‘How do you know? You have not been looking.’
At eleven on the clock, they hear scuffling downstairs, and voices. ‘Up, up this way,’ says a female. ‘Careful on the stairs, my poppet.’ And at last comes into view a well-dressed mama and her attendant nurse, each clutching the fist of a small child. These children – and one is really no more than an infant, quite bald beneath its little cap – scramble gingerly upward, stop-start, stop-start, their breathing loud and their tongues protruding as they exert themselves to place both feet on one step before pushing off to the next one.
‘Our first customers,’ whispers Sukie, clasping her hands, and in smiling silence she and Mr Hancock watch the slow and fumbling ascent of the children.
‘Here for the mermaid?’ asks Murray’s boy, rousing himself.
‘Most assuredly!’ The women jiggle the children’s hands to provoke their enthusiasm. ‘A mermaid, Harry! Cassy! What do you think of that?’ They turn their indulgent grins to Mr Hancock. ‘They have spoke of nothing else, you know. We are very excited, are we not, little ones?’ The children goggle in dumb confusion.
‘Delightful,’ Mr Hancock says. ‘This is very pleasing to see.’ He cannot help adding, ‘For I am owner of this mermaid.’
‘You own it!’ The mama is thrilled. ‘And did you catch it yourself? Did you see it alive?’
‘It died very shortly,’ he says. ‘Poor creature.’
‘Well! We are fascinated to see it. Shall we go in, little ones? Shall we go and take a peep at the mermaid? Yes, you would like that!’ They drop their coins in the tray and lead the babes into the dimmed room, closing the door behind them.
At first there is silence. Then a querying upnote from one of the ladies; then a lusty howl. The bellowing of the children reverberates through the stud wall, and the party bursts forth in short course, the children clutched in the ladies’ arms, scarlet-faced and inconsolable.
‘You monster!’ cries the mama, her infant’s fat tears splashing on the floorboards, and snot flowing over its top lip.
‘To upset innocent children in such a way!’ berates the nurse, and they descend the stairs at a far greater speed than they got up them, the children weeping all the way and the women broadcasting their own disgust and disappointment: ‘A horrid little imp!’ ‘The day quite ruined!’
Mr Hancock attempts to pursue them, calling out, ‘Ladies, how can I apologise? May we not settle this?’ but they turn up their noses and affect not to hear him. On the street beyond he can hear them resume their shrill narrative of terror to passers-by.
‘Scared the babies out of their wits! A horrid thing, it was, a menace and a disgrace.’
He retreats up the stairs, where Sukie is standing with her palm clapped over her mouth in horror. He sits and, taking off his wig, rubs the palms of his hands over his prickled scalp. ‘Oh, my girl!’ he mumbles, elbows about his face. ‘We are finished before we began.’ She plumps down next to him, lacing her fingers together in her lap, and they sit sombrely.
‘Perhaps ’tis not so bad,’ she ventures. ‘They are only two people.’
‘But they have gone forth from here to tell the entire city. Damn Jones! His taste for frivolities will ruin us yet. And I am no better, for I am so credulous.’
She says no more, although she is a little embarrassed at her uncle’s despair under the dispassionate gaze of Mr Murray’s boy, who rattles his tray – empty but for two shillings – most provokingly.
EIGHT
Presently Mr Hancock gathers himself. Catastrophe as it may be – that he has forfeited a year’s profits, that his reputation has lost a great deal of its gravity – is it not fortuitous that although he has overstepped himself in this folly, there are more terrible ways to lose what he has lost? No ships have been sunk, for one thing; not a single life lost, and if his pride is not quite what it was, he reminds himself that pride is a sin.
But poor Sukie, who looks now upon his shame with calm and childish eyes, has suffered most by this, although she does not yet guess it, and it is her dowry that gnaws at his spirit. He has witnessed more than once the way in which all the ardour in a young man’s eyes is extinguished by a single column of figures, and a host of terrible scenes flock his head: Sukie at her first dance, bashful excitement fading to shame as the beaux glance at her but do not approach, as her own peers whisper behind their fans; Sukie, grown older and thinner, sitting at the parlour window still, watching for the approach of a lover who has forgotten his promises; Sukie, alone in her querulous marriage bed, watching the damp spread across the wall while her infants cry for hunger and her husband drinks his cares away. Oh, dear Sukie, what depths his folly might bring her to!
‘Let this be a lesson to us,’ he says bravely. ‘I will buy us a rabbit pie for our dinner – what do you think to that?’
‘Oh, we are not leaving now,’ says Sukie. ‘You mean to let one single misfortune turn you back from your path?’
‘I—’
‘We have a ship to earn back!’ she snaps. ‘And a creature people will pay to view. Only a fool would not hold fast.’
‘Nobody wishes to view it,’ he says sadly.
They are interrupted by voices below: ‘This way to the mermaid?’
‘Dear Lord.’ He closes his eyes in forbearance. ‘I cannot endure this again.’ He makes to rise, but Sukie pulls him back.
‘Where do you mean to go?’ she asks. ‘Will you hide behind the curtains until they have left? Stay here with me, sir, see how it unfolds. Not long,’ she adds more gently, ‘but we must try.’
A pair of young clerks comes up, scrubbed and keen. Mr Hancock watches with dull terror as they pay their money and pass into the room where the creature awaits. But there are no screams. There is some silence, and then, as he strains his ears to hear, laughter, betraying – could it be? – real pleasure. The men emerge at their leisure, grinning ear to ear.
‘I never saw such a thing! And real, is it?’
‘The genuine article,’ says Mr Hancock.
‘Extraordinary! I do not know what to make of it.’ The pink-faced clerk is shaking his hand now. ‘You are a lucky man! This is the oddest thing in the city, I am sure of it.’
‘Thank you,’ he says quietly. Then, gaining confidence, ‘Do spread the word. Tell your friends.’
‘I shall speak of nothing else! To think I was first to see this.’ And the men retreat incredulous, and all a-bubble with the spectacle.
Shortly thereafter comes the stampede. Old maids and rich gents, pie-men and flower-girls and clerks and foreigners, their boots clatter up and down the stairs and their voices fill the air in increasing excitement. They demand to see the creature that made the children cry; that made their mama faint dead away; that put a Jesuit priest into a fit which (it is said) he is yet to come out of. In the afternoon, chairs draw up to deliver fine gentlemen and their ladies; a corpulent old woman is fairly carried up the stairs by her posse of white-clad daughters so great is her desire to observe the creature, and in the evening lovers come clutching hands, the girls squealing and the men preening their scientific minds. They queue out into the street, until Mr Murray distributes bone tokens amongst them and bids them avail themselves of his victuals in the downstairs room, an exercise that disgruntles the regular customers but intrigues their visiting ladies, who have harboured dark suspicions about the places their men spend their time.
The whole day passes and still the people crush into the little room so that they can only shuffle around the mermaid, peering and shrieking at its goblin glare. Another draughtsman arrives with his pencils and sketchpad and sets about making a series of studies to be printed up post-haste; he is joined in short order by one more, on the business of a scientific society, who send their warmest greetings to Mr Hancock and hope he will be agreeable to a lecture series on his extraordinary creature. Hawkers arrive – first one, then all in a swarm – to pass oranges and hot pies and small beer about the coffee-house and up and down the sta
ircase, and although the cashbox fills up at remarkable speed, Sukie will suffer nobody to touch it but herself, scowling at Master Daniel Murray as she heaves the takings into Mr Hancock’s own strongbox. Mr Murray scrawls tickets dated days in advance. ‘Could you not have ordered more mermaids?’ he asks Mr Hancock. ‘The one is hardly enough to share around.’
The end of the evening finds merchant and niece sore of foot for constant pacing, and sore of cheek from constant smiling. They can hardly credit the reversal in their fortune; the morning might be forty years distant, it has so little to do with their present situation. It is ten of the clock and the queue has not much abated.
‘What will we do?’ asks Sukie. ‘Turn them away until tomorrow?’
‘I durst not,’ says Mr Murray, who betrays a grain of admiration now. ‘They will riot for certain. As long as there are those as wants to see it tonight, I shall let them in.’ The thought of his twenty per cent pushes his own tiredness from his head. ‘You go on home, if it pleases you. The girl is ready to drop.’
Mr Hancock turns to Sukie. ‘Are you?’
She is rubbing her eyes. ‘A little. Only let me count up our takings.’ This gives him a little pang, since she is now intimately acquainted with his financial doings: if she reports back this aberration to her mother … but then her mother will hear of this, he accepts with a chill; perhaps she has already heard. He decides Sukie is far enough stepped into this business that it will do no harm for her to continue, and so he helps her carry their strongbox down to Mr Murray’s office. All day she has scribbled shillings and pence down in columns on a large leaf of paper; now she sets about matching the coin to the figures.
‘You will need a new ledger devoted to the mermaid,’ she says. ‘Daily takings and outgoings; and a separate book to account for every coin as you receive it. And you want a day-book, separate again, to record particular doings and correspondence, and a file to contain all that is written about it, and finally a large book to copy all the other books into.’
‘You have given this some thought,’ he says. He is impressed.
‘Common sense.’ She is stacking wobbly clipped farthings into towers and does not look up.
‘No, you are an accomplished girl. One day you will be a wife of rare talent.’
‘Like as not.’ Sukie’s secret ambition is to marry a gentleman in possession of a good trade but poor health, who will die very shortly after the children are born and leave her be. In such circumstances no body could blame her for entering into business herself, and thus thriving. ‘Here,’ she says, frowning, ‘I need you to count this again. I am distracted, I daresay; my total does not seem right.’
He scoops the coins towards him and begins again while she rises and paces the room, her palms in the small of her back. Rebbie’s borrowed stays pinch, and do not hold her in the way she is accustomed. The coins chink against one another, and his lips move silently. At last he sits back in his chair.
‘Well?’ she asks.
‘What did you come to?’ He looks a little stunned.
‘Thirty-eight pounds, four shillings and sixpence.’
‘Then you were correct. At least by my count, this is the sum we took today.’ She gives a little yelp, and he rises to embrace her. ‘Dear niece, all may yet be well! What a venture!’
She nearly skips for joy. ‘More than your sea-captain had supposed!’
‘If we go on this way, we shall be …’ Shall be what? He can hardly imagine. ‘No. Best see it as one remarkable day.’
‘So let us bow out while luck favours us.’ She yawns.
‘Ah, there is your good sense again.’
We fill their minds even when we are far away. They fancy they see us even when they do not. They tell one another stories about us.
The stories are of men who, walking on the shore, hear sweet voices far away, see a soft white back turned to them, and – heedless of looming clouds and creaking winds – forget their children’s hands and the click of their wives’ needles, all for the sake of the half-seen face behind a tumble of gale-tossed greenish hair. They cast themselves into the water, sometimes, their shirts gone to air about their bodies, or wade ungainly across the shallows, stumbling on weed-slick rocks, the gooseflesh standing out on their calves. And sometimes they never return.
Those that do, how can they explain themselves? What can they say? They felt largeness beyond words; they heard in the visitor’s lovely song something so unknowably perfect, pristine as mountain ice, that they would cast everything precious aside to hear more of it. These females from the other side of the world’s mirror pursue their own lust with impunity, never thinking to wait meekly to be approached, but complacent in their own beauty, calling out, I want you; I want you; come to me.
The stories are of brave men who turn their faces away, who remain resolute on the shore despite the ringing in their ears and the thunder of their hearts. And then what? The stories are of mermaids spurned who burn down churches, who strike men dumb, who see to it that your cradle will remain for ever empty. Petulant and cruel, these females, and vengeful.
The stories are of the bravest of men, who crept so softly down that the lady, communing with the wind and tides, or raising her silver arms to wring out her wet hair, never heard his approach until he seized her up. The stories are that mermaids once subdued make fine and modest wives, as loving mothers as any, except that they have a peculiar sense of humour, and often laugh aloud at ordinary things, like an old man hoarding his coins, or a pail of milk gone sour in a thunderstorm, as if there were something foolish to it all.
And then of course there is no leaving a sea-wife unattended. She is restive, and paces as if she still heard that dreadful calling from the water; she will go to the shore and stand there as the sea foam races about her new-minted ankles, her face sheened with tears. Unwatched, she will seek out the scrap of mackerel skin that fell from her when first she was dragged from the water. Given the means to return to the sea, she will unhesitatingly cast off the bonds of motherhood, forget her uxorial vows. She will vanish for ever in the turn of a wave as if it had all meant naught to her. For mermaids are the most unnatural of creatures, and their hearts are empty of love.
NINE
It goes on in this way for ten days. Mr Hancock neglects his office to loiter in the coffee-house, marvelling at the crowds of people he has drawn there. The first arrive not long after dawn, and they continue to stream through the doors even after St Edmund’s bells chime twelve; they would go all night if the door were not bolted against them. A group of Catholics come to pray about the creature and cast its demons out, but although they gibber on, the mermaid does not stir so much as a fin. Students arrive from Oxford already drunk, and liberate it from its glass bubble for a game of catch-as-catch-can. After that Mr Murray arms himself with a cosh. A man from the Royal Society comes to inspect the mermaid: he does not declare himself baffled, but his face speaks it plainly.
‘Ah!’ he cries in triumph after hours of increasingly frantic scrutiny. ‘There are stitches on it! And here, evidence of a wire frame.’
‘Well, how else were it to be preserved?’ asks Mr Murray in exasperation. ‘It is only mortal, after all – its body no less corruptible than any other low creature’s – we are fortunate it has been stuffed with such care as to preserve its original appearance. If it were a mere manikin it would require no such intervention: what greater testament could there be to its legitimacy than the fact that it has degraded, decomposed? You accepted the kongouro, did you not, and that was brought back a mere tanned hide.’
‘But that creature was witnessed alive,’ persists the man from the Royal Society.
‘And so was this, I daresay. There’s not a fishing town in England that has not been visited by merfolk at one time or another.’
‘Captain Cook saw the kongouro – a gentleman – his word is beyond question.’
‘Ah, a word’s a word. Any gentleman can tell a lie; any scoundrel can talk truth.’
‘An abundance of eyewitnesses!’ The gentleman’s argument falters; there is real terror in his eyes.
‘All of them on the same voyage,’ Mr Murray muses, ‘not an independent sighting amongst them.’
‘Well, how could there be, when no other man has ever gone there before?’
‘Convenient, that. Look, sir, it strikes me as contrary that you will accept the existence of a kongouro, which you never saw or heard of before, on such slim testimony, and yet how many tales have you heard of mermaids, and how many sailors report seeing them? In the annals –’ he waves his hand to indicate the sweep of history – ‘there is centuries’ worth of evidence to satisfactorily account for the existence of sea-maidens, and yet none at all for what creatures may creep upon the plains of an entire body of land that nobody visits and, need I really remind you, bears no name at all but Incognita.’
The expert hesitates.
‘Look at the thing!’ Murray exhorts him. ‘And consider whether such a beast could be invented.’ He pats him on the shoulder. ‘You know for yourself what is true, sir.’
The expert leaves, murmuring about the precision of the dorsal; the impossibility that the spine could be so fused; the skill required to create such a creature exceeds, surely, the artfulness of Man. He has been caught out before, when he declared that infant lions arrive in the world as puffballs, and he is anxious of attracting any more derision to himself.
Every day, the takings amount to twenty pounds or more. Mr Hancock is gripped by a sort of exhilarated helplessness: events sweep him onward whether he wills it or no, and he gratefully abandons himself to Providence. He has not the requisite canniness to steer his situation, and it is with relief that he says to himself, all this before me is uncharted.
On the eleventh day, he is passing through the downstairs room of the Pineapple, when a tall and lovely mulatto girl of about seventeen approaches him, smiling. ‘Are you the mermaid man?’ she asks.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 7