Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  Those are servants, aren’t they?”’

  “No, no,” she said quickly and somehow urgently, as if a word in time now could prevent serious misunderstanding. “No, people would see it in the light of their own lives. If you have servants while you are alive, you would naturally think of having them in paradise too. I have known this picture all my life. It used to fascinate me when I was a little girl, the expression on their faces. They are in paradise. You see how blessed they are. Nothing can touch them, they command everything.” She had spoken volubly andwiththe same note of urgency, a tone almost of pleading, childish and insistent.

  Erasmus looked at her with the same deliberateness with which he had regarded the painting. His face wore an expression she had never seen on it before, patronizing and almost contemptuous. “And dogs?”’ he said. “And fine clothes? Those are hunting dogs, you know. Do folk go hunting in paradise?”’

  In her expression now as she looked at him there was a kind of bewilderment. “But I have explained that to you,” she said. “People have to see things in their own way. If it is happiness on earth to wear beautiful clothes and be at leisure, then they think it must be the same in heaven too.”

  “Explained it to me?”’ Erasmus was smiling still but his eyes had narrowed. He said, “I believe you see yourself as one of those fashionable ladies, Sarah, don’t you? That must be why you like the picture so much. You think paradise is a place to dress up and act a part in. It is like being on a stage, isn’t it, like The Enchanted Isle?”’

  “That is not how I feel at all, it is just the contrary,” she said, regarding him more narrowly. “I always felt that they were in another world from mine, that is why -“

  “No,” he said. “That is what you may think you felt but it is not the truth of the matter. Children make up stories. You must always have known it was really just a picture of people walking about in a garden, but you made up a story about them. I tell you, Sarah, I know you better than you know yourself.”

  The shaft of perception had restored his good humour. He gestured towards the painting. “These are just people walking about in a garden,” he said. “If you will only look properly at the picture, you will see that I am right.”

  Turning back towards her, he was surprised to encounter a face set against him, blue eyes that looked antagonism. “Well, well, what a long time I have been mistaken!” she said, in the tone of angry sarcasm with which she nearly always began quarrels. “And just imagine, I might have continued in error if one fine morning Erasmus Kemp hadn’t condescended to take a look and tell me what opinion I ought to have, which of course turns out to be just exactly the same as his. In fact it seems I have always been of his opinion really, but without knowing it.” She had begun steadily enough, but her voice quivered now. “You don’t know me at all,” she said. “You don’t see me as I am.

  When you say what I am like, I don’t recognize myself. You don’t want me to have anything of my own. You don’t want me to have anything to give you. You are not in the least bit interested in the painting.”

  “Not interested?”’ Erasmus repeated slowly.

  He could not understand what she meant. He was hurt and astonished at this resistance to his knowledge of her—it was like a rejection of his love. “Sarah, consider a moment,” he said. “Reflect on what you say.

  Can people not discuss an old painting together?”’ He drew himself up and looked at her with a sort of gloomy remonstrance. “If we are to fall out over small things, how shall we agree on the great ones?”’

  This was, he felt, an important question, and one she should have tried to answer. However, she said nothing.

  She kept her face still turned from him. The ride together did not promise well and they might have decided against it, had not Miss Purdy, dressed and ready, now put in an appearance. If she saw anything amiss between them, she did not remark on it; the morning was fine and she was looking forward to her ride.

  It was a day of pale sunshine and light cloud.

  They rode together in silence, through meadows thick with vetch and buttercups and clover, Sarah in front, then Erasmus, prey to conflict still, dignity preventing him from riding alongside, love from falling too far behind. Miss Purdy kept further back on her stout, short-legged mare.

  Unhappiness in Erasmus was compounded with resentment. She had been perverse and unjust, he felt. Was he not allowed an opinion? To be misappreciated is never one’s own fault; it must therefore be Sarah’s if he had failed to demonstrate his true worth. He wanted her to see that it had been a disinterested quest for truth that had led him to discuss the painting with her. She expected still the indulgence accorded to children. He had shown her the respect of treating her as an adult —that was all his offence.

  He marshalled this in his mind as he rode along.

  He knew it to be true by the infallible sign that the alternative to thinking so involved self-reproach.

  He had never been much given to introspection. He knew what he wanted, and that was motive and reason enough. He knew he wanted to marry Sarah Wolpert. He knew he wanted to be rich. Some deep unease, something akin to fear, would come to him at any attempt, whether made by himself or others, to root about below the level of his conscious will.

  Virtue lay in achievement. It was this that since early childhood had led him to sanctify his desires by taking them to the high altar of his room and giving them the form of solemn promises.

  Their way wound upwards, at first through stands of mixed woodland, then out into more open country. After some half hour, as they were approaching a point where the bridle-path curved round a low spur, Sarah turned in her saddle to glance briefly over her shoulder at Erasmus, then urged her mount into a trot. He followed suit, as it was clear he was intended to, and found her reining in broadside across the track at the far side of the spur. She looked at him with the expression of conspiratorial glee he had come to recognize and rejoice in—they had achieved by this stratagem a minute or two out of sight of Miss Purdy.

  He had the grace at once to realize that with generosity greater than his own she had contrived this occasion for them both. He saw too, almost as quickly, that though an exchange of smiles might have been enough for reconciliation, a kiss would be considerably better. He urged his mount forward. The two horses drew close, rubbed hot flanks together; and their riders leaned forward in the saddle and kissed with a warmth the more eager for the fact that they could touch nowhere but at the lips.

  Other kisses there had been between them during the foregoing weeks; but in the isolation of this moment, the overwhelming sense of love restored and faults forgiven, Erasmus seemed for some moments to achieve the dream of containment he was always pursuing; sky and land formed a bubble of thin crystal shot through with light and he and Sarah were caught and held in it beyond the touch of change. It came with a shock almost, as he drew away from her and the walls of their bright capsule dissolved, to find himself exposed again to the touch of air, the world of colours, the attention, possibly reproachful, of the approaching chaperone. “I am sorry I hurt your feelings,” Sarah said in low quick tones. “I did not mean to.”

  Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds can be absorbed, but only like elements embodied in a story; they are always there, part of the meaning. Sarah was spirited, quick to resent wrongs and slights, to herself or any creature she was attached to; but no resentment could last long with her comshe did not bear grudges. Nevertheless, she was accustomed to kindness, especially in her home; she would always remember the look that had come to Erasmus’s face when she had confided the meaning of the picture to him, and she would always know that she had been treated with cruelty that morning.

  As for Erasmus, even while, in the moments before Miss Purdy came up with them, he was assuring Sarah that he loved her more than anything in the world, somewhere within him he was registering a private displeasure at the te
rms of her apology. This too, though vague at the time, was destined to take root in the formal garden of his future resolves. It had been right for her to ask his pardon, but not for the hurt she had given him, that was neither here nor there. Wounded feelings did not matter, but there was a principle at stake. Her apology still left unresolved the important question of whose fault it had been.

  She should acknowledge that she had been wrong about the picture. Perhaps some day, he thought, there would be an opportunity for him to return to the question. The present moment was clearly not appropriate. But she was fond of the painting and when they were married it might quite possibly be one of the things from home that she would want to bring with her…

  With Charles Wolpert he was quite often at loggerheads these days. There had been a certain coolness between them since the abrupt end to rehearsals of The Enchanted Isle. Charles largely blamed Erasmus for this fiasco, even to the extent of privately holding him responsible for Caliban’s defection as well, though the unhappy curate had long since explained to them the real reason. Moreover, he could not forgive Erasmus the lese-majeste of waylaying a Wolpert guest on Wolpert ground. There were, besides, temperamental differences between the two young men which would probably have led to disagreement in any case. Charles had his father’s physical bulk and gravity of address, but little of his business acumen. He was diligent and conscientious and sought to conceal his chronic irresolution behind a manner that grew daily more magisterial. Erasmus, possessed by the twin ardours of love and ambition, andwitha vision of the towers of Liverpool rising lovelier than those fabled ones of Ilium, besides offering much better rates of compound interest, grew impatient with the cautious and legalistic habit of Charles’s mind and with his long-windedness.

  One afternoon, when Erasmus was taking tea in company with Sarah and her mother, Charles returned from the courts in considerable ill-humour and proceeded to complain at length about the protracted course of some litigation the family were involved in, which his father had made him responsible for. As Erasmus knew, there had been recent Acts of Parliament seeking to limit damage to the roads by restricting the number of horses to the wagon and the breadth of the tyres of the wagon wheels. The Wolperts were seeking a ruling on permitted loads per wagon, and it was taking an unconscionable time, according to Charles.

  ‘They talk about horses, they talk about wheels, but they won’t come round to the question of loads,” he said. “It is exasperating in the highest degree.” He had taken to wearing a curled wig lately, which increased the resemblance to his father. He was booted still from riding, having entered in haste for his tea and the sympathetic attention of his mother and sister—it had not much pleased him to find Erasmus ensconced there. He sat back frowning, legs stretched out before him, thumbs looped into his waistcoat pockets. It was a pose Erasmus recognized as the prelude to a great deal of tedious prosing.

  “If we could only get a ruling on it, you see,” Charles said, “we might then be able to turn the tables, as we could retort upon them that with loads of that order it is nonsense to forbid extra horses or they will simply burst their hearts between the shafts. If we can once carry that point, we might be able to press for a change in the regulations concerning the wagon wheels. But these lawyers talk endlessly and get nothing done and charge confounded high fees.”

  Erasmus had felt antagonism merely at the way Charles sprawled there, the space he took up. And then these tedious and pointless squabbles over pack-trains… “Wrangling in the courts is a waste of time,” he said. “You will take six months over it and get an inch or two added to the width of the wheels. For the life of me I cannot see what good that will do. Your costs are not thereby much reduced, the amounts you can transport not much increased and the roads remain in the same state, all ruts in the dry weather and streaming with mud when it rains. It is the roads that need attention, not the wagon wheels.”

  These remarks and the manner of their delivery were irritating to Charles, who had been embroiled in the business for some time now and so felt entitled to be listened to, especially on his home ground. “It is no use trying to run before you can walk,” he said. “That is a besetting fault of yours, Erasmus, if I may say so. The coal is lying there, in the coalfields. It is needed now, today.

  We have to bring it on the roads we have got. What do you think will be the consequence to our salt works if we let the coal pile up thirty miles away while we wait for this Utopia of yours?”’

  “I am not talking about Utopias.”

  Erasmus’s eyes had kindled. ‘I am talking about known facts. The road between Liverpool and Prescot was metalled and tolls charged for the upkeep and that led to vastly improved supplies of coal from the southwest. Now they have extended it to Still Helens and in time they -“

  “It is time my son is talking about.”

  For some moments the heated Erasmus could not quite determine where this gentle female voice had come from.

  It seemed to fall on his ears from some unlocalized source somewhere up towards the ceiling. Then, with intense surprise, he realized that it was Sarah’s mother who had spoken: in her mob cap and lace shawl Mrs Wolpert had leaned forward and actually interrupted him.

  “That road was turnpiked more than twenty-five years ago,” she continued placidly. “That is before you were born, Erasmus. I remember it well, it happened in the year I was married. It has taken all these years just to carry the road on to Still Helens, in spite of all the great advantages you speak of. I hope you don’t mean to say that my husband has to sit twenty years and wait for better roads while they make their laws against him in London?”’

  Erasmus could find no immediate response to this. He had felt his jaw slacken with astonishment. Never in his whole life had he heard a woman intrude her opinion into a conversation on business matters between men. It was inconceivable that his own mother should ever do so.

  Wolpert must permit it, he thought, divided between wonder and contempt. Perhaps he even consulted her— her tone had betokened intimacy with her husband’s affairs. No wonder Sarah was so ready with opinion, with this model before her eyes. “No, madam,” he said at last, staring straight before him, “I did not mean to suggest that. How your husband fetches his coal to Liverpool is entirely his own affair.”

  The reproof rankled long afterwards as a setback, a blow to his selfesteem, made worse by the vindicated complacency that he had seen come to Charles’s face. But when he was alone and safe from such pettifogging objections, when he was at home or riding to and from the Wolpert house or occupied with family business, his mind expanded with a sense of the glorious opportunities the future afforded and the certainty of his place in it-his and Sarah’s.

  Coal was the key, so far Wolpert was right. The population of the town was more than twenty thousand now and rising rapidly, and the domestic demand for coal was rising with it. In Cheshire the boiling of brine and refining of rock salt called for coal in ever larger quantities, as did the other new industries springing up on every hand, metal-working, glass-making, sugar-refining: all were hungry for coal—and all were obliged to use the port of Liverpool to ship their goods.

  It was clear to Erasmus that wagon trains could never bring the quantities needed, even if the roads were improved. The coal would have to come by water.

  Already the Mersey was navigable by small ships as far as Manchester, and the barges were plying back and forth from Stockport. This had been achieved in the teeth of scoffing unbelievers, by deepening and straightening the river channels. A great feat of engineering comthey had reconstructed the river, no less. The skills thus learned could be—must inevitably be, and soon applied to man-made waterways, which would carry a vastly greater tonnage at a fraction of the cost. Erasmus felt energy course through him at the thought. His imagination might remain untouched by Ferdinand weeping for the king his father’s wreck, or Sarah clinging to a cherished notion of childhood; but it became incandescent at thoughts of transporting a hundred t
housand tons of coal a year in your own barges. The future lay in coalfields and canals. He knew it beyond any shadow of question. The men who gained control of these would be the new princes of the city, eminent, powerful, rich beyond the dreams of avarice…

  He was happy during these summer weeks. It was to be, in his recollection, a golden time, instinct with a promise and hope that he sensed at many different moments of his day, at home in his room or in the streets of the city or at work, where in addition to the duties normally falling to him—he was responsible now for all the coastal shipping business of the firm and for the movement of raw cotton to Warrington and Manchester—he was applying himself diligently to the study of accountancy and mercantile law.

  The season seemed to contain the same promise.

  It was full tide of green now in the hedges and wasteground on the outskirts of the city, where herons flapped above the marshes and cows grazed and vagrants slept in the long grass among the brick kilns. The willowherb came and the berries began to redden on the rowan trees. The meadows were scythed, the grass lying in long, slightly darker swathes. The slopes of the hills and the edges of the wheat fields echoed to the stuttering song of the yellowhammer, with its mournfully protracted final note. Then the birds fell silent and the stubble lay crepitant and hot, emitting odours of slightly stale sweetness. Summer reached its apogee and began insensibly to wane; and it would have no more been possible to say when this waning began than it would have been to say when William Kemp admitted despair as the companion of his days and with it the lure of death.

  26.

  Hunched in his cabin over his journal, Paris contended with sultry heat and general feelings of lassitude. In a way, these discomforts helped his resolve to complete his notes for the day; they were, together with the words themselves, details in the belated evidence of love that he was always offering to Ruth. The entries, however trivial or commonplace, had become links in a chain of communion. He spared no distressing matter, feeling that this too, all that he was enduring on the ship, could somehow be offered to her in terms of love and contrition.