Signals of Distress (30 page)

The light was lifting as Otto ran, through the frost, the mud, across the unforgiving rocks. He seemed illuminated by some sharp and icy sun. He was like a boy, dodging through the heather and
the gorse, leaping granite, skirting the low branches of wind-distorted trees. That wasn’t hard. Not hard for boys. But it was hard for Aymer to make the landscape change, to find a route for
Otto between the granite and the thorn into the distant, humid fields of Africa. Aymer pressed his palms more firmly on his eyes and tried to make the land and earth come vaulting at him in a
thousand forms, and every tumbling form a little warmer than the last, and every fleeting smudge of earth more succulent and odorous and dark and tropical. He tried to speed the landscape from grey
and white to deeper green and yellow so that he could imagine the miracle of Otto home again. But he failed. No matter what he improvised, the landscape wouldn’t change.

Aymer looked towards the parlour window. It was slowly taking shape. His eyes were tired, but he could recognize the frosty truth – that Otto’s home was not in reach and never would
be now. If he lived and had survived the snow, he could only be a ten-day walk away at most. He had his feet to carry him, and nothing more. Yes, Otto might be met again. Huzzah for that! He might
be glimpsed. But it would only be on some
English
street. That was both a chilling and a strangely hopeful thought. It left the shadow of a chance that Aymer still could make amends. He
concocted their encounter. He’d see Otto … where? In the market? Begging at the church door? Working in some warehouse by the marsh? Taking refuge in a stable room? He’d be
transformed by his cold freedoms, that was a certainty. Much thinner, yes. His skin would be dry and dull and chapped. But there’d be something better than before. Something in his face,
something in the angle of his eye, would be startling. Oh, what a meeting they would have, thought Aymer, his eyelids heavier than stone, the parlour window silver now with the first of
Wednesday’s light, and with the last of Wherrytown. What have your travels taught you? he’d ask Otto. What have you learned away from home? What have you seen? But Otto would not say a
word. He’d be joyful to have found a friend, of course, but far too weary to describe such cold, such bafflement, such heavy seas, such dislocating winds, such ships.

C
ITY AIR
makes free? Well, yes. It was a liberation to be home again amongst the soft civilities of city life, and free from the embarrassments of
Wherrytown. But Aymer Smith affected not to like the taste of city air that much. He was a travelled man now, amphibious between the country and the town. His blood was spiced with salt. He
wasn’t an innocent any longer. He took to wearing his tarpaulin coat and his heavy boots at every opportunity, to the factory, to debating rooms, to the subscription libraries, in the
streets. ‘Your brother has begun to look just like the pudding man,’ Fidia Smith complained to her husband, when she had spotted Aymer, hatless and ‘dressed for the fields’,
window-shopping like a vagrant in King’s Avenue. ‘He’ll have a basket on his shoulders next, and will be selling plum pudding by the quarter yard.’

Privately Matthias didn’t agree with Fidia’s opinion that his brother was ‘affected, but not improved’ by the trip to Wherrytown. ‘His stay amongst the hobnails and
the corduroys has been no benefit,’ she said. ‘If an ass goes travelling, he’ll not come back a horse. More’s the pity.’ On the contrary, Aymer had matured, Matthias
thought, in everything except his dress. Yet to have him safely back was not entirely a relief. There’d been so little tension in the works while Aymer was away. Orders could be given and not
questioned. Changes which were ‘not in the interests of Fraternity and Justice’ could be made without a pious argument. And men could be sacked. Indeed, Matthias had dismissed three of
the hands who had, at Aymer’s instigation, set up a Works Committee, and one other man who had poor eyesight. There would be a fine commotion, Matthias had expected, when Aymer got back from
his mischief-making along the coast. But unexpectedly his brother didn’t mention their dismissal. Perhaps he didn’t notice it. He made more fuss when consignments of almost pure sodium
carbonate,
méthode Leblanc,
were delivered to the factory yard in jogging-carts. Though even then the fuss he made seemed dilettante and not, Matthias judged, without the spice of
irony. Aymer claimed he missed the cumbrous wagonfuls of kelp ash: six horses and six thousand flies a load. He missed the smell. This, surely, was a tease.

‘Where is the beauty in it?’ Aymer asked, on his first encounter with the new soda. He fetched the ancient folio of seaweed specimens from what had been their father’s roll-top
desk, and thumbed through the heavy pages with their browning fans of kelp and their Latin names in browning ink. Matthias could see no beauty there, though Aymer was extravagant in his
appreciation of the weeds. ‘If only you could see these living kelps in water, Matthias. You would imagine you were at a royal ball amongst the finest ladies …’

‘And why would I imagine that? I cannot understand how I must confuse fine ladies with seaweed.’

‘You would understand if you could see the living kelp. It is quite beautiful, I promise it. But you will not persuade me that this new material has beauty in it.’

‘Its beauty, Aymer, will not be seen until our ledgers are complete, and then you will be able to admire it in the profits column,’ said Matthias. He felt quite well disposed towards
his brother for a change. Aymer had lost his argumentative edge. He seemed less preacherly, and more resigned. He complained less of minor illnesses. And, best of all, he displayed a less dutiful
interest in the factory. Some days he left at lunchtime, and didn’t return. On Saturdays he didn’t come at all. He seemed too preoccupied with private matters – the very thought
of which made Fidia laugh – to bully for the shorter working day or profit-sharing schemes.

‘What private life?’ said Fidia.

‘His books, perhaps?’

‘Ah, yes, his dusty volumes. Pity them, Matthias. They have to tolerate the tedium of sitting open on his lap for hours long with only him for company and his bad breath for
ventilation.’ Fidia laughed politely into her glove. She was relieved that it was only books that kept her brother-in-law preoccupied. She didn’t want a ‘private life’ that
might secure a wife for him – or offspring, God forbid. She and Matthias had a son who would inherit the soap factory in its entirety if Aymer could only remain steadfast in his bachelorhood.
The sooner he grew too old for parenting, or – better – contracted some ailment that was fatal rather than imagined, the happier Fidia would be.

I
T WAS
an afternoon in mid-January 1837 when Fidia had spotted Aymer in his tarpaulin and his boots outside the shops in King’s Avenue. Her
brother-in-law had been standing with his shoulders up against a wall watching the military band which exercised along the avenue on Fridays. They’d marched past him twice already –
first playing a hornpipe and then a doleful coronach – and Aymer had been marching with them like some schoolboy when he saw Fidia, hurrying fatly across the street ahead of him. He took his
refuge up against the wall until she disappeared into the haberdashery. Neither of them knew that they’d been seen.

When the band assembled round the King’s Hall steps for the tattoo, Aymer went up to look more closely at the drummer’s face. He was an African; that much was clear from fifty yards
away. And he was large; though hardly large enough to topple the Cradle Rock. Even when he got close, however, Aymer was not certain that he’d found his man. The nose was right, small and
depressed. But his face was pulled out of shape by its chin strap, and the hair was hidden by the regimental cap. His drumming was indifferent, Aymer thought, though he didn’t count himself
as musical. He stood through two more pieces and endured the posturings of their final marching display, which was unaccompanied except for Otto – was it Otto? – beating time.

The soldiers put down their instruments and drank from water flasks. The drummer was talking to the buglers. He was ten inches taller at the very least. Aymer circled them. He didn’t want
to call out, or even seem to stare. He wasn’t even certain what to do if he recognized the man. As he got closer he could hear the drummer talk. It was more complicated than
Uwip,
Uwip
, and pitched too high. Aymer grew more certain that, if he called out Otto’s name, the man would not turn round. At last he pulled off his regimental cap. His head was bald above the
temples, and what hair there was was slightly gingered. ‘Otto,’ Aymer said, at half-power. One of the buglers looked at him and yawned.

The drummer wasn’t the first – or the last – dark face that Aymer would pursue. Since his return from Wherrytown he had been struck by how many there were in the city. They
haunted him. He let them. Otto’s life and his seemed pleached together, like the woven branches on a hedge. Of course, there were other concerns that might have bothered him. Should have
bothered him, perhaps. The plight of Rosie Bowe, for one. Whenever he walked in the streets, Aymer couldn’t avoid encountering rough twins of Rosie: thin, tough women with no vanity, and with
only the same unpinned black hair and pauper clothes to soften the knuckle and the sinew of their frames. But Aymer didn’t waste a glance on them. The women that he turned for were fleshy and
sandy-haired, or black.

Aymer was unsettled by what he called ‘our Africans’, both the women and the men. Most – and that’s not more than forty, say, throughout the city – were the sons
and daughters of liberated British slaves; laundry maids and cooks, footmen, valets and coachmen. There were a few who’d broken away. There was a freeman carpenter who called himself William
King; because, he said, he would have been a Hausa king, if he’d not been born in London’s Battersea. And there was Susan Sack (or Sew-and-Suck as she was called), a mulatto seamstress
working in the Mart-way tenements. She was a nursemaid, too, labouring both with the hems and with the infants of fashionable ladies. She had no nipples, it was said. She had brass thimbles on her
breasts, and any child that she suckled had rusty lips. There was a black prostitute called Cleopatra, too, though no gentleman would admit to any acquaintance with her. Even when she greeted men
by name in the street, her familiarity was passed off to their companions or their wives as sauce or lunacy. Who could she be? What could she want? Her nipples might be brass, for all they knew or
cared. Their lips weren’t brown with rust.

Whenever Aymer saw black citizens, no matter what their station, he would catch their eye, press a sixpence on them, and enquire, ‘Are any of your brethren recently arrived?’ He
would describe Otto, down to the glassy scars around his ankles, but no one yet had seen or heard of such a large black man. They were used to unsolicited donations, and odd requests. They were
used to being stared at, too, and being shooed away like cats. Aymer’s sort was not a rarity – but even if they had seen Otto, huge and scarred, riding down King’s Avenue on a
camel they wouldn’t have told a stranger.

Aymer though, through his persistence, had managed to befriend a local black coachman called Scipio Jones who worked for a wealthy estate-owner on the city fringes. Each Saturday morning, Scipio
came with the family barouche to the city square, where he waited for his mistress below the salon rooms in the Royal Hotel while she played cards, drank tea and displayed her latest heavily
flounced crinoline, decorated mantle or pagoda sleeves amongst the crapes, tarlatans and bombazines of her acquaintances. Scipio had to come down from the warmth and comfort of his hammer cloth and
stand sentry by the horses, so that if any of her friends should leave the card tables and look out, they’d see him there in his show livery, his polished buttons and his braid, attending on
her fine horses and her carriage. ‘Don’t fidget, Scipio,’ she’d said. ‘Horses fidget. Coachmen do not move.’

Aymer hadn’t mistaken Scipio for Otto. He was too small and plump. But he had offered him the sixpence and asked his usual questions when he’d first spotted him on New Year’s
Eve outside the Royal. Scipio was cold, despite his jacket and his hat. He had to warm his hands at the horse’s nose and hope that no one had left the card tables and was watching him. He was
glad to engage in conversation with Aymer. To talk politely to a stranger was not fidgeting, surely – but it was warming. Aymer blocked off some of the wind. No, Scipio hadn’t seen
anyone as large as that, he said. Nor anyone with ankle scars. But he would keep his ears close to the wall and would be happy to oblige with information. Aymer could return each Saturday and
Scipio would report what he had heard (and take another sixpence for his pains).

Scipio had nothing to report on the first Saturday of the new year, but on the second he had ‘double news’, of a large black drummer in the regimental band, and of an itinerant boxer
– ‘an American, by all accounts’ – called Massa Hannibal. So it was thanks to Scipio that Aymer was outside the King’s Hall on the following Friday. And thanks to him
as well that on the Friday night, Aymer Smith put on his boots and tarpaulin and went to see the boxing contest in a district of the city that he’d never seen before. As it turned out, Massa
Hannibal was not an African, nor American. At most he was an octoroon. His accent was Italian. His hair was straight and greased to slide the blows. The blackest things about him were the bruises
on his cheekbone and his arms from the previous night’s fight. He’d zinced his chest with horizontal stripes, he wore bead anklets and he babbled some invented African language when he
came into the ring. His opponent – King Swing – was a bald man, bandy and unbruised. All the money went on him.

Aymer had only come to check on Massa Hannibal. He didn’t wait to see the fight. He gave his ticket to a wheedler waiting at the door. He was in a hurry to be home. It had been easy to
find the warehouse where the fight was held. All he’d had to do was to follow those carriages with only gentlemen inside, and then stay with the crowd. But getting back into the quarter of
the city where he had rooms was not as simple. He couldn’t find a chair to take him there. And none of the rattling four-wheelers, drays or raddle horses waiting outside seemed equipped for
passengers. There were no drivers, anyway. They’d bought cheap seats at the fight and weren’t for hire.