The Collector of Lost Things

by Jeremy Page

  On the quarterdeck it was just as dark, the only light being two partially masked dark-lanterns set above the twin binnacles at the helm, and the glimmer of brass along the skylights of the saloon. In a long sea cloak and cap, French was standing next to the wheel, his arms behind his back in a military fashion. He was as featureless as a churchyard shadow.

  ‘Enjoy your meal?’ he asked, on my approach.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘We shall see if you keep it down,’ he quipped, revealing a glint of teeth as he smiled. The compasses were gimballed, and in the glow from the lanterns their resolute needles shone like brilliant jewels set in their brass cylinders.

  French continued: ‘The captain bores me with his zeal for the ship and the journey. I have heard him say these things many times to passengers such as yourself—believe me, he is really not very sincere.’

  I was surprised by his candour, and equally glad that in such darkness he wouldn’t be able to scrutinise my expression. He seemed out to test me.

  ‘But he knows his mind,’ French added, suggesting that he’d gone too far. ‘The Arctic needs a strength of mind. If you are weak, there are a thousand ways to die.’

  ‘Or become crazed.’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  ‘I have read many accounts of Arctic exploration,’ I said.

  ‘As have I. It is always wise, embarking upon a journey such as we are on, to consider the other members of the crew, in case forced by adversity we should have to eat one of them.’ He chuckled, quickly, but without conviction.

  I decided to rise to the challenge: ‘Well, on first impressions, I believe Mr Talbot would make for a very unpleasant meal.’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, he is pure goat. Your boots would be preferable.’

  Above me, the sides of bacon swayed eerily in the rigging, once, before settling again.

  ‘I think I shall read for a while,’ I informed French, wishing to take my leave. I had the feeling he was out to trick me into saying something I might regret.

  ‘Yes. One of your splendid books,’ he replied.

  Back beneath the mast I wondered whether this was the absolute centre of the ship, the confluence of all the many balanced pressures of wind, sea and sail. Above me, the dark column of wood rose impressively into the sky. I could hear sounds, as one does under great trees, of the wooden limbs bending and turning. Ropes, too, stretching as the spars and yards tightened. Occasionally I heard the knock of iron upon iron, as bearings and fixings came together, and in waves I listened to the full enveloping sound of canvas filled with air. It arrived and sank with a whisper.

  I smelt the salt of the sea and the caulked timber of the deck and the bloodied smell of the Aberdeen bullock where Simao had tied it. I gazed once more at the sides of bacon that swung from the mizzenmast, wrapped in muslin, like the bodies of criminals hung in gibbets. As the ship swayed, they moved, in dreadful counterbalance.

  By angling my book towards the portholes of the fo’c’sle, I was able to read the Compendium of Arctic Fauna I had brought with me, whose pages were already frayed from my countless hours of study. Each illustration was wholly familiar. The bull walrus, with tusks raised in fearless defence, dwarfing the Esquimaux who stands cautiously beyond reach, his spear held poised to strike. The razorbills and guillemots gathered on the ledges of some bleak northern skerry, huddled against a wind that couldn’t be drawn but was no doubt there. Then the beasts of the sea, such as the elusive beluga, with its ghostlike countenance, its blind expression, or the narwhals, meeting in a lee of the ice floe, waving their unicorn tusks in strange unknowable greeting. The animals of the world became stranger, larger, more impenetrably skinned the higher north they were found.

  On finishing his tasks, Simao approached and kindly hung a lantern above me, for the purposes of reading. I thanked him and he looked for a moment at the open book in my hands.

  ‘May I see the bird you look for?’ he asked, intrigued.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, quickly turning to the page which was bookmarked with a jay’s feather.

  ‘This is the great auk, which man in his foolishness has made extinct.’

  Under the pale flickering light of the lantern, I offered him the illustration. A single bird, the size of a goose, pictured on a ledge of dark rock, with squat legs and wide paddled feet, a stout neck and large spear-shaped bill.

  Simao studied the picture for a long time. ‘It is a great bird, sir,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Yes, Simao,’ I replied. ‘It was.’

  ‘Will we find it?’

  ‘No, almost certainly not. We are too late.’

  He nodded respectfully, and moved back to the galley.

  I returned to the engraving, drawn to something I felt I might have previously missed. Something curious and intangible that I might have overlooked. The solitary bird faced me, inaccurately drawn and implausible, sketched from a collection of rare sightings and unreliable reconstructions, yet at that second, in that flickering lantern light, appearing to move in increments on the page. A trick of the light, yet for a brief moment it was as if the bird was alive.

  I closed the book, pensively. The dead centre of the ship, I thought, surrounded by the dead, the animals tied to the mast and hanging from the rigging, and the illustration of the extinct, a last record of a bird that had now vanished. We are too late. It occurred to me, in a fleeting moment of total understanding, that I was on a journey of several mysteries, some surrounding me and within reach, but others as dark and impenetrable as the ocean beyond the ship. And with a glance towards the aft cabin I realised what had really been on my mind all that time: the absent presence of the female passenger, travelling with us, but so far completely hidden.

  3

  OF COURSE, I DIDN’T sleep, not that first night. The ship was full of strange sounds, coming from deep below me, articles of cargo shifting in the hold, or the scantling creaking, the planks of the hull making sudden eerie snaps. A knock, once or twice, from below the waterline, as if the ship were already nudging through the ice it was strengthened for. They bend, these ships. They stretch and bend and twist with the pressures of water and air. I have been told there is not a solid join among them, they are merely timbers bound with tallow and caulking tar.

  I thought about my fellow passengers and wondered how each of them had come to be on this journey. Bletchley, with his gung-ho confidence, his popinjay clothes and that occasional glimpse of something dubious in his eyes. I have often made mistakes reading a man like him; such men carve out new identities for themselves each day. He had been revealing at supper, so enthusiastic about his guns, his steadiness of aim and ruthlessness of killing, then oddly childlike and uneasy when his companion was mentioned. And still we hadn’t seen her, even though she was in a cabin a few feet away, in some state of illness or reclusion.

  The first mate, French, had been interested in her, or interested in gossiping about her. Yes, leaping Mr French, playing games with his shadow. That was another man I was reluctant to trust. He had a mocking air which might be his nature or might be practised. It amounted to the same. And his crude joke concerning cannibalism was not in keeping with the manner of a gentleman. I resolved to keep my distance from him, and also Talbot, of whom, frankly, I was afraid. The slightest provocation and he might throw a man overboard; he had that bear-like quality. He’d refused to shake my hand, that was clear, it wasn’t that he hadn’t seen it. And then that business of chewing his meat with an open mouth. Quite horrid. Of them all, only the captain—whom French had described as a bore—seemed to be a man I could rely upon.

  I thought about these passengers, trying to sleep, while above me the early-hours watch paced the deck or gave out an order. I had heard French retire to his cabin, adjacent to mine, an hour or two beforehand. I had listened to him rinsing his face in the sink, and I had imagined how he might have looked at his reflection, studying those fleeting expressions of mockery and suspicion.

  Around
four or five in the morning, I became convinced that someone was watching me from the other side of the room. With fear, I stared at the canvas washstand at the end of my bed and, in the gloom, I was certain that a man’s face was looking straight back at me. He remained quite still, intent, and poised. Gradually, I pulled the felt curtain away from my porthole. The little amount of light was enough to reveal that the face was nothing more than a towel, which I had left heaped on the side. I vowed always to hang it properly in the future. Yet even knowing that the face was imaginary did not settle me, and I have since wondered whether this might have been a vision. But that night I had, at least, an explanation.

  Distracted with tiredness, I ventured into the saloon. The stove was shut tight. Inside I could see a well-nursed glow of coals ready to be stoked in the morning. Above it, a night lantern had been hung from a bracket. The long mahogany table was as still as a coffin, surrounded by neatly placed chairs whose emptiness now made me recollect glimpses of the meal we’d had. Talbot, chewing the beef while he looked at me, Bletchley, coughing on his drink when his female companion had been mentioned. Now, the empty chairs, and the settees beyond, cast shifting shadows on the floor as the ship swayed. It made the room feel dreamy, not fully real, mistrustful in its lines and dark spaces.

  Dividing the two areas of eating and lounging was the bare wooden trunk of the mizzenmast. Its solid dense shape nailed through the room, much as a pin holds a display in a collector’s cabinet. Crew and passengers, a scene impaled, it was a curious thought. I approached it, placed my palm against its smooth surface and felt a distinct tremble reverberating through the wood. Trapped deep within the mast, it must have been the current of vital energy transferring between the sky and ocean.

  I was about to return to bed when I noticed a tray outside the cabin belonging to Bletchley’s female companion. I crept towards it, mindful of creaking floorboards, and lifted the cloth laid over the plate and glass. A few crumbs, possibly the trace of a coconut biscuit similar to that which Simao had given me on arrival. Then a strange scent, coming from the glass. I bent to sniff it. A perfume, attar of roses possibly, but also something more medicinal, something unpleasant.

  I missed breakfast, due to a late, thick sleep, so at mid morning I sat upon one of the settees at the far end of the saloon, hoping to read more of the Compendium of Arctic Fauna. Simao poured me coffee, then offered to bring a little of the fried fish that was saved from breakfast. While I drank my coffee—which was excellent and dark and bitter—he must have gone to the galley in the fo’c’sle, for he came back with a bell-dish and set it before me. He laid three or four strips of fish on my plate, alongside cubes of fried potato.

  ‘You have not the seasickness?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mr Bletchley was pale this morning. But he will become used to the motion.’

  ‘I quite like it,’ I replied.

  He smiled with a hint of knowingness, before returning to the pantry. I tried some of the fish and discovered an unexpected spiciness.

  ‘Simao, what are these that I’m eating?’ I called.

  ‘Codfish tongue.’

  ‘Tongues?’

  He peered from the pantry, touching the smooth stretch of skin below his chin. ‘And sounds.’

  ‘Sounds are the swim bladders of the cod,’ the captain said, appearing rather abruptly from the chart room. For a man of his age and figure, he was surprisingly light on his feet. ‘Simao devils them in mustard for me. It’s the only way I can stomach them.’

  I looked at my plate, no longer keen.

  ‘Did you sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Only the innocent sleep, first night. The innocent and the drunk. Mr French does not drink.’

  ‘He doesn’t?’

  ‘That, I would say, is a peculiar decision for a man to take. You enjoy a drink, I take it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Perhaps you would join me in my cabin, Mr Saxby, when you are done,’ he said, in an instructive manner; it was not a request. ‘And please, bring your nature book, too.’ With that, he went to his cabin, tapping the face of the barometer on the mizzenmast as he passed.

  I ate some bread and preserve, feeling uneasy, wondering what the captain wanted. I adjusted my necktie and waistcoat. It was at that moment I noticed the tray had vanished from its place on the boards outside the cabin door. Cleared away, no doubt, but its absence now made me question the moment in the night when, almost feverish with tiredness, I’d crouched to sniff the curious smell of the drinking glass.

  Unlike the spartan furnishings of my cabin, the captain’s berth had the sumptuous air of a rector’s drawing room. Pictures and embroideries were hung on the walls, there was a garnet-red chaise longue in the centre, and a table with a fine oil lamp and cut-glass decanter of sherry placed upon it. His bed was partitioned from the room by a heavily patterned curtain.

  ‘You have a refined cabin,’ I told him, pleasantly surprised. ‘It’s quite a home.’

  ‘It is my home, Mr Saxby. Mrs Sykes is under the assumption that she is the keeper of my home, but it is on land, and it has Mrs Sykes in it, so it is not a place I am comfortable in.’

  ‘Maybe one day, when you retire, the ocean life might seem—’

  ‘I would rather be lost at sea,’ he interrupted, with startling emphasis. He pointed to a needlework picture hung in a frame on the wall. ‘That, Mr Saxby, is where Mrs Sykes would like to see me housed. On dry land. Notice the roses planted by the front porch and the view of the church in the background.’

  ‘It looks most acceptable in my eyes.’

  ‘It disappoints me in almost every aspect. I shall tell you something. My front door knocker is an anchor. Can you believe that!’

  I laughed. ‘Did your wife embroider the image?’

  ‘No. I did that.’ He looked at me, watchfully. A narrow band of dark pigment surrounded his cornea, the arcus senilis of old age. ‘You seem surprised that a ship’s captain makes pictures with needlework?’

  ‘Well, a little.’

  ‘It is my passion.’ Sykes regarded me, before ringing a dainty bell on his desk. The door opened almost immediately, and Simao entered.

  ‘We shall have coffee now,’ Sykes instructed. He let Simao leave, then turned to me. ‘And if you are willing, I would like to play a game of draughts with you.’ He went to his desk and brought a board over and placed it on the table in front of us. The pieces were handmade and unusual. ‘I like to beat all my passengers on each voyage. Mr Bletchley offered very little resistance, I can tell you that. A careless and impetuous player.’

  ‘What are these made of?’ I asked.

  ‘The blacks are flattened bullets, and the whites are sections of seal bone—from here,’ he pointed to his hand. ‘Except, of course, they have flippers.’

  I picked up a piece of bone and examined it.

  ‘Do you wish to be bullet or bone?’ he asked.

  ‘I shall be bullet,’ I answered.

  ‘A fine choice. The bullet usually triumphs.’ Sykes immediately made his first move. ‘While we are away from the other men, you might tell me more about these extinct birds. I prefer to be fully informed and they sound most intriguing. I am fond of rare creatures.’

  He appeared, at that moment, genuinely interested. I had with me the nature book, so I found the page relating to the great auk, and showed him the now familiar engraving of the bird standing on the rocky ledge. The captain made a move and then turned to the book. He studied the illustration carefully, stroking his moustache while he examined the strange bird, its large hooked beak, its long sleek black back, its shortened legs and paddle-shaped feet. Eventually he spoke. ‘This is a peculiar animal,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘It has an extraordinary beak. How large do you think it is?’

  ‘The size of a goose. Or perhaps a small child.’

  ‘A small child, you say. Standing upon the rocks.’

  ‘I have only
ever seen a reconstructed one, in a display case, made from similar feathers from guillemots and razorbills.’

  ‘Aha!’ Sykes said, leapfrogging three chequers and removing them from the board. ‘Talbot and I talked about these birds last night. Now, Mr Talbot is an extender of the truth, to suit his needs, but he nonetheless knew much about them. He told me that last century the tradition used to be that a whaler or Newfoundland trader would seek out their colonies. The locations were well known. All the ship had to do was moor alongside the nesting rocks and the men could wander at will, wringing necks or using hakapiks, whatever suited them best. These birds were docile and curious, and had no fear of man. Talbot said sometimes all that was required would be to fix a gang-board to the rocks and the birds would wander onto it, out of curiosity, I suppose. I believe most of them had never seen man nor ship before. Once on board, they could be encouraged towards the hatches and there could be clubbed, one after another, in a line. The captain made a gesture with his hand, as if dispatching the birds in order. ‘Thus, they would fall into the hold and be stacked or rendered as was fit. Doesn’t it make you wonder? These birds following one another to their demise? It would make the sailors most amused, I believe, that in so many cases they didn’t have to stand from their deckchairs, while their food and profit walked towards them.’

  Simao returned, bringing a pot of coffee which he placed precisely on the table. Sykes was giving me a heavy thrashing on the draught-board. ‘It is no wonder,’ I said once Simao had left, ‘that these birds are now extinct.’