The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  Eight days out of Portsmouth, the air stilled, suddenly, and we were becalmed. A painted ship, upon a painted ocean, as the poet says. The wind grew irresolute, mild, quiet, and then fell altogether still. The noise of the tiny waves at the flanks of the ship was of a thousand cats, lapping at a vast lake of milk. After a few hours, a succession of ladies ascended to the deck, pale and grateful. They were the less hearty names on the list, who had been laid low by the Channel’s mild briskness. For a week, chicken broth had been carried down to them, and reports of their health had been carried back up to us. Now, as the ship slowed and we all felt for the first time how very hot it truly was, they ascended, one by one from their incarceration as if they would be pleased for the ship never again to make any motion, up and down, side to side, forwards or backwards, but to stay here in this millpond for ever. The famous Miss Brown was one of these; she, at least, had the tact not to express any overt joy at her own improvement, knowing that the improvement in the state of the individual had been achieved at the cost of the common weal.

  You see, Bella, I am grown quite the philosopher, am I not? If this were a correspondence, I should ask you to pass on my reflection to your sister, that she could offer her reflections in turn on this important principle in life. But this cannot be a correspondence; it will be longer than I care to think before I can even hand these pages to anyone who can take them to you, and many, many weeks longer before I can hope to receive a packet directed by your dear hand. It cannot be a correspondence; we must guess at what each other may be writing, or feeling, seeing, or thinking at any moment, and write our pages in the dark. No, not quite that. Did I say that we must guess at what the other is thinking? No. I think I know that, and I hope you know, too, what I am always thinking of.

  Shall I describe for you my quarters? I think you never were at sea in your life, were you? Well, they are very superior, and very neatly, cleverly arranged. The first time I was at sea, I thought directly of Gulliver in his padded case; a cabin is a beautiful jewelled toy, fashioned by giants. Everything in it that can fall, or be thrown, must be fastened down, so everything has its place, and everything is secured by a series of ingenious little clasps and grips. Once, in rough seas, I forgot this, and was struck on the head by a boot I had carelessly let fall to the floor. It is not necessary to be reminded twice. The bed is set into a little niche, curtained during the day, and one feels very snug when ‘tucked in’ as children say, at night; even if one has been put to bed, not by a mother’s dear care, but by the brutal attentions of the tattooed Welshman called Elliott who has been assigned to you.

  I have my little shelf of books, secured by the same neatness of touch. In these long voyages, these long dull voyages, with no entertainment but the vagaries of the sea and our fellow passengers, books are highly prized, and a curious reversal of values takes place; it is the least readable, the least digestible of tomes that we most strongly desire, as promising to eat up the greater portion of our hours. The easier delights of a fashionable novel are universally shunned; they eat up room which, on board a ship, must always be precious, and offer no substantial exchange, few hours charmed away. Ecclesiastical histories, the baffling philosophical inquiries of the Germans, the darkest mystics, and, above all, learned disquisitions on the culture, language and customs of primitive peoples: these are the sorts of works that we fight over so eagerly. I have brought Gibbon, and find myself constantly waylaid by the most improbable people, asking with considerable anxiety when I hope to have finished with my current volume. No one on board has brought my book to read; none, which punctures my vanity, is quite sure they know who I am, though one clergyman thought he had known my father as a young man. Impossible; my father never was a young man.

  The Captain of the vessel is a smart young man called Taylor; I deduce that he is nearer the beginning of his career than its end, not merely from his fresh-faced aspect, but from his behaviour. He is attentive, civil, constantly interested in the smallest details of shipboard life, and his restless inspections above and below decks are, I perceive, the object of some merriment among the crew. Is it, perhaps, his first command? He is up early, and down late. Often, I am woken by the swabbing of the decks; in the warm rocking dark of my enclosed bed, an attractive trickling noise summons me from my deep or restless sleep. I pull back from my dreams, which are full of visions of floating and rocking in oceans of air, and for a long half-sleepy moment, wonder what that noise is; and then I realize where I am. It is the slosh of water overhead, the sibilance of the deckhands’ brooms, the attendant run of water down the flanks of the ship. And if I lie there for a minute before the intrusion of my man Elliott, I always hear the nervous click of the Captain’s boots, pacing the deck, ensuring that what is done is done correctly. Yes, on the whole, I think his first command.

  2.

  There is, I fear, no story here; no narrative to tempt you onwards. Life on board a ship is only of interest to the reader when things go wrong, and I am very much afraid I have no mutiny, and may have no typhoon to interest you. The crew are civil, well disposed and healthy; they will not slit our throats, or make Captain Taylor walk the plank. Bad weather is the most you, as a romantic reader, may hope for from my journal, and I cannot bring myself to wish for, invent, or summon up a storm, even for your amusement. Even when the winds started up again – and it was as astonishing, as imprévue an event as their disappearance – we still felt becalmed, marooned, suspended in time. Our lives, in this nowhere place, are abandoned for a time. The smallest events will do to mark the passing of the days; was it two or three days ago we saw the school of dolphins? Was it on a Monday the seaman was flogged? And time moves at a strange pace. After three days, I felt that I had been at sea for ever, so thoroughly did I know my shipmates; and yet, weeks later, I think sometimes that no time whatever has passed since then, that I am cruelly abandoned, three days out of England, three days’ journey from my Bella, in perpetuity, bobbing on an unmoving ocean, and each day that dawns is the day that has already ended, beginning, once again.

  We are entirely at home, now, and the way we speak has altered. Only the clergyman still talks of ‘ten o’clock’ in the morning; for the rest of us, the only divisions of the days are the number of bells. Fo’castle, galley, port and starboard, they trip off our tongues readily, if not quite naturally just yet. I remember the first time I was on board ship, that I would not say ‘for’ard’ or ‘bosun’ in company until I had practised saying it, alone, in my cabin. I brought it out, and it evidently seemed quite natural to my listeners. But I felt for some days like a fraud. They are words which one reads in novels, and, unless one has been to sea, has no idea of their exact meaning. Actually to speak these words with the affectation of confidence is to feel that you have been turned, against your will, into a character in a novel. Mrs Robinson has stopped saying ‘the sort of hut arrangement, over there, at the front end of the boat’, but you can see in her eyes she does not believe in a Mrs Robinson who knows port from starboard.

  The Captain, as I said, is not quite at ease here, not quite certain that it is he who should be in his place. He rattles around, and in the way he inspects and pokes and barks, and then looks at the mildest and least of his passengers like a nervous hound, as if for some sort of approval, it is easy to see that he does not yet trust himself, even when he is in the right. He rattles around like a hazelnut in its shell; almost a tight fit, but not entirely so. At night, he slides into his place at the head of his table and looks about him nervously, as if the man with a proper title to the position will at any second walk through the door. The ladies try to keep the conversation going; he, poor fellow, cannot direct it. Every night, he shows himself as much at the mercy of the table as a rudderless vessel in a busy sea. He cannot quell our clergyman, whose only subjects for conversation are the casual injustices of bishops; he cannot draw out the terrified English virgin; he knows not how to amuse or instruct, to introduce a new subject, and only appears at ease when someone
politely inquires about the progress of the board, or small domestic concerns. He hardly knows, I fear, who any of his passengers are, and we were obliged in the end to introduce ourselves and give an account of our lives to this point. It is a relief, all things told, when we can decently retire and I am left alone with my Romans.

  3.

  I was interrupted, there, as I wrote, by a timorous knocking on the door of my cabin. It was Miss Brown, the plain – I assure you, she is most plain – English virgin. By strange coincidence, since she knocked as I was writing the word Romans, she was returning the first volume of Gibbon’s history, which I had lent her only the day before. I rose, and asked her to sit, but she remained just inside the door, clutching at the book. To say something, I expressed admiration for her application, though it seemed to me that her rapid progress through the Roman emperors could only be ascribed to inattention rising from boredom. Any book may be read in a day if its reader is thinking continually on ribbons, bonnets and unattached clergymen. She shook her head – Oh no, it was not a question of that; she was not a great reader; she was disturbed to have to say such a thing; but a most shocking disaster had occurred, which she would not for the world have – She quickly fled, leaving the volume on the shelf, without explaining the nature of the most shocking disaster, but I had not approached it less than five feet when my nose twitched, and all became apparent. In short, Bella, she had been overtaken by a fit of nausea, and had vomited into the precious volume. It must have made a poor receptacle for her most inward sensations. Poor Miss Brown; she can hardly now ask for the loan of subsequent volumes, and if any other passengers ask me for the soiled first volume, I shall feel free to refer them directly to her. I wonder what drew on the fit; I like to think that it was not the motion of the sea, but the eminent historian’s description of the imperial vices. The stomach that turned at the mild turbulence of the English Channel could not, surely, remain calm when provoked by the recitation of the vices of the Emperor Elagabalus. But I will not prise apart the pages, to discover at what point the Empire earned so sincere a criticism; dal ventro, as Ariosto says. She has taken the solution many English spinsters have ventured, and is travelling to India in the hope of meeting some latterday Clive, some nabob Midas who will touch her, and with his golden touch turn that chilly marble into flesh. I confuse my mythologies; perhaps you have to see the poor girl to understand how apt the confusion can be.

  You see, I ramble on, having nothing to say, and yet feeling that I want to say it to you. To say that nothing. It was white, your skin, so white, and when I touched it, I remember how it flushed under the hand, like a red gentle bruise, fading. I could write my name on your back with my finger, and the letters rose up before fading again, so quickly. I wonder where you are, and what you are seeing, and whom you are speaking to, and how the world seems to you, now. And what you remember of me; that, most of all.

  Three days have passed, now, since last I wrote. We have been beset by periodic squalls; not brutish, but tiresome. It is not long now – a matter of days – until we put in to take on fresh water and supplies, and the food has grown monotonous, to add to our troubles.

  The food – I draw back, almost, from mentioning it. Not for your sake – I hardly worry about whether I shall weary you or not – but for mine. The food has narrowed to what the salt barrels can yield, and the occasional, necessary lime which we take in water for the sake of our health. And I dream of food which cannot be had. Most of all, over and over, I dream of watercress. A strange fad, a strange thing to crave, out here. I cannot remember ever having a great taste for watercress when it was there, but I fall asleep in my rocking shaded bed, and all at once, with no interval of dreaming, I am waking again, and my mouth is closing over a sandwich, soft English bread, cool butter, a mattress of crunching cress, refreshing as water. My teeth close on the pillow, and I rise and make do with what the ship, three weeks out of harbour, can provide.

  We are all fretful, dull, disinclined for company, and confine ourselves to our own quarters as much as we can, where we lie – I mean, of course, where I lie, knowing nothing of my fellow passengers’ leisure hours – and contemplate the creaks of the ship’s timbers, its rich brackish smells. Over dinner, we are inattentive, bring out stale anecdotes, make the same inquiries of the Captain we have made a hundred times, have to ask our self-absorbed neighbour three times for the mustard. The Captain asked me, last night, what expectations I had of India, and I was obliged to remind him that it was familiar terrain to me. He begged my pardon briefly, and then asked me, once more, for what precise purpose I was travelling; and that question I could not answer. I was coy and scandalized to be asked such a question as one of the husband-hunting ladies would be; we are travelling, I must remind you, in what we old India hands so vulgarly used to call ‘the fishing fleet’. I blushed, and stuttered, and coyly brought out some implausible explanation, and the Captain seemed satisfied.

  4.

  There are great difficulties in our history – there are always great difficulties, are there not? But you are not dull and plain, like Miss Brown, and I am not wicked or rich, so there is an end to the matter. Our difficulties are the ordinary ones; the facts of the world, and five seas between us. Those are small matters. I hope you see it in the same soothing light.

  I am constantly soothed by the contemplation of the sea. I had quite forgotten a strange fact; that one begins a long voyage like this worrying how the long days and weeks are to be passed. But in a week or two, all distractions seem to lose their charm, and even their necessity. Between each paragraph of this journal, hours, days, pass. Gibbon is laid aside. What enchants and holds the mind is the sea. It is uncharted, holds no distinction between one state and another. One wakes in the morning, and goes out on the shining fresh deck, and the sea and sky are quite different to the sea and sky as one last saw them. But the change has come overnight. When I sit on the deck and watch our progress, it seems to me that no alteration comes; only the tiny changes of light and shadow, of the height of the wave and the dark depth of the ocean. I sit and look for hours, Gibbon limply in my hand, and it seems to me that I am looking at the pelt of a single vast beast, turning and turning.

  Our clergyman has expressed interest, to this point in our journey, only in what he already knows. I dread coming across him in this little boat, and sometimes walk with my eyes downcast, affecting to be deep in thought. At dinner, there is no such escape, and he is quite capable of beginning a conversation with some reflection on Beeston of York’s unworthy preferment, or a comic tale of one cleric or another. He must be admired for his ability to turn the conversation to ecclesiastical matters on the point of a penny. To give you an instance – one from several weeks ago, now – Captain Taylor asked me some detail concerning the uniform of the Sikh cavalry, over the eternal porksteak. I confessed I did not know, and could not recall – it was a trivial matter, which he had raised for something to say. Before I could promise to search through my poor library for any help, however, the worthy reverend struck up like a band in the Park. ‘You remind me, sir,’ he called, ‘of the late poet Churchill, whose parishioners were said to approach him and ask questions regarding the scope of one of the latter commandments – before ladies, I need not specify which one – for the mere purpose of being diverted by his confusion and ignorance. There are many most amusing tales of the late gentleman in his pastoral role; indeed …’ It is best to give way under these nightly onslaughts; intervening would only prolong them, since he is determined to have his way and edify us with the adulteries of dead clergymen.

  Lately, however, he seems to be widening his field of interest. One night, at dinner, he remarked suddenly that we must be approaching the equator. ‘Indeed, sir,’ the Captain replied, as well he might, since we had discussed the matter every day for a fortnight. The Reverend Lannon’s remark was proof positive that he had taken no notice of the conversation at table. ‘Are there,’ he went on, ‘any interesting natural phenomena which may
be observed at the equator? I am most interested in natural philosophy, you know, sir, and would be sorry to miss any particularly valuable opportunity of observation.’ He looked around him at the table, as if he had made some particularly intelligent remark, rather than simply assert his own intelligence. ‘My son informs me,’ the kindly Mrs Robinson answered, ‘that there is a curious observation to be made of the manner in which water falls to the drains. In the Northern hemisphere, when the plug is removed from a basin of water, the water falls away in a definite anticlockwise direction. South of the equator, I understand, the water swirls in the opposite direction. Do I mean clockwise, or anticlockwise – Sophy, my dear, which do I mean?’ ‘But at the equator, madam?’ Mr Lannon put in. ‘Does it follow its own whim?’ ‘No, sir,’ Mrs Robinson continued, patiently. ‘It falls directly downwards, without any circular tendency.’ ‘No swirling,’ the august ecclesiastical figure amplified. ‘That should prove most interesting. But, sir, I worry – do we not move so rapidly that we shall pass the equator in a moment, and we shall have no opportunity to observe this interesting phenomenon? If there were some thought given to the possibility of, of stopping, of—’ he dared a new phrase, ‘—of dropping the anchor at the exact point of the equator. Is the sea particularly deep there, sir?’ There was a terrible snorting from the head of the table, and Captain Taylor seemed to be suffering from a mouthful of wine which he had swallowed too hastily; if he were not so very serious a man, I might suspect him of laughing at his passengers.