Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “Yer’Il not only be the best man aboard at jerkin” off,” Libby said, ‘yer’ll be the best at servin” a cable. Have yer seen him?”’ he said to Charlie. ‘Every night he goes out to the heads an” jerks hisself off, reggler as clockwork.

  Yer too busy doin’ it yerself to take notice, ain’t yer? I’m talkin’ to yer.”

  The boy turned his sun-freckled, undernourished face towards Libby. ‘allyes,” he said, “that’s right.”

  “Too busy juicin” yerself, ain’t yer?”’

  ‘That’s right.”

  Libby stared at him for some moments. The frozen lids of his blind eye hung a little open, showing an ambivalent gleam. “Pity to waste it,” he said.

  “Waste what?”’ Deakin had approached soundlessly on bare feet. “Give us a bit of cable,” he said, making to get between Calley and Tapley. “Haines sent me to give a hand.

  What the jig do you think you are doing there?”’ he said to Calley.

  “Dan’l is servin” cable an’ he is doin’ well, we are proud of him.” Libby gave his droll wink, the dead eye briefly doing duty for the living one. ‘now don’t you go spoilin” his concentration, that wouldn’t be right.”

  Deakin said quietly, ‘Dan’l, look up a minute, will you? Don’t you see, you are working on a loose piece of hawser, not on the anchor cable.

  You are wasting your time and if someone comes and catches you at it you will get in trouble. Who told you to bind it there?”’

  “One o” them.” Calley pointed at the others. ‘They said do it here.”

  “Stab me if we told the half-wit anythin” at all,” Libby said. ‘Why are you interferin”?”’

  ‘allyou will have to unpick it,” Deakin said. “Then you come further down here and I’ll show you how to do the worming on the cable and then the binding.”

  “I don’t want to unpick it,” Calley said. “I done it right.”

  ‘allyou have done it right as far as the work goes, but you have done it on the wrong rope. That piece doesn’t need chafing gear on it.”

  Calley looked down at the rope in his lap then up at the grinning Libby. Some sort of suspicion was beginning to dawn in his eyes.

  “You should have told him,” Deakin said to Tapley and Charlie. He did not look at Libby. “Men on a ship should stick together. Don’t make any difference what kind of ship she is.”

  “We have got a preacher here,” Libby said. His mood was turning ugly. The joke had misfired and he felt his authority was being undermined. “You don’t stick,” he said. “You run.”

  Deakin looked at him without expression. Someone had talked, then. “Do you think I would run from you?”’ he said. “You are big, but your bollocks hang by a string, same as anyone else’s.”

  “You shit-sack,” Libby said. “I will spill you out.”

  At this threat to his befriender, something mad looked out of Calley’s eyes. ‘no, you won’t,” he said. With astounding speed and agility, before Libby had so much as registered the threat, he had come from a sitting position on to his haunches, had his left hand planted on the deck to take his weight and his right clenched and drawn back.

  Leaning sharply forward, Deakin was in time to catch at his shoulder. “They will flog you if you start a fight here,” he said. He kept his grip, feeling after some moments the muscles of Calley’s arm relax. “He is not worth getting a flogging for,” he said more quietly.

  Calley, in the red mist of rage, felt the hand on his shoulder and knew the touch. This was Deakin, who had spoken words of comfort to him and touched him in the darkness of the hulk. “Deakin is not a shit-sack,” he said.

  Feelings of loneliness and distress had accompanied Calley since the first day out. Barton had proved a false friend, giving him nothing but abuse and kicks once he was on board. The vision of Africa and the hot lewd women had faded now; it was lame Kate from the taphouse that he mostly thought of at night when he crept to some deserted corner of the deck and rubbed himself for comfort in the dark and whimpered with brief pleasure. Now he smiled as he glanced up, and the traces of his rage shone with pristine glory on the smooth skin below his eyes. “Deakin is my friend,” he said.

  19.

  Hag-seed hence!

  Fetch us in fuel and be quick

  To answer other business: shruggst thou, malice?

  If thou neglectest or dost unwillingly what I command

  I’ll wrack thee —

  “No, no, Prospero, no, no, egad, pray allow me, I really must interpose.” The director spoke with customary languidness, but his words were enough to bring the headlong wizard to a halt, though swollen with pent speech and frothing slightly. They were rehearsing in the library, the weather having turned rainy. “No, no, you see,” the director said, “you are in too much haste, you absolutely must give Caliban time to do a proper shrug. It serves no purpose to ask him if he is shrugging and menace him with cramps before you have allowed him the time to do it.”

  His name was Henry Adams—a well-known one on the London stage, as Charles Wolpert had assured them all. He was a sallow, long-shanked man with fine eyes and bad teeth and a fashionable limpness of manner.

  “It is what I keep telling you, Bulstrode,” the curate said. “It is what I have often complained of. I must be given time to perform my shrugging.” His face was pale as always in the stress of these rehearsals and his fair, fine-spun hair showed the usual startlement.

  “Why, sir, as to that,” Adams said, “if you will permit me, you are not performing a suitable kind of shrug for a monster, you are drawing yourself too much upright, you are making Caliban too damnable proud.”

  “But, sir, excuse me, that is exactly why I do it in that way,” the curate said excitedly.

  “I see Caliban as a proud and rebellious character.”

  “There is only one way to see Caliban, reverend sir,” Adams said without heat, “and that is my way, so long as I am directing the play. I want a more abject shrug. Like this.” He crouched slightly, half turned his body and made a long, writhing motion which seemed to start at his thin knees.

  “A touch more sinuous, my good sir,” he sighed.

  “Try it once again.”

  Standing alone in a corner of the big bay window, Erasmus observed this demonstration with wondering distaste. That a man should speak in his own voice one minute and someone else’s the next, that he should slip so easily into mime and alien gesture, struck him as bordering on the obscene. There were other things too about the new director that he disliked, quite a number: the exaggerated cut of his coat, the tightness of his trousers, the rouge on his cheeks, the pimple painted black to make a beauty spot, the languid manner, the airs of a town man among provincials, the less than pristine cleanliness of the lace at his cuffs. But these were minor irritants, which under normal circumstances would have done no more than confirm Erasmus in his prejudices. What roused his rage was Adam’s freedom with his hands. A man of the theatre to his fingertips, Charles Wolpert had called him.

  These, along with the fingers that went with them, were all too frequently laid on the persons of the female players—particularly Miranda’s, or so it seemed to Erasmus. And—most distressing of all —Miranda showed little sign of resenting the freedom. She was there now, beautiful in pale blue taffeta, but she had no eyes for him—she was waiting for her scene.

  “Exeunt Prospero and Caliban, shoo, shoo, off you go, don’t overdo that over-the-shoulder snarling, Mr Parker, if you please. Caliban is daunted, he should cower more. Now we have the scene with the sisters. Come forward, Dorinda. Could I prevail upon you to abandon the window for a while, my dear young sir? They must look out that way while they talk of the ship. Thank you. Now, Dorinda.”

  Dorinda was being played by the daughter of a neighbouring squire. She was a rather heavy-faced girl but of good complexion, enhanced now by the excitement of performance. “Oh, sister!” she exclaimed, moving towards Miranda with a rustle of skirts, “what have I behel
d?”’

  “What is it moves you so?”’ Miranda asked, and Erasmus felt his heart lurch at the sweet enquiry of her voice.

  Dorinda gathered herself, gestured towards the window, took a breath and began: From yonder rock As I my eyes cast down upon the seas, The whistling winds blew rudely on my face, And the waves roared; at first I thought the war Had been between themselves, but strait I spy’d A huge great creature.

  Miranda waited a moment or two then uttered the short line Erasmus knew she hated most in the play and found most difficult: “Oh, you mean the ship.” It always sounded so flat, coming after Dorinda’s vivacious description.

  Ts’t not a creature, then?”’ Dorinda widened her eyes. ‘It seemed alive -“

  “No, ladies, no.” Adams minced forward between them. “I swear,” he said, ‘one might suppose you were talking in your sleep. Rot me if I tell a lie, you will cease altogether from petrifaction if you do not impassion your good selves more. There is Mr Bulstrode who gallops too much and you two sisters who are far too stately, my dears.”

  He took Dorinda by the hand and led her back into the centre of the room. “Dorinda should look raptly towards the sea while she is making her speech. She has never beheld a ship before, she has no idea what it is. She is lost in amazement. On the word ‘creature”, Miranda counts three to herself, one-two-three, then turns.

  S.” Here he set a hand at either side of Miranda’s waist and half turned her. ‘allyou know it is a ship, my dear, because Prospero has told you so. This is a little moment of triumph for you, and that is cosmic, is it not? It is a ludicrous descent from Dorinda’s high-flown description. That is the way to save the line, point up the comedy of it.”

  With rising fury Erasmus saw that Adams kept his hands on the slender stem of Miranda’s waist for an appreciable time after she was in the right position and that he moved them just a fraction up and down. Her face looked absorbed but there was a small flame of consciousness in her cheeks.

  “Of course,” Adams said to the cast at large, “they are also talking about men. Neither of them has seen a man before, other than Prospero.

  Caliban does not count as a man, being a creature of a lower order.”

  “I dispute that, sir,” the curate said.

  “You may dispute it, sir, till you are blue in the face. If we go by the indications of the play, these two charmers have never clapped eyes on a man before, never flirted, never known the sweets of love.

  That is the brilliant new feature of the piece as Davenant has given it to us. He has taken the original, not generally regarded by our cognoscenti now as more than indifferent good, and he has brought it to the point of genius. By introducing a sister for Miranda and bringing in Hippolito as a counterpart to Ferdinand, he has given us two couples to play out the comedy instead of just one. So you get all the complications of jealousy among ‘em.”

  “All the complications of jealousy, aye, there it is,” Bulstrode repeated, nodding his head. He had become very sycophantic towards the director and often repeated his words. “Twice two is four,” he said. “They have doubled the comedy.”

  “Egad!” Adams said. “I have seen Mrs Belmont do Miranda to a miracle, that turn of the head and swirl of her skirts, you know, and that sly look at the audience. These two innocents know a deal more than they are supposed to; the thing is full of double meanings, it is all brilliantly paradoxical. It is a play exactly suited to the age, full of raillery and sensibility and refined manners. Mrs Belmont is shortly to appear in a trifle of mine.”

  He had looked rather deeply into Miranda’s eyes as he spoke of the play’s ambiguities, or so at least the feverish Erasmus fancied. And not much later he was making remarks about Ferdinand that added insult to injury. ‘Lord love me,” he said, “you are supposed to be charmed by wandering airs, bemused yes, bewildered perhaps, but not, my dear young friend, as if struck by a butcher’s axe.”

  As this was not said to him personally but in his character of Ferdinand, there was nothing Erasmus could reply, resent it as he may; and the words had a spiteful aptness that made several laugh, the tutor with sycophantic loudness. Miranda did not laugh, but she looked vexed, which Erasmus thought almost worse.

  Later, for no good reason that Erasmus could see, Adams placed a hand in the small of her back, in the elegant concavity just above her bustle, and kept it there for at least fifteen seconds while he spoke quite close to her ear.

  It was at this moment that Erasmus, smarting with humiliation and furious with jealousy, formed his intention to depose Adams and ruin the proceedings. Though hardly at first so definite as this to his mind, he saw soon enough that the thing brooked no delay. He knew that he was living on borrowed time. From the first the director had regarded him as an unmitigated disaster in his role of Ferdinand. He now suspected that Adams had designs on Miranda. With both these factors combining, it was only a question of time before he was put out of the play altogether and someone else brought in to look into her eyes and declare his love. Perhaps even Adams himself…

  The idea was intolerable. The very thought of it made him flush and clench his fists. He thought of sounding the rest of the cast for support, attempting to incite a mutiny among them; but he was not sure of finding immediate support and there was no time for persuasion even if his pride had allowed it. No, he would have to act alone.

  Intimately joined with these thoughts was the pain of Miranda’s complaisance. As the last days of June passed into the first of July and the open land around the town was deepened and made vivid by the colours of the young corn, he struggled to understand why she showed no repugnance, why her face had no shadow on it when that posturing jackanapes issued his vinous breath close beside her, made his insinuations, put his reprobate hands upon her…

  Finally, in order to bind himself and guarantee success, he translated his intentions into a solemn vow. He had carried from childhood the belief that if one promises hard enough anything can be brought about. At home, in the silence of his room, in the midst of objects sanctified by familiarity a pair of silver cockspurs, a framed embroidery of the Eighth Beatitude, done by his mother in blue and white, the silver-mounted duelling pistols that had been a present from his father, his washing basin and matching jug with the design of daisies—before these silent witnesses he uttered aloud his vow to put paid to the director, even if it meant wrecking the play.

  After this, he felt, it could only be a matter of tactics.

  20.

  At the beginning of July the ship came into hazy weather with light falls of rain in the night and a small northern swell. At sunrise on the morning of the second, Thurso took an observation of the amplitude and was surprised at the extent of the compass error—it was customary to allow no more than a half point of deviation in these waters. He began to suspect that he was on a course eastward of the Grand Canaries but found it difficult to believe that he could be so far out in his reckoning on a relatively short run and in this continual fine weather.

  Some degree of uncertainty he was long accustomed to, navigation being a chancy business at this time. Latitude could be known with reasonable accuracy by measuring the height of the sun at noon; but to establish longitude Thurso had to depend for direction on his compass and for distance travelled on the log—a small board drawn astern by which the ship’s speed could be measured. This was not an accurate instrument, allowance having always to be made for drifting to leeward and for the action of currents, so the reckoning was frequently wrong. It was seldom that the master of a ship at sea knew exactly where he was. But the error here was greater than usual. It began to seem to Thurso now that they had come between Madeira and Port Santo, though without seeing either. If that was so, he was a good fifty leagues eastward of his reckoning. The suspicion troubled Thurso and darkened his mood. He sat alone in his cabin with a bottle of brandy, brooding on the malignant current that had carried them thus far out, seeking to understand whence it had come and to guess what offence on the
ship had set it in motion.

  Another man flogged today, Paris was writing in his journal some hours later. This for fouling his bedding after due warning by Haines, the boatswain, who I believe is generally hated. Thomas True, the man’s name. He was given a dozen lashes by our accomplished captain and unlike Wilson cried out almost from the beginning. When it was over he was not able to stand unsupported. That such cruel punishment can overcome engrained habits of uncleanliness or perhaps symptoms of some deeper disorder of mind, I do not believe. Indeed, it seems too savage a question even to speculate upon; and it is one in any event I could not pursue with anyone on board the vessel, my position as an officer of the ship preventing frank speech among us.

  I went forward to do what I could for True’s lacerations. I have also lately treated a member of the crew named Cavana for an inflamed condition of the eyelids which I suspect is venereal. I got it from True that he had come as a youth to Liverpool, to better his condition, as he says, after working from the age of ten in a stone quarry in north Wales.

  Having spent what money he had, he was given credit by a tavern-keeper and afterwards threatened with the magistrates unless he signed on for a slaver.

  He was also obliged, in the event of his death, to bequeath his wages for the trip to this same tavern-keeper.

  Since then he has been on several slaveships. He says he would not choose a Guineaman, notwithstanding the higher wages—it appears the men get two shillings a month above the normal rale as an inducement. This does not seem much to me in view of the bad conditions on these ships and the dangers of disease on the Guinea Coast. But the fact is, they cannot choose. All these men are driven by the direst poverty. I do not think there is one of them who would not quit the sea tomorrow if they could, except perhaps Hughes, who is savagely misanthropic and seems happiest when up in the rigging alone. He too has been on slaveships before, or so I think. It seems to me there is a difference, in the aura they carry about them, between these men who have sailed on Guinea ships before and those who are new to it, however experienced they may be as seamen.