On the steps from the house to the quay the water moved in a living skin and carried what it found: a mussel shell dropped by a gull; the button from a lady’s coat; petals the rain had knocked from a cherry tree, one of whose boughs, pink and extravagant, overhung the steps.
Because it was spring rain, there was, behind the premature twilight, the sense of something warmer and brighter, and as Calley reached the last steps and came out on to the quay, a low yellow light broke from between the buildings to his right, and where it settled on things they acquired a curious fragility, as if buildings, ships’ masts, a dray loaded with shining barrels, were only leaning into existence for a moment and would, shortly, lean out again, back into what was formless, into chaos.
He looked for Medina. He did not want to stand around on the quay while everyone got a good squint at him. Then his eye was drawn to a patch of colour by the wall of the pub, a yellow umbrella, a black man beneath it wearing a curious sort of hat, and next to him, sharing the shelter of the umbrella, was the Spaniard. Calley tilted his head and Medina crossed to him.
“He was there?”
“No.”
“No?”
“He’s fucked off.”
“In English, please.”
“He’s gone. North.”
“He knew we were coming.”
“He knew nothing. Knows nothing.”
“Then why has he gone?”
“He’s running. But not from us.”
“Someone has warned him.”
“No one has warned him. Who the fuck could warn him?”
“The same who sent us?”
“And why would they do that? Eh?”
Medina shrugged.
“Who’s your new boyfriend?” asked Calley.
“My . . . ?”
“The cunt with the boat on his head.”
“An actor. A storyteller.”
“Yeah?” Calley looked more closely at the man. He liked stories. Up on Saffron Hill, at the spike, stories were scraps of coloured cotton you pieced together in the dark. If you pieced together enough the world whispered to you.
“So now,” said Medina, “we have to go to the north. Where I suppose there will be snow.”
“Snow, icebergs. All sorts,” said Calley. “End of the fucking world.”
By one in the morning, the rain gone, the clouds gone, a cold sky rippling with stars, they reached the old ferry crossing on the Severn at Aust. Their quarry had taken ship but Calley, who did not much like horses, cared for boats even less. A ferry he could manage, and yes, a ship when he had no choice. But a ship, overhauled, was a trap. Where could you go? He could not swim and would rather hang than drown. So they would travel overland, keep clear of great roads, enter towns and cities only when they had to. They would lose a day or two but they could trust to their own strength rather than the vagaries of wind and tide. It was the way of the stalker, the beater. It was the hidden way. It was the correct way for infantry to advance.
They sat on the hull of an upturned skiff listening to the secret life of the river at night. The first ferry would not come until daybreak. (It would harden out of river mist, water-glare, the boatman, sculling, grey as a heron.) A drover arrived; they heard his song long before they saw him. When he noticed them, their silhouettes against the river, he stopped his singing and kept his distance, squatting among his cattle. Over on the far bank, by Swansea, smudges of dirty orange fire showed in the throats of furnaces.
9
The Polish woman had said thirty drops or thirty to start with but it was hard on a rolling boat among beasts who skittered in their dung, who danced on their blunt hooves when the boat went about, to measure the drug in any exact way. He put it directly on his tongue, a private rain, bitter despite the licorice. Then a swallow of whisky, mouthfuls of northern air, the public rain, the salt and rot of the sea.
The boat was low in the water; that was her type. You did not look down at the sea, you looked across at it, and with every second roll the foam broke in through the scuppers. To be on the boat was to be without any meaningful shelter. He was up by the bows. The crew—there were three of them—kept mostly to the stern, one on the tiller, the others doing little obvious besides sitting. They knew where to be dry. They sat. They watched whatever they watched, the weather, the birds, an island on the beam, an island ahead . . .
To Lacroix the islands were a surprise—how soon they came on them, how many there were, how close to each other, how varied. He wanted to call back to the sailors—“Which is this?”—but they seemed unsure still as to whether they had agreed among themselves he was there at all, an Englishman with a torn face eating fish from his pocket. To have called to them would have forced them to acknowledge him. It would, he thought, be indecorous.
And did he really care about the names of the islands? This was the tall one, this the sleek, this the bare, this like something made entirely from light and water. They were beautiful—more so than he had prepared himself for, and it comforted him a little that he had had the sense to find them, the world’s scattered edge, that there was in him, perhaps, some trace of a wisdom that could guide his actions.
It stayed light until very late, the dusk a thread pulled taut, blue then silver. Sitting in his place, a lashed barrel on the boat’s port side, he took out his fiddle and searched the wood with his fingertips. It had, he decided, survived its night in Glasgow better than he had. He did not even think it was much out of tune. He rubbed the hair of the bow with a nub of rosin and began a prelude by Purcell, but his fingers were cold and he stopped and slid his left hand under the long hair on the flank of the nearest cow. It was snug in there and the animal seemed not to object to his touch. When his fingers were warmed he started to play again. He could only remember the first thirty bars or so, and he played them twice, with a tempo suggested more by the sea than by Purcell. The men at the stern were figures in stone but he felt them attending to him, and for the minutes he was playing there was an enchantment he had hardly known before with music. Perhaps it was only the drug. He didn’t care. Let it be so. If so, then good. He played, he finished, he stowed the fiddle in its case, rested the case across his lap. He thought of his old music master at Wells, the room in the cathedral where history slept like a dog. (It was always wintry in there and they had started each lesson with a song to bring the blood to their cheeks, to get them breathing. “Ah, Silly Soul,” that was a favourite. So too “Awake, Sweet Love,” though pitched too high for them.) Then his thoughts moved to his father, to the songs in the books, the wild flowers, and he seemed to see him, a tiny figure, toy-like, very distant, coming down the stairs of the house, not to the hall but to the sea . . .
His father had loved him! He had no reason to doubt it. But could that love still touch him? Was love, once given, always possessed? A gift, a quality, you could scatter over your head like sacred ashes when you had need of it?
He had not wept at the funeral. He had sat in the family pew, dry-eyed, while Lucy’s nose turned red with blowing and Sarah, on the other side, dabbed with a handkerchief and sighed. Nell had cried. Even Tom for Christ’s sake (he had seen him quite plainly across the nave in the common pews). Tom who worked the fields, who was paid—what?—one and six a day at harvest, less in other seasons. He had wondered at it during the prayers, had been self-perplexed, made angry even by these displays of grief. Was it vulgar? Was it false? Might it be false? Or was it simply that he lacked something the others had? Some common response, a sense of pity? Was that what had happened in Spain? He did not know, he did not know. In his effort to understand he had worn language thin but made it no sharper. He was bitterly tired of thinking about it, thinking and a minute later beginning again with the same bare and terrible facts. That was almost the worst of it, not being able to stop the thinking. Or not until the world broke in with hunger, a fist, stars above the sea. Then, for a
breath or two, he went free.
In the morning he saw they were closing on an island. Were they going to land? On the shore a small fire showed a meeting place, a welcome party. The sailors worked the boat to within parleying distance, then, in a minute of swift activity, the sails were dropped and an anchor thrown clear. The boat swung and was still. The party on the shore—men and women—walked down to the sea. There were no houses in view, no nearby village. One of the sailors climbed on to the bows and called across in their own language. When he was answered he came down again, took Lacroix by the arm, picked up the fiddle and led him back along the boat, out of the way. He said nothing to him but there was no unkindness in his actions. Then he went among the cattle with the other sailors. They drew one of the animals to the shore side of the boat, and with a sudden movement—a thing they must have done together countless times—they launched it into the sea. Its panic was comical. Whatever it had expected of life it had not expected this. It bellowed. Its eyes were wild. Then, having floundered a while, it discovered itself to be a creature that could survive in this new element and began to swim for the beach. A second animal soon followed, until there were five of them, swimming like dogs, necks straining, heads held clear of the water. At the surf they were met, and, even at a distance, there was something beyond the merely practical in the way they were surrounded and touched, then led towards the dunes.
Another delivery took place towards evening, a neighbouring island. Four animals this time. The people on the shore shouted out to them. The animals struggled through, stumbling out of the sea, hides glistening, streaming. Lacroix thought they might shake themselves as dogs do but they simply stood, patient, good-natured, perhaps already forgetting the sea.
They did not sleep at anchor but spent another night in open water. Lacroix, on his barrel, thought he saw all of it, for the laudanum brought him repose rather than sleep. At some hour, very late or very early, when even the western sky was dark, he fancied himself on picquet duty—the outlying picquet, that uneasy station, tensed between armies, listening for alarms. Later, he saw things etched on the sea. A woman in a white dress turning like a star, then a whale, immense and silent, its black skin slack as a coat. A whale imagined by a man who had never seen one . . .
But he must have slept eventually, for he was woken—or startled into some new sense of himself—by one of the sailors offering him a bannock. He was grateful for it; there was no more fish in his pockets. He washed it down with whisky then studied the land ahead of them, a long island faint as a cloud, or else several islands, like stepping stones, north to south. They sailed towards them for hours. They lost the sun then had it back again. The boat nosed her way through the swell, the prow sometimes shattering a slab of green water so that the spray flew back almost to the feet of the helmsman. The cows ate damp hay. When they looked up, chewing, they were the most resigned creatures on earth.
Late in the day the boat crossed an invisible line and the land at last showed itself for what it was. There was no harbour, no bay, no beach, nothing but walls of streaked rock with white birds rising and drifting like chaff. They were closing on it fast now. Lacroix waited for a change of course but it didn’t come. Soon, even he could hear the birds, their incessant calling, could see, with perfect clarity, the sea in a smother around the base of the walls. He looked back at the man on the tiller, at the crew, all of whom gazed ahead as though there were miles of empty ocean before them. Had they gone blind in the night? Mad? Should he warn them? Or were these quiet men, who perhaps he had come upon all too conveniently, not what they seemed at all, but servants of the Furies carrying him to where he could settle his debts in the surf? Then a fold in the wall became a gap in the wall and they were carried through on a surge of current, the way so narrow he could have spun coins from his pockets and bounced them from the rocks on either side.
It was a river, a loch, and no wider at first than its entrance. Then, as they passed a boulder on which a seal was basking, the creature’s grey and the rock’s almost identical, the banks fell back and they were in a body of water calmer than the sea, the land on both sides low and bare.
The boat glided forward, trailing the faint silk of her shadow. The animals, the few that were left, scented the new air. Lacroix began to see houses, all of them small, all built of the same stone they stood on, some with a scrap of worked ground beside them. The sailors dropped the canvas and swung the anchor over. The boat was lying off a shelf of foreshore, a place strewn with smooth stones and weed. Some score of the island’s inhabitants stood there, dun-brown figures, silently waiting. There was a cart and a pony. Also a collie dog that seemed to watch the boat with the same rapt attention as the people.
The sailors gathered at the stern, talking, and though Lacroix could hear only the stone-tap and stray music of their voices (and would not have known their words had he heard them perfectly) he understood they were speaking about him and that his journey was over. One of them came forward, the same he had spoken with at the waterside in Glasgow. Lacroix stood up. “I’ll go ashore here,” he said, “if you will show me how.”
“You must take off your boots,” said the sailor. He spoke softly. If he had just given an order it had been given in a way that was hard to object to.
Lacroix sat and took them off. The big toes of both feet poked through the filthy wool of his stockings. The man took the boots from him. He made loops of rope about them both, then threaded the rope through the handle of the bag and the handle of the fiddle case. The other sailors came forward now. There were only four of the cattle remaining in the boat. Three of these they put in the water, watched them begin their swim to the shore.
“And this is for you,” said the sailor who had roped Lacroix’s things. He tapped the back of the last animal.
“For me?” said Lacroix. He had misheard; or no, he had not misheard. He shook his head, began his protest, but the men were about their business and not interested in what he had to say.
They put a tether round the animal’s neck, tied the end to a cleat and heaved the animal over the side. “Quick now,” said the man.
They lifted him—he must have been light enough after the cows—swept him clear of the gunwales and settled him on the cow’s back, his legs in the water to the tops of his thighs. It was cold! The shock of it almost sobered him, it certainly silenced him. Someone hung his gear around his neck, then the tether was freed, the end given to Lacroix as a type of rein, and the cow prodded away from the boat with the point of a boathook. He had, out hunting or on manoeuvres, forded half a dozen English rivers. In Spain he had crossed the Esla on Boxing Day, the French vanguard an hour’s ride behind him. But that was on a cavalry mount, on Ruffian, and the horse’s hooves had never left the river bed. This was a cow! This was swimming! He gripped the rope, gripped the wide back with his thighs. The possibility of simply sliding off and being dragged down by his own possessions seemed very real and for the first half-minute he was frightened. He urged her on as he would a horse. Behind him, the skirts of his green coat drifted like weed. He heard the rattle of the bottles in his pockets.
On the shore the people were calling encouragement, though more, he thought, to the cow than to him. When she touched the ground she lost her footing a moment, staggered, and seemed she would tip him between her horns, but she recovered herself and step by step lifted them both clear of the water. The collie was delirious. A group of men came down to meet them. Shy, stern, leather-faced men dressed in homespun. They would not look at him directly. He slithered from the animal’s back and stood on trembling legs while they led her away. He waited for instructions, for someone to tell him where he should go, where he could go, but no one did. He was too strange perhaps, too unexpected. He thought they might not be able to see him in the way they could see the cows, that they would have to go away for a while and imagine him.
He trudged up the landing place on to the track at the top of the ban
k, turned to wave to the boat (had he paid them anything? He did not think he had), then sat on a patch of yellowish grass looking at his wet legs, his bare toes. He wrung out the tails of his coat, examined the bottles and found them undamaged. He shook some laudanum on to his tongue, took a swallow of whisky. Everything tasted of salt.
The party on the shore were dispersing now. He opened his bag. The leather was damp but the contents dry enough. He wanted something dry for his legs and after a little digging found, rolled tight like a loaf of bread, his nankeen trousers. This was good; he had not been quite sure they were there. He held them, thinking of home, of Nell, the comforts of home, then stood, stiffly, and carried the trousers away looking for somewhere private to change, somewhere out of view of the cottages. One thing to come ashore on the back of a cow, another entirely to make a show of his bruised legs to people he suspected did not, for reasons both moral and practical, do much undressing.
He followed the track. No trees, no convenient rock, the low places all boggy. He kept going. The track handed him forward, curved sinuously to follow the line of the water. The sun was sometimes in his face, sometimes at his left shoulder. He saw no one, no solitary reaper, and the only house he came across was a ruin, its stones scattered, and marks of burning on the timber above the empty doorway. The sight of it disturbed him. He picked up his pace to leave it behind, was relieved when a turning of the track hid it from him.
Now the water narrowed again—gradually, then abruptly—until it was only a stream that he crossed with the help of a stepping stone that lay between two twists of clear water. On the other side he lay down on his belly to taste the water. It was fresh, or mostly so, and he scooped up handful after handful. When had he last drunk anything but whisky and laudanum?
Once he had taken his fill he looked up again—water dripping from his chin, his three-day beard—and saw a hill of russet and purple, a thing on its own rising out of the flat country, conical, steep-sided. He made for it; the old human instinct to be above. The track took him close to the lower slopes, then he set off through young bracken and past the bracken on to brown heather that crackled under his boots. Quick little birds broke from cover. High in the east, something much bigger made lazy, inward-leaning circuits of the cloudless sky. He climbed, listening to the rasp of his breathing. Here and there, standing in the heather, were stones as tall as he was, shaped, he thought, placed there with some intent, their faces blue with the blue of evening.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 15