who lived nearby. I was eighteen that summer, so you must have been eight or perhaps nine. Quite small.”

“I have no recollection of it.”

The words came too coldly and emphatically to be altogether trusted; but there was no mistaking the intention to rebuff, the rejection of a shared past his cousin had thus diffidently held out to him.

“I remember it clearly.” Paris sought refuge once again in his aunt—it was to her that he kept coming back. “I think because of a dam we tried to build that day. My cousin showed great determination of character. He did his very best to stay the tide.”

He went on to tell her in his gentle baritone about a channel and a reservoir they had built that distant day at the edge of the tide, using stones and driftwood and the thick black mud of the salt flats to line the banks and make a barrier, and how the sea constantly frustrated their efforts, scooping below the foundations so that the walls kept crumbling and the water leaking away, until the others got tired of it and went to divert themselves elsewhere—all but Erasmus.

‘He would not give it up. We went to ask him to come away, but he would not. He would not speak to anyone. He had mud all over him. He went on plastering over the stones and bits of plank and the sea went on wrecking his efforts. I thought to myself then that what my cousin sets his mind on it will come hard but he gets it.”