By the time I got to him the ice was frozen over again like glass, and its transparency was such that I could see him in the clear blue water beneath. He held his hands to his sides and swam with all his body like a seal, his uncut hair flowing out and his beard dividing like a fork beneath his chin, his tied legs making his feet into a seal's tail. He dived down deep, and seals came up from below to play with him. I cried out but he could not hear me under water, and I hammered with my boot on the ice to break it but it only became the thicker and more opaque.
When I knew I was awake, I was shivering. My wife wrapped the blankets about us and held me tightly to give me warmth. She said that she had never felt a man so cold.
She put her hand warm to my lips and quieted my cry. 'Shhh,' she said. 'Do not let the children wake. Breathe slow and let the warmth spread through you, and then tell me what you have seen.'
It seemed a long time before I could find words. I heard the rustle of the bedding heavy as if it were canvas, heard the children's sleeping breaths loud and insistent, heard the bark of a dog outside and its cry carried by other dogs about the town, every sensation heightened and only slowly fading into ordinariness.
At last I told her that it was my horror in my dream that I could not break through and save him.
Again she put a finger to my panicked lips.
'Coming back to us does not mean that you have abandoned your search, only that you do not know where else to look. So go no further. Continue your search instead from here if you must. See who comes by and talk to them, and when you travel somewhere, then speak to men there also. Open the subject and tell the story of his winter in the North. Say that he came back here, and see then what others have to offer. If he is alive and in the district, sooner or later you will find him out.'
23
A FULL YEAR it took. And then this summer when I was down the coast I met a reed cutter who had news that I believed. He said that he knew the man of whom I spoke, and had seen where he lived on the edge of the marsh where a village had once been lost to the sea. There were just a couple of huts left of the village and this old man was the only resident, living alone with the marsh behind and the sea before him and no other habitation for miles.
I asked where, and how far, and he gave me good directions. I never saw a plainer, more practical-looking fellow than this reed cutter, blue-eyed, ruddy-faced, all the redder because the day was hot and he was sweating, standing steady on his boat that was piled so thick across with reeds that it seemed solid as an island. I untied the rope that moored him and helped him push away.
'You'll be going down to see him?'
'Why, yes,' I said, 'I will.'
'They do say things about him, you know. You can't put too much store on it, the world's full of nervous, chattering folk saying this and that and all kind of nonsense, but then you can't be sure either. A man who can do what he does, his cures and such, you never know where it ends, do you?'
He said one other thing that made me shiver.
He told me he had heard it said that the old man had two creatures he kept by him, that some folk said were his familiars — one of them a fox with fur as white as snow and the other an immaculate white bird that had a cry like a shriek of anger - and these were seen about him in the winter and when the sea mists spread inland.
'How can this be?' I asked. 'I know these beasts by your description but they are none that belong here.'
He said that he could only repeat what he had heard, and I wondered at it. For it seemed to me that these were beasts from the whale stations: the beautiful but raucous snowbird, and the northern fox whose fur turns white to blend with the snow. Was it possible that some other whaler had come by and spoken of them, and the ideas had somehow linked in people's minds? If not, then I could not think by what coincidence or suggestion these Suffolk villagers might have dreamt such creatures up.
I went to find him that last week of July. It was the hottest week of all this year. A day of high summer, the tidal mud shimmering in the sunlight and a flutter of birds in the reeds and along the creeks. I walked from inland where the reed cutter had said there was a path. He said that if I were to have gone by boat then sure the old man would see me approaching and vanish before I landed.
An unmarked sky wide as over sea. The marsh wide also, and flat. I had thought that the land I came off was flat but looking back from the edge of the marsh I saw how it rose behind me, how the horizon rose and bore the softness of trees in all directions save that of the sea. It was a place in which a man might well disappear, his tracks fine as those of an animal weaving along the edge of the reeds. All about me the stifling rustle of reeds, the whistle and piping of hidden birds. The path was not clear, it was so rarely used, though once or twice I found a few blackened boards set above the mud. On these boards my steps made reassuring hollow thuds. Twice I strayed and found myself stopped before an impassable channel: path gone, a creek before me, coppery water and polished mud. I must track back and find the way again and hope that I held my bearings.
At last I saw the hut, on a raised slip of land just visible above the reeds. A low hut of daub, a new reed thatch gleaming in the sunshine.
And there he was, sitting on a stool with his back to the wall and his eyes closed to the sun. It was him. I knew him at once. It was as if he had only greyed and dried in all the time since we last met, his hair and beard become thin grey strands, the skin of his face and hands like parchment and deeply drawn with lines. His eyes when he opened them were still strikingly pale and clear, but so transparent and without recognition that for a moment I wondered if they saw me.
'Thomas Cave.'
His long fingers groped as if for a thought and his brow narrowed in concentration.
'It's Tom Goodlard. It's me. Don't you know me? I see that I am much changed. I think I did not even have a beard when you saw me last.'
The hut seemed no more than a temporary shelter, its fresh thatch and the patches of new daub rough attempts to hold back the ruin that had come to the others that had stood beside it, wrecks with walls like broken hulls and rafters spillikined about them. No intention to permanence in it, as if it would take only a great wind and a rainstorm to tear and melt it down, or a wave to bite at the sandy cliff so close in front and give it to the sea like the rest of the village that was once there; as if it might be gone with the first storm of autumn, or the work of a winter at most. And yet the reed cutter had said that he had been here years; and there was wood cut and stacked, and lobster-pots beside the door, and in a hollow a heap of discarded crab and cockle shells.
Inside was a single stark room: a table with two loose-paged and broken books upon it; a cot with a once-coloured embroidered cloth swagged above its head, quite dirtied and faded with the years; the smell of old man and of fish.
I saw that his violin stood propped in a corner and was glad at that.
'You know that your cabin is still there?'
'Is that so?' Cave's words were flat and slow and I could not hear the thinking in them.
'Or it was, six or seven years ago when I went there last, and I cannot imagine things have changed since then.'
'You are still at the whaling then?'
'Not now, not for these past three years. I did well enough out of it in the end, put money by, came back here to live at Swole.'
'Not far from here.'
'No, not far.'
Cave pointed to the stool before the table, brought in from outside the only other one he had so that we might both be seated. He did not speak but placed gnarled hands between his knees and looked ahead as if he were still an old man alone.
'There's not so many goes to Duke's Cove any more, not that I know of anyhow. Not to the island, which they now call Edge Island, to any of those eastern islands and inlets. They say it's too risky, too much chance of getting beset with ice, if the season runs late and the winds turn; they say there's whales enough and safer hunting along the inlets of the western coast
and have built there great cookeries for the oil. It's different now, it seems to me, they're different men.' I ran on and saw that he watched my lips as if he were reading them and still he did not speak. I thought that he took in what I said but I could not tell whether it interested him or not. 'It's changed from those first days of the Heartsease. You'd be amazed to see it. The place hasn't changed of course, men can't touch that, but the business has, it's all very organised nowadays, big fleets from the big chartered Companies, a big trade.'
The window in the far wall had a view down on the beach where the tide was almost at its last ebb, thin waves pulling away from stones on the wet sand. I could see among these stones recognisable pieces of houses: lintels, hearths, clusters of flints and of thin red bricks; pieces of the village that was lost. Still I was compelled to speak, rattling on to fill his silence. 'The Dutchmen,' I said, 'have built themselves a great town on the shore of the main island, before the largest of the bays, a town that has a population of many thousands in the season, a makeshift smoking factory town that has the name of Smeerenberg. It is such a big town now that it has its own cemetery, as any town must, an island they call Deadman Island, where bodies are carried by boat and, because the ground is too frozen beneath for digging, left in coffins heaped with piles of stones or wedged in between in the rocks, and even so the bears get to them. The bodies in that place do not rot from one season to the next, but dry and thin and whiten like beachcombings.'
'We should not have gone there.'
'What?' The interruption came soft as a breath. I could scarcely be sure that it was meant for me.
'We men. Any men. We should not have gone there. We should have left it be.'
The words came out in little runs, strange and hoarse but gathering power as if he had lost the habit of speech and just found it again, and now that they came he remembered hospitality and took up a flagon from the floor, and mugs, and laid them on the table.
'It was not right. I am sure of that now. We went where God did not mean us to go. We went beyond Him.'
'But we won't be there for ever. They say that those seas will be fished out, sometime soon, in a decade or half a century. You can see that, every year that passes, the whales are fewer, no longer those great heaving herds that filled the bays; some, but fewer, trailing in, and we must sail further for them, chase them out to the open sea. Sooner or later it'll end and we'll be gone, and the place will be lonely as it ever was.'
'But not the same.'
'What do you mean?'
'It will be changed, won't it? Just because we were there. Never the same.'
Cave slammed his mug down on the table so that the ale spilt out of it and wet his fingers.
'It was free of us, before. Now, because of us, things have been seen, heard there, that should never have been.'
We went out after that. It was too uneasy, sitting stiff at the table with that odd, hoarse speech echoing into the room. He stood slowly, unfolding himself as if he were brittle, and took up his stick and led me to where he had built a ladder against the precarious sand of the cliff and we went down and walked the beach. The sun was hot, the waves soothed as they pulled back against the shore. Thomas Cave lifted his head and sighed. I gave him my arm, for I could see that the stick was little support in the sand. His touch was dry and tentative like that of a moth. And after a moment he began to talk again, and this time his voice was quite different, thin but liquid and fluent.
Now I had the story off him, not of his winter on the island, I think he will never tell that, but of the time since his return.
'Remember where you left me, in that river valley in the spring? I watched you go, watched a long way for I was tempted to follow. It seemed a long time until the sun set that evening, and not a soul came by after you had left me and I slept in the porch of the church and did not see nor spoke to anyone, and left in the morning early going back inland in the opposite direction to that by which you had gone, a bright morning it was and I had the sun behind me. So many mornings in those years I spent in that way, on the road with the sun low in a coloured sky, already walking out as some village wakes, walking through that bustling early time when the animals are brought out and the carts begin to pass and men set out for the fields. I stopped in a place, a town, a city, some lodging, and set up my craft with the tools I carried and worked for a time, for there was always work for me, leather to be found and feet to be shod, and people came to know me and I them, and soon as things became close I found that I must move on. Perhaps I had spent too many years already on the move. Or perhaps . . .'
He paused. His mouth was dry. He slapped his lips together and swallowed, closing his eyes a moment to the bright noon light.
'Or perhaps it was that I had set so still all of that year beforehand, that I had spent the winter as if in a prison.' When he opened his eyes they seemed somehow naked, the pupils down to points and the colour drained out of them. 'Whatever the cause, the fact was so: I found that I could not settle in any one place on the land but was always restless. To stay somewhere had me frustrated as if becalmed, the place becoming oppressive to me, my thoughts becoming caged and pacing in my head and at last driving me on. I was in Halesworth, Bury, Cambridge, lost myself a long time in the wilderness of the fens, saw the great cathedrals of Ely and Lincoln and Norwich. I must have seen all the towns of eastern England, excepting the ports. I did not go to the ports. For many years I did not even go to the sea. For many years it went on like this, so long that I found that I had walked in circles and come back to places where I had been before, and people recognised me and asked me again to make for them, or do repairs, or help them with some other matter. I knew some cures, you see, and had learnt others from those that I met. I had herbs that I gathered as I travelled and I knew how to use them. In time my reputation as a healer became such that people would send to find me for this and not only for my trade, even at times pursuing me from far afield. As you have.'
And he lifted his hand from my arm and stared at me then. 'Why? What do you want of me?'
'I wanted nothing of you Thomas but to see you again.' I feared that I had lost his trust.
He is old, I thought. This heat will be too much for him and there is no shade. The beach ran featurelessly ahead, featurelessly behind, the low unstable cliff of shingle and sand, the shingle and the sand beneath it, the white fringe of waves, the shining sea. Perhaps it was time we turned back; I thought that he would want then to turn back but he did not. He put his hand back to my arm and took up his pace again and his story.
'These are disturbing times we live in now. I sometimes think that we are on the edge of tumultuous times. Have you noted how many strange events occur, the storms we've had, the floods, the strange kinds of hail and rain, the thunder unseasonal in midwinter, the snow in spring? And other things beyond the weather: was it last year or the year before, one year not long past, a crash in the heavens and a raining of stones from the sky, not hailstones these but rock, some hard rock of a colour like metal that none had ever seen before, and then one single stone the size of a loaf and hot to the touch, falling on to the heath before the town of Woodbridge? Myself I cannot suggest any cause for this, save only the idea of some physical change or realignment in the heavens, but there are many who see other meanings in it all, omens and judgements and warnings, and are made fearful and thrown into ferment.
'I cannot say when it began precisely, or how, only that the people who came to me began to ask for other things. They saw something in me besides the cures that I had done, saw what perhaps they sought to see, what I can only explain as a reflection of their fear and their incomprehension. They began to say that I had powers.' He spoke the last word with a strange emphasis, his eyes wide like innocence in the old parchment of his face.
'I do not have powers, Tom Goodlard, believe me.
'I do what I do, that is all. I have experience and I use a few herbs such as could be found by any man or woman who has the sense to look. I s
peak to men and I appeal to them with reason. And that is all there is to it. Anything else is lies and fancy. What did they tell you of me, those who told you where to find me? What did they say?'
'That you had been North and that you travelled about. I guessed that it was you from the description. There are not so many of us whalemen hereabouts.'
'And what else? What was it made them speak of me to you?'
'That, and also that you saved a man, and I remembered how something like it occurred with one of the men from the Heartsease there on the island shortly before we left.'
I saw at once that I should not have said that. What better thing I could have said though I do not know. Now again he doubted me. His face clammed tight although his touch remained on mine. I left the words time to fade. We walked on until we reached a wide creek where we had no choice but to turn. For the first time we could see the world of men beyond the marsh: the roofs of a village and a church tower in the distance. We walked back the way we had come, only the sea was on our left now and the sun was in our faces and dazzling.
'They say I cast out devils, don't they? And perhaps you have said it also. No, do not deny it.'
The sun was too bright for him and he looked at the ground as he walked, down at the broken shells and the high-tide debris at his feet. He seemed so old in that bright light that I felt tender to him.
'Do you know what else they say?' he went on. 'You must have heard what else they say. They say that because I seem to have the power to drive out devils I myself am some kind of witch. What fools we have in the world.'
A large bird wheeled over the sea, over our heads. Snow-white feathers, and a shadow passed over me. But when it turned I saw that its back was grey: it was only a common gull, of which there must be a million down this coast.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 16