‘Well?’ he said.
‘You remember Rio?’
‘Damn good place to live,’ Terry Byrne claimed. ‘Live like a king on Marine’s pay.’
‘When our fleet got to Rio, you might remember Mr Blythe was busy meeting merchants of the city. He was meant to buy seed and oil, and before bargaining with the merchants concerned, he asked His Excellency to sign three of the printed promissory notes. Blythe himself was to sign them and put the amount on them when the sale was closed. As it turned out, there was no sale. For one reason and another. Blythe was meant to give the notes back to His Excellency. He didn’t.’
‘Feathering his nest,’ Byrne assumed.
‘I don’t think so, I think he forgot them. Anyhow, there they are in a strong-box at the warehouse, and Blythe has even gone so far as to sign two of them. Just in an idle moment perhaps, just for something to do. I found the notes last month when I was helping Blythe. I said nothing, I put them back in their place and locked the box. I’ve promised the captain one of these.’
‘Break the box open?’ asked Halloran. He made a face at Hearn’s ample guile.
‘I’ve made it my business to have a key,’ Hearn said, with his eyebrows warning Terry Byrne to be wise.
‘Once he has that note, he’ll kill you and fill it out for thousands.’
‘I’m keeping the note.’
‘That’s what you say.’
Hearn played with his breath for a while.
‘He’ll get it from my hand in Valparaiso or he won’t ever get it.’
‘Brave words,’ said Halloran, even though Hearn hadn’t sounded self-glorious. ‘Then he’ll kill you in Valparaiso and fill it in for thousands.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked Hearn without any genuine interest. ‘In any case it will be filled out already by myself for £100. He should get sixty for it from the merchants. Of course, they’ll take it to the British consul, who’ll say yes, it’s on the proper form which viceroys alone have. And you must remember, this little town of ours was meant to be a Corinth of the south, as they say. The consul in Valparaiso wouldn’t be surprised to see a note signed by His Excellency for an amount within the bounds of reason.’
‘And the beggar wants stores as well? A promissory note, all right. But there’s so much danger in the other.’
‘He’s in a bad way for stores, he’s in a position to insist.’
‘Unlike me,’ said Halloran. He tried to look ironic, but a sneeze scattered his efforts. ‘Didn’t he doubt you? How could he know just what you were at?’
Hearn nodded. He looked utterly humble.
‘Like one greater, I had wounds to show.’
‘So you did.’
‘Well?’ Hearn asked after thought.
‘Don’t think you’ve talked me round. I’ll be surprised if he comes for you.’
‘Of course he’ll come. He’s a whaler, a man used to danger, the only danger he can’t face being loss, the loss of his ship, failure to make his fortune.’
Halloran had his mouth open again when Hearn raised his right fist and pounded it down on his own thigh.
‘Damn reasons and arguments,’ he said. ‘He’ll do what he’s meant to. So will I and so will you.’
But raw and vigorous faith had run aground before today, thought Halloran. He damned raw and vigorous faith and the ache behind his eyes, his belling ears, his tight breath. He felt as ill as Hearn should have felt but perversely refused to feel.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why will everyone do what they’re meant to when no one has up to now?’
‘There’s a pattern. I’ll tell you.’
Apart from the whaler and the new age in Europe, Hearn explained, Terry knew where a warehouse key could be got. The peculiar thing was that not only was Byrne crazed for redemption, but he had even been partner to some earlier thefts of supplies.
Halloran rolled his eyes.
‘Is this true, Brian Boru?’
‘It is,’ said Terry, proud of it. ‘Of course, I was forced. And it was before taking stores was made a hanging matter. But just the same, yes.’
In fact, there was that about Byrne that reminded a person of the Easter Mass at which the deacon sings, ‘O happy guilt, to have deserved so great a Saviour.’
‘God of Mercy!’ Halloran said.
‘A lot of it used to go on. It was just a bit of sport.’
‘I know a girl who’s splotchy with hunger. That’s not sport.’
‘You always take a serious view.’
‘Do I? That’s because I have to look at shit like you from the outside. An agony you’ve never had to face, my boy.’
Hearn said in a soothing way, ‘Corporal’. But mainly he was allured by the pains his destiny had taken with the entire affair. ‘There’s no moon on Wednesday night, and slack tide will be a quarter to midnight. About half past midnight there’ll be a strong run-out tide. We won’t rush it, muffles on the oars, just an occasional pull to get us into the middle. I’ve been down to the bay in the middle of the night to look at the tides. I know that even there we’ll be helped.’
The image came to Halloran of a humourless seal-skin coat dropping like a bad dream through the white, young town; not deviating, as the chain-cranked angels rising and descending in religious festivals in Rio did not deviate; bending at the end of its descent to watch the swirl and suck of the bay.
The key belonged to a man called Miles, Private Albert Miles. Did Halloran know him?
‘He’s that tall, mean-looking bastard,’ Byrne supplied, ‘who’s always got someone else’s watch to sell.’
‘You mix with the best, don’t you, Terry?’ said Halloran.
Hearn explained, ‘You and Byrne would see him together. You’d have to threaten him. You’d have to say that you wanted the key . . .’
‘If he’s still got it,’ Halloran said.
‘He’s still got it,’ sang Terry out of the fullness of either faith or knowledge.
‘. . . and you wanted him to row. And if he won’t, you’d go to the officers and report all you know of him. And you’d have to tell him it’s no use murdering either of you, that there’s a third person who’d report him as soon as you come to any harm.’
‘A spirit of hearty brotherhood,’ said Halloran.
Terry Byrne became equitable all the way down the length of his strange mouth.
‘We’ll have to let him take a bit of beef. That’s only fair.’
‘Yes,’ Halloran said, ‘so is the backside of the whore he’ll buy with it. No. No beef.’
‘It’s only fair.’
‘No beef.’
‘He’d knife us.’
‘I’ll talk to him.’
‘I’m not willing to die to no use,’ Byrne said.
As, the sun being on his face, and his soul robust with plots, he was quite willing to die to some use.
All their dealings would be with Miles, Hearn told them. But at the same time, a guard would be needed at the warehouse and another at Government Wharf. Now Miles had a friend called Barrett and a friend called McHugh.
‘McHugh’s wife to Miles,’ Byrne laughed. ‘And Barrett’s sort of fancy-lady to both of them.’
‘They’re not to be told anything, you understand. They’re servile to Miles. They’ll do what you want them to if Miles beats them enough. Or so I’m told. You’ll have to see the two of them are the guards for the warehouse and wharf on Wednesday night. After all, you’re the orderly.’
So Hearn’s eyes and intentions probed Halloran, while on the slope behind those boulders, some pigeons mourned sanely, bringing to Halloran’s notice once more that he was not bound. Amongst the rocks, a tribe of grudging starlings went scrabbling, as mean, as unaspiring, as assured of the sunlight as one could wi
sh to be.
The plot ground on in Hearn’s mouth.
The officer of the guard that week was a Subaltern from Major Sabian’s company and could be relied upon to be slapdash. He would be at the wharf at ten o’clock, one o’clock, and possibly not again. If the cutter, having stranded Hearn, were back at Government Wharf by two o’clock in the morning, they had, so Halloran gathered, God’s and Hearn’s permission to go on breathing easily for an unlimited toll of years.
Halloran looked at the earth, at the strewn complexities of dead leaves, patterns of dying which must somehow have a designer.
‘If he doesn’t come for you,’ he said, ‘and the sun rises and there you are, sitting on the sand with three hundred pounds of beef. . . . We’ll look the silliest dead ever.’
‘He’ll come. You pretend he’s as hard to believe in as Michael Archangel.’
‘He is. Very nearly.’
The three of them looked at each other until Byrne went red.
‘It’s no use,’ Halloran said at last. ‘I’ll need that sign.’
‘I’m not dismayed.’
‘You never are. I’ll wait on the sign. There are risks, you know. Present company not excepted, as they say.’
So Halloran went away to wait for the sign not to happen, and Hearn watched the tired young image stepping on the charred shadows of the forest; the unaggressive colour, the unguarded back suddenly dwindled in the chaos of grey and olive.
Byrne whispered in the prophet’s ear.
‘I know him. He’s for you.’
The sign came to Halloran as he stood easy in the ranks at the start of a Church-parade. Waiting there, he was attuned to expect it. For a grey island of flesh, large as anything that ever foundered a ship, had risen in the bay, and two boatloads, Marines and transports, had been sent chasing it through the mulberry, deep water.
Unlike the transport ranks below them on the slope, Halloran’s company, lined up on the edge of the parade-ground, could see all, the entire whale chase, for surely a whale was what, with fantastic appositeness, the hump awaiting the boats was.
The transports and guards were lined facing inland, yet had their mind’s-eye at least on the chase. The Rev. Calverley stood isolated by his interest in the deity at the door of the white-washed long church of St Jeremy. Halloran felt sorry for the man, and for the church like a humble beast. With nothing to thrust heavenward, it nuzzled the windy side of the hill, and kept the black, unglazed, Gothic sockets of its windows very much to the ground. Both the priest and his temple seemed to sense, as did everyone else, that whatever of truth and sacrifice there was in the town that morning was to be revealed on the blue of the bay.
A sergeant, tatty waist-sash and all, went on with the convict roll-call. Half a mile away, one of the cutters had come within throw of a cow-whale, big as a town-house, and her twenty-foot calf. Neither beast moved. The cow hissed without malice. Perhaps exhaustion had visited the walls of those barns of meat fleeing from sharks into a mere thirty fathoms.
No one in the cutter knew much about whales. It was thought wise that the harpoon be thrown into the mother; and so it was thrown. Her pain made the bay seethe in front of her. This clear day, the men on the parade-ground could see for some seconds the classic fountain of red water she snorted into the mid-air. At half a mile, it was a bounty of colour, not the agony-flower it was to the whale, not the unspeakable banner it was to the men in the cutter. She vanished for a moment, but then was solid again athwart the boat which splintered with the leisurely sound of a felled tree.
Her shape and the shape of her calf were gone. Twelve men agonized with no urgency in the grey turmoil of her wake. Across a bay of silence, the slower cutter bore towards them. It was far too slow. The whales came back in white froth, and went again; back and went again. Whenever they went, they thwacked the water with what looked like wrath in such big creatures. Yet perhaps it was horror. Whichever way, men disappeared amongst the curds of angry water, and the second boat stood clear.
The creatures did not come back the third time. Halloran saw them in the fore of his mind nosing down into those foreign shallows. Behind their pigs’ eyes, the brains and foundry hearts groaned busy with dismay, busy with deprivation, busy with pain. The bay healed back to uniform blue as if they had never come.
In the world of men, the remaining cutter hauled up an improbable number of survivors. ‘I can’t even swim,’ said one of them laughing, settling back intact between an oarsman’s legs. ‘Hold on!’ they told the only three left in the water. Another cutter had put out from shore. One of the three clutching the gunnels sneezed. ‘Us?’ the sneeze said to those who heard it. ‘We were meant to last.’ For in the cutter were nine drenched men, and the three in the water made twelve. Not one had been lost.
Byrne made a prodigy out of all this, a clumsy parable. To Halloran though, it was merely a sign, a sign in the strict sense, an indication. The indication was that no man could plot his course away from moments so extreme, so drunken with terror and uproar that, emerging breathing by accident from them, he might as well have died in them. It was meant that man should weather a number of these occasions with a whole skin, and so go home to dinner.
If a man was meant, and if he knew he was meant to chance himself three hours on a given Thursday night, under a whale of a different complexion – he might as well. That was all that could be said. He might as well. He thought on the other hand, and immediately, that there was nothing mystical about whales, that they were as seasonal as turnips.
So, agonizing, he saw the town, the woods and the bay. The wind splashed their thick insensitive colours across his eyes. Ann and he could pretend to be a universe to each other, and all the rest of it. He could pretend that he was able to hold her safe from the extremes of her destiny. But the ironstone world was always there, it said that one day it would penetrate the avid heart and make it meat.
He shut his eyes and remained there, hating the enemy world.
23
Mrs Blythe’s silver-ware had seen too much salt air these last three years. There was a salver which rode the muslin table-cover in the back parlour and two cruets on the sideboard, all of them badly tarnished. Ann took them to the kitchen that Sunday afternoon to remedy them before Halloran came. She sat in the door, in the sun, her lap vulgarly wide just for comfort.
She had the salver covered with paste when Mr Blythe came in. His entry took time. With a grimace of pleasure, he let himself down the two steps from the house as cumbersomely as a man walking on his hands. He was in shirt-sleeves, bearing a glass and, perilously, a decanter of brandy. Once he had the steps behind him, he saw Ann.
‘The last,’ he said, holding up the decanter. ‘The very last.’
‘It must be, sir.’
She frowned and turned back to the salver.
He came across the room carrying his shoulders shrugged, as if actually pulling the nimbus of the liquor about him.
‘It’s no better out here,’ he said, however. ‘It’s just as cold. Or nearly.’
‘Wouldn’t your own room be warmer at this time of year, sir? It’s got a window facing north.’
He had put the decanter down on the table.
‘No!’ he said. ‘I’m sick of the view. I’m sick of that clay road and I’m sick of the same bits of bay you see through the same trees. I’m so sick of it that I can see it all by closing my eyes. Look, I’ll just show you.’
His eyes snapped shut and the muscles of his cheeks strained to keep them shut. Ann felt forced to ask herself, is this Mr Blythe, this friendly man who does not prefer clay roads? Sober, he looked to be blank of preferences, and when his sober lids closed they never gave any hint of not closing on darkness.
‘There,’ he said, blind. ‘Myrtles of a kind. They seem to be dying, but I think they’ve seemed to be dying for two th
ousand damned years. And one of them has a wasp’s nest wrapped around its fork like a poultice.’ The eyes opened. ‘You see, Ann, there’s very little profit in looking out that window.’
Watching him with the broad furtiveness which cannot be used on the completely sober, Ann wiped a thumbful of paste off the flange of the salver and had a glimpse in the exposed silver of the day gone molten, ruled by her own face jowly and pompous there. She had no time to hunt for a glimmer of Mr Blythe in the fragment of shadow, though he would have been there, even in that thumb-nail world.
‘It’s not very comfortable for you out here though, Mr Blythe,’ Ann said, more capable with him when he was humanized by drink.
‘I know better,’ he told her genially while hitching himself onto the table, ‘than to expect to be comfortable in my own house.’
So perched, his right arm, glass and all, was prodigal with gestures of reassurance.
‘No, you mustn’t worry about Mrs Blythe. At the moment she’s asleep in the front parlour. The condition isn’t permanent or eternal, although a man could do worse than drink to that merry possibility.’
He held his glass up.
‘To that merry possibility!’ he said, drinking too long a toast and recovering as an athlete recovers from his excesses, huffing.
‘To the passer-by,’ he went on, ‘she presents a picture of deep maidenly repose. Her nose is blocked and her mouth is open.’
He showed Ann how, even making noises with his nose.
‘There’s a blow-fly on her forehead too. But that’s his business. No, Mrs Blythe’s well asleep. Don’t you worry!’
So Ann didn’t worry, and there was silence.
After some seconds, Blythe said, ‘Ann, you are so lovely. You’re an agony of loveliness. No cancer ever scalded a man as –’
‘No, Mr Blythe,’ Ann told him, no longer unsure now the situation had broken, ‘don’t get carried away with words. It’s not wise and it gives you short breath.’
‘My God,’ said Blythe, ‘short breath. Did Thisbe speak to Pyramus about short breath?’
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