The Lime Twig (4 page)

He could only nod, but once again—the
Artemis
was rolling—once again he saw the silver jaw, the enormous sheet, the upright body of the horse that was crashing in the floor of the Dreary Station flat. And he could only keep his eyes down, clasp his hands.

“… Back sways a little, you see, the color of the coat hardens and the legs grow stiff. Months, years, it’s only the blue sky for him, occasionally put to stud and then back he goes to his shelter under an old oak at the edge of a field. Useless, you see. Do you see it? Until tonight when he’s ours—yours—until tonight when we get our hands on him and tie him up in the van and drive him to stables I know of in Highland Green. Yours, you see, and he’s got no recollection of the wreaths or seconds of speed, no knowledge at all of the prime younger horses sprung from his blood. But he’ll run all right, on a long track he’ll run better than the young ones good for nothing except a sprint. Power, endurance, a forgotten name—do you see it, Mr. Banks? He’s ancient, Rock Castle is, an ancient horse and he’s bloody well run beyond memory itself. …”

Flimsy frocks, dancing children, a boy with the face of a man, a girl whose body was still awkward; they were all about him and taking their pleasure while the feet tramped and the whistle tooted. But Hencher was talking, holding him by the brown coat just beneath the ribs, then fumbling and cupping in front of his eyes a tiny
photograph and saying, “Go on, go on, take a gander at this lovely horse.”

Then the pause, the voice less friendly and the question, and the sound of his own voice answering: “I’m game, Hencher. Naturally, I’m still game. …”

“Ah, like me you are. Good as your word. Well, come then, let’s have a turn round the deck of this little tub. We’ve time yet for a turn at the rail.”

He stood, trying to scrape the shards of the smashed mustard pot from his shoe, followed Hencher toward the white sea doors. The back of Hencher’s neck was red, the checked cap was at an angle, they made their slow way together through the excursion crowd and the smells of soap and cotton underwear and scent behind the ears.

“We’re going to do a polka,” somebody called, “come dance with us. …”

“A bit of business first,” Hencher said, and grinned over the heads at the woman. “A little business first— then we’ll be the boys for you, never fear.”

A broken bench with the name
Annie
carved into it, a bucket half-filled with sand, something made of brass and swinging, a discarded man’s shirt snagged on the horn of a big cleat bolted to the deck and, overhead, high in a box on the wall of the pilot house, the running light flickering through the sea gloom. He felt the desertion, the wind, the coming of darkness as soon as he stepped from the saloon.

She’s home now, she’s thinking about her hubby now, she’s asking the cat where’s Michael off to, where’s my Michael gone to?

He spat sharply over the rail, turned his jacket collar up, breathed on the dry bones of his hands.

Together, heads averted, going round the deck, coming abreast of the saloon and once more sheltered by a flapping canvas: Hencher lit a cigar while he himself stood grinning in through the lighted window at the crowd. He watched them kicking, twirling, holding hands, fitting their legs and feet to the steps of the dance; he grinned at the back of the girl too young to have a girdle to pull down, grinned at the boy in the black suit. He smelled the hot tobacco smell and Hencher was with him, Hencher who was fat and blowing smoke on the glass.

“You say you have a van, Hencher, a horse van. …”

“That’s the ticket. Two streets over from this quay, parked in an alley by the ship-fitter’s, as good a van as you’d want and with a full tank. And it’s a van won’t be recognized, I can tell you that. A little oil and sand over the name, you see. Like they did in the war. And we drive it wherever we please—you see—and no one’s the wiser.”

He nodded and for a moment, across the raven-blue and gold of the water, he saw the spires and smokestacks and tiny bridges of the city black as a row of needles burned and tipped with red. The tide had risen to its high mark and the gangway was nearly vertical; going down he burned his palm on the tarred rope, twice lost his footing. The engines were loud now. Except for Hencher and himself, except for the officer posted at the foot of the gangway and a seaman standing by each of the hawsers fore and aft, the quay was deserted, and when the
sudden blasting of the ship’s whistle commenced the timbers shook, the air was filled with steam, the noise of the whistle sounded through the quay’s dark cargo shed. Then it stopped, except for the echoes in the shed and out on the water, and the man gave his head a shake as if he could not rid it of the whistling. He held up an unlighted cigarette and Hencher handed him the cigar.

“Oh,” said the officer, “it’s you two again. Find the lady in question all right?”

“We found her, Captain. She’s comfy, thanks, good and comfy.”

“Well, according to schedule we tie up here tomorrow morning at twenty past eight.”

“My friend and me will come fetch her on the dot, Captain, good as my word. …”

Again the smothering whistle, again the sound of chain, and someone shouted through a megaphone and the gangway rose up on a cable; the seamen hoisted free the ropes, the bow of the
Artemis
began to swing, the officer stepped over the widening space between quay and ship and was gone.

“Come,” said Hencher, and took hold of his arm, “we can watch from the shed.”

They leaned against a crate under the low roof and there were rats and piles of dried shells and long dark empty spaces in the cargo shed. There were holes in the flooring: if he moved the toe of his shoe his foot would drop off into the water; if he moved his hand there would be the soft pinch of fur or the sudden burning of dirty
teeth. Only Hencher and himself and the rats. Only scum, the greasy water and a punctured and sodden dory beneath them—filth for a man to fall into.

“There … she’s got the current now. …”

He stared with Hencher toward the lights, small gallery of decks and silhouetted stacks that was the
Artemis
a quarter mile off on the river.

“They’ll have their fun on that little ship tonight and with a moon, too, or I miss my guess. Another quarter hour,” Hencher was twisting, trying for a look at his watch in the dark, “and I’ll bring the lorry round.”

Side by side, rigid against the packing crate, listening to the rats plop down, waiting, and all the while marking the disappearance of the excursion boat. Only the quay’s single boom creaking in the wind and a view of the river across the now empty berth was left to them, while ahead of the
Artemis
lay a peaceful sea worn smooth by night and flotillas of landing boats forever beached. With beer and music in her saloon she was off there making for the short sea cliffs, for the moonlit coast and desolate windy promontories into which the batteries had once been built. At 3 A.M. her navigator discovering the cliffs, fixing location by sighting a flat tin helmet nailed to a stump on the tallest cliff’s windy lip, and the
Artemis
would approach the shore, and all of them—boy, girl, lonely woman—would have a glimpse of ten miles of coast with an iron fleet half-sunk in the mud, a moonlit vision of windlasses, torpedo tubes, skein of rusted masts and the stripped hull of a destroyer rising stem first from that muddied coast under the cliffs. Beside the rail the
lonely woman at least, and perhaps the rest of them, would see the ten white coastal miles, the wreckage safe from tides and storms and snowy nights, the destroyer’s superstructure rising respectable as a lighthouse keeper’s station. All won, all lost, all over, and for half a crown they could have it now, this seawreck and abandon and breeze of the ocean surrounding them. And the boy at least would hear the moist unjoyful voice of his girl while the
Artemis
remained off shore, would feel the claspknife in the pocket of her skirt and, down on the excursion boat’s hard deck, would know the comfort to be taken with a young girl worn to thinness and wiry and tough as the titlings above the cliffs.

Michael stood rigid against the packing crate, alone. He waited deep within the shed and watched, sniffed something that was not of rats or cargo at all. Then he saw it drifting along the edges of the quay, rising up through the rat holes round his shoes: fog, the inevitable white hair strands which every night looped out across the river as if once each night the river must grow old, clammy, and in its age and during these late hours only, produce the thick miles of old woman’s hair within whose heaps and strands it might then hide all bodies, tankers, or fat iron shapes nodding to themselves out there.

Fog of course and he should have expected it, should have carried a torch. Yet, whatever was to come his way would come, he knew, like this—slowly and out of a thick fog. Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emerging
to put its arms about him: where to discover everything he dreamed of except in a fog. And, thinking of slippery corners, skin suddenly bruised, grappling hooks going blindly through the water: where to lose it all if not in the same white fog.

Alone he waited until the great wooden shed was filled with the fog that caused the rotting along the water’s edge. His shirt was flat, wet against his chest. The forked iron boom on the quay was gone, and as for the two tankers that marked the vacated berth of the excursion boat, he knew they were there only by the dead sounds they made. All about him was the visible texture and density of the expanding fog. He was listening for the lorry’s engine, with the back of a hand kept trying to wipe his cheek.

An engine was nearby suddenly, and despite the fog he knew that it was not Hencher’s lorry but was the river barge approaching on the lifting tide. And he was alone, shivering, helpless to give a signal. He had no torch, no packet of matches. No one trusted a man’s voice in a fog.

All the bells and whistles in mid-river were going at once, and hearing the tones change, the strokes change, listening to the metallic or compressed-air sounds of sloops or ocean-going vessels protesting their identities and their vague shifting locations on the whole of this treacherous and fog-bound river’s surface—a horrible noise, a confused warning, a frightening celebration—he knew that only his own barge, of all this night’s drifting or anchored traffic, would come without lights and making no sound except for the soft and faltering sound of
the engine itself. This he heard—surely someone was tinkering with it, nursing it, trying to stop the loss of oil with a bare hand—and each moment he waited for even these illicit sounds to go dead. But in the fog the barge engine was turning over and, all at once, a man out there cleared his throat.

So he stood away from the packing crate and slowly went down to his hands and knees and discovered that he could see a little distance now, and began to crawl. He feared that the rats would get his hands; he ran his fingers round the crumbling edges of the holes; his creeping knee came down on fragments of a smashed bottle. There was an entire white sea-world Boating and swirling in that enormous open door, and he crawled out to it.

“You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog!”

He had crossed the width of the quay, had got a grip on the iron joint of the boom and was trying to rise when the voice spoke up directly beneath him and he knew that if he fell it would not be into the greasy and squid-blackened water but onto the deck of the barge itself. He was unable to look down yet, but it was clear that the man who had spoken up at him had done so with a laugh, casually, without needing to cup his hands.

Before the man had time to say it again—“You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog, eh, Hencher? I wouldn’t ordinarily step out of the house on a night like this”—the quay had already shaken beneath the van’s tires and the headlamp had flicked on, suddenly, and hurt his eyes where he hung from the boom, one
hand thrown out for balance and the other stuck like a dead man’s to the iron. Hencher, carrying two bright lanterns by wire loops, had come between himself and the lorry’s yellow headlamps—“Lively now, Mr. Banks,” he was saying without a smile—and had thrust one of the lanterns upon him in time to reach out his freed hand and catch the end of wet moving rope on the instant it came lashing up from the barge. So that the barge was docked, held safely by the rope turned twice round a piling, when he himself was finally able to look straight down and see it, the long and blunt-nosed barge riding high in a smooth bowl scooped out of the fog. Someone had shut off the engine.

“Take a smoke now, Cowles—just a drag, mind you— and we’ll get on with it.”

She ought to see her hubby now. She ought to see me now
.

He had got his arm through the fork of the boom and was holding the lantern properly, away from his body and down, and the glare from its reflector lighted the figure of the man Cowles below him and in cold wet rivulets drifted sternward down the length of the barge. Midships were three hatches, two battened permanently shut, the third covered by a sagging canvas. Beside this last hatch and on a bale of hay sat a boy naked from the waist up and wearing twill riding britches. In the stem was a small cabin. On its roof, short booted legs dangling over the edge, a jockey in full racing dress sat with a cigarette now between his lips and hands clasped round one of his tiny knees.

“Cowles! I want off …I want off this bloody coop!” he shouted.

The cigarette popped into his mouth then. It was a trick he had. The lips were pursed round the hidden cigarette and the little man was staring up not at Cowles or Hencher but at himself, and even while Cowles was ordering the two of them, boy and jockey, to get a hop on and drag the tarpaulin off the hold, the jockey kept looking up at him, toe of one little boot twitching left and right but the large bright eyes remaining fixed on his own— until the cigarette popped out again and the dwarfed man allowed himself to be helped from his seat on the cabin roof by the stableboy whose arms, in the lantern light, were upraised and spattered with oil to the elbows.

“Get a hop on now, we want no coppers or watchman or dock inspectors catching us at this bit of game. …”