Sacred Hunger (60 page)

As he entered Fritz the poodle yapped at him as usual from its cushion and showed its pink gums.

A travestied and unrecognizable woman in a peach-coloured gown, her features concealed behind a mask of greyish, pimpled skin, reclined on a sofa in the dressing-room adjacent to the bedchamber.

“Is it you, Margaret?”’ he said, advancing.

“What in God’s name is that on your face?”’

“It is a chicken skin,” she replied in a voice slightly obscured. “I am advised by my friend Lady Danby that it is the non plus ultra for restoring one’s complexion.” The ragged fringe of skin round her mouth moved with the movement of her lips.

‘It has to be a freshly killed bird so as to be moist enough.”

“So your husband, who is to be away several months, is to make his farewells to a chicken skin.”

“I cannot see why you should need to look at my face just because you are going away, when you take such small interest in it while we are under the same roof. This must be kept in place for an hour at least, so Lady Danby says, if it is to do anything.”

‘Lady Danby is little better than a whore and I am sorry to hear you call her friend,” Erasmus said. “I cannot wait that long, we are sailing with the tide.” He took her listless hand and kissed it.

“I hope you will take care of your health,” he said. “Your complexion, I see, is in no danger of neglect.”

In the coach, as they jolted past Tower Bridge, it occurred to Erasmus that his wife must have donned the chicken skin shortly before his visit, though she had known he was coming. She had wanted to conceal herself. Her complaint against him had some truth in it: on the occasions, rare enough now, when they slept together, he did not look much at her face; at all other times when they met she was masked or disguised in some way, with fard and rouge and patches or with some charlatan lotion. It came to him that he almost never saw Margaret’s real face. He wondered if he would recognize her passing in the street, or in the midst of a crowd… There was one face he would know instantly, after twelve years or twenty, the green eyes, so pale as to seem like some solution of silver, the deeply marked brows, the patience and obstinacy of the expression… With a sudden rush of detestation Erasmus realized that he knew this face of Matthew Paris more intimately than that of any other person in the world.

It was a face that returned frequently to him during the voyage, accompanied always by further remembered details of his cousin’s appearance and manner, this process resembling a story he repeated to himself, more elaborate with every repetition.

But wherever the story began it ended always in the same place, with those stronger arms lifting him, swinging him away, violating his body and his will. He had uttered no sound, submitting in furious silence, making himself a dead weight in his cousin’s arms…

He recalled Paris’s appearance on that last visit, the gaunt and awkward frame, the thick wrists and clumsy-seeming hands that were yet so precise in their smallest movements, the deep voice with the odd vibration in it and the sardonic, lop-sided smile. There had been that disturbing suggestion of physical power, of imperfect control …

The possibility that this face, this bundle of attributes, should have continued in being all this while, surviving his father’s ruin, his own loss of love and home and all the long struggle to pay off his father’s debts, was something he found difficult at first to endure. That the survival had been achieved by such heinous crimes—murder, piracy, the theft not only of the negroes but of the ship itself and then only to abandon her—made it the more monstrous. The thought that his cousin might be alive still was literally monstrous to him, a shape of ugliness and deformity in the natural order of things, something to be extirpated.

It subverted all the rules that men lived by. If such wrong-doing was allowed to succeed, what price duty, what price honour? What price his own faithful discharge of obligation to the family name?

But as the days at sea followed one another in monotonous succession, with the wash of waves against the ship’s bows and the slow creaking of her timbers, he found himself in the strengthening grip of paradox. The less Paris seemed deserving of liberty and life, the more Erasmus found himself hoping that he was still in possession of these, so that he could be brought to justice and deprived of both together. For the other miscreants who had been aboard, whom Paris had doubtless persuaded to join him, Erasmus cared little. They were scum in any case. But his thoughts tended always to a passionate preservation of his cousin’s life, until the fear that he was not there, that he might not be able to be found, even that the whole story might still prove to be a fabrication, set him burning with a fever of anxiety as he lay sleepless on his narrow bunk, rocked tirelessly by this barren mother who could give him no security, no relief. The chafing of the sheets brought him to sexual arousal sometimes, a mechanical tension that was like a transference of his tense will. At these times he brought himself to a cold release and lay empty, waiting for dawn.

As the leagues mounted between himself and what he had left, the years fell away, became unreal, and he returned to the elemental feelings of childhood.

His life dwindled to one intense focus, of such simplicity and power that it reduced the rest to shadows.

This falling away was like the slow dismantling of a scaffolding that had never been necessary; but he could not discern the structure it had supported, or seemed to support comt too was an illusion. There was the intense and brilliant focus of his resolve.

Outside of this little was visible to him. The blankness of sky and ocean seemed evidence only of more stripping away. But in lieu of possession and identity there was the notion of justice, which deepened and grew abstract and religious, renewed every day in the promise of the dawn, confirmed by the simple sunlight, solemnized by the approach of the dark.

Harvey he questioned from time to time and always closely, as if intent to find him out in some contradiction; but the seaman’s story was too simple for that, and at the same time too vague. Harvey had no picture in his mind of the route that had led him to the creek. He had blundered on to it. “I had taken drink, sir,” he said, always with the same expression, wry and philosophical, as befitted references to this common accident of the human condition. He could remember, so he said, the watering place and the general lie of the coast where they had anchored. And indeed he felt pretty sure of this, though apprehensive of failure; he knew his master well enough by now not to relish the thought of disappointing him.

However, he was not a man who worried overmuch and he was otherwise enjoying the voyage mightily: it was the first time in his life that he had been at sea without having to sweat at the ropes. He messed with the steward and other crew members exempted from watch and regaled them with extraordinary stories about the world of fashion into which he had been introduced. His own simple wonder disarmed his listeners and he was popular with everyone aboard.

The same wonder governed his relations with his employer. That a man with a fine house and servants and money—in short, everything he needed in life —should want to go halfway round the world merely to look at a stinking hulk in a creek bed was so far from reasonable, so opaque to normal understanding, that it placed Kemp on a different level of humanity altogether, lordly, superbly unaccountable, needing to be humoured like the mad.

This humouring Harvey took seriously, conceiving it his duty, part of the terms of his engagement. His story gained in fluency and dramatic colouring without acquiring much more in the way of substance. It was also refined in the direction of virtue: someone else had drawn off the rum from the ship’s stores, someone else again had been for trying to catch the women. To the discovery itself he could add little. The elements after all were few: the drink, the headlong chase, the stumbling through the mangrove swamp, the curving bank of the channel and the tilted wreck lying there amid the debris of her masts, the vegetation trailing over her from the banks on either side. Sometimes he added details. ‘She was a slaveship,” he said once. “I been on slavers. There was the remains of the bulkheads markin” off the rooms.”

At the same time he tried to defend himself against possible mistake. ‘That bit of coast,” he said, “it never looks the same. Sometimes it an’t even the coast you are seein”. You see what looks like land but it is only shapes of mist built up on the horizon and they disappears as you come closer in.”

As they passed through the Santaren Channel and out into the Florida Stream, these words came to seem prophetic. They struck a season of wandering and irregular mists, warm air above the current meeting with colder on the edges. Through these they loitered for some days with the low green shapes of the Keys, glimpsed intermittently on the port side, vivid and brief enough to seem like hallucinations.

Anxious to avoid the shoals to eastwards, the captain kept in mid-channel until they were north of the Great Bahama Bank, then approached the Florida coast at the rough latitude of the Boca Nueva—the only landmark Philips had supplied and so far invisible in the continuing mists.

He did not dare go in too close. The only charts they had were Spanish, well drawn enough but not to be relied on, the configuration of the coast in this south-eastern part having undergone constant change as the sea nibbled at it. ‘It is like a flobby old prick hangin” down, gettin’ wore away all the time,” Harvey remarked in a moment of gloom to the steward, after studying the map of the peninsula. ‘With poxy Spanish names on it, which no Christian can read.” He could not read in any language, but this did not lessen his sense of aggrievement.

However, next morning they woke to clear weather and a succession of fine days followed. They drew closer to the coast, and made gradual way northwards with the current, scanning the shore as they went. Towards noon on the second day of this they sighted the green mouth of the entrada, with its long, curving sand bar on the north side, where the sea broke white in the shape of a sickle, just as Philips had described. They anchored in ten fathoms and the shore party put out in the punt with provisions for two days, Erasmus, Harvey and six of the crew armed with musket and cutlass.

It was a day of clear sunshine, almost windless. The shore and the scrub beyond were completely deserted. Low waves broke on the sand with scarcely any sound at all. Erasmus was never to forget the sense of terrible incongruity that descended on him as he stepped out of the boat on to the white sand and felt the peace of the place settle round him.

Before him the beach sloped gently upwards to a fringe of motionless palms. A flock of birds with black wings and white faces and crimson, blade-like bills rose and flew out to sea, keeping low over the water, making no sound. Here, he thought, or somewhere not far, perhaps on a day like this one, the fugitives had made landfall. It was hardly possible to believe it. There was no print of man anywhere to be seen.

He began to walk up the beach. Feeling firm ground under his feet, he staggered slightly, after the weeks at sea. But the unsteadiness seemed to him due more to the shock of this hush that lay over everything.

He came to a stop, glancing in something like bewilderment along the empty shore, with nothing in his mind but his own loneliness and the incongruous violence of his intentions.

Such faltering was unusual and it did not last long. If anything, his resolution was strengthened by the difficulties that followed. It emerged that Harvey could not immediately locate the place where they had watered. He would know it when he saw it, he said, in an attempt to deflect his employer’s wrath. But he could see nothing directly before him, here on the shoreline, to indicate which direction it lay in.

Since all he knew for sure was that the place lay south of the inlet, Erasmus judged it best to take the point of their landing as central and seek north and south from it along the coast. Creeks there were in plenty, running into the wetlands behind the shore; but they were not the streams of Harvey’s memory. It took two days of casting thus, with their escort now openly surly at being made to row long hours in the sun, before they came upon the stretch of slightly higher, rockier shore scattered with pines that Philips had described and Harvey now recognized.

The springs were here right enough—there was fresh water below the ground over a wide area, emerging in pools among the rocky scrub. As if to compensate for his failure before, Harvey led now without hesitation, skirting the pools, plunging into the mangrove thickets that grew beyond them. Sweating profusely, stumbling among the intricate roots of the trees, sometimes floundering knee-deep in swamp, they kept a rough course between the shore and a chain of small brackish lagoons that ran parallel to it.

The mouth of the creek, when they came to it, was dark as a cavern, roofed over with branches. There was no more than a foot or two of water in it, almost black and quite still, half choked in places with spreads of heavily scented, hyacinth-like flowers. Keeping as close as possible to the bank, they followed the channel as it wound inland. A crocodile, which had been sunning itself in a break among the trees, slithered without apparent haste down the bankside, broke the dark water into brief glitters and disappeared among a tangle of bushes. The creek began a wide curve away from the sea. Quite unexpectedly, following this round, they came upon the ship.

She lay where the retreating water had left her, keel embedded in the mud bottom. In settling she had leaned heavily to port and the refuse of her decks had piled against the gunwales on that side.

Creepers had found their way over her bows and clothed the ruined trellis of the forecastle railing.

Drapes of pale green moss like horses’ tails had lowered on to her from the trees that arched overhead.

Thick-stemmed vines had lassoed the stumps of her masts. Only the upper slope of her quarterdeck was left bare. She was tied down here, bound by the lacing of creepers, a rotting captive in this forgotten channel.