Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  I poured a whisky and went out on deck. Above the yellow moon rising over the city the stars burned cold and bright, funeral stars, Ford, sadly gleaming. Fox-Bourne was still on my mind. I was wondering what had happened to him and whether he still commanded the Brigadier, which seemed likely, when a vision of him came to me. He was sitting in his quarters, reading the manuscript beneath the dual gaze of Edward and his wife, fascinated, appalled, even sickened by the story Conrad had vividly brought back to life. At that moment Conrad’s belief that Fox-Bourne might sacrifice himself on the altar of the truth seemed preposterous. The man would hate him. If he could get control of his emotions he might very well laugh out loud at the proposal Conrad had made in his cover letter. Asking him to agree to publication was tantamount to suggesting that he have himself keel-hauled as a preface to being drawn and quartered in full view of the Royal Navy. The book would never be published. With that certainty burning as clearly before me as those bright cold stars, I went below.

  IWOKE IN THE dark and put on my suit in lamplight, inhabiting the damned thing against my will, hating the feel of the wool, the constriction of the jacket and shirt collar. Never a man for suits, I detested the glimpse of myself in the mirror. But it was for Conrad, a sign of respect. If nakedness had been required, I’d have gladly strode bare into the church. The loss of Conrad had hit full force as I dressed and I had choked up as I cinched my tie, the fellow in the mirror a blur. Indeed, I was so distraught I couldn’t deal with breakfast and contented myself with a cup of coffee, which I took on deck, where I gazed blankly into the darkness.

  At dawn, Harrison, Barnes, Kepler, and I boarded the train at Victoria Station. Since it was the weekend, and damnably early, we had the car to ourselves except for a family in the compartment next to ours, where a woman glanced at us, clearly startled, hardly surprising given that we were dressed in black and must have looked like undertakers, or maybe a band of fanatics off to proclaim the Apocalypse. The four of us suffered equally, though in different ways. Having followed the sea longer than our companions, Harrison and I had a particular bond with Conrad, the tribal attachment that can only obtain when you have shared the same trials and exultations. But Barnes made up for it with a morose observation about the empty train, and poor Kepler was conspicuously undone. Slumped against the window, he stared down at the tracks, his head jerking as the train chugged out of the station and clattered past the back sides of buildings blackened by centuries of smoke and soot. A few dimly lit windows showed like a scatter of dying sparks. There was a church spire framed in the gloomy space between trees, rows of tracks, signals, none of it ever envisioned by Wren or any other architect worth the name, their spirits no doubt appalled that the entrance and exit to London languished in utilitarian squalor. I thought of the manuscript and hoped the others had something like it to cling to, a memory of a happy day on the Nellie when Conrad was in good form, an image of him, anything. If they did, they kept it to themselves.

  By the time the train was out of the city we had fallen silent, our usual garrulousness banked like a fire. The monotonous clicking of the wheels came up through the floor. Whenever we caught one another’s eye, we shifted our gaze. The safest thing was to look out the window. I tried to lose myself in the countryside as I once did in the sea on long voyages when the expanse led to all sorts of pleasant thoughts. But this view was too particular, too perfect, if you know what I mean. The greenness of the fields and ancient hedgerows, villages like illustrations in a book of fairy tales, looked too bloody happy, the kind of thing you think of when you hear a folk tune or read an old poem about shepherds and maids. I had no interest in sunlit perfection. I wanted clouds, rain, wind like the wind that blew while Lear bellowed on the heath.

  It was even worse in Canterbury. The city was festooned with colored buntings and signs celebrating Cricket Week, the street lamps and buildings tarted up like dance-hall floozies. We all laughed, agreeing that Conrad would have been vastly amused. When our cab arrived at St. Thomas’s Roman Catholic Church I saw you out in front at the edge of the crowd, Ford, standing as straight as a soldier on parade, patting your pockets like you’d forgotten something, the old nervous gesture you always fell back on when you were upset. When I approached, you stuck out your hand awkwardly and said, “I can’t get used to it, Malone.”

  “Nor can I,” I answered.

  Pursing your lips, you said, “You look like it has sunk in.”

  “Do I?”

  You nodded sympathetically.

  “Not far. It’s just gotten through the first few layers of my hide.”

  “When the word came I told myself there must have been a mistake.” You looked around and added, “Everyone’s here,” staring at the crowd with a hurt expression in your eyes that seemed to suggest that you were privy to an insult or some indiscretion that passed by me. “Joseph would have appreciated this, of course, but I can’t ignore the irony. You remember the years he struggled in obscurity when he said he felt as if he were writing in invisible ink.”

  “It’s not invisible anymore,” I ventured.

  “He deserved better than he got. He was great, Malone, before the public would give him the time of day.”

  “I know,” I said, “but it didn’t stop him. This was the only life he was cut out for.”

  “You’re speaking of consolation?”

  “Reality,” I told you. “There’s consolation in that.”

  “Yes, well . . .”

  People were beginning to go inside. I looked around but couldn’t find Harrison and Kepler.

  “They will write things about him soon.”

  “They?”

  “The literary establishment.”

  “As they should.”

  “Yes. Overdue, of course. I intend to do something myself. It was the first thing I thought of after I’d gotten the news. I think I’ll call it Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance.”

  “I’m sure it will be very fine.”

  You shrugged.

  “It will be what I know, the truth.”

  Stella appeared then, and after saying hello to me slid her arm through yours and said, “We should go in.”

  Barnes and I followed the two of you. After we sat down I caught a glimpse of Harrison and Kepler in the middle of a pew near the front. The old Irish priest’s thick fingers, wrapped around the silver chalice, looked like they’d be more at home grasping a belaying pin. His lungs were strong enough to cast Latin all the way to the last row of pews in such a mellifluous voice that it consoled even those of us who were strangers to the liturgy. Given Conrad’s antipathy toward religion, I knew that the presence of so many friends would surely have meant more to him than the baritone of that representative of a stern, exacting faith. But it was obviously consoling Jessie, whom I could see quite clearly.

  I don’t know how you feel about funerals, Ford, but I have always thought that they come too soon, everyone in a rush to put the departed in the ground, including the gravediggers standing off a discreet distance, impatiently fingering their spades. Oh, I’m aware of the physical need, but shouldn’t the ceremony come later, after people have had time to absorb what has happened and think of something to say that doesn’t suffer from your typical treacly sentimentality, especially when they are eulogizing a man of letters? I don’t mean to denigrate the remembrances we heard from Jean Aubry and Cunninghame Graham. They were well intentioned and moving, but they had been written for an occasion which demands that those who speak practically sanctify the departed and because of that they missed, or so it seemed to me, Conrad’s gnarled, pithy essence, the character that had been formed from years of the seaborne life, his quiddities. I didn’t mean to go on like this but remembering the service just now made me wish again that our friends had spoken of a man of flesh and blood who was far from being an angel but could write like one.

  In any case, I was relieved when we mourners were given the signal to troop out, our footsteps on the cold stones echoing
in air that bore the smell of incense and candle wax. Barnes and I followed the pallbearers as they carried the coffin to the graveyard while the priest stood at the head of that black hole in the earth, reciting ancient words of consolation. I gazed at the tombstone where the dates that so coldly graphed a life were relieved by some lines from Spenser that Conrad had chosen as an epigraph to The Rover:

  Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,

  Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.

  When the time came, Barnes and I joined the line of mourners passing by the grave and I tossed in my handful of dirt, walking away blurry-eyed. Outside the church’s entrance, where the limestone is carved with images of the apostles, Barnes and I ran into Jessie and Borys, who were with Conrad’s Polish relatives and the austere count. A dozen or so people waited in line to offer their condolences and we joined them, inching toward Jessie, whose eyes were glazed with fatigue and grief. I remember thinking of how alone survivors always look no matter how many people hover nearby, offering comfort. She smiled and took my hand and I introduced Barnes, adding that he was one of the Nellie’s gang. He choked up when he told Borys how sorry he was and then we passed on, relieved that we had gotten through the last ritual. Barnes asked if there was anything we could do for Jessie and I said I couldn’t think of what it might be, not mentioning the manuscript. I should tell you that his question made me all the more determined to get hold of it, for I was convinced that she’d find some comfort in those pages. It seemed to me that if I were Jessie I would very likely see Conrad’s study as a shrine, the books, papers, pens, ink bottles, blotters, all his writer’s implements as relics that held some portion of his spirit.

  Barnes said he’d had enough and wanted to leave, preferring to lick his wounds in private. Seeing Jessie in that state had brought on a new spasm of grief for me as well, and I suggested that we find the others. A minute or so later I spotted Kepler and had just pointed him out when I noticed a lone figure coming up from the graveyard, one of several officers in attendance. He was walking fast, shoulders thrust forward, long legs fairly eating up the ground, as if he’d seen more than he had bargained for and wanted nothing more to do with death. I was wondering vaguely what he had been doing down there by himself—delivering some last word in private, perhaps, or just communing silently—when he turned and started toward us. I noticed captain’s insignia, a square jaw, pale blue eyes, and in that instant something happened in my head, Ford. I seemed to be listening to Conrad once again describing Fox-Bourne to me in that meticulous way of his, the picture he was creating word by word now coming to life before my eyes. It was him, no doubt about it, his presence utterly improbable and thus all the more stunning. I stood flatfooted, immobilized, fascinated, watching him becoming larger as he bore down on us, thinking as the distance decreased between us that he might have singled me out of the crowd for some reason, when he reached a junction of the path and took the branch that passed through the rose garden, where he was immediately swallowed up to his chest in red blossoms. I wanted to know why he had come, what could have been strong enough, urgent enough to bring him to that spot where he was surrounded by people who had loved and respected Conrad, people whose feelings and memories were surely at odds with his own. Vengeance, I thought; but how could he avenge himself on a corpse? A desire to desecrate the grave, deface the stone, dance on the freshly turned earth? Relief that the man who’d committed him to paper, his author, was dead and gone? Belated gratitude that Conrad had put the fate of the book in his hands? What I had seen of his face showed not the least trace of those emotions.

  “Listen,” I told Barnes, “there’s someone I have to speak to,” and set off across the lawn to the garden with its overpowering scent of roses, a wonderfully concentrated scent whose sweetness was at odds with the thoughts buzzing in my head, images of the Valkerie’s crew and Conrad. Fox-Bourne had not slowed down and I had to break into a trot to catch up, calling his name breathlessly. In the next instant he stopped dead in his tracks, his head going up as if he were sniffing the air, trying to identify a scent, deliberating whether to continue or face me. He turned around slowly, his eyes meeting mine, his sober, abstracted expression making clear that whatever he had been thinking was still on his mind and troubling him. I had the impression that he was looking at me through a screen of complex thoughts that agitated and distracted him, leaving him unsure what was happening. For all of that, Ford, he was still a piece of work; tall, almost handsome, solid, an exemplar of the officer class, his appearance practically shouting that the mere thought of veering away from the hallowed idea of a fixed stand of conduct was unspeakably repugnant to him. In a word, he reminded me of Jim, outwardly a representative of a superior human being. Now that I’d seen the living man, I understood far better than I had the depth of Conrad’s surprise when he heard the chime of the Brigadier’s telegraph. I had underestimated the power of Fox-Bourne’s appearance, the perfection of this man who seemed the incarnation of all the values and beliefs Conrad held dear. Nothing in the man remotely suggested that he was capable of changing the minesweeper’s course and in the process defaming all of us who’d ever commanded a vessel. So it was clear to me that the sound of those chimes had been like an electric shock to Conrad. I was fairly tingling myself, trying to reconcile what I knew of the man with the way he looked.

  He was trying to identify me, put a name to my face and my face to a context, the task having pushed whatever else was going on in his mind into the background for the moment, and he was drawing a blank, his curiosity turning to irritation as he waited for his brain to make the connection. A few seconds passed and he gave up. A rather suspicious gleam came into his eyes.

  “Excuse me,” he said in a pleasant voice, softer than I’d imagined, refined, on the verge of posh, “I’m afraid I don’t know you.”

  “Jack Malone,” I answered, surprising myself when I held out my hand, coerced into the offer by his immaculate facade. He gripped it just long enough for a decent shake, both of us letting go at the same time. I was on the verge of losing my advantage, knowing him while he still had no idea who I really was, and much as I wanted to hold on to it the confrontation proceeded as it had to, leading to the next level.

  “How do you know who I am?”

  The question was predictable of course, inevitable, the only one he could ask at that point. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have had a response ready, something casual and low-key so as not to upset him any more than I had to, but my wits were conspicuously absent.

  “From Conrad,” I told him. “We were old friends.”

  His eyes flickered and something came into them, or rather returned, the gaze similar to what I’d seen when he’d turned around. I thought that was enough information for him to infer what else I knew, that the rest would fall into place by itself, but if he made the connection he gave no sign, said nothing, standing there with his eyes on me, waiting. I was acutely uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, but I seem to remember feeling especially bad about compromising myself by shaking hands with him, as if some of his taint could have rubbed off.

  “I recognized you from his descriptions,” I said.

  “Descriptions?”

  “From his book.” I saw no reason to explain that Conrad had told it to me. “That’s why I followed you. Whatever you’ve decided, his wife will want it back to add to his papers. I’d planned to get hold of you but this saves the trouble.” I paused then, and no sooner did I do so than a range of emotions flickered across his eyes—shock, surprise, chagrin all mixed up together. “I suppose you’ve made up your mind,” I continued, unable to hold back. “I’d be interested to hear.”

  I had caught him off balance—knocked him off balance is probably a better way to describe the effect of my words—and he was having a hard time righting himself. With no apparent idea of what to say or do, he just stood there staring at me, holding his ground even though it must have seemed as if it were shi
fting beneath his feet. The next thing I knew he executed an about-face, the gravel crunching beneath his shoes. He didn’t stop after I caught up and I was obliged to walk beside him, matching his strides, irritated that he’d run off but glad, too, because it meant I no longer had to watch my words.