Sacred Hunger (45 page)

He glanced again, involuntarily it seemed, at the veiled portrait on the easel. “If they live long enough, that is. Death is good for my business as well as Kalabanda’s. Or the threat of it, at least. There is nothing like the shadow of mortality for inclining a man to have his portrait painted. But what the sitter pays for, Mr Paris, is the promise of life. Just take a look at this, sir.”

Delblanc finished what was left in his glass and moved towards the easel. After a final moment of hesitation he threw back the cover.

“Good heavens!” Paris exclaimed. Whatever he had expected it had not been this. “What have you done to him?”’

The likeness was remarkable: the artist had perfectly caught the high-bridged, disdainful nose, the languid eyelids; but the eyes were fixed, the bloodless mouth frozen in avarice and the whole face stark with ultimate composure. It was a mask of death that looked at him.

“Now do you see what I mean?”’ Delblanc spoke as if making a point in an argument. “A man who lives in perpetual fear of dissolution, who is for ever dosing himself and taking his own pulse, and I have depicted him as a death’s head. It only happened in these last two days. The portrait was finished, or so I thought, he had done his sittings.

I was intending only some finishing touches, heighten the flesh tones, ennoble the expression and so on, the usual embellishments, you know.

Then, I don’t know how it happened, a touch here, a touch there, the line of the mouth, the set of the eyes, and this face emerged under my brush. And I can’t bring myself to change it—it is the truth of the man, and something more than that. But of course he won’t like it.”

“No,” conceded Paris, “he won’t like it.”

He felt a little lightheaded, after the wine at dinner and the brandy now, and the lapping light and shadow in the room, and this staring, moon-touched portrait of a stricken miser. “He won’t like it at all,” he said.

“And if he doesn’t like it,” Delblanc pursued, with a sort of gloomy logic, “he won’t take it, and if he doesn’t take it, he won’t pay. But it’s not really that—I’m not short of money for the moment. No, but you see, he could make things devilish unpleasant for me, if he wanted, and he would want, I feel sure.”

Delblanc gestured at the portrait. “You only need look at his face to see that. I could find myself in the dungeons on some trumped-up charge. We are a long way from home and justice is a relative concept at the best of times.

Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence… It was Pascal said that, wasn’t it? I don’t feel like taking the risk.

It is for that reason I thought of taking passage with you.”

“As to that,” Paris said, “I think it would be best if you deal direct with Thurso himself. My recommendation would not dispose him in your favour, quite the contrary.”

Delblanc nodded. ‘He did not appear very fond of you. My purse, such as it is, will best recommend me to the captain. He will take me, I have no doubt of it. It is not only to save my skin I want to get away.”

He paused to replenish the surgeon’s glass and his own. “To be quite frank,” he said—and it was difficult to imagine his ever being much else—”I am fair sick of what I am doing and assisting in here. I have had to paint a good number of faces in order to get to this one. For eighteen months now I have been painting likenesses of company officials and agents and resident merchants up and down from James Fort to Elmina, not only English, but Dutch and French too. And now I have come upon their collective face. It is no accident that it has sprung out under my brush. Since I came to this coast I have seen things and heard of things, Paris, that I will take to the grave with me. The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities—which we supply. And so we spread death everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough.

Well, it is not enough for me. That face on the easel is the face of plunder and death, sir, it is the face of Europe in Africa. It is an unacceptable face to me, sir, and I cannot go on any longer painting it. I have come to the end of portraits, on this coast at least. A man can hold off the truth of things for purposes of making a living comt is legitimate, I suppose, though ignoble. But when the face is there, before your eyes… It cannot simply be expunged, d’you see, as if it had never existed, not when heart and mind have worked together to produce it.”

‘Heart and mind,” Paris repeated, struck by this simple and unaffected yoking of the two. Once again he was aware of some essential ingenuousness in the painter, a quality of innocence that had survived the wandering and makeshift life. He encountered the transfixed and horrendous stare of the face in the portrait. Moonlight lay along the pallid temples, revived a gleam of avarice in the dead left eye.

“Yes,” the painter said, with the same eagerness.

“To make a good likeness you must have heart and mind working together. But the heart comes first.”

“The heart is a vital organ,” Paris said, in his serious and slightly pedantic way.

“But it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.”

“I take an opposite view,”

Delblanc said excitedly. “No man will ever find virtue by the mind alone—to think so was the folly of the Greeks. This trade we are helping in our different ways—do you think it comes about through the dictates of the heart?”’

“Nor truly of the mind either, but greed can take that colouring, as can other vices.”

“Yes, sir, and so our natural instincts are perverted. Do you think for a moment that men would enslave one another if they lived in a state of nature?”’

“Well, it is a large question,” Paris said doubtfully. “And one that cannot be easily answered.”

“You are right. Let us have some more brandy now, so that we can the better discuss it.”

Whether it was Delblanc’s precipitation of speech or his readiness to forget his troubles at the prospect of debate, Paris did not quite know, but there was something about this eagerness that moved him now with a mingled sense of comedy and pain. Quite suddenly, with that lonely urgency that comes at times to reticent natures, he wanted to entrust something to this man, so frank and unaffected, so unforced in his transitions from thought and sensation to speech. “We can discuss it if you like,” he said, “but there is something I wanted to say before and didn’t. You spoke about the need to make a living and how it inclines us to evade the truth of things, but I have not even that excuse.”

“But it is your livelihood, as I understand the matter. I suppose you do not offer your services free?”’

“I did not need to take my uncle’s offer,”

Paris said. “My uncle is the owner of the ship I am serving on. I could have gone to another part of England or to one of the colonies. I could have gone to America, where there is need for doctors.”

“You needed to get away then?”’

The gentle matter-of-factness of this brought a tightness to Paris’s throat that he had not anticipated. Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it; but he knew that he was set on a course here, in this room from which the moonlight was receding, leaving it darker, before a man he hardly knew and a face of death. “Yes,” he said harshly, “I needed to get away, but I did not need to take a post on a slaveship, I did not need to use my profession, of which I was proud once, to certify people as fit for branding and chaining.”

‘I suppose you thought it didn’t much matter,”

Delblanc said, in the same tone of gentle simplicity. “What you did with yourself, I mean.”

At this the surgeon rose in his turn and began pacing to and fro across the room. “It never mattered what I did, as far as only myself was concerned,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now. I don’t care what becomes of me. But I had no right…

I should not have argued in favour of the mind just now, that was only for argument’s sake—I still have that vice. It was my insistence on opinion, concealed under the appearance of a desire for truth, that ruined me and killed my wife. Yes, sir, killed her.”

Paris nodded fiercely, as if he thought the other might attempt to contradict him. “By my arrogant folly I killed her and the child she was carrying.” He paused to drink what was left in his glass, though hardly aware of the action.

“We lived in Norfolk,” he said, “where I practised as a surgeon-apothecary. I became interested in fossil remains and what they can tell us about the age of the earth, and also in the evidence of rises and falls of the earth’s surface through long ages of time. I began to form a collection of marine fossils, some of them found high above the level of the sea. The existence of these cannot be reconciled with the account of creation given to us in the Bible. So far, if it had been a mere question of my private studies, all would have been well. There are men of science all over Europe quietly forming their opinions on such matters. But I, sir, I had to air my discoveries and opinions. I acquired a printing press and issued pamphlets in which I championed the views of Maupertuis. Perhaps you are acquainted with his work?”’

“Not even with his name, I am afraid,”

Delblanc said. “I have not taken much interest in such matters.”

‘He is a man of genius.” Despite his distress, Paris’s tone had quickened with admiration for this hero of his youth. “His name has been obscured by misapprehension and envy, but one day his worth will be known. By his investigations into heredity he has shown how, from two individuals only, the multiplication of the most dissimilar species could grow, owing their origin to some accidental formation, an error you could say, each error creating a new species…”

“But that would mean that we ourselves are the result of error also, that we need not have been as we are.”

“Yes, some different accidents might have occurred. Or so Maupertuis would say. Something impossible to imagine… I was greatly struck by these ideas when first I read them; they seemed to offer an explanation of the diversity of creatures, something which had always puzzled me. And they confirmed my own conclusions about the age of the earth, because such changes would have needed great periods of time to accomplish.”

Paris paused, swallowing at some impediment.

“Great periods of time,” he repeated, in a voice that trembled slightly—they were dear to his memory, these early studies and speculations, his desk in the lamplight, Ruth busy somewhere not far.

“I published these theories,” he went on after a moment. “They run counter to orthodox opinion and especially to the teachings of the Church. I was warned, not only by those who were hostile, but by friends and colleagues. Yes, I was well warned. But I paid no heed.” Paris stopped his pacing and stood still in the centre of the room, looking fixedly at Delblanc, who sat out of the candle-light, his face in shadow. “I was clad in the armour of truth,” the surgeon said. “Or so I thought. Or so I pretended to think.” He tried to smile but failed.

“In fact, I was merely obstinate and overweening, vices which I have still. I was arrested on a complaint of the Bishop of Norwich. The judge was in the Church Interest. He found me guilty of issuing a seditious publication, imposed a fine beyond my means and consigned me to prison until it was paid. My uncle redeemed the debt when he learned of it, but while I lay in prison a mob set on by the Church Party broke into my house with a view to smashing the press and in the course of this they terrified my wife so that she miscarried. She was not a strong woman and she did not recover. I did not see her die…”

These unguarded negatives broke the control which he had struggled to maintain by an appearance of reporting on facts. “She died without me,” he said, and his voice broke on it. He saw the artist make a sudden movement, as if to rise and come towards him. He said quickly, “You would serve me best by staying as you are. I do not know why, for the life of me, but I am set on speaking to you as I have spoke to no one else, and I need a distance between us if I am to get through to the end.”

For some moments, however, he was obliged to remain silent, checking the tears that had threatened him at Delblanc’s impulse to kindness. The hardest part still lay before him. Below the acknowledgement of blame, below the self-reproach, at the deepest level of confession, lay the words that would express the shame of what had been done to him. It was characteristic of Paris that he should seek a way to it through argument. “You quoted Pascal just now,” he said. “

“Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence.” Delblanc, no latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice. Publishing seditious material is a felony in our law.

Before I began my prison sentence, they set me twelve hours in the pillory. In our enlightened land, for publishing the view that the earth is older than six thousand years, and thus contradicting Revelation, I was chained by the legs to a post, my head and hands were stuck through a board and clamped there and I was left to the mercies of the crowd for a night on the market square of Norwich. Pilloried alongside with me there was a man who had been convicted of sodomy.

Fortunate for me, because he diverted the wrath of the mob and so I was saved from injury at their hands. He was stoned by the whores of the town. In the morning, when they came for us, he was insensible—I do not know to this day whether he lived or died.”

Paris’s voice was unhesitating now; the droning fluency of nightmare had descended on him. As he spoke he had the sense of a steady seepage of filth and blood, a stain that spread with his words in this quiet room, with no check to him in Delblanc’s motionless figure or the hideous silence of the governor, and only the distant booming of the sea for admonition. The festering restraint of months fell away from him and the agony of his humiliation returned, licensed, almost welcomed, that crouching, ludicrous, beast-like posture, the terrible exposure of the naked face and head, detached from the rest of the body, offered like a pumpkin at a fair for the crowd to shy at, the hanging head and meek hands of the sodomist, his face and hair all pulped and bloody, like a burst pumpkin, lolling there, still unable to retract his head from his tormentors, his pleading mercy made indistinct by the blood that had filled his mouth…