Signals of Distress

by Jim Crace

  She wasn’t pleased to see that Palmer Dolly also hung around the quay, offering to help with any heavy load or fetch some tool or timber from Mr Howells’s store. Palmer was too intimate. He called her ‘Mig’. He pulled her coat. ‘I got a dollar,’ he said. ‘You want to see it, then?’ He put Rankin’s dollar in her hand: ‘There’s fifteen stars on that,’ he said. He pointed out the harp-winged, bowered bird on the reverse, and the date of 1794. ‘It’s old, in’t it? It’s older than my ma and da.’

  Miggy didn’t care about the date, the bird or fifteen stars.

  ‘So what?’ she said. But she liked the dollar’s bust, so unlike the bull’s-head portrait of the King on English coins: it was a girl with flowing, unconsidered hair, slightly parted lips, and eyes raised to the sky.

  ‘Don’t that look like you a bit?’ Palmer said. ‘It’s Liberty, she’s called.’

  ‘So what?’ Miggy’s lips were slightly parted, too. Her hair had not been combed, it seemed, since 1794. ‘Where d’you get it, though?’

  ‘The captain give it me.’

  ‘I bet he didn’t. What for?’

  He made her listen to his boasts that Captain Comstock meant – if he were asked – to take him on as a sailor. Miggy was not pleased. She and Palmer might have been sandmates when they were small. But now she was a woman, promised to another man, and ready for the voyage to America. She wanted no one in the rigging except the real Americans. Palmer ought to leave her well alone. She didn’t even want to speak to him.

  Nor did she really want to speak to Aymer Smith. But he was so insistent with his greetings and his enquiries on her welfare when they coincided on the quay that she had little choice. Besides, hadn’t he promised her ‘a small payment’? She didn’t like to mention it outright. But when he asked how she was looking forward to America, she said, ‘I’m looking forward to it well enough, so long as we have pennies for our supper.’

  ‘You’ll not find pennies in America,’ he said. ‘The coin there is called the dollar, Miss Bowe. You will not discover the sovereign’s head on it, nor will you find it divides into farthings. The farthing in America is called the cent, though the scent of money is the same, both here and in America …’

  ‘I’ve seen a dollar.’ She didn’t look at him. He wasn’t thistledown. This man was badger hair. She knelt and stroked the little bitch which – God knows why – had taken quite a fancy to him. It seemed a lifetime since the dog had first come up to their cottage, the ship’s ensign in its collar.

  ‘You’ve seen a dollar? So then you understand, Miss Bowe.’ He stood back to let a length of timber through. ‘I see the Belle is getting shipshape. How soon before she leaves?’

  ‘Ralph says three days or four.’

  ‘So Tuesday, then? Are you prepared for your encounters with the sea? I promise you – and I have voyaged both in tranquil waters and in rough – that there is nothing you must fear except, perhaps, unsteady feet. Keep your stomach full and sickness will not bother you.’

  Seeing Ralph up in the renewed rigging of the Belle, she walked away and said (she hoped, she feared, that Aymer overheard): ‘It’s only money’ll keep our stomachs full.’

  Aymer hadn’t forgotten his promise to the Bowes. But he would wait until the day the Belle set sail. Then he could make his payment to this girl and her mother in public view. He might be required to stand beyond the chapel wall in Wherrytown, but they would see who was charitable and who was not. He didn’t think that Mr Phipps would hand out coins on the quay. He might hand out tracts. Or New Commandments for America. And Mr Walter Howells, on all the evidence, was more likely to collect than give: a penny tax for walking on his quay, a halfpenny for breathing his salt air, another penny for the screaming concert of his gulls, a shilling for the hire of sea.

  Aymer felt unusually well, apart from aching legs. His chest had cleared. His throat was sweet. And his greatest fear, that Otto would be found and sent back to America, had disappeared, now that the hunting parties were returned with nothing but a pigeon, and now that he’d discovered George with his lantern, walking on the walls towards the little hut. Aymer was in a celebratory mood. ‘There is no better doctor than the sea,’ he told himself.

  And he was getting all the sea he could. Katie Norris had expressed a plan to put the voyage to Canada to good use. She’d make a two-loop necklace from the shells near Wherrytown. She’d have to bore a needle hole in each and then work through the thread. That would keep her busy on the Belle. And then she’d always have a little bit of home to wear around her neck in Canada. She and Robert could be seen each morning with their backs bent, searching along the shore in front of the salting hall for matching, tender-coloured shells. If the Norrises were there, then Aymer was as well. He used Whip as an excuse. She had to have her exercise. She loved the beach. So while the dog played in the surf or made life difficult for crabs and sanderlings, Aymer joined the Norrises and made life difficult for them. He had the name of everything. He knew his winkles from his whelks. The pink and glossy chink-shell that she had chosen for her necklace, he explained to Katie, was Lacuna vincta. No, he didn’t know the common name. Nor did he know the common name for what it was brought him and Whip down to the beach. He might pretend it was Amicitia platonica, and that his affections were directed equally at both of the Norrises. But there was a simpler word, as ever. Even in Latin. It was amor.

  So Aymer picked amongst the seaweeds for her, glad of every chance – when he found an unblemished chink-shell for her throat – to put his fingers in her palm. She would reward him with a smile: ‘I thank you, Mr Smith. A lovely one.’ Sometimes a strand of sandy-coloured hair would lift up from her forehead in the breeze and reach across to Aymer’s face. Sometimes the breeze would sway her skirts at Aymer’s legs, or tug the ribbons on her shawl. He spoke most to her husband, but hardly took his eyes away from Katie. He didn’t want to miss those times when she bent down to search the sand and displayed her ankles, petticoats, her clothy, apple thighs, her willow back.

  His love for her was undeclared, of course. She wasn’t like a Miggy Bowe, uneducated, immature, unlovable, within his reach. Katie was a distant star. Aymer wouldn’t force his lips on hers, nor write her sentimental letters, nor even make her blush with any open display of his feelings. There wouldn’t be a duel between Aymer Smith and Robert Norris, at dawn, with swords. There wouldn’t even be a duel of words. They weren’t the personalities for that – a chilling thought. There wasn’t time. She’d be off to Canada within the week. What Aymer wanted, in these final days in Wherrytown, was simply her proximity. He wanted to store her up, like Rosie Bowe was storing Miggy, to load himself with images of her, to have, if not a country wife, then some lasting, dark companion of the heart. When he was old, the greying bachelor, they wouldn’t look at him and say he’d never loved. They would instead remark on how his silences were her, whoever she might be, however far from home. What would Fidia and Matthias make of brother Aymer sighing?

  The Norrises regarded Aymer as a nuisance. Katie threw his shells away where they would not be found again. The whole point of the necklace was that she would only thread the shells she’d found with Robert. She might wish her husband were a little ‘fuller’ in his conversations. She might snub him once in a while, out loud. But that was just to show her power. She loved every blink of his eye. When the necklace was finished, she could tell a rosary of love on every shell, his, hers, his, hers, their lives looped round her throat. She didn’t want a stranger’s shells to interrupt the chain.

  By Saturday she and her husband had had enough of Aymer Smith’s unrelenting company. They avoided the nearest foreshores and walked instead along the coast towards more subtle coves. But hardly had they found the path down from the cliff and reached the pebble beach than they heard Whip barking at them from above and turned to find their room companion waving at them with his hat. They were still fond of him, despite his oddities. He was too vulnerable and headlong in his dealings to be dislike
d entirely. And he clearly regarded them as his friends and equals. That was both flattering and charming from such an educated man. He and Robert had a lot in common, Katie thought. Yet she could not imagine two men less alike in their attractiveness. Aymer wasn’t resolute like Robert. He wasn’t wise. He had, in fact, become an irritant for both the Norrises. They did their best to hide their impatience, though. They didn’t want to be impolite. He meant well, after all.

  And surely it was only loneliness that made him hunt them down, that made him join them over breakfast, lunch and dinner, that made him sit on his bed at night, a candle on his knees, engaging them in conversations that had no consequence or end, or reading to them from his book, and asking them to comment on his Mr Paine or Mr Lyell or Mr Know-not-who. He seemed to watch them all the time, and be too ready with his feeble, reedy laugh. Katie didn’t even want to make love anymore. She felt their every movement could be heard and, if she and Robert whispered in the night, the words would bounce around the room and Mr Smith would hear. She wondered if he ever slept. Was that him wheezing, or the dog? She worried that the man was watching her when she took her clothes off for the night, when she crept out for the pot. Did he stand with his candle, looking down on her, when she was unconscious in her bed, her hair across the pillow and her nightdress disarranged? How could she now get pregnant for the Belle with Aymer Smith just yards away?

  When Sunday came, despite Mr Phipps’s disapproval, the work continued on the Belle. ‘You will bring God’s damnation down on the ship,’ he warned. ‘Betray the Lord’s observances and you will pay the price.’ But Walter Howells thought God had all Eternity for His observances, and Sabbaths till the end of time, while he had promised Captain Comstock that the ship would sail at high tide on the Tuesday morning, November the 29th, 1836. That was a day that wouldn’t come again. To start the voyage in December, when the sea was at its most unforgiving and the polar ice was sending its outriders south, would be a day too late. It had to be the Tuesday, Comstock said, or it would be next year. So Howells had every hand on deck, tarring timbers, knotting canvas, dislodging barnacles. Most of the Wherrytowners wouldn’t work, of course, not even for the extra fourpence on the day. The Americans might leave on time, they judged, but Preacher Phipps would not. And his memory was long and unforgiving. They didn’t want to find themselves made to stand outside the chapel walls, or be buried on the common land without a prayer or hymn, or be told their sons and daughters couldn’t marry on holy ground. They went to all the Sunday services and made certain they were seen and heard. But there were some who thought it worth the fourpence to risk a stay in Purgatory and help out with the ship. Palmer Dolly, for example. Some of the coastal fishermen, who lived outside Mr Phipps’s rule. Together with the sailors, there were more than twenty men. When the chapel foghorn was blown for matins, the hammers on the Belle called back and didn’t stop for prayers.

  Walter Howells couldn’t ride his horse down companion ladders nor canter between decks. He had to swagger on his feet, directing what repairs should be completed, often as not with unseasoned, shrinking wood and cordage that was badly chafed. He pointed out what minor leaks or springing planks or damage from marine worm should be disguised with gobs of tar, or battened down with strips of wood. The Dolly boy, he had discovered, would do what he was told, no questions asked. Howells worked him all the time. That … Palmer? Was that his name? … might prove to be a useful man in future. Palmer had asked Walter Howells to recommend him to the captain. The boy wanted, it would seem, to be a sailor and go off to America. But Howells considered him too handy and too willing to lose so soon. He needed him in Wherrytown. He’d warn the captain that Palmer Dolly could not be trusted. Light-fingered, maybe? Clumsy? Daft? The captain wouldn’t want the risk. Who’d ever know? Who’d ever learn the truth?

  That afternoon, when dusk had put a stop to work, Palmer Dolly did ask the captain for Nathaniel Rankin’s place. He was, he said, a willing hand, and strong, and young, and used to boats. He’d been the one, he reminded the captain, to bring the dead sailor ashore. No one had worked harder on the Belle. Surely Captain Comstock had seen him work? But it was too late. Walter Howells had already said the boy had fits. They couldn’t take a boy with fits on board. The captain shook his head, ‘No, sir. Your place is here, amongst your own,’ and went to spend his last night at the inn in Alice Yapp’s good care.

  That Sunday night, they all sat down again to pie. Not squab. Not star-gazy. But good beef pie. One of the cattle in the dunes had ‘died’, and Walter Howells had given the flank to Alice Yapp. She’d pay him back somehow, when her captain had departed. Again, the young Americans were sitting at the softwood trestle in the Commercial, raucously excited by the prospects of their voyage home, the wives and lovers they might see in the New Year. They envied Ralph. He would be the first to have a woman in his arms.

  The large oak table in the parlour was a squeeze. There were two extra places set. Mrs Yapp and Walter Howells wouldn’t miss out on beef. They sat with Captain Comstock by the parlour fire. Only George didn’t have a knife and plate. He had to serve. And only Otto wasn’t there.

  ‘Not pie again!’ said Aymer Smith, down at the cold end of the table with the Norrises.

  ‘It’s always pie,’ said George. ‘Be glad of it. That’s why the Devil never comes to Wherrytown. For fear we’ll put him in a pie.’

  At this, John Peacock took up his fiddle and played the Devil’s Jig at George’s shoulder, serenading every steaming plateful in the parlour. When George placed the servings for the Norrises on the table, John Peacock put down his fiddle and sang in Robert’s ear:

  ‘Put the Devil in the pie,

  Hot coals, hot coals,

  Put the Devil in the pie,

  Hot coals hot.

  Dish the Devil to your wife,

  Hot coals, hot coals,

  Dish the Devil to your wife,

  Cut his tail off with a knife,

  Run away to save your life,

  Hot coals hot.’

  Katie hoped that Canadians would prove to be a little more self-conscious than these Americans. The fiddler had almost put her off her meal. She didn’t like the way the beef had whistled when George had spooned it on her plate. She didn’t like the way that Aymer Smith was watching her, as if she had the Devil’s gravy on her chin.

  Elsewhere in Wherrytown, the more observant families had already finished their pies and had climbed the lanes to chapel. The Norrises wouldn’t go. They couldn’t condone the preacher’s fierceness at the funeral.

  ‘Master Sacrilege and his bloody uncles, Mr Cant, Mr Sin and Mr Cynicism,’ Preacher Phipps told his smallest congregation for more than a week in his toughest – and most alliterative – sermon of the year, ‘are not amongst us with the Lord this evensong. They do not hear the Sabbath’s holy horn. They do not lay their cups aside, they do not hand their hammers down, they do not pause in their profanities. These gentlemen and their dark friend are not content with building Pandaemonium for six days of the week, and doing Devil’s work amid our harbours and our homes, amongst our barley and our beans. Now Master Sacrilege is roaming free in Wherrytown and he is intent on breaking up the one day in the week when we can give our thanks unto the Lord, Amen. These freethinkers, the Devil at their side, are lodged in Wherrytown and they are labouring against the Lord our God and His Observances.’

  His congregation couldn’t think where the beans and barley were. The best they had was thistle-rye. But they enjoyed this sermon more than most. It cracked with piety and spleen. And it was thinly coded. They could tell whom Preacher Phipps was lamming from the pulpit – anyone who hadn’t come to chapel. He thrashed the sailors and the Sabbath-breakers. Master Sacrilege was ‘surely’ Agent Howells (the preacher’s most long-standing foe). And that dark stranger doing Devil’s work was, no doubt of it, the African. The congregation was, for once, excluded from his disapproval. It was a happy sermon then. They couldn’t wait to sing.

 
So when Mr Phipps called the first note of the hymn, the congregation did its best. They sang more loudly, more zealously, more fearfully than they’d sung for weeks. They sent the African away with verses beating at his ears. They drove him back to Hell with choruses. This was their battle hymn. They’d save their daughters and their chickens from the Devil’s work with euphony. They’d scarify the night with noise. Their voices could be heard at sea. But Mr Phipps was not entirely pleased. The hymn seemed thin. So did his flock on that chilling Sunday night. He should have been elated. He was not. He missed the finest voice. He missed the finest head of hair.

  When Mr Phipps’s flock departed for their beds, his eyes were fiery at the chapel door. His goodnight handshakes were hard and purposeful. And unforgiving. But the preacher’s fires were dull. He was cold inside. He put the chapel candles out and went back to the chapel house. Usually he was proud of the simplicity of his two rooms, the hardness of his bolster, the bareness of his unplanched floor, the plain wooden cross, the water in the jug. He wasn’t lonely with the Lord as his companion. How could he be? That was the choice he had made when he was only seventeen, that he should embalm himself in God. But today he hoped the Lord had not been his witness, had not heard him preach so icily, and did not see him now retrieve the brandy bottle from its hiding place. He warmed his teeth and chest on it. He said his prayers. He could not sleep. His sermon haunted him. Had it been too venomous? It had, it had. It had no warmth, no Christian charity. It was not kind. He was a snake, he thought, a hornet. No wonder people flinched when he shook hands with them. No wonder Katie Norris had not come to chapel. He warmed his teeth again. He was used to dealing with self-pity. He lay, fully clothed, on his bed. He dreamed up better times in Wherrytown; he made amends. He and the Norrises – and even Mr Smith – were spending pleasant evenings in the chapel house. They made a decent four at whist. He called them by their Christian names. They called him John. They put the world to rights over cups of tea. They lodged with him, and somehow he refrained from feeding them on Buttered Tracts or Bible Soup or Hebrewed Ale, or dishing up the Word Made Flesh for supper. And Katie, Robert, Aymer, John were fond companions for the night.