by Peter Carey
The Anglicans insisted on talking. There was nothing in their conversation but money. He knew their situation was difficult. He felt a certain sympathy. But he had never heard such gross materialism. Mrs Stratton, so she told him, was engaged by a certain publisher to write a novel. Theophilus nodded politely. Inside he boiled. He did not doubt that Satan spoke through novels. Mrs Stratton wished to discuss the financial arrangements she made with publishers. He did not wish to speak of anything that might assist her plan. Mr Stratton wished to know how Oscar had obtained the money for his voyage. He did not press at this directly but came at it, like a mouse around a skirting board, all stops and starts and quick grey scurries. Theophilus thought this impertinent. He excused himself and went back to his work, but this did not stop the Strattons and they talked away, pennies and shillings, to each other. It was like sharing a carriage with a pair of grocers.
Theophilus became so out of temper with the Strattons—although he thought it unchristian to be so—that he was quite unprepared for the reunion with his son. He was hit before he got his muscles ready. He stood on grey, sooty Southampton station and was nearly washed away. He watched Mrs Stratton embrace his boy. Jealousy ripped him. He trembled. He did not embrace. He shook hands formally, but felt so light in the head he feared he would faint. He found a bench on the pretext of tying a bootlace, but when he got there, he dared not put his head down lest the blood rush to it. He placed his tin box beside him on the seat and his Bible on top of it. The Bible shed some markers. Mr Stratton picked them up for him. Theophilus stuffed them in his greatcoat pocket as if they were nothing but dead leaves.
He had felt faint ever since. He was like a man who arrives at Osaka when he had been expecting Edinburgh. Everything was odd, distant, trembling. His son was beautiful to him. His heart sang the Song of Solomon. He had his mother’s fine, heart-shaped face, the face he had cupped in his hands at the wonderful moment when his seed spurted. A bundle of myrrh is my well—beloved unto me; he shall lie all night between my breasts. He had his mother’s gorgeous hair and milk skin, his mother’s animations and enthusiasm, her wide eyes and, most of all, her hope. This was not a dark face that would fall prey to pride of jealousy. It was a better face, a better face by far. He offered the gift. It was all he had.
The box, as you know, was a tin box containing implements for soldering, a technique Theophilus set great store by, but one never properly mastered by his son. He had made not just the box, but the wooden handles for the soldering irons themselves. He had given up his two best bottles (ones with ground-glass stoppers) for the acid and flux. He had made a smaller box to hold the resin. On the lid of the box he had riveted a little copper plaque on which he had etched: “O.J.P. Hopkins, a gift from his father.”
But even when the son had accepted the box and thanked him for it, Theophilus could not contemplate him without agitation. He wished to kneel with him and pray. It was not shyness prevented him from doing it on Southampton railway station. (He was never ashamed publicly to bear witness.) It was the fear of being overcome with emotion. This was his flaw, the crack in his clay, and the more dreadful for being so unexpected: that one who preached so fearlessly in front of even the most hostile audience could also break down and lose control in public. He had disgraced himself at the boy’s mother’s funeral. He had tried to say a prayer for her. They had led him away. He had not been able to say the words. His voice had become a stranger in his throat.
When he heard the name Leviathan they were in a hansom, travelling across the slippery streets towards the docks. He did not think of a ship. He knew it was a ship. He had heard the Strattons lecture him with great authority on this subject. But when he heard the word Leviathan in Southampton, he thought of the giant whom God made to impress Job with his ignorance and powerlessness.
I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportions. Who can discover the face of his garment? Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up close together as with a close seal. Out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks of fire leap out. The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved.
This was the Leviathan Theophilus saw. He stood on the wharf and stared at it.
He saw his son tremble before the face of Leviathan.
Rain stood on the edges of his hair as on a holworth blossom.
“Surely, Oscar, surely,” Theophilus said, “surely you can walk.” But suddenly there was a stretcher, a blindfold, a cage. He wished to say his prayer but when he began no one noticed him. The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire. The pain prevented proper concentration, but the name Leviathan stayed with him and gave him a curious and unexpected comfort, reminding him that he should not question the will of God, that he was ignorant in His sight, that his son might not be damned after all.
Theophilus Hopkins did not see the ship as the work of Satan. And what he did not like—satin, silk, plush—he did not look at. If the interior reminded him of anything, it was an Anglican cathedral, but he chose not to retain a single detail of it. He wished only to remember the face of his son.
He wished to go up on deck. He had a hunger for plain air. The sea was clean and uncorrupted.
Oscar could not go up on deck. They therefore stayed below, walking up and down, arm in arm, as Theophilus had seen men do in Italy.
Oscar praised the natural lighting and thorough ventilation. He had a firm grasp of the principles.
They went into Oscar’s cabin where there was a sheet of celluloid, the new substance Theophilus had read about but never seen. The celluloid was marked with squares and was affixed to the porthole. He could get no proper explanation of its function, but did not persist. He thought they might say a prayer. He was wondering if the prayer he had devised on the train was the correct prayer after all. (It had been devised in jealousy and pride.)
Oscar showed how the bed folded up at day, and down at night. When the bed was down, Theophilus sat on it and was momentarily more comfortable in his joints. Oscar sat opposite him in a low chair with a carved back, but he could not be still and jigged his knee and played with his hands.
It was then that Theophilus gave Oscar the second present. It was tiny, wrapped in white tissue and wrapped with a black ribbon. It looked ominous, and the black (some leftover mourning ribbon from Theophilus’s cabinet drawer) was perhaps in honour of the woman from whose womb the present had kept it, because it was said—superstitiously, of course—that such a thing would protect the child from drowning.
“Here,” he said, holding it out with a hand that shook visibly. “It is your caul.” And when Oscar did not understand: “From off your little head.”
He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and unleashed the fragrance of Mrs Williams’s ironing board. He blew his nose, not looking at his son. He was remembering a child and wife in a Devon lane—myrtles, perfumed hedges, luscious red mud, which caked so thickly on their boots that their feet became heavy and padded as creatures in a dream.
Oscar put the caul in the soldering box. It did not fit easily, but he crammed it in, jamming it around the bottle of acid, squashing it against the little box of resin, crushing the paper, kinking the mourning ribbon. He did not wish to harm it. He was much moved by the present. He clasped the lid shut and made a fuss of arranging the box on a long shelf behind his head. When he at last turned to face his father, his own expression was wary, hooded.
He was frightened of Theophilus’s emotions. He could not name them. He could not guess their shapes and colours, and although he would spend the rest of his life wondering what these emotions were, now, when it appeared likely that they might be laid before him, as bare as knives and forks on a white tablecloth, he shrank from them.
He remembered his father’s skin, that part of it where the black beard grew thin across the cheek, from there into the rippled
mud-flat bay beneath the eyes. The skin looked like something that had been wrapped up too long. And there was a smell, a disturbing and familiar smell, which he recognized like the smell of a family home when it has not been lived in for a season. This combination of familiarity and distance was most disturbing. Also there were noises. They had been sounding for some time: electric megaphones. It would soon be time to go. Oscar felt the water stretching out endlessly behind his neck. The lines on the celluloid sliced through it, cut it into neat squares, which bled and joined again, were sliced, rejoined, sliced, rejoined.
Oscar did something jolly and scuttled out on to the promenade.
The air smelt of new paint and electricity. There was also something vaporous, like brandy, and leather, like a St James’s shoemaker in the week before Ascot. Through all this there threaded, subtle but insistent, the smell of the sea. Oscar imagined he detected movement in Leviathan. He stood outside his cabin door. His left hand grasped the wall rail. He grinned at Melody Clutterbuck.
Miss Clutterbuck barely saw the death’s-head grimace. It was the father—he in the doorway behind the son—whom she was anxious about. She watched him creep from the top-tier cabin and thought he gazed around as from a pulpit. When he walked it was slowly; she did not think to attribute this to pain.
She stood and moved towards the other stair, like a customer in a bank who feels there are bank robbers in the queue in front of her but is not quite confident of her intuition.
Thus she did not escape the embarrassment. She stood still, pale in the face, blood mottling the plump hands, the hands clutching the gloves she had removed for tea. She saw the elder Hopkins drop to his knees. She thought she heard a groan. She thought: Evangelicals do not kneel!
She saw a steward begin to move towards the old man, and then he stopped. The praying mantis went down beside his father. Miss Clutterbuck imagined she heard the thump of bony knees on a carpet that should have been thick enough to muffle anything. She caught, just then, her fiancé’s eyes, but only for a second because he—oh, you fool, you fool—was aping the fundamentalists. She looked to the Strattons but he was already on his shiny knees and she was lowering herself, resting her large hand on his shoulder. And now she saw strangers as well, those who had nothing to do with their pathetic party. A short man who smelt of wet animals came and knelt beside her. There was something horribly intimate in the sight of his balding crown. Others, some with crystal wine glasses in their hands, followed suit. The stewards remained standing, but even they folded their hands in front of them and bowed their heads like so many Baptists. Outside the megaphone continued blaring, but inside it was very quiet, and Melody Clutterbuck, not wishing to be thought a Dissenter herself, knelt.
There was a long silence, a minute, perhaps two, before Theophilus Hopkins, FRS, began his prayer.
“Oh, Lord God,” he began. His voice was tangled. He began again: “Oh, Lord God, this is my son.”
The next pause was shorter, but felt more painful.
“These are his friends, and fellow voyagers.”
You could hear Mrs Stratton’s asthmatic breathing. She was swaying a little on her knees. Mr Stratton rubbed her back.
“Oh, Lord my God,” said Oscar’s father, the deep voice so broken that many did not hear the last words: “What can we do?”
Then he was on his feet. He touched his son, so briefly, a brush so light Oscar would always wonder if he had not invented it himself. He walked up the stairs quickly and in pain. He went out of sight with a peculiar hobble: fast, short steps and a tightly screwed up face. The congregation rose slowly, and were not keen to meet each other’s eye.
Down on the wharf, Theophilus Hopkins prayed again. He stood before Leviathan and a crowd gathered around him. But the scales of the giant were fitted tight together and the sound of his voice did not reach the son who would not leave the promenade.
Oscar waited for his father to return. And while he waited, while it became clear, even to him, that his father had left forever, he could look nowhere but towards the busy bulkhead through which the old man had departed. A great pain took possession of his heart and clamped around his lungs so that although he stood, in the midst of his friends, with his red lips parted, no air came to rescue him.
He thought: I will never again look upon his wise old face.
He thought: I have been a poor son to leave him all alone. He embraced Mrs Stratton, shook hands with Wardley-Fish, Miss Clutterbuck, Mr Col ville and the pupils from the school. There was a great fuss of sirens, bells, fireworks. Lucinda, watching from above, wondered why the clergyman sat by himself on the bright red chaise-longue.
Oscar was caught in the web of his phobia in the geometrical centre of the ship. He imagined everyone had gone.
49
The System
Mr Stratton gave Oscar a fright. He pushed his face close up. He did not give a warning. He came creeping over the carpet with one last glass of complimentary sherry in his hand. The boy did not look up, but Mr Stratton did not imagine himself invisible. Quite the contrary. He was the only visitor left on the promenade. He had been requested, twice already, to leave the ship. He felt his defiance bathed in limelight.
He imagined the young man waiting for him. It was only natural in his view, for there were matters too long postponed which must be spoken of between them. He had expected them to be spoken of earlier, but as they had not been, they must be spoken of now. He was a man with a nervous respect for clocks and timetables. Bells, alarms, sirens, all had a direct effect upon his physiology. But he would not be cowed by sirens today. They could row him ashore if necessary.
Mr Stratton sat on the settee three feet from Oscar. He placed his sherry on its back rail. He balanced it nicely there and really did not care that the alcohol might scar the varnish.
Oscar did not see him. All Oscar could see was the image cast on his retina by his departed papa’s face, most particularly that penny-sized area of vulnerable skin beneath the eyes.
“You can no longer put me off,” said Mr Stratton. He pushed his face up close to Oscar’s.
Oscar leapt a good two inches from his seat.
“Hooo,” he said.
Mr Stratton’s face stayed complacently where it was, although the hand which served it went back, searching blindly along the edge of the settee for its master’s sherry.
Oscar had remained very fond of both the Strattons and his pity for Mr Stratton had not diminished his feelings, quite the contrary, but today he was repulsed by the too-obvious signs of cunning he saw on the face which had once been—the past showed through the corruption of the present—so innocent and boyish.
Oscar was too preoccupied with the loss of his papa properly to grasp the clergyman’s intention. He laid his hand on Mr Stratton’s shoulder. “It’s time,” he said, “and a sad time too.”
But Mr Stratton’s face had become tight with suspicion. It was a face that knew the world was not as it is commonly presented. It knew there were tricks and larks played everywhere, by bishops, provosts, kings, even rural deans. It was a face ripe for some heresy, one that would make even the Lord God of Hosts nothing but a vain and boastful demiurge whose claims to omnipotence were based on ignorance and pride.
“There has been enough of cat and mouse,” said Mr Stratton, pinning his eyes to Oscar’s, “you must tell me now.”
When Oscar looked at Mr Stratton’s eyes, he felt that he must never have done so before this moment, that he must have, through politeness, even squeamishness, have slid around them, knowing he would see only unhappiness there. Today he was not permitted to avoid them. They were blue and watery; the whites were yellow, veined, stained, like the porcelain basin at the Swan in Morley.
Mr Stratton’s hand brought the sherry glass to his mouth. The lower lip reached out to anticipate it. The foot of the glass came close to Oscar’s nose.
“We have looked after your poor father,” he said. “as best we could. We fed him when we could barely a
fford to feed ourselves and we could have no expectation of reward, at least not on this earth. Similarly, we looked after you. You could not imagine we had profit in mind,” Mr Stratton laughed, a shallow noise made from old air at the back of the throat. “We educated you so you might bear witness. We did not think we were assisting a wealthy man.”
Mr Stratton looked around the promenade, underlining the opulence of their surroundings in a manner which, had it occurred upon the stage, would have been pure ham but which here, driven before the rough current of his hurt, served only to fill Oscar’s heart with shame.
“I thank you,” Oscar said, “I have always—”
“I have been thanked before,” said Mr Stratton. “I cannot think that it has been beneficial to be taunted with fancy coffee or mysterious packets of currency.”
For a moment Oscar was angry. The amounts he had sent the Strattons had not been insubstantial.
“Naturally you wish to speak to me,” said Mr Stratton. “You do not wish to taunt me any longer.” And he opened his mouth a little as was his habit when waiting for someone to speak. The tip of his pink tongue flicked quickly across his sherry-sticky lips.
The sirens were blaring. They had changed their tempo and were now short, sharp, insistent, like dagger thrusts into taut white canvas.
“Now you will tell me, God help me. You cannot leave without it.” He took Oscar’s wrist and squeezed it. He would not let it go. It hurt. “How does a Christian clergyman acquire the funds to travel in such luxury? I am not a cadger. I do not come to you with a begging letter. I am sunk low enough, but not so low. You must tell me how it is you have managed.”