by Jeremy Page
Edward Bletchley would refuse to sit at the same table, preferring to either stand by the stove or go out on deck.
‘A peculiar fellow,’ Sykes said at one occasion, once Bletchley had gone. ‘Oppressed by many dark clouds, I believe.’
Over the next few days the Amethyst worked its way along the edges of the sea ice, landing wherever seals were spotted. The sledges would be dragged off into the distance, then return several hours later loaded with skins or, occasionally, empty. I didn’t go on any more hunts. Bletchley refused to be consulted on the matter, either raising a hand to stop the offer coming his way, or simply turning his back with a deeply concerned expression. During those days he claimed many things: severe pains in the head, an itching across his skin, a malaise due to the fall in temperature, anything that required him to sit by the stove with a blanket across his knees, or spend entire mornings in his cabin until it was too late for him to join the expeditions.
His humiliation during the seal hunt was never directly mentioned, but he was treated differently by the crew. He was allowed space on deck. The men made themselves busy as he approached, turning the sealskins fur side down on the wood and rubbing them with salt, or junking blubber into strips and laying it into barrels where it would turn to oil in a few weeks.
Bletchley would look at their industry with open disgust, as if they were demons stoking fires. Only once did I overhear him speaking to the men. Impatiently, he said, ‘Don’t you miss coiling those damned ropes, now?’ Surprised to be addressed, the sailor hurriedly agreed before continuing with his work.
‘I do not like,’ he told me, as he stared into the fire grate one morning, ‘that the seal I … shot is on board this ship. I know it is down there.’ He tapped his foot on the floor. ‘In the cargo. And I very much wish it wasn’t.’
I noticed his eyelids were sore with tiredness, and he had shaved badly. He sat still, not wishing to add anything, but repeatedly cleared his throat with a little swallowing sound. I held back from admitting that I, too, had become haunted by the seal hunt. That each night I relived the moment when the seal had slipped beneath the ice hole, the water masking the scene of its drowning.
In the evenings Clara sat with Bletchley, as she had done before, often with her eyes shut in trance-like meditation. I would sit across the room, reading my books or occasionally playing draughts with Mr French, but at every opportunity studying Clara and her cousin, too. Their relationship was deteriorating, with edges of tension and dependency I could not gauge and periodic spats of annoyance that were perplexing. Like a couple of magnets, they intermittently repelled each other with sudden force.
When I had the opportunity, and to escape the rendering of skins and blubber on board, I would take a walk on the ice near the ship. The very edge of the floe was a perilous border, against which the open sea slapped relentlessly, with deep cracks and misleading shapes able to slide a man in. Knocks and surges could be heard, travelling through the ice, vibrating the surface with a constant tremor—the sea had eaten away many caves and fissures. In some places the ice had a molten aspect, as pure as an ingot of glass, filled with a luminous blue depth and shot through with bubbles, entombed and motionless. Radiating deep into the darkness, hair-like filigree in webbed patterns indicated weaknesses and planes of growth. Further down, there was the shadow of the ocean, a cloak spread underneath. The captain had told me that the water was ten thousand five hundred and sixty feet deep at this point.
More commonly, the ice was grey or cloudy, a brittle and dusted white, through which nothing could be seen and no estimation of its depth guessed at. I had been informed that sea ice can be boiled and drunk, although it retains its saline flavour, whereas older ice might be washed in, and truly ancient blue ice—the ice of the bergs—can be drunk.
It was an unknown environment with its own rules. When the sun shone across the floe, the air became dazzling and bleached and curiously warm. There must have been unusual density in the air, because the horizon—which could only have been entirely flat—sometimes appeared to lift and buckle into unusual lumps and hills. Either that, or the distance would tremble with an eerie fluidity, as if the sea was attempting to break through. Most unnerving of all were the cracks that zigzagged in from the sea, sometimes for several hundred yards, like the jaws of open mantraps, revealing glimpses of terrible black water that shivered with current. If we had moored for several hours these cracks might appear, then close, yet it was a process which was never seen, as if the ice sheet opened its jaws when you looked away. It was most unsettling. A kind of frozen breath rose from these vents, wet and salty and chilled, as the waves moved beneath. Occasionally the ice would groan and shake, or sound as if it were being hammered from below, or a low thunder would roll briefly across the surface, then all would be quiet again. We were forced by the arrangement of the floe to enter channels of open water, seeking routes through the ice. Often they were not much wider than the ship was broad. Fenders were hung from the waists, in protection, and sometimes the men had to haul the Amethyst upon its hawsers, while others boomed the sides from the edges of ice. Within these bites of the floe, bergs of ice sometimes moved at astonishing speed, as if pulled by wires beneath them, creating their own currents and disturbances in the water, although the rest of the surface was entirely unruffled. On one such instance, during an otherwise perfectly fine morning, I happened to be standing near French at the helm, when he suddenly shouted ‘Clear men! Take hold!’ In the second after his command, with nothing but apparently still water ahead of us, I saw a seething of the surface, as if a vast invisible hand were sweeping low across it, followed almost simultaneously by a tremendous dark squall that punched the ship harder than any wave I had felt. I stumbled forward, as the shrouds and stays strained above me, the masts seemed to bend, and men cried out in sheer alarm. I thought we had hit the ice, or worse, but also knew that this was a dark and violent phenomenon of the weather that no one, save French perhaps, had had the presence of mind to recognise. A singing rang up the taut lines of the stays, as if travelling up thin nerves. The Amethyst shuddered back on its stern as French shouted, ‘Aback! the rudder!’ and the men sprang to action, vaulting past me and letting fly several ropes from the clews. As I regained my footing, the ship nestled back against the ice, moaning and cracking but, mercifully, I knew the squall had vanished.
Bletchley appeared on deck, spooked by the sudden movement, as startled as a bird that’s hit a window. He sought me immediately.
‘What on God’s earth was that!’ he said, nervously scanning the ice, while the anemometer began to slow its frantic spinning. The scene was tranquil, once more, the gleaming ice restored and benign in the morning sun.
‘I have no idea,’ I replied. ‘But it has gone.’
On several days, when the sun shone brilliantly like this upon the ice, the air was filled with a soft and marvellous spectral glimmer. The light glistened in a mysterious vapour as countless unbranched crystals floated in a haze above the ice, fallen from a cloudless sky. It was so tranquil that a wave of the hand would part and swirl the glitter, as if the elusive quality of its shine could be gathered, carefully, and held. It was eerie and enchanting, and created in me an impression that none of this was truly happening. Clara would accompany me in a silent trance as if sleepwalking. She would wear a dark satin day dress, with shawl and cloak, and kidskin gloves that did not look warm enough. When she spoke, it was in a soft voice, hushed by the enormity of the ice around us.
‘I owe you an apology,’ she said. ‘When we first met on deck I think I was rude and untrusting towards you. Please disregard it—I am not used to meeting people, especially men, and I find it difficult to be in another’s company. You have been patient with me.’ She paused. ‘I am … a demanding person, I fear—I blow hot or cold—at least that’s what I’ve been told. They like to tell you these things, don’t they? Are you always so patient?’
‘You are being harsh on yourself.’
Sh
e sounded nervous, as if picking her words carefully, afraid of a false step. ‘My childhood has made me strange,’ she explained. ‘We’re made by our childhoods, don’t you think? Made and bent by them—like seedlings growing from the soil in search of this—the sky—but instead only finding our parents already there—large trees casting us in shade. We either grow towards the light they have found, or …’
‘… or we wilt?’
‘Yes. A mother should love you unconditionally, don’t you think? But mine showed me no affection and would have little to do with me, and I think my father in turn held me responsible for the difficulty that I must have brought to his house. I do not blame him. Men change when they inherit wealth. My father was said to have changed. He inherited a large house and its accompanying duties,’ she explained. ‘He managed so many people, but was unable to deal with me. I don’t think he has ever loved me—I have merely been … a problem.’
‘You don’t have to tell me these things, if you do not wish.’
‘But I feel relaxed with you, Eliot. It helps me to speak out,’ she replied, with a forced brightness. ‘And Edward is asleep, so I am able to talk to you freely, without feeling that he is watching me.’
‘You feel that?’
‘He is a possessive man. He wants me all to himself. I think you understand.’
I nodded, worried, not for the first time, that I was missing entire elements of their relationship.
‘I have always been surrounded by possessive men!’ she quipped, without conviction. ‘From what I have been told, my father was once a charming man, but that is unrecognisable to me. He is morose and distant, not really equipped to be a father at all when I think about it, and has recently been ill with a blood disease. I think he brought it upon himself. You have poisonous thoughts, it follows that poison must remain in your system. My mother—I’m certain she never wished to be a mother—was unable to comprehend the life of a child growing between herself and her husband. What is that bird that hatches her young in a stranger’s nest?’
‘The cuckoo.’
‘Yes, the cuckoo. I was a cuckoo to them—I may as well have been.’
‘Except, Clara, the cuckoo chick is looked after well by its false parents.’
She turned to look at me, a sideways smile on her face. ‘You see, you are a kind man—you’re trying to make me feel loved.’
‘I’m sure you were, in a thousand ways.’
‘Yes, yes, but only in terms of comfort, schooling, these pretty clothes I am wearing.’
‘Edward told me a little of this.’
‘Did he? Yes, sweet Edward—he was a ray of sunlight when we were children.’
‘He said you were kept apart.’
‘That too,’ she said with an affectionate smile. ‘He has always had a wild streak. They thought our behaviour was inappropriate. But Edward said we were free spirits—birds of a feather.’
‘You flock together. And were you?’
‘We developed a special connection. Isn’t it true that the best things are always what’s bad for you? Like sherbet.’
‘Yes. And butterscotch and peppermint creams.’
She laughed. ‘My personal weakness is for cherry tartlets! You also have a wicked streak, I see.’ She halted, staring towards the shimmering, endless horizon of ice. ‘Motherhood made my mother humourless,’ she said. ‘She would leave the room as soon as I entered, or she would do this …’ Clara raised a hand ‘… if I asked an unwanted question, or just stare through the space where I was playing, so that she could look through the windows at the flowerbeds outside. I recall these moments with no lessening of their impact and hurt.’
I listened, watching Clara stepping tenderly on the sea ice, through the shifting patterns of sparkling air that glowed around her, remembering the autumn I had spent at her parents’ estate. I had been a young man, eager to impress and willing to work in the most precise and methodical manner that was possible. But I had found the father to be an unusually oppressive character. He rarely sat down, and would hover above my desk in the conservatory with a frowning air of displeasure. He had brooding, thickened eyebrows and flexed his fingers continually, either holding his hands behind his back or occasionally drumming the worktable or shelf, on which many neglected plants were struggling to exist in earthenware pots. The conservatory had smelt of soil and damp geraniums. He had treated me with little respect, as if the fragility and unkempt nature of his sprawling egg collection were somehow my fault.
‘You might see, Mr Saxby, that among these boxes are some of the rarest and most fragile beauties of the natural world. The goldcrest egg there, which is easily the most delicate of my collection, you might notice is smaller than the last fingernail on my left hand. If you crack that I shall dock you a guinea, you hear? And I will have you roaming the hedgerows when they nest until you find me another. The guardianship of precious items is a duty I take seriously.’
Had he been referring to the incarceration of his daughter? I could not be sure. Each morning he would stand before me, his arms crossed, daring me to make reference to her. I would sit, determined not to take my eyes from the eggs in the trays, while his daughter was led across the lawn outside, aware how badly my fingers were trembling. Did he know that by then I was trying to befriend her? Certainly, he had his suspicions. I was being watched, as a hawk watches the fledglings in its territory.
‘My parents have ruined my life before it has even started,’ Clara said. ‘I can’t bear the thought of returning to them.’
‘Clara—you must forget your past, it is too heavy a burden to carry around with you,’ I said. ‘Think of this—of the world in such a strange and unexpected light as this morning. Think of all the possibilities you now have.’
‘I am able to deal with the world when it is so brightly lit as this morning,’ she replied. ‘But at the end of each day I am faced with a long night, and I am afraid of it.’ I held her hand. ‘My feet are cold, Eliot. We should return to the ship. I don’t want Edward to wake and see me out here.’
I nodded, unable to let her go.
‘Why do you look at me so strangely?’ she asked. ‘It was the first thing I noticed about you. It’s as if you know me.’
Soon, the weather deteriorated, and we were unable to remain by the ice for much longer. I was glad to leave. The sea became the colour of lead shot, unreflective and choppy, and squalls of rain and snow blew bitterly through the rigging. The spray froze quickly on the woodwork, turning the deck into a hazardous sheet of ice. Seals, we were informed, had the advantage over the hunter in such weather. The Amethyst stretched at her reins, much like an impatient horse, as the floe creaked alongside in a murderous fashion.
As I went towards my cabin, I noticed a small soft ball of fur blowing across the deck. I stopped it with the side of my boot, thinking it might be a mouse, but quickly I saw it was a very tiny bird. I crouched. A wheatear, no larger than the palm of my hand.
‘Simao,’ I called. ‘A bird has landed—bring me some grains.’ I had cupped my hands on the deck, and the wheatear had nestled quickly into the space I had made, instinctively seeking shelter. It leant against the warmth of my skin, but trembled most horribly. A film of skin descended several times across its eye, and its beak parted, almost in a silent call.
‘Quick, Simao,’ I called. He ran to me, bringing jars of seeds and meal with him. He crouched by me, and swiftly made a small pile of food on the deck. But the wheatear was in no state to eat. It shivered uncontrollably, falling into the palm of my hand with no more weight than that of a leaf.
‘It has died,’ I whispered.
Upset, I went below and sat in my cabin, wondering how it could be possible that such a small and fragile bird could live out here, upon the ice. It had blown out of a dense grey fog of freezing air, with no protection, no hope of survival. I sat at my desk, trying to study my books, attempting to calm my mind, but I kept thinking of the bird, how it had died, and then I started to think abou
t Clara and the things she had told me of her childhood. Why hadn’t I confessed, when I had had the chance, that she was known to me?
I remembered the day I’d first met her father. I had been walking on Blakeney Point, in north Norfolk, among the dunes and shingle, studying the nesting sites of sandwich and little terns. It was in May. I was fascinated by migration, even then, and I wished to chart the landings of the flocks coinciding with the arrival of the coastal herring and with the flowering of sea kale, toadflax and thrift.
I was observing the nesting site from within a shallow dune, when a tall man strode past, in full hunting attire, not six feet from where I lay. He failed to see me, but continued directly into the colony. The birds flew up as he approached, and he waved a walking stick angrily at them. Although I was frustrated that my studies would be cut short, I became fascinated when I saw him crouching on the shingle and placing something carefully into his bag. By the time I reached him, he was already straightening and beginning to walk off.
‘I say! What are you up to?’ I had asked.
The man had turned at me with an irate look. ‘How dare you address me like that!’ he replied. ‘Why, I could ask the very same of you. In fact, I shall. What are you up to?’
That was how I met Celeste’s father. In fear. He had the ability to destroy your nerves with a simple glance and, at that first encounter, I had faltered trying to explain why I had been hiding in the dunes.
‘Migration, eh?’ he had said, with a little less hostility. ‘So you know about birds, I take it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He pointed along the shore with his stick. ‘That?’
‘A dunlin.’
‘That?’
‘A female oystercatcher.’
‘And by the pool?’
‘Redshank. He has been stamping his feet and flapping for nearly an hour—in courtship. I believe he must have lost his first brood and is trying again.’