The Difference

by Marina Endicott

  Mr. Brimner said grace, gabbling slightly as one who is often called upon. “Benedic, Domine, nos et haec dona tua, quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi, per Christum Dominum nostrum.” He paused, flicked his great eyes up at the company around the table and repeated in English, “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we receive by Thy gracious bounty, through Christ Our Lord, Amen.”

  Francis nodded and Thea unclasped her hands. After a gargantuan slice of beef to tame his first appetite, Francis looked down the table, the benevolent captain. “You are fortunate, Mr. Brimner, you are fortunate! Normally we’d be no use to you, bound as we are to Hong Kong, because we’d nip up into the China Sea and then on eastward through the Banda Sea—but this trip we have a cargo of case oil for Auckland and Fiji, so we’ll tack south along Australia and come round New Zealand slow and safe.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Brimner was surprised. “I rather thought we would swing west around the Horn—is that not the shortest route?”

  Mr. Wright and Francis laughed, and Francis said, “No, no, we don’t do the Horn the wrong way round! That is never lightly undertaken, and I’d be reluctant to put Thea through it. Prevailing winds and currents run west-to-easterly, you know—and the Horn is scarifying enough in that direction!”

  On the globe, Thea had shown Kay how the Morning Light would speed eastways round the bottom of the world—her narrow, blunt-tipped, needle-bitten finger resting lightly on the downward slope, sliding around the tip of Africa as she made the earth spin with her left hand. On a flat map it was harder to see the sense of the route.

  Mr. Brimner made noises of comprehension and horror that Kay thought were put on, but Francis reassured him: “Oh, the Morning Light’s a tea wagon, slow as a barge, but from time to time she can put on some speed, I promise you.”

  “I suppose there is some commercial reason not to use the Canal?”

  “No Suez for sail,” said Mr. Wright. “That’s what’s let us in for all this h’mmed steamer traffic. We still struggle around the Horn—or on the outward leg, round the Cape of Good Hope.” He bent to his beef again.

  Francis nodded. “September is an even-tempered month around the Cape. We’ll saunter along in the friendly forties over to New Zealand, and give my dear wife an easy voyage for her first time out. And Kay!” Francis added, as if he had clean forgotten her until his eye caught hers.

  “We ought to have stayed at home,” said his dear wife. “Kay and I both.”

  Francis looked down the table, silenced.

  “But every wish beckoned me on board,” Thea added, to show she had not meant to complain.

  Kay felt her cheeks getting hot and put up her palms to cool them, not exactly liking Thea to be sentimental.

  “If you’d stayed at home, you’d have had to join the Cryptosporidian Club,” Francis said, to lighten the air.

  At Mr. Brimner’s uprising eyebrow, Thea smiled, and leaned to push the mustard within his reach. “The Krito-sophian Club,” she said. “It is a signal honour to be asked, and I won’t be, till I prove myself a suitable candidate! I am told the name is based on a Greek word meaning council of the wise?”

  “Well, debased, perhaps!” Mr. Brimner dobbed a large spoon of mustard next to a little pyramid of salt he had spilled on his plate from the cellar. Kay watched him dip a piece of beef first in the mustard and then in the salt, until it looked like an iced petit four. “Is the club intended for intellectual improvement?” he asked.

  That made Thea laugh a little. “I believe they are quite forcefully improved by Mrs. Adah Murray, who oversees the reading programme.”

  Francis smiled down the longer table with the unexpected sweetness he from time to time displayed. “Your own intellect could hardly be improved upon, my dear!”

  Kay did not mind when it went that way, when Francis was soft to Thea.

  While Thea and Francis and Mr. Brimner drank their tea after dinner, Mr. Wright went to relieve Mr. Best at the wheel, and Kay ran up behind him to fetch the books she’d left on deck. An orange line above the indigo of the western sea marked where the sun had gone. Soon it would be dark night, although still so balmy and warm.

  But the books—had they been swept overboard? She had felt no heavy swell. Not on the table, nor the deck…Kay looked about her in the gathering twilight, almost despairing.

  Old Seaton the carpenter leaned over the edge of the lifeboat above the roundhouse, one bare, ink-drawn leg and foot pointing with a great grey-callused toe to a deck box, and there she found books and papers stowed safe away. In a rough whisper Seaton warned her that she “orter take more care,” so she supposed it had been he who stowed them.

  She looked up to the brown fingers clawed over the boat’s rim and said, “Thank you very much.”

  He beetled his brows at her in mock annoyance, spat tobacco juice in a long arc to the sea and lay back down into his sanctuary.

  In part payment of his passage, and as his bounden duty, Mr. Brimner held Morning Prayer on deck on Sunday, inviting any of the crew who might like to attend. A surprising number did haul up from their bunks, to stand or kneel on scrubbed planks as the service prompted. Francis ran a Christian ship, Thea thought, watching the men. They followed the readings well, though on this Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, the Epistle was a complicated piece of Revelation.

  She and Kay were left in a pew circle of their own, and Kay (never a natural religious) seemed to receive the lessons in good part. Mr. Brimner’s green stole for Ordinary Time was delicately embroidered with birds. Someone at home must love him.

  He had very thin legs, thin right up to his waist, it seemed. Fixed on those sticks, his body was round-set like a bug’s. His deep, mellifluous voice was so pleasant that Thea sometimes found it easier to close her eyes while listening to him, not to see his guileless, guiltless, pug-dog look. His voice was more intelligent than his face. The slight bulge of his eyes and the portliness of his carriage made him somewhat ridiculous. But he was a serious person, and she was coming to appreciate him. The reading was from Job 11:

  For then shalt thou lift up they face without spot;

  yea, thou shalt be steadfast, and shalt not fear:

  Because thou shalt forget thy misery,

  and remember it as waters that pass away:

  But she did not forget her misery. Since her father’s death, she had receded from God. The effort of handing on the school, and the long journey home to the reasonable, long-awaited, yearned-for but still unsettling fact of her marriage: all this had kept her from thinking why she was not praying. She said her prayers, of course, but they were rote. Comfort, or poetry. Until the pains took her; then she had done nothing but pray, and prayer had done no good. If she could consult him now, Father would no doubt say the outcome had been a calling home, that the child had been spared travail, God’s mysterious ways.

  This is why I do not pray, Thea told herself sharply. As the crew dispersed to their work, she sent her body on weak, betraying legs to climb down the companionway and put the saloon in better order, and to water the geraniums in the skylight. To do what she could.

  Days passed with no difference between them but the way the dimpled morning sea ironed out to a steadier pattern of uncombed waves by afternoon, and the sun swam up and down, sharper or less sharp in focus. Days and days passed, almost unregarded, dots in the seven weeks the crossing would take.

  This life was not so different from their old life. Early in the morning, once Francis had gone up on deck, Kay could still creep along to Thea’s cabin and climb into bed with her, could still have another half-sleep cuddled beside her or watch through half-opened eyes as Thea began the ritual of dressing. Kay loved to watch her strong, thin fingers, quick and deft at buttoning, her sweet back bending and rising for stockings and petticoat-ties, exchanging nightdress for day, skin powdery pale in the filtering, shifting light from the port, the brie
f underarm hollow as her arms raised to lift her dress over her head. She was easy in movement, elegant by nature, and Kay loved her very much, more than anything.

  As they went farther and farther south, early mornings were so good that Kay woke earlier and earlier, kneeling up on her bunk to peer out the tiny port window and see what the sea was doing in the dawn: melted silver, molten lead, shifting mercury, then warming and transfiguring into deepest green.

  Those mornings she would not disturb Thea at all, but pull on skirt and middy and sagging stockings (Thea had decreed she must never again go up on deck unless fully dressed) and climb quietly up into the soft, shining air, markedly warmer as they sailed on into the south.

  Some mornings she emerged into a forest of empty masts, bare sticks like the sticks of teepees before the skins are draped over. Some days the rigging was already full of white sails billowing and bellowing, and the invigorating race of wind. It still made little sense to her why the sails were up or down, or what the cries and answers meant, but she liked to watch the long line of men straining to sweat the ropes, raising the sails as the wind fought to fill them, snapping in the shrouds.

  Each morning she was greeted by the sailors, the ones she knew well: Mr. Wright the first mate, monstrous Mr. Best the second mate, shy, red-headed Mr. Quick the third, and Mr. Cocker the bosun, expert in marlinspike seamanship, the art of rope tying and coiling. The ship’s boys, Arthur Wetmore and of course Jacky Judge and George Bayard, were always on the run and only threw a hallo there! back over their shoulders before racing down the deck or leaping for the shrouds to nip up aloft on some urgent, mysterious purpose.

  It was warm enough to eat their breakfast on deck, so Francis could sit with them and still attend to matters; Kay saw that he had arranged it that way so Thea would have reason to come out into the sea air. Francis believed every ailment, physical or otherwise, could be cured by exposure to sea air, and perhaps that was so. After they had eaten their porridge and kippers, or a boiled egg with toast soldiers, if the hens were laying, Mr. Brimner and Kay would read Greek for a while beside Thea’s hammock, only going down to the saloon when the heat of the day overtook them.

  Mr. Brimner had two Greek books with him: the First Greek Book from Canon Judd’s shelves and The Frogs, by Aristophanes, which was a play. While Kay wrestled with translations of Xerxes and wrote declensions of verbs and derivation lists, Mr. Brimner read The Frogs. “To improve my idiom,” he said. From time to time he laughed aloud, which made Kay want to read that book instead of hers. She had been taught by Father that it was unforgivable to ask a reader what had made him laugh—at least, she had been taught that by Thea, in Father’s service. Father rarely answered a question put directly to him, but relied on Thea to answer, to translate his silence to his younger daughter. He considered answering a question to be a form of capitulation. His dead-blank eyes would slide off her face and course around the room, coldly suffering, until Thea told her to hush and not disturb his sacred train of thought.

  “πομφολυγοπάφλασμα, pompholugo-paphlasma,” Mr. Brimner said beside her, derailing Kay’s own huffing train.

  He lifted his round head to the wind and recited in rolling syllables the rest of the verse, building to that long, bubbling word again: “…πομφολυγοπάφλασμα…the sound of bubbles rising from the sea.”

  He pointed his pipe hand out over the rail, where there were indeed bubbles rising and rising. Some sea creature not yet visible beneath the surface. The ship went cantering on over gentle waves with a breezy, careless air. Kay left her page unturned to stare down into deep green, remembering turning in the turquoise Caribbean water’s effortless lifting buoyancy, how under the water she had opened her mouth to shout and heard in the deafness below the wave that bubbling release of air.

  Mr. Brimner, perhaps because it was Sunday, opened his own mouth now and called forth to the waves the singsong verses from Job he had read in the service earlier:

  Canst thou by searching find out God?

  Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?

  It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?

  deeper than hell; what canst thou know?

  The measure thereof is longer than the earth,

  and broader than the sea.

  It could not all be Greek and Latin. Sometimes, when Mr. Brimner did not want to work, Kay ran out of knowledge and had to stop. Then she would gently vanish so that Thea did not notice her idleness and bring out the loathsome sampler.

  Although she loved the galley, with its clever cabinetry and nooks and hooks, Kay could not like Dent, the ship’s cook, a thin man who had once been fat and still lived in his old, sagging suit of skin. There was something wrong about him; he did not smell good. But he was welcoming, even anxious for her visits, seeming to want her youthfulness in some medicinal way. And he always gave recompense in jam or candy, or at least a sponge rusk.

  “I scraped the bottom of the barrel,” he confided once, so dolefully that she felt even more obliged to listen. “Born to a good life in Upper Pubnico, and look what’s come of me.” Not much, it looked like, but he had a cozy curtained berth here in the galley, and a closed stove (kept lit in all but the worst weather) to keep him warm as toast all day long.

  Dent carved in bone—the art called scrimshaw. In the empty galley one long afternoon, quiet at that hour save for random screeches from the poor moulting canaries he kept in a wire cage, he showed Kay his trove. He had built a shelf on which to array his bits and bobs, each bone thing penned in by a tiny wooden bar. Kay shuddered inside as she stared up at them. The biggest was a whale’s tooth carved with a clipper ship in full sail, an infinity of black lines composing the picture; the smallest was a tiny box that opened, with a red bead for a handle. She did not like scrimshaw. The carving was rough, not at all expert.

  But she felt sorry for him, so she gave some effort to praising it, enough that he found a button to bestow on her. A crooked yellow bird hooked one tiny-clawed foot to the cage wire to watch as he rummaged.

  “Here ye go,” Dent said, putting the three teeth remaining in his head on display. His hand sought after hers, pawing almost, so it took a good deal of effort to hold out her hand and let him deposit the button there. His lips were wet and his wet eyes almost lost within grey folds of skin and grey wisps of hair on his brow.

  She would sew it onto her hair bag, she promised him. The bone button was carved in slices, like an opened orange or a flower. It was cool in her hand, but she imagined it kept a trace of the cook’s rheumy substance, and she could not wait to put it down.

  In her cabin, she set the button in the washbasin and poured water from the jug until it was submerged. The refraction of the water (at first bubbling and disturbed from pouring, then gently shifting as the ship shifted) made the button loom and recede, its darkness enlarging. She scrubbed at it with her fingertips and water fell from it as she pulled it out again and dried it quickly on the linen towel. Milky bone with darker channels, polished and gleaming. Two dots of darkness to sew it on with. Very well, darkness was hardly foreign.

  She found her chatelaine and took up the hair bag, and set to work.

  Francis had promised Thea that she could sight Saint Peter and Saint Paul’s Rocks: tiny islands, dead mid-Atlantic, sixty miles north of the Equator, used by ships to check their bearings. Francis said (Thea found herself repeating Francis said too often, and laughed at herself for that feminine inanity) that Charles Darwin had stopped there in the Beagle and listed all the fauna he could find—a booby and a noddy or two, a large crab that stole fish intended for the booby’s babies; those might all count as visitors. For permanent residents, only beetles and a number of spiders, which he believed must be scavengers of the waterfowl. Not one plant had he found on the rocks, not even a lichen.

  By this time Thea had grown expert in helping with the sights, and she took her t
ask seriously. When the ship’s chronometer (most carefully guarded in its sheep’s wool bed on the saloon mantel) registered noon, she would call Greenwich time out the skylight while Francis, above, measured the angle of the sun with his sextant. A complicated equation then revealed the latitude, and Francis would estimate the local time.

  She enjoyed feeling useful in this daily task and fairly sang as she took the time, and Francis made a great show of relying on her. Once in a while he switched places to let her use the sextant instead, telling her she had a dead eye for it. She loved his partiality.

  The rocks appeared soon after breakfast, a dabbling of grey along the horizon, and as the wind was negligible, the ship hove to for a kind of holiday. They tacked closer to the islands so that Thea could see and say she’d been there. Francis let her use his good spyglass, and called Kay to come and look too. In the round eye of the glass, Thea still saw nothing— Oh, there. Yes, rocks. An uncomfortable clutter to stub a ship into in the dark, the way the Portuguese had first discovered them.

  The islands were not volcanic, Francis said, but a lifting of the seabed. The tip of a very tall mountain down below. How strange that in the middle of the waste of ocean this set of stones had been raised up, granted by God for the pure purpose of giving aid to navigators.

  To cap the holiday they had a visitor: Captain Davison from Windsor, Nova Scotia. Rounding the southern rock, they spoke a schooner, the Moskwa, and since the wind was very light, Francis put the boat out to bring the captain back to midday dinner. He toured the ship and said all the right things about Thea’s arrangements. His own chickens were a failure, he told her. “Two dozen, and they have never laid an egg!” Thea had Hubbard crate up one of their older birds to send back to the Moskwa, in case a maternal presence might persuade the others to lay, and told the captain to enjoy some stewed chicken if that did not avail. She sent back with him also a sack of potatoes, for which he was pitifully grateful, in exchange for the books and newspapers he had brought over in case they’d worked through their reading material by now. Kay and Mr. Brimner pounced on those.