'You are certain of it? You understand that it is my duty to ensure that your resolution is fixed?'
'I am.'
'You speak it lightly and yet I do not believe that you are a foolish or a foolhardy man. I wonder at your motive. You were riled with Carnock certainly. I know that Carnock is a man can drive a dispute out of any trifle, but I suspect that there is something more to this thing than that.'
He had said that last with his voice rising as if it was a question, but ran on soon as he could see that no answer would be forthcoming. 'Something further between yourself and him? Or something between yourself and God, perhaps?'
And Cave stood with his neck bent and let this question also fall, and the Captain, who was a vivid, energetic, impatient man, ended the pause again before he could respond. He smiled, a vivid smile, white teeth in a dark beard, eyes a strong Celtic blue, and touched his arm and led him out on deck again where the sky was high and he could stand, and turned his head to the bright sea and was speaking again, telling a story just as Cave had begun to form in his head the words that he might have said.
'What you propose to do puts me in mind of something,' the Captain said. 'A man I met last winter when I was ashore. He was an old sailor who had been out to the Indies early on, fifteen, twenty, years ago. He went with Raleigh on some great voyage in search of Indian gold - a madness of the time it was, every other man in those days when in his cups or in an idle moment dreaming of finding a fortune to top the Spaniards', though never then or now could I begin to believe there's any such thing to be found, no land of gold for me but honest toil and the hunting of whales and a plain trade in oil, bones and blubber and barrels, but then of course I'm a plain man, a straight Hull seaman who works for himself, not a King's man nor a poet. So, as I am telling you, this sailor said they did not hear a whisper of any great mines, saw no more than the tawdry bits of gold the Indians wore around their necks and in their ears, and at the last Raleigh decides to make for home but he wants to take with him to show there the son of some local chief and exchanges for him one of his own sailors whom he leaves behind, whom he leaves in a village of savages on the muddy banks of a great river without any expectation of returning.'
'And what became of the man?'
'My informant did not know. He left the ship when they got back to England and heard no more of the story. But he had not forgotten it. The sailor was hardly a man at all but a boy, barely sixteen years old.'
'His case, Sir, was very different than mine. Firstly, I stay because I choose it for, as you put it, my own motives. And secondly then I know for sure, I am confident that, you will return. You are as you say a man of business not a courtier.'
'Yes, Thomas, I will be back.' And the Captain had him sign a paper concerning the wager that had been made and showed him the money the crew had staked on it, and locked both the document and the coins into a chest. 'And next year I may bring my own son with me. He also will be sixteen by then. Perhaps it is because of him that I think of that boy.'
'Then I shall meet him.'
'What did you say?'
'Next season, when you come, I shall meet your son.'
And the Captain turned and showed interest in him again. 'You do not have a son, Thomas, no family ashore?'
'Once, sir, I might have had a son. No indeed, in fact, once I did have a son.'
The ink on his pen has dried. The fire in the stove has burned down. No, he will not think that way. Thomas Cave stokes up the fire, watches until the flames burn steady again, returns to the table and cleans and dips the pen.
The changes in the weather here come as sudden and total transformations. At once, a blizzard, swirling, obscuring every single thing, and then as suddenly it abates and there is a stillness and clarity as if all before one's eyes is made from glass. The change of the season however has followed a steady and doom-laden progression despite the tempests and the fiuctuations of wind and temperature. Those creatures with whom I have shared the island appeared to understand this. All through the past six and more weeks I have observed the departure of the birds that in the first days of my solitude flocked so densely in the sky along the strand and about the cliffs. Gulls, auks, petrels, guillemots, kittiwakes, others whose names are unknown to me, have grouped and taken off for the south, one species after another until not a screech nor a wing can be heard overhead and the silence begins to deafen. Day by day the appearance of the sun has been limited to a noticeably briefer time until days came when its orb, big, coloured and strangely flattened in form, hovered scarcely a few minutes over the southern horizon though the red glow from it might persist for a long period across a wide band at the foot of the sky. Ice filled all the bay with similar inevitability, appearing first prettily as distant ships with sails, sometimes white, sometimes blue, sometimes tinged pink and lilac as touched by the vanishing light, receding, returning, then becoming permanent as the water about them first steamed and then congealed and froze at last into a hard crust.
It has become my habit to climb each day to a lookout on the mountain behind the beach to catch what best view lean have of the retreating sun — so often that it is possible now in the twilight to pick out the clear path that my feet have trodden in the snow. The last few days the sight of it was so slight that I did not know how much of it existed only in a trick of the eye or the delusion of my imagination, but on this day, the fifteenth of October, not even the finest slip of it did appear. I know that for this year I have now seen the last of the sun. The great cold is coming.
5
THERE WAS A TIME of domesticity before this. A closed room, cold outside, a fire within. When he learned a craft through the long hours of winter afternoons, a trade by which he had thought to earn his living when his life with the sea was done, learned from her father the shaping of lasts, the making of soles and heels, the cutting and stitching and burnishing of leather. Then as now he worked to the sound of the fire in the stove, working against the murmur of steady flames, the crack and fall of logs. Then also life seemed pulled close to the small immediacy of a single square room, a single firelit heart with the world immense and distant outside.
The need for routine has become the more to him as the pattern of the days and nights has disappeared. In September there was an easy sanity to be found in the knowledge that he could depend on sunrise and sunset to mark his hours, then mark the ends of the day with prayer and with a meal. Since the loss of the sun he has attempted assiduously to continue to observe the normal passage of time, setting the rhythms of waking and eating to the times of his prayers, naming the days to himself and marking them down, taking note each day of the length of the period in which some glimmer of daylight still persists in the southern sky, when there is light, say, to read the verses of the Testament or to make out only the titles and heads of the pages, taking when visibility permits an observation of the size and form of the moon and noting it so that he can continue even when that light is gone to keep a precise record of the days of the week and the months as they pass.
He wakes, prays, rakes the embers, resets the fire. In this designated morning, if he does not hunt, he chops wood or makes adjustments and improvements to his quarters, in the simplest contrivances of which he takes a childlike satisfaction. He has extended with a length of sailcloth the chimney hood that overhangs the stove and both improved its draw and reduced the smokiness in the air. Such comforts matter to him greatly. More ingeniously, he has used a sheet of lead taken from one of the coolers to construct a lamp in which he can burn whale oil as luxuriously as the richest merchant in Copenhagen. In this clear glow of light he may sit through the rest of his day, writing his log, reading his Bible, making the wooden heels of shoes.
So many heels he has made already that he has set up a shelf against the wall facing the table and lined them up upon it. So many that one evening he looks up unconsciously from his work and suddenly the sight of all those heels sets him laughing: he laughs at the absurdity of dozens of he
els, heels to be paired and fitted to shoes and covered or painted black or red, heels to be worn and danced on and scrape the floor, to sink in mud and clack on cobbles; the ludicrous idea, it seems suddenly to him, of so many people being in existence, even if there were only as many people in the whole of the world as half the number of the heels he has made, two heels each man or woman, the one odd heel on the shelf beyond the even numbers denoting perhaps a one-legged man or someone perhaps like a boy he had known in his childhood whose left leg had ceased to grow after an illness and dangled useless and unshod beside his crutch and the knee of the sturdy right one. He laughs aloud and the sound cracks through the silence of the chamber. He laughs until the tears run at the picture of those frivolous shoes and feet shuffling and hopping about. He snorts and blows air from his nostrils, and when the laugh fades his face is warm and the muscles of it feel unfamiliarly stretched.
And after the laughter his eyes again well over. He looks about him. So many echoes there are in the room as the sound dies. He sees it suddenly with pity for himself, the crude windowless chamber and his attempts to make a home of it, sees how in its arrangement he has in so many details mimicked the other house even when he has not been conscious of doing so. The way he has hung his coat on a hook from the back of the door. The arrangement of his tools laid out as on Hans's bench. The hymnal and the Bible stacked in their place beside the bed. The piece of embroidered cloth with which he had wrapped the fiddle spread and draped like a gull's outstretched wings on the rough wooden wall. The fiddle itself.
He has not played it yet. He has not touched it since he put it out. He cannot bring himself to play it for fear the sound might set off an avalanche in him. Men said that a sound could do that, though he has never seen the evidence of it with his eyes. Men said that a sound could set snow and ice, a whole mountainside, hurtling down; and here in the North, in the unstable conditions of summer, when the whalers went inland or sailed beside the glacier cliffs they passed beneath hushed and aware. Would music do that also, would music have the same effect on what is frozen inside him, would music set him crashing down?
Yet now for just a moment the silence that has held like a taboo in the room has been broken. He takes the instrument down from its wooden pegs. Not to play it but to handle it only, he tells himself, to run the pads of his fingers down it, to pluck a string and see how far its tune has drifted in the cold. Just one distorted note: a flicker of memory, eyes and a swirl of skirts. He carries the instrument to his cot at the fireside, sits, lays it on his knees, his chapped hands cradling it gently as a baby. In the warm patch of light its wood glows like a conker taken new from its spiny green casing. So much is contained there within its hollow body: the potential of sound and the memory of sound, and not only music but all the people and evenings past, a thousand people, a hundred different places. He closes his eyes, his cheeks still damp beneath them. Slightly, as if a vibration runs through him from the floor, as if the ground beneath juddered, his head begins to rock from side to side. It is not any evening that comes to him but one in particular, a long evening in a northern port that opens with strangers and music and ends with a sense of friends though he could not have put a name to any one of them, with wandering out in the moonlight to find his lodging with the face of a girl in his mind, hot and blue-eyed and washed about with hair.
He went with a Dane from the ship, was taken because the sailor knew that he could play. It was a wedding party though he spoke to neither groom nor bride. He spoke few words of any kind all that evening, only the little smattering of English, Dutch, Danish that he had in common with the rest. Music served him well enough for communication, eye to eye with the other players, nodding heads, fingers, chords, rhythms, ripples of notes; where to come in, to follow, to leave off; patterns mastered and racing to crescendo. Then all about him there were bodies moving, faces turning; grinning mouths, eyes alight, clapping and stamping; and at last the music began to blur and his fingers to slide, and he was aware of nothing so much as one distinct point that stood out to him in the crowd: a mass of hair that fell out of its knot on to a girl's shoulders, dark blonde and so much of it and so thick that it fell in a wave like a mane as she was turned about and cantered through her steps. By this time in the evening the fiddle was a part of him and he played on scarcely conscious of separation between the music and himself, and his eyes followed the flash of the girl's hair as if there was no separation there either, as if it were he himself who was making it spin directly through the action of his fingers, spinning the girl round and out of her partner's hands, spinning her through to the end of the dance. And when the music stopped she sank almost to the floor with a sigh and then after a moment she rose and folded the hair back against the heat of her neck, and for the first time he took note of her face, which was generous and regularly proportioned but would not have been distinctive were it not for the richness of the hair about it and for the wide-open blueness of her eyes.
So brief a time he knew her, that first occasion has not tarnished, still outshines the rest.
There was a shoemaker who had a shop close by the quay., Another sailor recommended him to Cave, saying that this man made boots that were both stout and supple and lasted in the sea and snow. His name was Hans Jakobsen and he wore fine samples of his work on his feet although he could not walk without two sticks, since he had injured his spine in an accident in his youth. When Cave went to find the place he saw the girl again. She was walking on the street that they called the Strand and he asked directions, but she did not tell him that the shoemaker's was the very house from which she had come. Her hair was hidden beneath a linen cap and her neck beneath it was fragile. Her eyes showed no recognition as she spoke to him but that was not surprising since he must have looked so different in the street, just a sailor come to the port and buying boots, not a musician transfigured by his playing; and besides, she had a basket in her hand and her mind was no doubt occupied with what she must buy at market. She accorded him no more than the courtesy she would have given to any honest-looking stranger. Her voice was lower than he would have expected, measured, older, and shared the same quality of calm as her eyes. And that was it, the extent of their first contact. Thank you and good day, and he went in and ordered his boots, and when they were made he came back and collected them without seeing her again, and they were as good boots as he had been told, of thick waterproof cowhide and triple-soled to keep out the cold, so that on the next occasion he came to the port he went back to the shop for more, and saw her again.
On this visit Hans Jakobsen told him to sit and pass the time while he went on with his work before him. The job could be lonely, he said, shut in the shop day after day with only an ignorant boy apprentice and a songbird for company, while all the world came in and went out again. Once in a while he liked a man to stop and report of his voyages and what he had seen. So many years he had worked here by the Strand, since his boyhood, he had learned snippets of many languages and English enough to hear a tale or two. Thomas Cave liked the look of intelligence in the older man, the interest and mobility in his face, the crispness of his movements which showed how fit was his upper body despite the weakness of his unused legs. So he found a seat for himself, which was hard as the shop was small and crowded, with shoes and lasts hanging from the beams and swatches of leather on every available surface, and sat and smoked a pipe in the Dutch style and answered the other man's questions. Rarely had he heard himself talk so much. Jakobsen took a shoe on to his knee for stitching and turned it round and his awl stabbed the leather, so fast and precise that you would have thought all his concentration was for his work save for the sharpness and unceasing curiosity of his questions. How tall were the men he had seen on the African coast? Was it true that their wives had necks as long as swans'? What was this thing they called a banana and how did one taste?
Imagine a fruit yellow and long and curved but thick as the handle of your hammer, he answered, laughing, and the flesh soft as that
of a medlar but with the pureness and colour of butter. And through the open door he saw the girl working in the back of the house and he realised by some resemblance in her look and her eyes that she was Jakobsen's daughter. He was glad that she was not married yet.
He passed the whole of the afternoon in the shop and yet he did not get the chance to speak with her. And when he went back up the steps to the street on his two strong legs he felt an envy for the life of the crippled man who went nowhere but stayed in that one place that was his own and had his daughter by him and worked wood and leather in his hands.
These days and nights without form he knows that he cannot afford to indulge his thoughts too much. Given a chance they can become more vital than his reality. The phase of the month without moon is the worst. When there is moon there is light, a light which amongst the snow possesses a wonderful clarity like distilled daylight, and there is also movement, change, the visible passage of time. The moonless days are dead days and those more than any others affect his spirits. On those days more than any others he prays, prays to the Lord that he can resist the temptation to melancholy.
He prays for sleep also, knowing now as he has not known before how sleep may be God's greatest gift: His last creation on the Seventh Day, the culmination of His work. Sleep, it comes to him, is God's order. And in this place where the pattern of time is broken, where the sun is obscured and light and darkness are no longer divided, where the very ocean freezes to the hardness of rock and with the forms of rock within it, it takes an effort of will to hold to God's order. It is a pattern that he imposes upon himself, lying on his cot for the allotted period whether or not his body or, more difficult, his mind, has the inclination to sleep, then rising to observe the rituals of the day. And yet he fears what will in fact be the case: that he will not sleep and wake again in clear and orderly stretches until day and night are re-established in the world outside.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 4