Silver (9 page)

At this time in our knowledge of one another, I hesitated to press Natty for more details of her life, since my questions might easily have given hurt when they only meant to show interest. I felt no such reserve in mentioning our adventure – so when I thought we might have exhausted the subject of her father for the time being, I asked, ‘Supposing we find our island. Supposing we find it, and afterwards come home safely and rich. What do you see after that? What do you want?’

I expected a bright reply, but Natty surprised me by speaking very gravely. ‘I don’t expect to come home,’ she said.

‘Not come home?’ I repeated, looking into the narrow fields that now began to open on either side of us.

‘No, never come home.’

‘You mean not survive?’

‘Oh,’ she said, with a weary relaxation, ‘I expect to
survive
. I mean not come home to England. You have seen my life here.’

This invited me to make a judgement that might offend her, so I replied evasively. ‘Both our lives have their frustrations,’ I said.

‘Mine are more than frustrations,’ Natty replied, with the same
air of steadiness that characterised all her conversation. ‘This adventure will allow me some liberty, at least.’

I thought her admission proved she would not mind me speaking more directly. ‘Does your father know this?’ I asked.

‘What does my father know of anything? He rambles – you’ve heard him. He knows the past but not the present. Perhaps your father is the same?’

I agreed vigorously with this, and Natty continued.

‘He speaks about how he has changed, which is true in certain respects. He is not a pirate any more. He is a law-abiding gentleman – for as long as he remains in the world. But he cannot change entirely, because he cannot forget the island. He must have that map of yours. He must have the map, and then he must have the silver.’

‘Well,’ I said, somewhat dully, because my mind was still fixed on practical things. ‘At least that should mean he has found us a reliable crew.’

Natty nodded, and despite the gathering darkness I saw that her face was flushed – which I thought had more to do with the heat of our talk than the effort of our work. ‘We shall not have the same experience as our fathers,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I can assure you of that. I have met this crew and their captain. They are all good men – Captain Beamish especially.’

‘You know them all?’

‘I said I have met them. The hands have all been hired by the captain. He is the only one I
know
. But I assure you we shall be safe. My father wants his treasure too much to allow it otherwise.’

‘But how will he have it, if you do not return to England?’ As I asked this question, I already knew how Natty would reply. She would tell me that once she had found the silver she would send it home with this Captain Beamish, then take her life in her own hands and strike off in some other direction.

I could not decide what this meant for me. It was an uncertainty that lay too far beyond other uncertainties. Because I did not want to imagine them yet, I was relieved when Natty did not answer me, but left a pause in which I heard nothing except the sound of our oars biting into the water. My question drifted for a moment on the surface like a leaf, then slipped out of sight.

‘Of course,’ said Natty, after a while, with a sharp note in her voice that showed she was changing the subject, ‘I shall not be sailing as myself.’

I looked at her blankly.

‘I shall be there,’ Natty said. ‘I shall be with you. But I shall be travelling as a boy. It is my father’s idea – for my safety. Captain Beamish knows me for what I am, but the crew are already convinced that I am Nat.’

‘Nat?’ I echoed, with a smile.

Natty raised her eyebrows, pretending she was not in the least amused. ‘I could not possibly go as myself,’ she said. ‘That is what I believe. And what my father believes. Our shipmates would not allow it. And supposing we run into any trouble … It is better this way.’

I assured her that I understood the good sense of what she had decided, but in truth my response was a little more complicated than I allowed. I felt a sort of annoyance at not being consulted, and thereby included, in her decision. I also realised that Natty’s disguise meant no demonstrable affection could possibly develop between us during our journey – although I was so far unwilling to address this idea in any detail.

‘Very well,’ I said briskly, copying her example. ‘This evening you are Natty. Tomorrow you are Nat. That is all we need say on the subject. But I have a question that is connected.’

Natty raised one eyebrow in a pretty arch.

‘Will the crew know who
I
am?’

‘You mean, will they know you are your father’s true son?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Only the captain.’ Natty paused, then added with the confidence I had come to admire in her, no matter how much it took my consent for granted: ‘We thought it for the best. The men would only bother you for stories, and you have already said you do not enjoy such things.’

‘Very good,’ I said, knowing she spoke nothing less than the truth. My reward for this degree of understanding was to see Natty give me her sweetest smile; as it left her, we fell silent to complete the work in hand.

I have said that we reached our destination fairly easily, by which I mean our talk continued fluently enough. In fact we took considerably more time returning than we had done setting out. Perhaps we were tired. More certainly, I was loath to complete the crime I had already begun – partly out of respect for my father, and partly because I feared discovery. In any event: by the time we were past Greenwich (which was about nine o’clock, if the churches of that village could be relied upon), and beginning the last slow sweeps of the river that I recognised as the beginning of home, the moon had climbed into the sky, and the first stars were gleaming above the marshes.

Because I knew my father would be serving his customers until midnight, and was therefore likely to notice my arrival, or have it reported to him, Natty and I had no choice except to lie up in secret for a while. I therefore suggested we pull into a creek some distance away from the Hispaniola, and wait until the inn was quiet. The place we found was a water-alley that several seagulls had already chosen for their roost; they complained very loudly as the nose of the
Spyglass
turned out of the main river and drove them away.

Once this hubbub had died down, it was replaced by the sound of a million oozings and bubblings that were the ordinary
conversations of the marsh. This was comforting for me, because it was the sound of the earth itself; yet it could not help but remind me of everything I was about to offend. I tried to ease these guilty feelings by keeping up a constant flow of chat with Natty – in whispers, of course, so the sense of conspiracy was never far away.

Our talk led us from earliest memories (avoiding the subject of mothers and fathers); to schooldays; to the difficulties of the Latin language; to hopes (of happiness); to fears (of
worms
for her, and of more abstract things, such as
failure
, for me); to birthdays; to foods liked (beef) and disliked (hard biscuit); to the stars and moon, which shone so brightly above us it might have been the door to another world, made entirely of light; to schooldays again and the teachers we had most enjoyed; to books (where Natty would not follow me, calling them
dull
); and so on. Occasionally a bird would approach, take fright, and clatter away again. For the most part the river was deserted – although now and again quiet barges sailed past, with lamps fore and aft, their sails and hulls a beautiful soft charcoal colour. The water lapping against their prows was like the noise of sleep itself. All these things helped to control my sadness. Had the air not grown steadily colder, I believe we would eventually have closed our eyes and leaned together, then resumed our gossip when the dawn broke.

I calculated that midnight had already gone when the last of my father’s customers staggered out from the Hispaniola and home along the towpath. We knew this because we heard a tipsy farewell, and a few bars of his disappearing song.

A profound silence succeeded the fading of this ditty – swelling through the emptiness like a wave of black water. Yet instead of drowning me, the effect was to splash me awake, so that suddenly all my senses revived, and my brain concentrated. Everything I had previously done – all my book-learning, and in particular my time studying the creatures of the world – appeared to me like a preparation for this moment. I had no need for Natty to wish me good luck. After I had waited a few minutes more, in which I imagined my father taking himself upstairs and falling asleep, I merely touched her on the shoulder and climbed out of the boat. She, in return, said nothing I might have taken with me as comfort – except what I most wanted: ‘I shall stay here.’

It is the strangest thing, to stand outside a childhood home and feel unknown to it. In my own case, the sense of division was all the more shocking after the last few hours, in which Natty and I had entertained ourselves with the history of our past lives. When I slipped in through the side door of the house, its familiar curly handle and the squeak of the latch were merely cold facts.

This feeling of strangeness deepened as I stepped further indoors. The pale stone counter in the taproom, daubed with moonlight; the larder door with its metal grille in the central panel; the worn-away hollow in the red bricks of the threshold to the hallway: these were suddenly objects of curiosity, and not the fabric of my existence. I moved on –
floated
on, I should say, since I felt no more substantial than a wraith from the marshes. Up the narrow stairs. Along the corridor where the faces of huntsmen and hounds and horses regarded me impassively. Down the three steps of which the middle must be avoided because it would creak if stepped on. And here was the door to my father’s room – left ajar – and the sound of his snores rising like bubbles through mud. These would have directed me to my father’s bedside even without the help of a
lantern, which he had left guttering on the floor beside his shoes, and which I now silently retrieved.

As I lifted up this light, a fresh sense of trespass poured through me, because I could not recall the last time I had entered my father’s room. When I had been a child, no doubt, woken by a bad dream and stumbling for comfort. My exile at school in Enfield had brought an end to such visits, not by eradicating the need for them, but by creating a coolness between my father and myself. This grew steadily whenever we lived together during my holidays. He had his work in the taproom, and I had my life on the marshes, and my habits of botanising and collecting. By the time my school days had ended, and I had become a daily servant in the taproom, my body remained in the Hispaniola but my mind was elsewhere.

For these reasons, I now found myself looking round his room as inquisitively as a stranger, very grateful for the glow of my candle. My first thought was: my father kept his possessions remarkably neat and tidy. The shirt and trousers he had been wearing that day were folded on a wooden bench, ready to be put on again tomorrow. The single picture on his walls – the sketch of a working vessel entering an estuary under full sail – was hung exactly above the Windsor chair, in which he evidently sat to look through his window at traffic on the river below. A pitcher and ewer stood on a marble-topped table in one corner, their whiteness strengthening the lantern-light. All perfectly orderly, all perfectly settled. Like a ship’s cabin, I thought, and not just because I was thinking about the low roof above my head. In a part of my mind, I was already on the high seas.

At the foot of his bed, standing square and black, and locked with a most ingenious-looking and ancient device, was the chest I had come to open. The chest that had long ago been trundled into the Admiral Benbow with Billy Bones, and had remained there when
Billy Bones went to meet his Maker – for my father to redeem when he returned from Treasure Island. In my own childhood, I had been encouraged to venerate this object as though it contained relics that made the grave-cloths of our Saviour as insignificant as kitchen rags. But in truth it had not been so much the contents that attracted my attention as the thing itself. Running my small hands over its pitted planks, touching the scars in its iron bands, and the initial B burned on the top of it with a hot iron, I felt that I could trace the exact course and drama of the stories my father told me, with a far greater sense of conviction than any of his words engendered. The cannon-smoke of battle still hung around it, along with the gleam of blades, the blood of wicked men, and the glamour of their feuds. When I reached it now, I set down my lantern on the floor and laid my hands flat on the domed lid as if expecting something like human warmth to pass into my fingers.

I felt nothing but dust and cold – which my father also seemed to think was disappointing, for he suddenly stirred in his sleep, broke off snoring to open and shut his mouth with a succession of loud smacking noises, then resumed his dream. In the course of this disturbance, as his head rolled on the pillow, I saw round his neck the dark string on which was tied the key to the chest.

Up to this point in my raid, I had told myself that if my father were to wake, I would say that I had come to bid him goodnight, and report myself safely returned from my visit to London. But as I crept forward, and the night-winds pressed more loudly around the house, sending unexpected creaks through its timbers, I felt the weight of my actions more heavily. I was about to reach the point where my excuses would run out. The point where I turned from being a prodigal returning, into a prodigal departing.

So gravely did this thought strike me, I came to a dead halt and stood regarding my father for a full minute, as he lay softly
illuminated in his unconsciousness. I examined his face and the hair thinning across his scalp. I saw his lips shake loosely as his breath came in and out. I studied the folds and ridges of his ears, and their long lobes, as if I were poring over a trophy I had brought from the marshes to add to my cabinet of curiosities.