The Fern Tattoo

by David Brooks

  The prolonged embrace over, Daniel extended his hand – about, absurdly, to introduce himself – only to have it brushed aside and himself hugged almost likewise, and with considerable strength, as if this man were willing him in, securing him in a bond he had not known he had made. Then, still almost wordlessly – neither Isobel nor her father appeared yet quite able to trust their emotions or reduce them to such a plane – they found a porter and moved outside, where Daniel was assailed by the full glory of the Grand Canal, the Ponte degli Scalzi at midday, the delight of a gondola, and the wonder of the grand palazzi as they moved off, through a flotilla of fruit barges and other water traffic, toward San Trovaso.

  For Daniel in retrospect, it was the shock of their arrival at the house on the rio Ognissanti that was the turning point: the struggle to heft their baggage onto the landing and up the worn marble stairs to the first-floor entrance, then to have the wide wooden door opened by someone they had not expected, a dark, very beautiful woman not many years older than Daniel himself. And to see him, the Captain, hug this woman, perhaps in truth only sharing the joy he felt, in the same way he had just hugged his daughter.

  Daniel did not need to look at Isobel’s face to know that something had sunk within her. He sensed himself almost palpably pulled down with it. Although he did not quite know what it was – although he would never really know – for much of that fortnight he saw Isobel struggle bravely against something she would not or could not share with him. At times, in the Frari, or caught in the glow of the Bellinis at the Accademia, she seemed almost to have put it out of her mind, yet she inevitably grew quieter and darker as they approached the house each afternoon. And each evening, when Marina joined them for dinner, whether at home or in one of the numerous fine restaurants the Captain would lead them to with an uncanny sense of direction through the labyrinthine streets and alleys of the city, her mood became brittle, volatile, now engaging almost over-enthusiastically in the conversation, now retreating, just as suddenly, into an intractable silence.

  The first week was nonetheless negotiated, survived, and during the first days of the second things seemed to improve. Some demon of daughterly possessiveness or jealousy, he at last tentatively allowed himself to think, had been fought down. But it was only a brief respite. The weather had been warm and was becoming more so. On the third night before they were to leave, they had found it too hot and too humid to sleep. Cruelly, as it seemed to Daniel – for since they had arrived Isobel had allowed only the most cursory of embraces, and then with a kind of sufferance that he had found humiliating, a kind of betrayal – they lay almost naked under a single sheet beneath the broad canopy of the mosquito net, with not only the windows but the shutters, too, opened upon the canal and the long balcony they shared with the Captain’s room and the large living-area between. At around three in the morning, or so it must nearly have been, since they had lain an age in restless, uncomfortable silence, they began to hear soft moaning from the far room, where the windows must have been similarly open, a sound ceasing for a short time and then beginning again, mounting slowly and unmistakably, ending at last in groans of such deep pleasure from both the man and the woman that Daniel found himself aroused almost beyond bearing, wanting as he had never so intensely before the person who, he could tell, lay wide awake, taut and racked beside him, within inches of his outstretched fingers and yet utterly beyond reach.

  They left, as they had planned, three days later, and spent as many days more cruising down the Adriatic toward the Gulf of Corinth, Patras, and the great canal. Venice itself might have done its inexhaustible best to distract her daily from the various aftershocks of her discovery, but now – with only the cabin, the deck, the sea, the shipboard entertainments, the occasional sightings of a temple or town on the rocky coast as they moved southward – Isobel had time to think, and to brood. Though Daniel hoped for a gradual improvement, a lightening as the time and the distance increased, her mood, and the relations between them, only grew worse. Even Athens did not buoy them for more than a few days. The dry, hot silence of the Parthenon, the long, still grasses between the huge blocks of fallen stone, the worn, ancient gestures of the architecture, haunting as they may have been to him, appeared to provide her only with external confirmations of a kind of inner desolation he could not, whatever he tried, get her to talk about.

  Aboard ship again, he would rise early, with the dawn and the upper deck almost entirely to himself, and over and over, staring into the long wake stretching out behind them, try to fend off the feeling of blunder, irreparable error, irretrievable waste, all the more appalled by the growing conviction that at the heart of it was something quite out of his hands, something somehow massively out of proportion which – against all his instincts, his training, which had been to alter, to take responsibility, to change the world immediately about him with his own will and actions – he could do almost nothing to counteract. And that, worse still, it might be the shape of things to come, for years.

  There were points – in Limassol, Haifa, Port Said – where were it not for the relief of arrival, the sudden crowd of distractions, they might have done what in the late nights on shipboard it had seemed to them both they must do, and separated, she to take the first ship back, he to continue toward Australia on his own. Indeed, had either of them stated this openly to the other, there was a strong chance that it would have happened. But there was the hope, in each of them, that it was a season in their relationship – who could tell, when neither had had such a thing before? – and that it would eventually pass. He read his way through whatever he could face in the ship’s small library, spent hours each day staring into the waves, longed for someone to talk openly to about all that had happened, all the apprehensions that were filling him, and longed for it to be her, but so much of what he was wanting to say was about her, about the pain and the frustration that her own pain was causing him, that he felt any mention would only make matters worse. Instead, when she would converse at all, they would try to talk about the events of the day, the sights, the shipboard life. And fail, almost relentlessly. He would see the details – the camel trains, the men working at the water-wheels at the side of the canal, the flying-fish leaping from one wave to another, the dhows, with their bright sails, against the emerald blue of the sea – and she only the featureless immensities of desert, sand, ocean receding beyond them.

  On the second night out of Aden there was a storm. They were bolted from sleep by the pitching of the ship, the violent lashing of wind and water on the black portholes. There had been rough weather before, but nothing to prepare them for such fury. After an hour clinging to the edge of the bunk Isobel rose to vomit and did so numerous times before dawn. In the early light, the gale calming only slightly, she was a haggard and deathly pale. The ship’s doctor was understandably hard to contact – she was not the only passenger in such a condition – and could not come until mid-morning. He did what he could, but for the next two days of strong winds and heavy seas she did not leave the bed except out of physical necessity. Daniel brought her food but she could keep nothing down. He sat with her, but it was as if she did not know or care that he was there. And as if the storm itself had been a symptom, a climax, and something had at last broken within her, on the third day, when the sun returned and the wind and seas calmed, and although all signs of her illness had passed, she would still not leave the cabin, indeed much of the time would not leave the bed.

  There was a party to celebrate the return of good weather. Daniel went alone, got slightly drunk, spent much of the evening talking to a woman – older, somewhere in her mid- or late thirties – on her way back to India after attending her sister’s wedding. She was a tall, auburn-haired Englishwoman, married to a man in the East India Company. Unlike most of their friends, she and her husband, an older man, loved India and would probably stay on after her husband retired. She would be leaving the ship in Colombo, taking separate passage up to Madras. Her deep voice and slight north Englis
h accent, mixed with inflections from her seven years abroad, intrigued him; her unusual unreserve disarmed him almost utterly. She looked him directly in the eye, asked penetrating questions, was undeterred by evasions, and without knowing quite how he had come to do so, he found himself talking about Isobel at length, almost compulsively, as though in the talking, the expressing at last, the having to make connections, he was beginning to see and to think more clearly. It was not just the alcohol, although doubtless he drank more than he was used to. Later on it would seem as if this woman, this Mrs Lydia Curtis, had reached out that night and the next from amongst all the people on the ship, and pulled him to her, leaving him very little choice.

  She had left the thinning party at nearly midnight, shaking his hand in farewell, and he had stayed on, enticed into a game of cards to replace a player who had just gone to bed, only to find the game folding after two further hands and himself still restless, disinclined to retire. He left, and lighting a last cigarette in the fresh air outside, walking slowly along the deck toward the cabin, thinking of some of the things he had said, came upon her unexpectedly, returning in his direction from where it seemed she had been standing at the railing, staring out at the sea. She laughed. ‘I have just been thinking about you,’ she said, and almost as if they had known each other far longer – almost as if they were already lovers – she reached for his face and kissed him lightly goodnight, leaving a trace of her perfume on his cheek. Back in the cabin he found himself inflamed, aroused by her, and took a long time drifting to sleep beside his wife.

  They had only four days with one another – four parts of those days, or their evenings – before reaching Ceylon, but it seemed that some key experience, some central aspect of a lifetime was thus compressed. He would leave her cabin disoriented, aphasic, as though not just his eyes but his entire body had been hours in diastasis and were now too open and too sensitive to the world beyond. And not only his body, but his mind also, coaxed out of its usual boundaries, allowed to ask things, admit to things it had never before felt able to. For several minutes, until his heart and his mind adjusted, he would have to carry himself carefully, for fear of blundering, revealing to all about him where he had been, what he had just been doing.

  At Colombo he watched as she disembarked – still Isobel would not leave the cabin – making no public sign of farewell, and receiving none, until she had reached the boat far below, and could turn and stare, and wave, for then it might have been any one of the many watching from the deck that she was waving to, any one or thing below that he was looking at so attentively: the men selling wallets and handbags from their wicker baskets, the boys – what were they doing? diving for coins?

  She did not leave him an address. That was not the way, she said. And would have declined his had he one to offer. They had swapped stories continually. She had told him things he thought no woman would ever speak of to a man. Now he realised that, in terms of actual facts, he knew almost nothing about her. He half suspected that, were he to consult the ship’s register, there would be no Lydia Curtis on it.

  Something had happened while his attention was so much elsewhere. After Colombo, Isobel rose and left the cabin, complaining that for the last week he had hardly seen or spoken to her, although while this was in large measure true, it would have been no less so for any of the three weeks preceding, and not initially for want of his trying. But something had changed within her; she had made a decision: some kind of turning-point had been reached. Although no less moody nor very much less irritable, she would now talk more readily, express opinions, take interest. In the two weeks that followed, just now discovering them, she made firm friends with an older couple, the Littlemores from Western Australia, who had been at their allotted table since Cyprus. She would swim with them, play deck games with them, play board-games or cards with them late into the evening – including him readily enough when he wished but liking them, he half suspected, all the more because he did not, for between him and her, despite her new vigour, little had essentially changed. Her gestures of affection when they came, seemed premeditated and unconvincing, and when they made love, as in fact they did twice in what remained of the voyage, it had the air about it of experiment or duty, and he felt, on the second occasion especially, that in his search for what he had found with Lydia he had perpetrated upon Isobel something brutish and unpleasant. Although no longer reluctant to talk with him in private – prepared, even, to talk generously and at length on certain subjects – she would not discuss their relationship, claimed instead that she could not understand him, that she felt no such awkwardness, that he must have some problem of his own. As perhaps, now, he did, little as he felt this explained things. For the feeling of waste had intensified; of a shocking – appalling – mistake, and waste of being.

  Although he spent a great deal of time vacillating over the matter, and although opportunities came and went – although indeed he did try, and would have, had she not wrenched the conversation from its course almost as if she sensed something coming – he did not tell Isobel about Lydia. In the end he did not need to. A day before Fremantle she confronted him. The Littlemores, it seemed, had told her. Rumours only, of course, but the rumours had only corroborated what she claimed had been a suspicion of her own at the time. She was not angry. In fact it was a kind of relief. Things had been different between them since Nice, she said, or Venice, and whatever it was that had happened with the Curtis woman had only confirmed that it was much the same for him, that something had irrevocably changed. She had decided to go home, and ever since making this decision had felt considerably better. She did not know whether or what kind of divorce might be possible, or how such a thing was to be done, but would find out as soon as she could.

  She did not really blame him; it was not like that; nor even very much resent what he had done, although it had been an embarrassment to her, and would be to him if he could hear what people had been saying. But she was not ready for marriage, perhaps neither of them were; not ready for travel, not ready for Australia. The Littlemores had invited her to stay with them in Perth until she could get a passage back. The ship’s purser had suggested this might be possible within the month.

  He recovered in the Bight. That is, if ‘recovery’ is not another instance of one’s deciding to employ a word. There may not in the end have been a great deal to recover from, though that impression itself may be one of the symptoms of recovery.

  There had been little to say. He could protest or not, could fight the matter or not, and had chosen not to. For a month already he had been looking at Isobel and wondering who, really, it was he had married. Difficult as it had then been to comprehend then, that glance she had given him in Venice – of utter non-recognition, almost of hatred, or perhaps it was only of the trapped animal – had finally penetrated. For a day, as the ship headed south from Fremantle past the Dunsborough and Leuwin lighthouses, making for Cape Naturaliste, he had been almost intolerably sad, might even have said that he mourned, but then, on the second day, waking to a colder, more bracing wind and darker water as they launched into the Southern Ocean, he found himself more critical. There was something that he didn’t know, had never been told. Since the time with her father, since Marina Battaglia – since even before them – she had been different, had been shrinking away from him. The actual severance only confirmed what in effect had already happened. He regretted the fool he had made of himself, or might be made of, amongst her family, their few friends in England, but he might never see them again. And perhaps there were worse kinds of fool. Arguably it had been she who, in a deeper sense, had made a fool of him. Perhaps, since most of them knew her far better than he, there would be some who would not be so surprised. He regretted the embarrassment he would face at the dock in Sydney, disembarking alone, but could avoid some of that by wiring the news ahead. He regretted, too, the fool he might have made of himself on shipboard over Lydia, but this even less strongly: she had given him, as he now saw it, somethin
g that he might never have seen otherwise, and that had left, after all, no irreparable scar. Perhaps, if one is not willing to risk making a fool of oneself, or being fooled, if one plays always by the rules, one gets nowhere, learns nothing beyond what was told one in the first place, handed down by earlier generations not willing to take the risk. Absurdly, suddenly, he wanted to talk with Isobel about this; to wonder at it with her, to show her another way, but of course couldn’t. That was the sadness. Misreading something, asking too much of it – turning it, because they had never been taught anything else, into something it might never have been intended to be – perhaps they had ruined a friendship of a kind neither had ever had before. But in the Bight, pushed by the Trades, racing for Melbourne across the almost-black ocean, it seemed strangely appropriate to be returning alone.

  14

  Lilian Grey

  (1928)

  The second time Daniel met Lilian Grey it seemed so much like an act of fate that he no longer thought to resist it. You could almost say he threw himself in. Love, he had sometimes reflected, whatever else it may be, is always in some part a verbal phenomenon, a moment when one chooses to apply a certain word to a particular feeling or set of feelings that it seems that one has. There is no qualified judge, no ultimate arbiter before whom one can bring the arguments for and against, or to tell one what it is that one has in one’s hands. There is no machine, no application of electrodes that can detect it. One has to learn and choose for oneself. And in this case he chose early. Perhaps that is the test after all.