Beneath the weight of his rugs, he knows her. He knows the hardness of her pregnant belly. That had surprised him at first, its hardness. Her belly is taut like clenched muscle; it has not the softness of woman to it. And because of it he must take her differently and she must come on him. Slow she comes on him, taut, hard, strong, like a ship climbing a wave. Her face is strange and her eyes are closed and her breasts full as sails, the veins showing in them, the nipples dark and roughened and distended, and he closes his eyes also and has no thoughts in the surf.
After, there are words again, easy words.
'Do you remember last winter, Johanne, how cold we thought it? How we said to each other that it was one of the coldest we had known? Day after day of biting north-easterlies and the sky leaden and damp above us. On the streets within the town, ice froze layer upon layer so that walking out was like walking on uneven bubbled glass, and horses slithered and people fell and broke their limbs. It became worse as the weeks passed, with every further melt or snow fall or new freezing, and down every alley the tipped water from household pots made hazards or thin-iced traps. You of course stayed inside most of that time. You wore that red jacket that you loved, with only the top buttons fastened now as you were so big, and a dark shawl over it sometimes and a heavy dark woollen skirt. You sat in a pool of warmth with your swollen ankles up upon a stool and stitched or made tidy pieces of lace. I remember that I thought your stillness very beautiful, the huge wrapped calm of you. Even so there were times when you shivered and looked pinched and you complained of chilblains in your fingers that made it hard to handle the little wooden bobbins.'
He speaks to her in his mind, not breaking the silence. He would not dare to, as if he knows that the brashness of his voice would drive her out. He is aware of her unreality even as the words rise within him.
'I think that I had never lived in such a way before. Not since I was a child in a home I never told you of, in a village two days' walk from the sea, and when I was young I did not see it thus. I was impatient then to be away and my father sent me at the age of twelve to learn the sea from a cousin, his mother's sister's son, in the major port along that stretch of coast. It was where in a sense my life, my life as myself, my life as I could tell the story of it, began. Not in the village, not as the small child I was. I have little memory of him, only a picture of a sober boy who had a mother who was gentle and carried about with her ever smaller children than himself, until one day she died and was not there, and left him with his father and five brothers. I do not think I could tell you more about that early time.'
He is surprised at himself. He begins to be carried away on his words. In this solitude he has begun to look within himself and into his past in a way that he has never done before. He has always been a silent, contained man, but not a thinker. He has lived a life of action surrounded by other men and he has vested his interest in material things. That has been his philosophy: to act, to work, to understand the mechanics of what he does. Not to indulge in pictures and dreams and chameleon memories. Now he feels almost a guilt at what she has tempted him to do, as if it is a sin.
He opens his eyes. He has had them closed to let the pictures run through his head. He wills himself to rise. As though if he did, if he acted like a man beginning an ordinary day, the sun itself would rise, the world melt and come to life outside, the stream run again across the beach, the sea begin to swell and move. But for now his will lies frozen. He seems to have the strength only to turn on to his back and look up to the rough wooden ceiling. He feels his stillness on him like a weight, like the furs holding him down. Something in the fire hisses and draws his attention, and though he does not look he pictures her there seated beside it, seated upright in the chair gently making lace. It has not occurred to him before but perhaps, now he thinks of it, she is a little like his mother.
'It was so very different, that winter when I was with you and the Sound froze over. The type of cold so very different my love from here. Here cold is wholly another sensation.'
His thoughts turn, repeat. What is he doing, talking to someone who is not there? He is tired. He huddles in the furs on his cot. It is not the cold that he fears most now but the inertia of his existence. It may be that the inertia itself is a product of the cold and the incessant dark and of his poor rations, but it is that which he feels crushing his soul: inactivity, enervation, indolence. He lives in constant fatigue, he drifts between waking and sleeping, his brain turning without focus, his identity becoming frozen, clear and yet thick, opaque as ice. Speaking to Johanne reminds him who he is. Was. Again he sees her, gazing vacantly now at the fire with the circle of lace forgotten on her round belly.
'Did I tell you, Johanne, of the time I went to the Americas? We sailed across the mouth of a great river so wide that it was like a sea, and on its shores was a jungle so dense that a man could not step into it. Captain Duke when I was talking with him here - just the other day it seems, though it was in truth many months ago now but they have passed without time - Captain Duke spoke of this very same river and made mention of a boy who was left there by Raleigh, not there where my ship went but far inland along its banks. I think of him in these days because of some similarity and at the same time contrariness in our situation. I wonder if the ship went back, if he survived to see it, if anyone ever found out what became of him.'
It is such a small thing, one boy's fate beside the great brown river and the hugeness of the jungle. He has tried to imagine the boy walking alone in the heavy green heat. He pictures an impossible tangle of vegetation, a rich and rotten smell, a seething abundance of life, but he cannot see the boy there. The boy is insubstantial to him, a wisp, a wavering mirage before the substantiality of the place.
Just then he hears a great crack like a gunshot reverberating across the island. It is the sound of the ice cracking: whenever the temperature dips sharply the place resounds with the writhe of the ice.
And who is he, Thomas Cave? A man from Suffolk strayed into the empty enormity of the North. A man of experience, unlike that boy, with a life behind him. A grown man without love or issue. A wintry stalk of a man, dried-up and hollow inside. A man who makes the wooden heels of shoes, who used to be a sailor, who once played the violin. A man who lets a ghost draw his thoughts, and speaks to her as if she is real as himself.
He cries out suddenly in fear. 'Johanne, why do you come to me? Did you come with the lights? I have heard men say that there are souls in the lights, the souls of the unborn but perhaps those of the dead also. Or do you come from my mind? Is it that I am so astonished with the snow?'
Is this the beginning of it, then? Is this how a man falls prey to what is in his mind, how the madness and the scurvy will get to him? But Thomas Cave has always been a resourceful man, rational and pragmatic. He will not give way so easily.
A man is what he does, God is his witness to his actions. A man who does nothing is nothing. So he will go out. He will hunt. He will not let her take him.
There are sealskins in the outer cabin, scraped and dried, frozen in a pile stiff as planks. He breaks one off and brings it in, and when he has melted and softened it he cuts it to make a mask. He fits it around his head, cuts slits for his eyes and a round hole for his mouth, ties it with cord. He wraps his neck and head in a woollen shawl and puts on his hat and great coat of wolfskin over all, fits his hands into fingerless woollen gloves with clumsy skin mittens above. When he steps outside he is scarcely human in appearance, a slow cumbersome beast with a musket on his shoulder.
For three successive nights there has been a great white ring about the orb of the moon. The light is so bright that he casts a neanderthal shadow on the snow. He seeks other moving forms in the stillness. For minutes at a time he watches an upstanding rock to see if it will move, or a cask left on the beach and blanketed in snow that may at a distance be a lurking bear. He examines shadows, scours the white ground for the patterns of prints. He believes that there are bears about. In the last few
days he thinks he has heard them snuffling about the walls of the cabin though he has not caught sight of one. But either he imagined them or the wind must have swept away their tracks and there are now only the marks made by his own feet in their broad snowboots, meandering out towards the mountain and then back along the ice. He does not return until his fingertips begin to burn with the frost inside their gloves. His stomach feels bruised but he does not know if it is with the cold or with the longing for fresh meat.
9
SOME DAYS THE cold is so sharp even within his chamber that he must warm stones at the fire and wrap them and hold them to the small of his back to keep himself from freezing. He huddles curled, immobile, within the few square yards of warmed space before the stove, his awareness so dulled that he cannot reckon the hours.
And yet he preserves his discipline.
Whenever the temperature rises, just so much as to lift the numbness or the pain, he forces himself out. He takes up his skins and a musket, and hunts. Even were there no chance of prey the affirmation implied in this activity would help to keep him alive. As it is, if there is prey to be had then he will find it.
His shipmates have always known him for his skill at hunting. It was a knowledge he brought with him out of his boyhood on the land, a knowledge of tracking and trapping that he had learnt before ever he saw the sea. He is proud of his skill and has always been among the first to go ashore for meat in whatever place he has come to, be it these Greenland shores or the hot coasts of Africa or the Americas. He has shot antelope and alligators, he has caught green parakeets on limed twigs, set snares for monkeys and lizards, brought down such other nameless extraordinary beasts that he thought would amaze the people of his distant home. And yet it is all one, whether you trap a rabbit or an armadillo. It comes down to a question of instinct: the eye for the pattern of an animal's movement, the tension on the thread of a snare. Instinct, and patience.
By the end of January there is a twilight lasting hours on end. He watches through it, watches for movements of shadows, for indications of life, and the minutes pass and his mind seems to fall between them into other times. There have been so many waitings in his life: the waiting in port, the waiting on ship, waiting through calms, waiting for wind, waiting for the child. He looks out into the long twilight and it seems to him that he has been waiting all of his life. There was a waiting in the English winter when he would go out with his slingshot to hunt the pigeons that roosted in the trees on the commons before the river, he going out early with his brother into the mist and watching through that long vulnerable moment before dawn. So many years it must be since he has thought of that. A half-light like this, and yet it was not like this, for there he knew that it would soon be over, and the birds begin to call and colours break the sky. Here in the North there is no relief: the hung moment extends to the edge of his endurance. He wraps himself tighter against the cold, plods further into the snow, searches, checks traps, moves on. Sometimes he tracks a bear a long way and must turn back daunted at the distance it would appear that the animal can cover, the speed with which it seems to travel. And yet always he is back before the twilight dims, and it lingers longer and longer so that it begins to seem a ghostly kind of day.
Whenever there is a chance of it I take out the musket and look for game. I have had no success since that great bear before Christmas, more than one month past, though I have made a number of sightings. My situation is not yet desperate though God grant that I may have an outcome soon.
It being close to the end of January and thus by my calculation a halfway point in my stay here I have these past few days made a thorough inventory of the stores remaining to me and their condition. I still have a fair quantity of dry stores, biscuit, sugar, cheese. All the ale and wine has frozen in its casks yet the wine at least is palatable when thawed. lam confident that if meat be forthcoming I shall have stores sufficient to last until the summer. Even so I have designated Wednesday a second day of fast in the week, in which I shall subsist on water and biscuit alone, in addition to the Fridays I have kept until now.
He continues to be meticulous in his reporting of the material things of his existence. He does so because, he tells himself, that is what interests Marmaduke — daylight practicalities, the physical things of life - but also, and this he knows but will not put into words, because the writing of this log holds him steady, every detail he writes, each bag of sugar that he counts, like ballast on his imagination. On the pages at the back of the log he has listed his inventoried stores and ruled lines down before them so that he can record in columns neat as those of any accounting housekeeper the quantities consumed. It has become a part of the preparation of each little meal he has: the measuring and the making of an entry in his little book; another piece of his monastic rule, like the saying of his prayers, the reading of his Bible, the making of another pair of wooden heels.
'You are a methodical man, Thomas, I never knew a man so methodical as you.'Johanne had watched him as he brought in his things for the first time, unpacked them into the room above the shop that was to be their own. He put his Bible on the table before the window, folded his clothes into the chest at the foot of the bed, set pegs into the wall from which to hang his fiddle. He was conscious of the way she looked at him, with a kind of tender respect that made him feel wiser than he was.
'It is so many years at sea,' he said, 'carrying about with you just a few things that you can call your own. It makes you tidy with them.'
It was not such a remarkable thing to say but she received it as if it was. Perhaps that was part of why he liked so much to be with her, that she gave him identity. She laughed at his jokes, took his thoughts as wisdom, touched him and made his body more alive.
Her breath is a warm draught down his neck.
'Such a methodical man, Thomas Cave.'
He hunches over his log, a monk-scribe resisting temptation. Only a crack in his thought and he has let her in.
I was disturbed this morning to discover when I went to fill my powder-horn that one of the powder-bags I had in store had somehow become damp and frozen. I have brought the bag as close to the fire as I dare to lay it and spread its contents to dry.
'I wish my dear that you would not read over my shoulder.'
'But Thomas you know that I cannot read.'
'In that case will you not see how by standing there you press in on me and take the light?'
He does not turn to see her but looks fixedly ahead, his tight words spoken from tight lips. Always he has been a man to hold his feelings tight. This is not Johanne, he tells himself, this is a phantom; he might rage at her if he would and he need feel no guilt. If only she would go. He wants her quite gone, out of his light and out of his mind. He pushes the chair back and it grates like the anger held in him. For the second time in a day he puts on his furs, takes the musket, the horn, the shot, and goes out into the cold twilight. He will not look back though he can sense her there watching. Such a glow there is in the sky now, such hints of dawn colour, that he can scarcely believe that the sun will not appear within minutes above the horizon yet he knows that it will not. For days this light has tantalised him and put his nerves on edge.
He decides that he will climb the mountain behind the beach where he last saw the sun. Each day conditions permit he will do that now, climb the mountain or at least to the lookout and watch for the first moment that the sun returns. It was always a steep climb and it is the harder now, as his old path is all gone and he must remember his way and tread it out again. Close to the summit he pauses, panting for breath, and looks down the way he has come. The slope looks smooth in the flatness of the light, steep and perfect as a sugar cone, a lilac glimmer to its surface. It looks as if he could sit and give a great push with his arms and slide back down on his behind smoothly as a child at play, slither right down to its base and come to a slow halt on the beach below. He follows the gradient with his eye, back down the way he came, and starts suddenly to see movement
down there on the path he has made. Just movement he sees, for in the twilight he cannot make out the form, which is no more than a smudge on the snow.
He climbs on, turns again. The pale shape follows his path, but closer now. All he need do is load the musket and wait for it to come within range. So lightly it moves, slowly gathering form as it approaches, advancing uphill with easy light steps, tracking him. A big bear, it seems, though he knows from experience how thick the fur is on these Greenland bears, how much bigger they look than they are when it comes down to meat and bone. He holds his breath as it comes, the wind blowing fine grains of snow into his face, wondering if at some point the bear will decide that his tracks are too fresh, will become wary and begin to circle round. Lord, let it not be so. Let the beast come close . . . The bear pauses, stands a moment on its hind legs, disconcertingly like a man, and sniffs the air. Thomas Cave fires the musket, directly at its head. And the animal lets out a great howl and is thrown backwards down the steep mountainside, somersaulting over again and again and continuing to howl as it falls. The sound stuns him where he stands above it in the landscape. It is so long since any sound of life has been heard here, any sound so gruesomely redolent of flesh and blood. Over and over it rolls and at last comes to rest against a rock.
He follows cautiously, reloads the gun, fires again at close range. The howls fade to whimpers and, at the last, a wet gurgle in the creature's throat. He goes and stands above it, like a bear himself in his furs. Deep inside he is hot, exalted with the killing. A grand beast bigger than himself, meat to last him many weeks, if he can get it home. See, woman, what a man can do. Out here, even here, where one man is so small, so minute on the face of God's frozen Earth.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 7