The Secret River (4 page)

She did not look at Thornhill, and yet her leg spoke to him, its exposure meant for him. Did she hope to provoke the bloodless husband, by showing leg to a mere boatman? Or was it for her own satisfaction, to remind herself that there were other kinds of men in the world, ones who knew what to do with a leg when they saw one?

In the next moment, the gentleman had pulled the skirt down, interposed himself between them: had somehow got them both into the boat, his bottom at one stage brushing Thornhill’s face as he climbed in. Thornhill had his hands full holding the boat, so inept were his passengers, and when he got in himself, feeling his wet legs weak with cold, hardly under his instructions, his passengers were sitting in the stern and the white skirt was well down, the green slippers out of sight.

But the owner of the leg spoke:
Henry dear, she said, I am afraid
my slipper is all but ruined
. She extended her leg out in front of her, and indeed the poison-green silk gleamed with river-water, and the little furbelow on the front hung sad and bedraggled. Her skirt was hiked up almost to the knee so that north of the slipper was the leg again, and beyond that the shadows where a man could guess at all her other charms.

My love
, said the man more sharply,
you are exposing your leg!

And now the woman definitely looked at Thornhill, and by God it was a sultry teasing look, though gone so quick no husband could find anything to blame. The glance that passed between them was the glance of two creatures, male and female of the same species, recognising each others’ blood.

The dandy put his arm around his wife’s shoulders now, although not to Thornhill’s eye in a way that promised anything of an interesting nature when they got to the shrubbery of the Vauxhall Gardens.

In any race for survival with this Henry, Thornhill knew he would have been the victor, lad though he was—shipwrecked, for instance, the dandy would have pined and drooped and died, while he himself would have known how to prosper. And yet, in this particular desert isle of London, this jungle full of dangerous creatures in the year 1793, Thornhill was at the mercy of such mincing pansies, who looked at him as if he were of no more account than a bollard.

Not all the gentry were of that ilk, however, and he had his few regulars who spoke to him like another man the same as themselves: Captain Watson, for instance, who always asked for him at Chelsea Stairs, and with whom he had a steady arrangement of a Wednesday forenoon when he visited his ladyfriend over in Lambeth. He’d hold the boat up on the ramp for the captain, a stout sort of gentleman, to make it easy for him to step aboard, and never mind how hard it was to launch again off the ramp with his portly behind in the stern, because he was a good fellow and did not haggle with a poor man over a few pence.

A waterman’s brain was exercised from the moment of waking, when even without rising from the bed he could guess the state of the river, the tides, the wind. These were his books: the colour of the sky at dawn, the cries of the birds over the river, the set of the waves at the turn of tide. From them he could tell where he would best find his fares.

After a time the mud-choked water and the ships it carried, thick on its back like fleas on a dog, became nothing more than a big room of which every corner was known. He came to love that wide pale light around him out on the river, the falling away of insignificant things in the face of the great radiance of the sky. He would rest on the oars at Hungerford Reach, where the tide could be relied on to sweep him around, and stare along the water at the way the light wrapped itself around every object.

~

Of a Sunday, Mr Middleton did not always require him to work, and he and Sal found time to be together. He loved to be with her, watching the thoughts dancing beneath the skin, and would not have tried to explain it to anyone else. He had the feeling he could say anything to her, any confession, any shameful truth. She would listen, and answer with some cheerful kindness.

That first winter she took it into her head to teach him his letters, as her mother had taught her. To please her he agreed, but he was not sure about it. Marks on paper seemed to sap the power of the mind. He had seen Sal write things down in order to remember them: a list for going to the draper or the grocer, where he himself would have simply carried such a thing in his head. Numbers, too. He had seen many a gentleman need to get out a pencil and scrap of paper from his pocket to work out the fare to Richmond and back, two passengers one way, one the other, plus a packet one way and the Sunday surcharge. He, ignorant waterman, had meanwhile done the sum in his head, added the ten per cent for goodwill and the sixpence for the Benevolent Fund, before the gentleman had even found a flat place to rest the paper.

They did it at the table, sitting squashed together on the same side, with a candle in its holder casting a sputtering light. He could smell the fruity femaleness of her, a thing like the memory of
strawberries left in the wood of the punnet, that sweet flowery fragrance. She leaned in to him and said,
No ink to start with. Just
hold it—see?—like this
, and held up her own small hand, showing.

When he tried, it was maddening, pernickety, unnatural. The way his hand worked with an oar made sense. His fist closed around it and his thumb kept it all in place. This holding of a feather was a contortionist’s trick, pincering in with fingers and thumb, twisting the whole hand sideways, the quill rolling in his grip. Only his desire to please her made him persist.

When they added ink to the nib and he scraped the feather down the paper, the nib snagged and spattered. Black droplets and smears were bold on the modest white surface. Sal laughed and he nearly tipped the whole table over there and then and hurled out of the room, down to the river where he was master of himself. He could row to Richmond and back against the tide. He had won the Doggett’s Coat and Badge, rowing against a foul wind, straining to keep a boat’s length ahead of Lewis Blackwood the whole way. He had not let his mind go anywhere but into his arms and his hands. Pulling across the line ten yards ahead of Blackwood, he had felt that any feat of strength or endurance would be within his grasp.

Just not this squibby business squeezed in tight against a table.

Seeing his face, Sal seemed to understand that this was not a laughing business. She dried the ink off the table, the paper, the nib, his fingers, and dotted out a T on the page.
Just go over them dots,
Will
, she said.
We will leave the W for now
. He approached the nib gingerly to the line of dots, controlling the runaway tip with all his power. The first time he overshot: a wavering horizontal line cut through the dots and beyond. He tried the second line, watching the trail of ink. A wobble in the middle, but there it was: two lines, a letter T.

He became aware that his tongue was far out of his mouth, helping the tip of the quill along. He pulled it back, licked his lips,
laid down the pen, heard his voice rough as he said,
Enough for
tonight
. Sal looked at the page with the marks.
Look, Will
, she said.
How good you are doing it now, against them you did at the start!

He rubbed at his hand where it was cramped. To his eye the marks he had made were shameful, nothing more than foolish scratches. He wished to crush the page to pulp. But she was nudging him with that elbow of hers, that arm that liked to alight along his, and saying,
I promise you
—but lightly, it was a promise hardly necessary to make—
I promise you that by next Sunday you will
write that W, fair as ever was
.

Winter wore away, and there it was at last, his whole name:
William Thornhill
, slow and steady. As long as no one was watching, no one would know how long it took, and how many times the tongue had to be drawn back in.

William Thornhill
.

He was still only sixteen, and no one in his family had ever gone so far.

~

Love came upon him so gradually that it was not even given the name. As the years of his apprenticeship wore away he knew only that, out on the river where the wind cut keen through his old coat, he was warmed by the thought of her, sitting with her mother, threading the needle for her and stitching away at shirts or handkerchiefs. He marvelled at her efficient fingers, doing the edges of the white squares with tiny deft movements too quick to be seen. One moment there was the ravelling edge, the next it was rolled under, turned in, magicked into a tidy scroll of fabric in the time it took her mother to squint at a needle.

He did not know what it was that melted something in him, so he felt his face grow smooth with thinking of her, could even drift away into a dream of her that stayed with him all day, until he trudged up the steps at night hearing the water squelch in his
shoes. Lying on his straw in the kitchen, waiting for sleep, the knowledge that she was above him in her room under the roof made something thicken in his throat. Sometimes, coming across her by surprise, he found he could not quite breathe for a moment, or find the words to answer her greeting.
Why Will!
she would always exclaim, quite as if it were a surprise to her that her father’s big-shouldered apprentice was filling the doorway, stooping to save his head from the low beam. She was a one for touching, would take hold of him when she spoke, and he would feel it there long afterwards: her little hand on his arm, speaking to him through the stiff fabric of his coat.

Rotherhithe was being grown over now with tanneries and knackeries and rows of tenements where there had once been those marshy spots where two children could find a place of their own. Even the gypsies had been chased away. But they found that the yard of Christ Church at the Borough, where it backed onto the river, was a hospitable place in fine weather. Among the tombs two people could find a little privacy.

Dawdling in the pleasure of being together, whispering, crouching behind one of the stone boxes, Sal read out the writing along the side, one slow word at a time. His job was to keep track of the words she had already read, so she could concentrate on the one at hand, because it was too hard to read and to remember all at once.

Sal’s voice was especially sweet getting her tongue around the knots of words:
Susannah Wood Wife of Mr James Wood Mathematical
Instrument Maker
, she said.
She was tapped nine times and had 161 gallons
of water taken from her without ever lamenting her case or fearing the operation
. Thornhill blurted out,
Like a bladder of sack, sounds like
, and saw her trying not to laugh.
Oh Will
, she said,
think of the the poor soul
,
and us finding it a joke!
She took his hand so he felt how soft and small it was within the stiff claw of his own. Smiled, so he saw her dimple: just the one, her face itself winking at him.

He stared out at the river, where the tide was beginning to swirl the water upstream, trying to find the words to say what pressed up out of his heart.
There is something
, he started, and felt a fool, not being able to go on. He started again, heard himself loud and definite,
Soon’s
they make me a freeman, first thing I’ll do is marry you
, then he thought she might laugh, a prentice from Tanner’s Lane saying such a thing, but she did not.

Yes, Will
, she said.
And I’ll wait for you
. Her eyes searched his face, serious for once. He could see her looking separately at his eyes, his mouth, back to his eyes again, reading behind the words the truth that was written on his heart. He looked into her eyes, close enough to see the tiny copy of himself there.

He longed for the seven years to run their course. He had only to let time pass, and another life would be waiting for him.

~

They wed the very day of his freedom, just before he turned twenty-two. Mr Middleton let him have his second-best wherry by way of a wedding gift, and they took a room not far from Mermaid Row, where husband and wife could make free with each other in a way the place behind the tomb of Susannah Wood had never allowed.

It turned out that Sal was a saucy one in bed. That first night, she came up close against him. She was afraid, she said, of the dark. Took his arm, needing, she said, something by way of support. He felt the warmth of her, her noisy breath tickling his ear. They had to keep things quiet, for the walls were paper-thin. There was a man in the next room whose every cough was as clear as if he were in the bed with them.

What happened next was nothing loud or forceful. It hardly even seemed as decided as an action. It felt merely an unthought process of nature, a seed bursting out of the dirt or a flower unfurling from the bud.

The night became the best part of every day. Now they had a bed to themselves, she loved to curl around him, a candle guttering on the stool. Her breasts lolled out in a way that shocked and aroused him. She would peel a tangerine and feed him the segments slippery from her own warm mouth, and when they had done all the things with tangerines and mouths that could be done, and the candle had snuffed itself out in a pool of tallow, they lay together and told each other stories.

Sal liked to tell about Cobham Hall, where her mother had been in service before marrying Mr Middleton, and where she had gone with her mother for a month once when she was a girl. A few things stayed in her memory: the carriageway up to the entrance, a green tunnel of poplars. Starched damask on the tables, stiff as hide, even in the servants’ quarters. And the proper ways of doing things. There had been a grapevine there, she said, and once or twice the treat of grapes in the servants’ dining hall. The housekeeper had scolded her for taking a single grape from a bunch.
Eat what you like, the old thing told me
, she said.
But never spoil
the bunch, get the grape-scissors and cut a sprig
. She turned to Thornhill and whispered,
Fancy, Will, scissors just for nothing but grapes!
The only grapes Thornhill had ever known were the few he had picked up from the ground, broken and muddy, when the market was finished.