by John Darnton
“So what happened?”
“I took a train home—the longest trip of my life—and when I arrived, I was in disgrace. My father could barely look at me.”
“And Harvard?”
“They dropped me. I applied later but I didn’t get in the second time around. I ended up going to the University of Michigan.”
He talked about his parents—his father, a successful New York lawyer, and his mother, who fell in love with another man and left when Hugh was fourteen.
“That’s why you went off to prep school,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It must have been rough.”
“It was, I guess. And then, two years after she left, she died. She was living with another man and they were going to get married, and then she suddenly died, just like that—from an aneurysm. She was sitting in bed combing her hair one minute, and the next she was dead.”
“How did you feel?”
“Confused. I told myself at the time it was divine retribution.”
“But you don’t really believe that.”
“No.”
“So you were raised by your father?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Did he ever remarry?”
“Yes. Three years ago.”
“So as a teenager you had no woman in your life.”
It was a statement, not a question. Odd—he had never thought of it in those terms. “No.”
“Are you close to your father?”
He considered the question. It was the hardest one of all. “He’s loving enough, I guess, in a distant sort of way. He used to drink a lot. He’s stopped now, but . . . I don’t know, he went off into his own private world so much—nights, he would just drift away on a sea of alcohol. I could never talk to him, not openly and honestly. I could never tell him what I felt. Which was that I always felt I disappointed him. That I let him down.”
That wasn’t the half of it, he thought to himself.
“It sounds like he let you down. Strange how children have a way of blaming themselves, as if they were the ones responsible for it all.”
He grunted by way of an answer.
“Any brothers? Sisters?” she asked.
He gave an involuntary start. “No.” Not anymore.
He thought of changing the subject but decided not to. He took a deep breath.
“I used to have a brother, an older brother. But he died—in an accident.”
“My God, I’m sorry. What happened?”
“A swimming accident. It’s a long story.” He paused. “I’ll tell you sometime, not just now.”
“Of course.”
They were silent again, for a beat. Then she took his hand.
“I think you’ve packed a lot of suffering into your life so far,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to trot out this catalogue of woe.”
“No, I wanted to know. And it explains a lot.”
“Like what?”
“Why you’re here, on an island in the middle of nowhere, all alone—
at least until we came.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“So am I.”
He had the sudden desire to put his arm around her and kiss her; looking at her, he knew she had the same idea. But she stopped him.
“We can’t,” she said, resting her hand on his arm. “Nigel.”
They decided to return. At the top of the cliff, he extended his arm to help her up and said: “Welcome back to reality.”
That night, in his sleeping bag, he thought about all he had left out of his story. He had ignored the most important parts—that his brother had been everything to him, the center of his solar system. More than just looking up to him, he had counted on him for survival. Those long-ago nights after their mother left: lifting the old man out of his chair—you take his legs, I’ll get his back—and heaving him into bed. Sometimes father and son would set out to pick his brother up from evening basketball practice, the car weaving all over the road, and he would duck down in the backseat and pray they wouldn’t crash. When they got there, the relief when his brother took the wheel, peering over the dash, just learning to drive, going home at fifteen miles an hour, the sudden warmth of safety.
And that his brother was not just older by three years but bigger and faster and better in everything. He could always run faster, jump farther, reach longer. He was the perfect son, always got high marks in school, became president of the junior high school class, actually wrote a weekly column for the town newspaper. For Hugh, he was the impossible standard—tall, good-looking, athletic. On the baseball diamond he was a natural, captain of the team, and when he hit a line drive to the outfield and streaked around the bases, Hugh would turn his head slightly to watch his father’s hungry eyes.
“C’mon Hugh, let’s play catch.” The smell of cut grass in their backyard, the shadows darkening in the late summer afternoon, the cicadas humming.
They threw the ball back and forth, grounders, pop flies, line drives. “Give me a hard one, over my head.” He’d run, circling back, and look over his shoulder and make a diving catch. The throws straight into the small leather pouch stung his hand. “Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, here’s the pitch. . . .
It’s a long fly ball. . . . Can he get it? . . . Back . . . back . . . He’s got it! That’s all for the Yankees. Side retired.”
Hugh finally made it onto the team but he spent most of his time on the bench. Once in a while, he’d play right field, lonely in that huge blanket of grass, touching his rabbit foot between each pitch: “God, please don’t let it come to me. But if it does, if it has to, please make me catch it.” Once he promised to take over his brother’s newspaper route, but the papers were so heavy in the sack he couldn’t ride the bike without tipping over. He tried stuffing them under the seat and around the spokes but nothing worked and it was soon time for the game so he panicked and left his bike in the bushes and totally forgot about it. “How’d it go?” his brother asked. And Hugh gasped. Later they found the bike in the dark and his father drove them on the route, shaking his head; he had had a few too many and was in a foul mood.
The sat phone sprang to life, an insistent, annoying ring. It took a moment for him to surface from his memories and answer it. The voice on the other end sounded thin, with a long time delay.
“Beth Dulcimer, please? I apologize for calling so late. It’s an emergency.”
He had an American accent and sounded young.
Hugh pulled his shorts on and carried the phone across the campsite, feeling his way across the rocks with his bare feet. The embers from the fire were still glowing. He opened the flap of her tent and bent down and walked in. She awoke quickly and sat up in her sleeping bag and looked at him, at first in alarm and then, misunderstanding, with a slight smile. Her eyes were puffy with sleep. He explained and handed her the phone and walked back outside. He could hear her talking—her tone was warm but nervous—and then he heard her gasp and cry out. Nigel rushed past out of the darkness and entered the tent, saying,
“What? What is it?”
Hugh lit a kerosene lantern and started the fire again and brewed some coffee. When he carried it to her, she looked up at him with tears in her eyes and said that her mother had died—a heart attack. She drank the coffee, dazed, her cheeks flushed.
“I have to leave,” she said. “Right away. Tomorrow.”
The next morning she prepared to leave on a panga that had been called to pick her up. Nigel was going too. He explained that he could hardly leave her at a time like this; if she wanted, he would accompany her to Minneapolis for the funeral. From inside her tent, she called her father. Hugh and Nigel could hear her crying softly as she talked and they looked at each other, feeling helpless.
“Hate to leave you in the lurch like this,” said Nigel. “Mind you, I’m sure the project will send replacements right away—not to worry about that.”
“I’m sure,” replied Hugh. But that was the
last thing he was concerned about.
At breakfast, she didn’t eat much of anything, though Nigel, busily industrious, cooked biscuits. She looked drawn and pale but Hugh thought, with a stab of guilt, that her grief made her look even more beautiful.
By 10 a.m., the panga arrived. She leaned over to kiss Hugh on the cheek and gave a sad little smile. He hugged her, then helped her down the path with her gear. He shook hands with Nigel at the welcome mat.
In a matter of minutes, it seemed, they were gone, without even a backward look, and the gulls that had followed the boat returned and began once again circling the island looking for fish.
It felt odd to be alone—odd and yet so familiar. But he didn’t resume his normal routine—he didn’t even erect the mist net. Instead, he sat on his rock and looked out at the ocean. It was all different now. The equilibrium of his long solitude had been disturbed and he knew that it was gone forever; it was impossible to carry on as if nothing had happened.
An hour later he used the sat phone to call the project headquarters and asked for Peter Simons.
“I’m pulling the emergency cord,” he said, using the researchers’ slang. Instant evacuation—no questions asked, or at least very few questions—was part of the deal. But Simons did ask a question: “What are you going to do?”
In the welter of emotions, how could he say what he really hoped for? That maybe he could salvage something out of this whole trying experience, recoup his losses and shake that overwhelming sense of failure? He was surprised to hear himself answer.
“I’m thinking of going for my degree,” he said. “Not fieldwork but some kind of research, maybe on Darwin. With your help, of course—that is, if you’ll give it?”
Simons said he would.
They were as good as their word. A student couple came out, a man and a woman in their early twenties, eager to learn. Hugh showed them everything he thought they needed to know. On the morning of his departure, he walked to the north rim and sat quietly on the rocky ledge for an hour or so. Then he packed hurriedly, taking only a single duffel bag filled mostly with his books. The students walked him down the path and handed him the bag from the mat, then waved, happy to be left alone.
“Finally had enough, heh?” said Raoul, yelling above the whine of the engine.
“Something like that.”
“You glad to be leaving?”
“I’m glad to be going somewhere.”
“Where you going?”
“England.”
“You gonna shave your beard when you get back to civilization?”
“Probably.”
“Hombre, you looking good.”
He was surprised to hear that. He was also surprised to feel a bit of hope rising up. His stay on the island had not all been for nothing and he had nothing to be ashamed of—after all, when others had abandoned the project, he at least had persevered; he had kept it going.
As the panga roared off, he looked back at Sin Nombre. The birds circling above it caught the light on their wings and reflected it back, flecks of silver and ash turning in the sunlight. He realized that all this time living on the island and learning the shape of every rock and every crevice, he had forgotten what it actually looked like. Now he saw with surprise that it was symmetrical—its sides sloped down evenly, like an anthill, he thought.
From a distance it appeared small and dark, a burnt-out volcano sitting all by itself way out in the ocean.
CHAPTER 4
Life, Charles reflected, is a game of vingt-et-un. Three days after the disappointment that dashed his hopes, he found himself at the Admiralty in Whitehall in a wood-paneled office with ships’ clocks and chronometers, sitting across a felt-topped desk from none other than Captain Robert FitzRoy. He was not quite sure why he had been summoned, but the excitement churning in his stomach told him there was still a possibility he was being considered for the voyage. He began to suspect that “the friend” was something of a smoke screen and that this strange and alluring man across from him was leaving himself an escape hatch if Charles proved unsuitable. Indeed, he felt as though he were sitting for an examination. He was at pains to appear relaxed, for the Captain was clearly assessing him—the dark eyes stared openly at him from time to time and in particular, it seemed, at his nose.
FitzRoy, at twenty-six only four years older than Charles, was worldly wise and self-assured. Thin, with dark hair, long sideburns, an aquiline nose, and a voice accustomed to barking orders, he exuded authority well beyond his age. But he was also spirited and imaginative and, best of all from Charles’s point of view, he was a devotee of the natural sciences. Charles had been well briefed by Henslow. FitzRoy had had a meteoric career in the Navy, aided no doubt by his aristocratic connections—he traced his lineage to the illicit relationship between Charles II and Barbara Villiers. Then, too, his rise had been assisted by what the Admiralty delicately termed a “death vacancy,” a reference to the fact that the previous captain of HMS Beagle had blown his brains out with a pearl-handled pistol off the God-forsaken coast of Tierra del Fuego after scrawling in the ship’s log the message: “the soul of man dies in him.”
“FitzRoy was given command of the ship for its return voyage,”
Henslow had related. “He did a good job of it by all accounts, especially considering that the crew refused to relinquish the belief that the ghost of the dead captain was on board the ship.” Henslow had paused before completing the thought. “And speaking of suicide, you will remember that Lord Castlereagh’s career came to an inglorious end a little more than a decade ago when he slit his throat. He was FitzRoy’s uncle. The poor lad was only fifteen at the time. It seems that self-destruction is a motif in his life. I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t account for his need for some companionship at sea. He can hardly talk to the lower officers, can he?”
But melancholia did not seem to sit on the man’s shoulders. His long-lashed, almost feminine eyes sparkled and his voice was light as he described the trim beauty of the Beagle, currently being refitted at Plymouth, and the hard freedom of the open seas. The trip was to last two years, but—who could say?—it might extend to three or even four. He said the primary purpose was to chart the coast of South America, and the secondary was to refine the measurements of longitude by taking chronological readings around the world.
“Why South America?” put in Charles, almost breathless with excitement.
“The sailing is treacherous, rough currents, uncertain winds. The Admiralty wants up-to-date charts, the finest we can deliver, every cove and shoreline in detail.” His voice dropped conspiratorially. “Trade is increasing, you see, especially with Brazil. The days of Spain are over and we must show the flag, keep the ports open for our vessels. We have the Falklands. Argentina’s in a perennial uproar. The Americans are poking around. We already have a squadron of men-of-war outside Rio.”
Charles read the turn in conversation as a good sign. But he was taken aback a moment later when FitzRoy abruptly leaned forward and demanded, in a non sequitur, whether it was true that he was the grand-son of Erasmus Darwin, the famed physician, philosopher, and “free-thinker.” FitzRoy emphasized the word “free.” Charles admitted that he was.
“I do not care for his philosophy,” the Captain said in a tone that brooked little argument. “I could not finish Zoonomia. All that emphasis on natural law and the transmutation of species—it’s Jacobin, if you ask me, and it comes perilously close to heresy. Do you not find that it detracts from the received and unquestionable wisdom that every bug, leaf, and cloud is the work of the Original Creator?”
“I am certainly not an atheist, if that is your question, sir,” replied Charles firmly. “I do not think that one species can transmute into another, despite the obvious similarities. I believe in the Divine Authority. And I think that a trip such as the one you describe might well serve to give substance to the teachings of the Bible. Though I must add that lately I am tending towards the view that the world we h
ave inherited has traveled through successive stages, each with its own distinctive flora and fauna.”
“Ha!” yelled FitzRoy, clapping the table with an open palm. “As I suspected, you do not subscribe to the belief in Mr. Paley’s Watch-maker.”
“To the contrary, my good sir. I’ve read Natural Theology on three occasions. I do believe in the Watch-maker. It’s merely the newness of the watch that I find open to question. You see, I do have a fondness for the longitudinal effects of age.”
FitzRoy leapt up and paced around the office.
“Old the world is, indeed,” he said. “Seeing that it was created on twenty-fourth October 4004 B.C. And we shall find ample evidence of the Great Deluge.”
“No doubt.”
“Well,” FitzRoy blurted, “you’re a man after my own heart. Stand up for what you believe but remain true to the Holy Word—heh. We’ll have lots to talk about in our tiny cabin, Whig and Tory, locked in intellectual combat on the high seas. Ha!”
And that’s how the offer was made.
On the way to the door, FitzRoy asked Charles if it was true, as he had heard from Henslow, that he had once put a beetle in his mouth. It was. Charles recounted the story of how, as a student, he’d lifted a rock and found two exotic beetles and scooped them up, one in each hand.
Then a third appeared, and he put one in his mouth so that he could grab that one also, only to have his mouth seize up from pain—the poor insect had secreted an acrid fluid.
“By Jove, I could not eat for days,” he said, as FitzRoy’s laughter echoed from the walls.
“Ha!” said the Captain. “You can’t try that with bugs in the tropics.
They’ll put you in their mouths.”
The joviality prompted Charles to ask a question in turn.
“Tell me, good sir. I had the impression—or perhaps it was my imagination—that you were inordinately taken by my nose. Was that the case?”
“It certainly was,” came the reply. “I’m a phrenologist, you know, and I abide by physiognomy, which explains my interest in your proboscis. And I must say, it does not speak well for you. It took me a while to realize that it was misleading me—you are indeed trustworthy.”