He went to find the Pastor. As he felt the kindness of the snow on him he wondered if it was any longer necessary. The women had pressed him to it and for a time he had resisted. 'See, she is in agony,' they said. 'She is too weak, she will never push it out.' There were so many visiting women, so many voices who knew what he did not. 'She will tear,' said an old woman, some thin crone from up the street on whom he had never set eyes before: 'It will tear her apart from the inside.' Even good Anna Nielsdatter, the baker's wife, who had looked after Johanne often when she was a child: 'I have borne seventeen children, two sets of twins, six stillborn, and I have never known a birth like this.' So many voices at him and yet he did not act until she herself asked and he saw that her hope was almost gone.
The snow clung to the tower of the church, lodged in the carvings of the stones in the churchyard. It lay on the black brim of the Pastor's hat and in the folds of his cloak as he walked. It fell like petals outside the window of her room so that when he called her to consciousness that the Pastor was there she asked suddenly if the cherry tree beyond the wall was in flower.
And they knelt in the room and spoke prayers and the Pastor read from the Bible. The door opened and people came and went as they prayed, and when he looked round he saw that Kirsten Pedersdatter knelt among them and the daughter who looked like her beside her, and did not know why it was that he was surprised to see them.
When the Pastor left most of the women left with him, going out and down the narrow stairs with a steady rustle of skirts like a procession. The grey room seemed to settle behind them as if it was cleared of more than their presence, as if it was cleared of action, of effort and fear, all the air in it exhausted and exhaled. Only Kirsten Pedersdatter and her daughter remained besides himself and Hans, who had left his tools at last to take up a place at the bedside.
'Thank you, Mistress Pedersdatter, for all you have done. I know that you have great skill and have worked hard. Whatever comes to pass is no more than God's will.' In his new resignation he felt that he must settle with her, thank and straighten accounts.
'Wait. One thing, there is just one thing. If you will allow me, there is perhaps one last thing more that we may do.'
Insistent voice, insistent eyes. As she spoke the spasms racked through Johanne's body again and he did not know that he could bear any more, let alone that she could.
'My daughter has brought me a drug that was prepared by a friend, a woman who has taught me much. It might yet give her the strength to expel the child that I know still lives inside her.' Her words were like a drum to his head. Her mirror-daughter stood beside her, doubling her persuasion. 'I know that it lives, I have heard its heartbeat, weak but still there. It is a strong child and she is a strong woman. Let me try this, I ask you.' And she brought out from a cloth bag her daughter handed her a small phial of blue glass. 'I cannot say for sure what it will do, only that I trust the woman who made it more than I trust myself.'
More hope, more pain. His mind reeled. He looked across the bed to Hans but never had he seen that intent and expressive face so closed, absent to him. He looked outside. The snow outside fell so softly, covering, blanketing everything, as if no more effort should be made, as if everything should be blanketed in its soft white cover.
He thinks now that hope hurts more than anything.
These days of false dawns have been anguish to him. He has woken to the beginning of light, to a pinkness in the southern sky that has spread itself and crept about the entire horizon, all about his vision, the pinkness of a sun about to rise that holds him expectant through all the hours of a day and then fades and leaves him cheated. At the time that he must imagine to be midday he has seen brightness and shadow move high on the mountains to the south of the island as the light of a hidden sun passes across them. At that same hour for each of the past three days he has climbed the mountain at the end of the beach and looked, and he has thought he has seen the tip of the yellow disc of the sun on the horizon, only to have it flicker and waver like a mirage and disappear. Now again he fights his way up the mountainside, fights because of the wind that has arisen, cold as any wind he has known in this desolate place, which comes again and again in icy gusts and tries to push him down. He climbs bent low so that he is not caught in the full force of it and blown away, and when he nears the top finds that he must crawl on hands and knees and at last lie flat on the rock that the wind has bared of snow.
He sees the mountains laid out, the crumpled ice of the bay and the fjord, the mountains of the land on the other side, and far away, the vague stillness of the frozen ocean. Everything has faint colour, the pinkness of the sky everywhere reflected, the shadows lilac, all quite unreal. For a second he thinks he does at last see the sun, forming all at once yellow and round distinctly above the horizon and separated from it, and then remembers that that is not at all how the sun appears and understands that this again can only be a mirage.
Is it the wind or is it the despair in him that whips tears to his eyes and clouds his vision? A blue bottle: more pain. Why did he let them give it to her? He lets himself stand in the wind and a great gust takes him and blows him away. For an instant he is blown into air as if he might fly, and then he crashes down on his shoulder, his hip, his head, crashes and rolls down the mountainside, his limbs thrown about him. Some great distance he falls, he knows only the sensation and the pain, and then, with sudden extreme awareness, knows that an avalanche has begun to fall with him. So, he knows it now: he is gone, he will be buried spread flat as he is upon the snow, the mountain itself will bury him where there is no man to do it. And yet he continues to fall and the snow covers him no deeper than a spray flying back across his body, and he realises that it is carrying him. He is being carried on the surface of the avalanche like a raft on rapids, the current tossing and throwing him but all the while rushing him down. Lord, if only there is no rock. If only this will end without a rock. And at last, with surprising softness, he finds that he has come to rest. He opens his eyes to the merciful snow heaped beneath him and to the lilac sky. How far he has fallen and yet he is still alive. He had not thought it possible. The Shepherd gathers his lost sheep and saves them from harm. Slowly he picks himself up, almost as if he must gather the pieces of himself together, as if he is not sure that they will fit together again. His head has taken a sharp blow: he can feel the swelling on it, the blood in his matted hair. He has pains too in his shoulder where his weight first fell, in his ankle and in his chest. He speaks to himself, would speak aloud if the cold had not contracted his lips and reduced his voice to a ventriloquist's whisper. Slowly now, Thomas Cave. Have patience, man, have care. Hold to the sober way you have always lived, one step at a time, never giving way to emotion or despair. The Lord has brought you this far; now it is to yourself to bring yourself in. You yourself are your own witness as much as the Lord. You know your strength, your weakness. By discipline, by reason and by care, you can control the means of your survival.
Each step he takes hurts him. He counts five, then stops, falls to the ground and lies there without sense of time. No good, he tells himself, that is not how you save yourself. Keep count, keep track. You have not been here all these months to let go now. Pick yourself up again, you did it before. Again, five steps. A pause. Five more and he leans on a rock to catch his breath. Stabs of pain in his shoulder and his ankle, yet the ankle will just take his weight. Next time he forces himself to a dozen steps and rests standing on his good leg. In this way, stage by stage, he makes his way back to the tent.
He sees the child at once, lit in the glow from the stove. A baby asleep. It sleeps with that serenity seen only in the very young, such trust in the smoothness of the closed eyelids, the curl of the lashes, the faint curl of a mouth that smiles in a dream. It is plump and warm, the shawl in which it is wrapped loose about it, basking in a warmth that he enveloped in all his furs can scarcely imagine. Can this be his son? For the first time he knows what it is to have a living son. He kneels d
own, takes in the pinkness of the boy's cheeks, the softness of his skin, his round arms, his little loosely clenched fists, the dark-gold curls beneath his cap. He removes a glove and understands that even the most tender touch would burn like ice on that little coiled hand that seems to reach out to him.
What if he were to touch him? Would he wake and cry, a boy's lusty cry to fill the cabin, or would he disappear? He reaches out in wonder and in horror, holds his fingers an inch away; their tips can sense the warmth that comes off a sleeping body. If this is a hallucination, he could not have believed one could be so complete, so warm, so alive. Even she did not come so alive to him.
12
HE SITSCLOSE to the fire as he can be, closes his eyes in his reeling head. Slowly, as the heat penetrates, he begins to distinguish the separate pains. He sees that he must be thankful. He was lucky, or blessed, to be caught so in the white hands of the snow. His ankle pains him badly. It is blinding torture to take off his boot but when he examines the injury he is reassured to see that the joint bends this way and that as far as its swelling will allow and he believes that he will be able to walk on it again before too long. The colour of the bruising is already violent and he can imagine it will be as bad on his back and on his ribs though he has not stripped himself of his clothing which belongs on him now like a matted extra skin. How much worse it could have been. With much discomfort he kneels to pray, thanks God for his deliverance. And then he tries to find an easy position on the cot and attempts to rest. The silence in the cabin is suddenly so complete that he believes that the wind outside has entirely dropped.
It is only a short time before he compels himself to move again, flexes his stiffening body and his ankle in an attempt to keep them supple. He finds himself a stick of a good size and hobbles across the room, hobbles even to the outer door of the tent to see.
This night the lights have shot across the sky in the most terrible manner, like as the world was bound to end or as if it had ended already in all places but here. It was as if I might have seen in the heavens the reflection of a distant battle, the flames, the palls of smoke, the arcs of gunfire, all reversed and distorted and discoloured into faint and indescribable shades of green and rose, orange and violet, all the violent sound of it reduced at this great distance to a whirring like that of spinning wings.
In truth it was only a hint of a sound, a whirring or whistling so faint that he did not know if it was in his head or outside of it, and beneath its strange high hum he seemed to hear a softer tone, a contralto murmur that came and went like waves. It sounded like a voice, a woman's voice, her voice soothing the child: a lullaby sung beneath the breath in that language of hers that was so plain and bare to feeling.
He thinks that he does not sleep more than a moment for all the throbbing of his body and his brain. He does not even attempt sleep for most of that night but sits up at the table in the lamplight as he had in the early days and engrosses himself in his work, chipping away persistently and mechanically as if by doing so he might make his mind inert as the materials he handles, dull the pictures in it, make it plain, true, predictable as wood and metal.
The picture of Johanne, laid out, hair spread on to her shoulders. Once the agony was over her face was calm and he knew her again. And even as he did he wondered how far he had ever known her when he could not begin to understand what had passed inside, as if she had only ever been an idea to him, a dream, a surface, a texture, not herself but a face, a girl, a wife.
She was never so real as what is in his hands. Wood, metal. These things he can know. Not those others.
Not that creature beside her. He had them cover it so that he did not have to see.
This work he can do without thinking now, he could shape heels with his eyes closed. To better engage his mind he has thought to make himself a pair of clogs: the bases hollowed out of wood, warm on the cold ground; the uppers of sealskin, well-oiled and with the fur turned outwards as he has seen on the boots of Lappish traders. He has found a block of beech from off the ship that will serve well, has taken some sealskin, scraped and steeped it until it is supple.
The indentation of the sole, the rise of the instep; it is true what Hans had told him, that he has an instinct for the craft. They might have worked well together if he had stayed. They might have expanded the shop to serve the gentry, taken on another boy or two, hired a servant to greet the ladies: Jakobsen and Cave, shoemakers of Copenhagen. Only he knew, knew as clear as if he had already lived it, what sort of life that would have been. The hollowness of it, that set a terrible silent clamour echoing within him. People all around, and the absence of them inside. The faces of the fashionable like masks; the faces of all, eyes, smiles, voices, false and alien to him. The city in which he had thought to find a home as alien without her as any place that he had ever been to, any place where he had come to shore with sea-worn eyes out of focus; all its acquired familiarity, its houses, its spires, its known sights, no more than things he might at some distant time have been shown a picture of or imagined in a dream.
And yet he had stayed some weeks, two, three months, without the impulse to move. He had stayed at first as he must to see them buried in the graveyard, mother and child-that-had-not-been, the two in one coffin as if the instant of separation had never occurred, the one name upon the stone.
Stay, said Hans. In the day, in the shop with work before them, it was well. What he could not bear was the quiet in the evening.
He saw the whale ships leave harbour at the start of the season, the Gabriel on which he had sailed the year before. He had refused his place on her yet when he saw her go he suddenly envied the look of her, sailing out on a fresh breeze one April morning when all the roofs and towers of the city glowed bright behind. It seemed brave on such a fine spring day to sail out towards the ice when there on the land the grass began to ripple in the meadows and the blossom blew off the trees. He watched until she was gone from the horizon and knew that before long, somehow, he also would be gone.
The next ship that would take him was a cargo ship bound for the Shetlands. He did not care where she went. Swiftly he took his leave, took with him in addition to what he had come with only a shawl that Johanne had embroidered, of fine creamy wool patterned with coloured threads, and this he used to wrap his violin. He wrapped the instrument with care though he had not played it since those strange days in the upstairs room, took not a note from it as he folded it in the wool, and the bow beside it, and packed it at the top of his chest. He could find no suitable words with which to part from Hans Jakobsen, who had closed his shop and had the apprentice help him all the way to the dock to see him leave. So long as I remain there is place for you here, Hans told him, and it was pathetic to see him lean so on the dull boy's shoulders.
Good Hans. Goodbye Hans. He could explain nothing. There was no one else from whom he felt the need to take his leave. None on the new ship would know that the English sailor they took on board had any more than a passing connection with the city nor any but the most elementary knowledge of the Danish language.
They made it quickly to Lerwick, the same fair gale behind them all the way, a quick, fresh voyage that whipped life into his cheeks if not into his soul. The Shetlands seemed nowhere: plain, bare islands beaten by the sea and suited to his mood. He left the Danish ship, took his chest and went ashore. He found lodging at an inn. Those he met there asked how long he would stay but he answered only an indefinite time, as if he were waiting for something to occur. He had there an attic room with a high view out over the harbour to the sea, and a number of times each day, so many repeated minutes he could not add and count them, he stood with his long back bent beneath the slope of the roof and looked into the grey distance, feeling inside himself that same blank boredom that he had known on the longest voyages. It was, he thought, the way a man feels when he has been gone so long from the point of departure that the purpose of a journey is lost and with it all sense of the possibility of arrival.
&n
bsp; There were many ships that passed across his view. He observed their passage in and out the harbour with no more interest than if they had been driftwood on the sea. He could barely have said which was coming and which going, let alone which way they were headed. He must have seen the Heartsease coming in from the south, a sturdy three-masted bark, seventy tons, nothing special about her, no particular reason he should note her. There were other English ships, other whalers even, putting in for water and last supplies before the final haul north.
A shaft of sun was all it took, breaking the clouds. He was standing idle by the harbour, and there was a brilliant shaft of sunlight and into it stepped the figure of Captain Marmaduke. Then he knew the energy of the black-haired Captain, the force of his smile. We're short a man. The firmness of his handshake.
Two days later he was high in the rigging of the Heartsease with the scream of gulls about him. He saw the rocky island recede and marvelled that it could remain so fixed with all the winds and tides and currents that pressed upon it.
How good it had been at first to come again to the briskness of the North. Somewhere hard and cold. Somewhere that had no memory. No history of man. Or woman.
Such crispness there was on that ship. She had been held some days before the Scottish coast, made it late to Shetland and now on the voyage north she sped to make up the lost time. He had heard the name of Captain Thomas Marmaduke even in the Danish ports, and was impressed to see the boldness of the man and his sureness of the Greenland seas. He took them further than any of the whalers of the Companies, beyond the scope of charts, east and beyond where only Barents was known to have been, up a wide fjord where the ice had only just broken up and to the great bay that came to be called Duke's Cove, to which he had led a trio of Hull ships the previous year. The crew were mostly Hull men with open faces and heavy voices, save for the Biscayans who did the skilled whaling work and who were dark and popish and crossed themselves for fear and luck and when they woke in the morning and before they slept.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 9