The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  ‘No, sir, only to see you take receipt of the message. ’Tis important.’

  ‘I see. I see.’ Mr Hancock inspects the seal on the note: it is impressed, God be praised, with Captain Jones’s anchor signet. ‘Thank you. Will you have a drop of brandy?’

  ‘Thank you, sir. No, sir. I must away.’

  Once the boy has gone, Mr Hancock gazes again upon the seal. News from my ship, he says to himself as the muted notes of the clavichord drift down the stairs, accompanied by the laughter and hum of his assembled new friends. Momentous, perhaps. As if I required any more moment in my life. He thinks of the fever with which he had demanded a new mermaid; the hectic bliss when news came that one had been found. And now? Why, it does not matter. I have everything I want; the addition of a wonder to my life will improve it not one whit.

  And if it is bad news, therefore, if the creature is lost or proved a forgery, then it matters not one whit either. Even so, he is not quite easy, and goes upstairs to fetch his wife. She is standing by the clavichord, turning the pages for Sukie; when he enters the room she turns her face to him with an expression of gentle happiness.

  ‘What was it?’ she asks quietly, so as not to interrupt Sukie’s performance, but seeing the expression on her husband’s face she steps away from the instrument all the same, beckoning the dancing master to take her place.

  ‘A note. I have not opened it yet. I – I hoped perhaps you would. ’Tis from Captain Jones.’

  Her eyes grow large. ‘He has returned?’

  ‘I do not know! Open it!’

  She slides her finger under the seal, and unfolds the paper carefully. It is a damp and dirty sheet, its contents made out in the most ragged of scrawls. It reads as follows:

  Mr Hancock,

  Sir,

  The good ship Unicorn has docked safely. I beg that you meet me at Greenland Dock tomorrow morning at seven o’clock to take receipt of its most cumbersome and unusual cargo.

  Yours etc.,

  Captain Tysoe Jones

  P. S. –

  SHE IS ALIVE.

  In this quiet bubble, something is growing.

  It doubles and doubles and doubles again, unseen, and moment on moment on moment it begins to wake up, becomes more of itself. Slowly it will start to extend itself, to stretch out like a taproot from a tight seed, or to swell like a tadpole, limbs knotted within its body, but although it is like these things it is certainly neither of these things. It is only itself.

  If it thinks, it does not know it is thinking. If it feels, it does not know it is feeling. But it strives, without knowing it is striving: it surges towards life without knowing what life might be, and although it has no understanding of attainment, to attain is its sole instinct. It has no idea of age, but it conquers seconds and minutes and hours: it lives now, and now, and now; each moment bubbles into the next, and once gone is quite forgotten. It might be the oldest thing in the world, for all it knows. It might be the very newest.

  This something sleeps in the dark, a secret even to itself. People who have never seen it might credit it with fingers, eyelashes, a voice, but how can they know? Who knows what it does in its small bubble, when it does not even know itself? They will suggest it has a moral code, a motive, a divine purpose, a soul worth stealing. They assume its rules might be the same as theirs. They are wrong.

  It is a seed crammed with everything it will ever need; it beds down. It swims. It flies. Blind and deaf and dumb in its sensual world, it rides on tides of dreams. It knows, or does not know, the roil and churn of fluid all about it, and the thud and rush of some eternal comforting tide. What it knows is that it is part of something bigger.

  What it knows, if it knows, is that something is about to happen. It is prepared at every moment for something to happen.

  Something is about to happen.

  NINE

  Mr Hancock has never set an alarm in his life: dawn is such a logical time to awake that he does so without complaint or difficulty. This particular morning, his eyes snap open as the bells in St Nicholas’s spire sound the third of six chimes, and is in an instant as perfectly awake as if he had never been asleep.

  ‘Mermaid,’ he says in the dark, and sits up. He cannot see much, it being dark and the bed-curtains being half drawn, but he can feel Angelica, warm and sweaty, curled up next to him, and he pats what he supposes to be her shoulder. She squeaks like a kitten. ‘Your mermaid has arrived,’ he whispers. ‘Will you come and see her with me?’

  ‘There is no mermaid,’ she mumbles, rolling over onto her belly.

  ‘Wake up, Mrs Hancock.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I cannot persuade you?’

  ‘Go and satisfy yourself it is real. I’ll not make the journey for a silly toy.’

  ‘I suppose rest is of particular importance to you,’ he says, ‘in your happy condition.’ He opens the bed-curtains and eases himself out; she sprawls into the space he has left while he hops about with one foot in his breeches, as silently as he can manage. On the way out of the bedroom, he cracks his shin on the blanket chest and spits hoarse curses.

  ‘Shh!’ says Angelica.

  ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’

  He tiptoes downstairs as light as a ballerina. Bridget is coming from the kitchen, carrying a full coal scuttle.

  ‘Good morning,’ he says, bursting with contentment, but she squints and scowls blearily at him, and says nothing. The shutters at least are open, and the hall is all awash with spring sunshine. ‘A glorious day,’ he remarks, as the cat follows him out onto the street. ‘An important day. I am to be a father at last. And my ship has come in – the Unicorn – the most important of them all.’

  The cat zigzags the road from gutter to gutter, her little snout close to the ground, her whiskers twitching. She is hungry.

  ‘You imagine this is of no consequence to you,’ said Mr Hancock, ‘but this business is what keeps you in bacon rinds.’

  When they reach the tall walls and slaughterhouse fug of the Admiralty Victualling Yard, Mr Hancock and the cat part ways. She darts into the shadows, her tail standing up like a mast; he strikes out across the fields, where the air swells moist and green-smelling. The birds are clamorous, and three red cows watch from under their eyelashes as he hoists himself over a stile, breeches straining. From here a long tree-lined avenue leads to Greenland Dock, and he idles happily along it, kicking up dust and screwing his eyes so the sunshine glows pink through his lids.

  As he draws closer the air takes on an oily weight, which settles on the clothes and layers the nostrils with a greasy, deep-water scent. And the nearer he comes, the worse the smell becomes, until it blooms into the stench of ghastly decay: the blankets of flesh peeled from whales on the Greenland ice have lain for days and weeks upon the ships that bear them home, reeking and sweating and oozing. On the docks, the labourers hoist them one by one from their piles, retching and leaning against one another as they unleash pockets of trapped gas and foul greasy fluid that have hitherto suppurated undisturbed. These unfortunate men have never seen a live whale, but they are experts in its parts: fat for soap and lamps, spermaceti for smokeless candles; baleen for their sweethearts’ corsets.

  The rendering ovens in the long brick buildings on the nearside of the dock are already roaring hot, while the labourers fill vats with spongy rashers of blubber. Mr Hancock approaches a group taking air on the quayside.

  ‘Good morning, boys,’ he says.

  ‘Morning to you. We don’t see you here so often.’

  ‘No, indeed. I did not expect to be here today. But I have been summoned on some mysterious business. Is Captain Tysoe Jones about the place?’

  One of them jerks his head back, towards the edge of the dock, and there he stands by the water, tall and narrow and all alone in the midst of this industry, his face white and immobile. He is turning his hat around and around in his hands in a constant motion, as if it were some ritual of prayer.

  ‘He’s not so good,�
� says one of the dockers.

  ‘A bad voyage,’ says another.

  ‘They do get that way sometimes.’ He taps his temple meaningfully. ‘Crazed.’

  ‘I see,’ says Mr Hancock, who indeed has seen it before. ‘He needs a rest.’ He approaches his old friend, smiling and reaching out his hand, but although Captain Jones looks as if he is waiting for something, and his eyes are roving and expectant, he does not seem to see him.

  ‘From the looks of it you have had a hard voyage,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘Eh, Tysoe? But you are home now.’

  His friend tears away his eyes from an invisible point in the air, and fixes them with difficulty upon Mr Hancock’s lapel. He is silent for a moment. A muscle in his jaw seems to be working. ‘Yes,’ he says, presently. ‘You might say so.’

  ‘Here, Tysoe –’ Mr Hancock’s jubilance bubbles up before he can suppress it – ‘much has changed in my circumstances, you will not credit it. I’ve a wife, sir!’

  Captain Jones remains impassive.

  ‘And she has one in the basket already,’ persists Mr Hancock. ‘I’m to be a father. What do you say to that, hey?’ But for perhaps the first time in his life, Captain Jones has nothing at all to say. He nods absently, that is all, leaving Mr Hancock to stammer and cough and then ask lamely, ‘And how were your travels?’

  ‘Strange.’ His old friend’s eyes will not meet his; he mumbles into his stock. Then his eyes roll off into the middle distance again.

  ‘Do you know –’ Mr Hancock hesitates, perturbed at his friend’s strangeness – ‘you took far longer to return than you had expected?’ He longs for the gratification of a warm handshake, a clap about the shoulders; he regrets that his old friend does not rejoice in his achieving this most masculine of things. But what signifies more is that something is gravely amiss.

  Captain Jones shrugs. ‘What’s time anyway?’

  ‘And we are not meeting in the usual place,’ prompts Mr Hancock.

  ‘No. This is not the usual cargo. So …’ They stand for a minute longer, silent. Then Captain Jones says, ‘Come with me.’

  He sets off with a little burst of energy, and moves quite rapidly in a sort of lurching shuffle: his limbs wobble like a puppet’s and his feet never quite leave the ground. In this way he leads Mr Hancock along the length of the dock, where the ships jostle gently together like cattle, and towards a tumbledown warehouse beyond. When they are just a few yards away from it, his footsteps falter and cease. He stands still again, looking at the ground.

  ‘I got you what you want,’ he says. ‘I found her. But I think – I think perhaps you should not have her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She will not be what you expect. She is not what I expected, Lord knows.’

  ‘I expect nothing. I expected a dead one.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you she is not dead.’ He snorts mirthlessly. ‘I do not know if I would call her alive, but she is not dead.’

  They step into the shadowy warehouse. Squinting, Mr Hancock sees that one of the big-bellied rendering vats has been dragged from its shed, its passage across the stone floor marked by clawing lines of soot. Mr Hancock advances slowly. To his surprise, Captain Jones keeps talking:

  ‘Every sailor is heartsick at least sometimes in his life. But this was the most melancholy voyage I ever knew.’

  The water – for the vat is surely full of water, and not oil – gives a little plash, as if something very large has rolled gently over in it.

  ‘We installed her quite comfortably in the hold. At first the crew was in good spirits. I would always catch one or other of my boys down there, just gazing at her. But after a while …’

  The vat is as tall as Mr Hancock, and he cannot see inside. He slaps his palm against its scorched side. ‘Have you any steps? I wish to look.’

  ‘… well, by and by every man on that ship was overcome by grief, a sort of melancholy hollowness. As if each one of us had been gutted like a fish. Everything warm and substantial taken out and thrown away.’ Captain Jones remains in the doorway, just shy of the thin shaft of sunlight that creeps in. He begins again to turn his hat around in his hands. ‘How to describe it if you have never felt it?’ he says softly. Perhaps he is talking to himself. But he wishes to be heard; his voice is high and urgent. ‘It is like realising that one is no longer in love. The restlessness. Nobody looked anybody in the eye. Nobody spoke or sang. It was as if every soul on that ship suddenly knew that somewhere in the world there was a great love just for them, but that the world was so large they would never find it.’

  ‘I did not know you were so poetical,’ says Mr Hancock. He drags an empty keg up to the vat, climbs onto it, and peers inside.

  The water stirs. In the dark it appears quite black, apart from the mica booming through it like stars. At first he thinks, why, there is nothing here. My wife was right: I have been duped. Then the water heaves a great sigh, rainbows glance across the copper, and he sees her. She is indistinct but there is no doubting she is there. She is like a shoal of tiny fish, all surging and flickering together, a great mass that forms and re-forms and thinks all in accord. He can make out sometimes her arms, and often her swirling hair. He sees the silvery rolling-over of her heavy tail. He hangs over the water for many minutes as she sighs and rolls.

  ‘Oh,’ he says.

  ‘And when we disembarked last night,’ continues Captain Jones, ‘we all knew – we will never sail together again. We who were like brothers. I do not know where they will all go; not back to their homes for they have no homes that feel like home.’ He contemplates this statement for a moment, before repeating it, turning it over as if it were a curiosity he needed to inspect. ‘They have no homes that feel like home.’ Then he straightens up. ‘Take her away. You are fortunate we did not scuttle the ship, for we’d have done it gladly. I’ve a mind to return to sea again as soon as possible. What is there for me here? What good is money?’

  Mr Hancock is not listening. ‘I must tell Angelica,’ he says, squinting into the waters once again. ‘I must go at once.’

  Even so, he remains leaning over the vat for many seconds longer.

  TEN

  ‘Urgh,’ says Angelica Hancock, opening her eyes.

  Something is happening.

  She finds she is in a great deal of pain. ‘Urgh,’ she says again, and gets out of bed. Her legs will not do as she tells them; her belly is gripped by something. She drops to her knees and vomits into the chamber pot, not much.

  ‘Urgh,’ she heaves from her diaphragm. She kneels there for a moment or two, palms pressed flat to the floor, spitting saliva that glides in gobbets down threads suspended between her lips and the pot, which stretch and dangle but will not break. She waits to see if she will vomit again. No. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and shunts the chamber pot back under the bed where her hair will not trail in it, but she cannot get up. She kneels, her body folded tightly, with her feet under her buttocks and her knees under her breasts, as if she were trying to parcel herself up, hold herself together. The pain in her belly is phenomenal.

  ‘I know what this is,’ she says out loud. She is almost exasperated; it is not the first time in her life. She raises herself off the floor a little, one hand pressed to her stomach, and puts the other in between her legs. It comes away bloodier than she had expected; it gleams like a beetle-back as she holds it in front of her face, splaying her fingers out. The blood stretches in mucous webs.

  ‘Oh, dear Jesus.’ There is a sob swelling in her throat. When she rolls her eyes heavenwards she catches the sheets on the bed, smeared and blotched. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ What a mess. What a state. That will not wash out.

  She crouches there for a long while, hunched over her pain, as if her body only exists to contain it. Her ankles are trembling and she lets her head hang, so that all she can see is a wall of her own hair. After a while she drags the sheet off the bed and jams it between her legs. She rolls over onto her side and curls there, knees to her che
st, pressing her hands to her face. The creases in her palms are sticky and smell of her own emissions.

  She does not weep, though. All other things being equal she would be bawling like a hungry lamb, for she has little tolerance for pain and has rarely felt so sorry for herself, but something prevents her. She knows what is happening. And she feels a terrible sadness.

  ‘Stay with me,’ she whispers, and the tears run over the bridge of her nose, spread over her cheek, and pool on the floorboards. ‘Stay with me. Oh, what will I do without you?’

  There is no stopping it, of course. The only thing she can think to do is what she has been taught before, on other occasions after the usual ritual of hot baths, strenuous walks, patented tonics. ‘Breathe. No, breathe. You’ll be better for it. In. Out. In. Out. Blow it all out,’ she was told. ‘Blow it all out.’ And she would blow, long and even, until all her breath was gone and it felt as if the two walls of her lungs might stick together. On those occasions there were other women around her, rubbing her back and shushing in her ears: she howled on those occasions but only with the pain. Afterwards there would be sweet wine, and a clean bed, and eventually laughter.

  Now, she is alone on the floor of her marital chamber. She blows all the air out of her lungs in a long and steady stream, and in this way she is able to manage her pain, more or less, at least enough to bear witness to the passing of this thing.

  Sukie must have heard her from her bedroom, for she pokes her head around the door and sees her legs knotted in the stained sheet, little bloodied fingerprints on her face.

  ‘Mrs Hancock!’

  Angelica does not uncurl herself; she does not get up from the floor. ‘I think it is done,’ she says. ‘I think it is too late.’

  ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘No, no. I can’t get up. Don’t touch me.’