Rest eternal.
Mary looks at the faces of the people standing with her, and feels strangely separate from all of them. She experiences the coffin and the hole in the ground, and the blustery wind, the biting cold, the rattle and jingle of the wagon wheels, all of it as a provocation to her senses, a kind of assault. Her brother sobs, holding his hands over his face. She hears none of the prayers, and nothing anyone says to her.
3
TIME SLOWS. She goes on in the house, taking care of everything, alone, mostly. Charley has finished without distinction at Cambridge and is home all day, now, in frail health, requiring her attention. She finds no taste of life in anything. The air grows warm and the trees on Mortimer Road begin to bloom. Birdsong is everywhere, and everywhere people move through their happy concerns, their moods that are determined by the fresh, sunny air and the return to bloom of the world. She goes out for walks with Lucy Toulmin-Smith and with other friends, and they all express their worry for her. She rebukes such worries, denying that anything has changed. But at night the quiet room where she tries to sleep is like a small compartment in hell.
Charley’s grief has exacerbated an overly fastidious strain in him. He sits in the library at his father’s big desk and holds forth in a tone she recalls quite well as being that of someone like Lord Dunraven—but that gentleman had a sort of imposing ruddiness and vigor about him, even with his recurring cough. Charley is pallid and lethargic, and when he talks of making a journey to the Far East, there is something almost too boyish in it, as if he were only elaborating a daydream, a sickly boy talking from a bed. He’s all complaisance when she asks anything of him, but he is also increasingly rather sophistic and opinionated.
One evening, while sorting through some of her father’s papers, she discovers her parents’ marriage license, and her own birth certificate. Earlier, she was thinking she might try to make a book out of everything her father left. There isn’t enough. It is becoming evident that he never expressed himself fully about anything, though she hasn’t quite allowed herself this thought. She reads the marriage license: “George Kingsley, bachelor and of full age,” and “Mary Bailey, spinster,” both in residence at 30 Tavistock Terrace, Islington. “October 9, 1862.” The date seems off, must be off, she thinks. She turns to her birth certificate, entertaining for a moment the thought of what it might have meant to be the firstborn if she had been male. But something is nagging at her, and she stares at the piece of paper, and reads her birth date: “October 13, 1862.” Again she stares at the marriage license, and that date. It is not a mistake; she realizes that all the dates are correct, repeated twice in each document.
Four days.
With trembling fingers, she puts the papers in the drawer of the desk and then sits down behind it, gazing at the wall of books. Four days. She feels all the more her own difference from the rest of the society she lives in, and very quickly, with revelatory strength, various matters of exclusion and casual slights from the Kingsley side of the family take on a significance they’ve never had before. The picture she has always had of her parents’ life together changes, too, as if in a vision before her eyes: her father’s long absences, the deeps of stillness that had existed in the rooms of the house when they were together; her mother’s terror of losing him, even her long years of invalidism—everything about the two of them. It is all altered, or it shines forth in a terrible fresh way in the light of this new understanding.
Now, Charley’s self-satisfied calm, his pompous holding forth, annoy her irrationally; and it is more than mere aggravation: there he sits, perfectly accounted for, the second child, on whom all the money has been spent for education, and she knows without quite admitting it to herself that the education is wasted on him; that she could have put it to such far better use.
I am extraordinary.
She rejects the thought; it is unattractive. She dutifully performs all that is expected of her, and begins gently to agitate about getting away. Everyone, even Charley, agrees that she needs a change of scene, some other climate and place. They’re alarmed for her health, and especially her mental well-being.
—There is a wonderful spa at Baden-Baden, Charley says to her.
She rejects this.
—What do you propose, then? Guillemard asks.
They are sitting in the parlor with its window overlooking the wide, shady lawn in front, and the sparse horse traffic on Mortimer Road. Beyond the road, there are more trees, and a grassy meadow where a cricket game is under way. Mary thinks of her father—how he loved to watch them, and to walk down to the river to attend to the rowers, the crewmen from Cambridge in their round of practices. Abruptly, the whole expanse seems oppressive and cloying. It comes to her that the whole island of England, all of Europe, depresses her immeasurably.
—I would like to go farther south. The Canaries.
Charley snorts, and clips the end of a cigar:
—Surely you’re not serious.
—I think it could be arranged, says Guillemard. Mrs. Toulmin-Smith might be prevailed upon.
—I wish to go alone, Mary says.
Neither of the others speaks for a moment.
—I intend on going alone, Mary tells them.
Guillemard says:
—Well, I’ve learned by now not to argue with that tone in the voice of a Kingsley.
—It will have to wait until I leave for Singapore, Charley says.
Mary nods:
—Of course.
—The whole thing may be academic.
—Of course.
—Perhaps you should settle for someplace closer to home. There are several wonderful spas very nearby, actually. I’ve looked into it.
—The Canaries, Mary says.
Charley rises and leaves the room, sighing as if with exasperation. He climbs the stairs and the door to his bedroom closes.
Guillemard says:
—I think Charley is a bit at sea.
—Master Charley will have to come to terms with himself, Mary says. I’m certain that he will.
4
HE PUTS OFF sailing for the Far East until the end of June. Mary doesn’t speak to him about it again, either. She waits, bides her time—it will become something at which she grows even more adept than twenty years of nursing her mother has already made her—and performs the services of a sister, preparing his meals and looking after his needs. She bears it all gracefully, including his progressively more arcane opinionizing, his verbal hairsplitting, his flourishes of bombastic rhetoric, and his evident assumption that every single thing his mind touches on is as he perceives it, without the possibility of question or contradiction. She learns, in fact, to keep her own opinions to herself, for the sake of peace between them, and she believes finally in his intentions, understanding that the best thing is not to press him about his plans: he must be allowed to think that they are all his idea. Occasionally she gives him small reminders of his Far East journey-to-be. She buys him a new compass, and a gauge for reading barometric pressure; she expresses the hope that they will be useful to him, but she never mentions the journey itself.
Finally, he settles on a time. He elicits the help of some friends of his father at the British Museum, and Mary also helps, packing for him, writing out lists for him to refer to, and booking passages ahead. At last he’s on his way.
Watching his steamer pull slowly out of Liverpool, she rejoices, waving at him, and attempting to look sorrowful at his departure. The next day, she goes to Guillemard and with his help applies for passage to the Canaries.
She takes a passenger Castle liner out of Liverpool. Guillemard and several others, Lucy Toulmin-Smith, her cousin Lucy, and two friends of theirs see her off. It’s a curiosity to some of them, Mary, so strange and reclusive, after all those years of hiding in books and in the requirements of her mother, walking up the gangplank in her skirts, with her parasol and a perfectly ridiculous hat. She waves to them all, and makes her way up, steps onto the deck with its
tightly seamed planks and its stained, pitted surface. She goes to the railing and the smell of the harbor lifts to her nostrils—smoke and dead fish, brackish water lapping the supporting posts along the pier; old wood, the heavy stench of the streets of the city. She waves to everyone as the ropes are untied and the ship makes its slow shift toward the end of the harbor. They are under way. The land seems to be moving, and she feels herself to be stationary. She gazes at the dirt and bustle of Liverpool as it slides out of view—the coal stacks and the brick facades stained with soot. The city grows small, recedes into a brown line on the horizon, and sooner than she would have believed possible it is gone, swallowed by the constantly shifting surface of the ocean with its little crowns of foam. Standing on the deck, she has the sense that this is a kind of rehearsal.
All the way south, in the troubling waters of the Atlantic, she finds that she is suited to it; it is her father’s blood, she believes. Others are ill, even the sailors. She sits on deck in her dark dress, and writes letters home to Lucy Toulmin-Smith and to Guillemard, and others. The words to describe what she sees come to her with a facility that surprises and delights her. And in the open air, in the free, far-distant waters, so far from anywhere, she begins to feel her spirits lift, the pall that has been over her dissipates like the morning mists over the sea.
5
THE CANARIES are a group of seven volcanic islands off the coast of northwest Africa. They were often used as ports of call for Greek and Roman ships, and for a short period after the fall of those empires, they were relatively free of outsiders. The story goes that they were rediscovered when a European vessel bound for France was blown by gale winds to the islands, and that when the vessel finally put in to port on the coast of France, the sailors spread the word about the lovely volcanic paradise to the south. In 1399, the Spanish came in conquest—five vessels landed at the second largest island, Lanzarote, and took the king and queen captive, along with nearly two hundred native islanders. But this possession lapsed, and again for many years the islands were left in peace, or rediscovered and then forgotten again. The French established a colony there, led by a man named Juan de Béthencourt, who introduced slavery, among other aspects of civilization of the time: he also built churches and brought in the first missionaries. But it was the Portuguese, along with some of the tribes of northern Africa, who first began to develop the slave trade that would flourish throughout the world for the next four hundred years.
The largest island in the chain is Tenerife, with its twelve-thousand-foot-high volcano, and this is what Mary first sees rising out of the ocean to the south. She has been at sea for seven days. She has spent hours in the nights, walking the deck, aware of the vast spaces all around the small vessel, and the limitless expanses above it. She watches the stars, and the changes in the sky as the morning approaches. She sleeps very little. It is too beautiful to let it go by her in sleep, this ocean, the great curve of the world, thousands of miles of water and sky. She stands at the railing, breathing deeply, taking in the salt air and the odor of the smoke from the stacks.
Finally, on this morning toward the middle of July, here is the amazing purplish peak of Tenerife rising out of the sea. Last night there was a squall, and several passengers were ill, and one sailor broke his leg working during the worst of the storm, trying to secure a lifeboat that had come loose in the pitch and yaw of the vessel in the turning waves. Mary, with her medical knowledge, assisted a shipboard doctor in setting the leg, and the doctor, a young, gruff, heavyset man with piercing dark eyes and a way of snorting when he talked, expressed his admiration for how well she had been trained in medicine.
—I’ve no formal training, Mary told him.
He shook his head, smiling. Then said:
—You trained yourself well.
Now, standing on deck again, sleepless, faintly shaky, she sees the mountain peak in its violet haze, lifting out of the green and bluish distances. It is odd to her that while Liverpool had receded so quickly upon her departure, this arrival seems to draw out—an eon of slow time, while the distant mountain remains essentially unchanged, as though all approach to it is illusory. She feels a pang of loneliness; there is no one to whom she can speak to tell what she’s feeling now. The waters almost swallow Tenerife, and the sky reddens. Others come on deck. There is a game of dice being played against the pilot house—two sailors and a German clergyman, and his heavy wife. Jolly people, who never fail to smile at her as though she has just done something to please them.
Finally, the heights of Grand Canary rise out of the flat green expanse. She sits at the railing and looks through the bars, and writes in her notebook: yellowish-red peaks, and how beautiful is the lovely, lustrous blue of the air which lies among their rocky crevices and swaths their softer sides. I believe that if I were to find some alchemy by which I could put it in a jar and take it back to Cambridge, it would come out as a fair blue-violet cloud in the gray air of Cambridge.
6
THE LINER comes to port in Las Palmas, all white beaches and white villas, the mansions of wealthy Spaniards whose banana plantations give a faint yellow cast to the far sweep of the coast. The sand looks whiter than the foam in the waves. She allows her bags to be carried ashore by a tall, stooped man whose correct English delights her. She discerns that he disapproves of her cockney accent, and this makes her a trifle self-conscious, and at the same time rather gratifyingly defiant. He calls himself Marco, and when she asks for his surname, he says there is none. To herself, she calls him Polo. He accompanies her to what he calls the English Quarters, a white sandstone building that is near a strikingly ornate cathedral, with tall spires and minarets, too. He offers to show her the city. She refuses, politely. He scowls, looking pained, as if he suffers some physical ache or infirmity, though he is obviously very strong, carrying her bags into the open foyer of the English Quarters.
When she comes down from her room, perhaps an hour later, there’s Marco, waiting for her. He puts down the book he was reading and comes to his feet. The book is Tales of the Notorious Pirates. She asks him what he thinks of it.
—I think it is rubbish, he says. And you?
—I very much liked it, she answers.
He says:
—You are very young.
—’ow old are you? She asks.
—I shall be fifty-six in November.
—And you’ve always lived here?
—No.
She waits for him to explain. He doesn’t, and the urge to laugh comes upon her. She manages to keep this back.
—And where else’ve you lived?
—Persia, he says.
—Are you Persian?
—Spanish. But my family believes we are also descendants of the aboriginal people who once inhabited these islands.
She says:
—The Guanches.
He’s unable to hide his own surprise.
—And where do you come to know about them?
—I liked to read, she tells him. When I was a child. And of course I still do.
She walks out of the building, and looks at the wide whiteness of the sandy beach in the near distance. People are lying there, or moving around in the water close to shore. To her left, bordering the horizon, is the jagged, tawny beginning of mountains, with patches of dark forest—pine and palm trees, mostly. There are Spanish goats in the street, and people in all sorts of different styles and colors of dress—Arabians and Europeans and Africans. A man in a white toga walks by and bows, smiling, showing, in the middle of his wiry black beard, with its stringy appendages down his chest, a cavernous mouth with no teeth. A dog snuffles along behind him.
—Would madam care to walk the beach? Marco says.
She looks at him, at the deep-set, lined eyes, the unhappy wrinkles around his mouth.
—Do you have family here, Marco?
He bows.
—Yes.
—Go see them. She starts away, toward the cathedral.
He step
s around in front of her.
—I have done something to offend madam?
—Of course not.
—It is not permitted for a woman to be unescorted in Las Palmas, madam.
She has no reason to suspect the veracity of this information, and still she hesitates, regarding him. He shifts from foot to foot, not quite returning her gaze.
—And if I don’t wish to be accompanied?
He makes no answer to this, but stares at the ground between them.
She starts toward the beach again, and he walks along at her side.
—Who of your family is here? she asks him.
He mutters:
—I am a widower. I have a brother.
—Here, on Gran Canaria?
He shakes his head. His bearing is now something akin to that of a shamed child. He keeps his head down, walking along, a look of distraction on his dark face, as if something distasteful has begun to plague his mind—some unsolved dilemma that he had forgotten about and now freshly recalls.
She senses that he feels chagrined at having to insist on being her companion. So she turns to him and says:
—Thank you for saving me from causing trouble.
—No, don’t mention that. His tone is aggrieved.
—I do not wish to cause you discomfort.
—You have caused none. There is a small fee.
—I expected nothing less.
They walk on a few paces.
—I’m quite glad to ’ave your aid, she says.
He nods, almost dismissively; yet she can see that he’s pleased.
On the beach, he procures a wide blanket and a canvas chair, and leads her to the water’s edge. There are booths up and down the beach where people change into bathing clothes. She sits in the canvas chair and the sun beats down on the dark folds of her dress, but the air is cool. The wind plays with her light hair, blows strands of it across her face. She breathes the salt fragrance of the sea. Marco tells her about the man-made carved shallow pools for gathering salt, which is one of the substances for trade produced here. The unevenness of the coastline lends itself to these giant salt pans, as they’re called. He talks about the banana plantations, and the many people who stop here in transit, from Africa to Europe, and back.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 39