The Forgotten Story

  Anthony slid quickly out of bed.

  ‘News? Good news? What about?’

  ‘Never mind, boy. Wait till you get below; your aunt’ll tell you.’

  Perry went unsteadily out, leaving a strong smell of rum behind him.

  Anthony followed with the least possible delay. He found them both in the kitchen. Aunt Madge was reading Malachi. Her little lips were forming the words as she went from line to line. She was wearing the same dress as last night and he suspected it had not been off; its stiff lace collar and heavily brocaded front with flaps and frills over it looked out of place this morning. She had not even taken off her earrings or the four strings of pearls.

  ‘And the day that cometh shall burn them up,’ she said. ‘News. Your father. A letter this morning.’

  Daylight had undermined some of the terrors of the night. This announcement abruptly drove away the rest to a distance at which they could be tolerated.

  ‘What does he say? Does he –?’

  ‘You’re to go out. Early boat. He’s sent money. Passage paid. And ye shall go forth and grow up as calves of the stall.’

  Anthony let out a whoop of delight.

  ‘Did it come this morning? When have I to start?’

  Aunt Madge turned over a page. ‘ That is left … Hi thought. Fare is booked from Bristol. No regular service from here. The Grey Cat. Leaving on tonight’s tide. Calling at Bristol. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children. We thought … Your uncle and I. Save the train fare. Bristol the day after tomorrow. Captain Stevens knows you. He would look after you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anthony. ‘ Go to Bristol by sea, you mean. I’d like that. That’d be fine. By sailing ship. Yes, thanks, Aunt Madge. Would that be tonight?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘I must pack. I can hardly believe … It’s nearly twelve now. What time do they leave? Does Captain Stevens know?’

  He hurried upstairs again, bursting with excitement. But behind the excitement, like the structure behind an ornamental façade, was relief. Relief to be leaving this house and its shabbiness and hysteria. Relief at the thought of leaving the horrible scene of last night three thousand miles behind. It wasn’t explained. Nothing was explained; some instinct told him that there might come a time when these perplexities and unsolved relationships would irk him, when he would blame himself for leaving them without a backward glance. The weakness of this escape might leave a hard core of self-despisal, overgrown but not overthrown, which some day would serve him ill. But at this instant he had no second thought, only a surging happiness at the idea of casting everything away. Somebody else could worry about the policemen in the cemetery. Someone else could argue out the problem of the Will. Somebody else could carry tales to Tom Harris. Not he. Not he.

  Only one thing he would have liked to do, and that was to say goodbye to Patricia. That being impossible, he would drop her a short note; he had her address and could get a stamp from the nearby post office.

  The day was a bright one and mild, a fresh southerly wind having puffed away the remnants of fog. It seemed in keeping with his mood of relief that the sun should shine and the harbour look as bright and gay as in summer. There was little time to lose, since The Grey Cat would be weighing anchor at seven. Even in a few months he had collected all manner of souvenirs which he was anxious to take with him, and these had to be fitted somehow into his one wicker travelling bag.

  All the afternoon both Aunt Madge and Uncle Perry were very quiet. No doubt they were worrying about the news he had brought last night. But neither of them seemed anxious to go out and consult Mr Cowdray, unless they had already been out before he woke. They had an odd air of waiting, of sitting still and having nothing to do. Aunt Madge took down a number of flypapers in the kitchen and put them into the stove. Perry had reverted to his rum again. His face had that heavy, studious look which told its own tale. He always looked as if he was going to produce some great thought and never did.

  The sun went down that night behind the town glowing red among the clustered black clouds. For half an hour after it had gone all the old town of Falmouth stood out clear-etched in the twilight glow as if impressing itself indelibly upon the boy’s brain; the church steeples and the grey houses and the narrow quays and the climbing cottages looking down over the pink flush of the harbour.

  He finished such preparations as there were to make and knelt for a moment at the window of his bedroom. Not many minutes’ rowing away were the three masts of the barquentine which was to take him on the first part of his long journey. He felt no apprehensions that the journey might be tedious or difficult: his only wish was to be gone.

  Perhaps it was only in these last few hours that he had begun to realise how much the happenings in this house had weighed on him. Like a man who had been carrying a burden, he had not felt how much his shoulders were cramped, his breathing restricted, until the weight was eased and he was standing there waiting for it to be finally lifted off. Most burdensome of all perhaps had been the necessity for making judgments of his own; not decisions, but judgments of people. He had been pitchforked from a world of friends and acquaintances, in which he had instinctively drawn his opinions from his mother, into a new circle in which he had to form every judgment upon complete strangers for himself. He had at first seen many things through Pat’s eyes, but for the last two months he had found himself forced more and more back upon the bedrock of his own immature sense of values, and these were blown like a leaf in the wind turning one side and then the other up. To be released from all his contacts here, to wipe out all the past mistakes and begin anew, this was almost the greatest relief.

  As the brightness faded from the sky there crept over him, without any sort of prompting, the conviction that even now he was not leaving all the problems behind as he had supposed. Somehow, in some manner, they were now a part of him and had to be resolved. Most gladly he would have forgotten the horrible scene of last night. But it would not be forgotten. It was only over-laid for the moment by the happy and exciting news of today. Some time it would return. He had seen something which no manner of excuses from Aunt Madge and Uncle Perry would explain away. Something which was not a final event in itself but which had to be searched and sounded to the depths. He was young but he was not a fool. His judgment of events was often faulty but not always. Aunt Madge’s lame explanation did not convince him. The police were in it. That was what frightened him. The police were in it.

  As the light of the thin crescent moon began to show up he saw a small dinghy cutting a dark rippling arrow through the silver water. Captain Stevens coming to fetch him.

  Not before time. Five o’clock was past and he would be happier away from the house. Once in the ship he would recover his confidence and his good spirits of this afternoon. Once in the ship he would really begin to believe the journey begun. Not until then.

  Now there were goodbyes to be said. Must not forget to thank them for their kindness. His father would be sure to ask. (Or at least his mother would have been sure to do so. He suddenly realised that he hardly knew his father.) Anyway, he owed them thanks, Aunt Madge and Uncle Perry: they had given him food and a home; he had barely given them loyalty in return.

  He picked up his bag, his cap, his coat, two parcels, looked round the now familiar room, at the sloping raftered ceiling and the pieces of cheap furniture, which had the friendly pull of five months’ intimate association. Then he went down the two flights of stairs into the kitchen. He found Aunt Madge and Uncle Perry with hats and coats on and valises packed, waiting to accompany him.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  By the frail fight of the sickle moon following the sun down towards the south-west, The Grey Cat slid quietly out of the harbour under a strip or two of canvas. Once past Pendennis Point she shook out the rest of her sails and bent and quivered under the touch of the wind like a horse feeling its master after a long rest. Then she moved off slowly with the wind on her starboard bow, dipping li
ghtly in the choppy sea, her fights winking their farewell to the shorebound castle and the line of darkening cliff.

  The barquentine had never been designed to carry passengers, and accommodation was uncomfortably cramped. Captain Stevens had given up his own cabin to Mrs Veal, and Anthony and Perry were to share the store-room which led off from the main saloon on the opposite side and which had been hastily made habitable by the provision of two floor bunks fitted up unpleasantly like two premature coffins by the ship’s carpenter.

  As Aunt Madge said, addressing nobody, the inconvenience was only for a couple of days. They had important business in Bristol and at the last moment had decided to take this opportunity of settling it. Together with this business matter they could discharge their duty to Anthony’s father by accompanying the boy and seeing him safely aboard his ship for Canada. Uncle Perry said it did his old guts good to feel the deck under his feet again, and Aunt Madge said it would be a nice change and a rest for her; she had been feeling thoroughly run down and she wished she had thought of the idea before.

  Anthony did not believe a word of it. He didn’t know quite what was happening, but he was beginning to have a fair idea. Uncle Perry didn’t in the least look as if he was deriving any pleasure from being at sea again, and unless he was very much mistaken Aunt Madge was the last person in the world to accept this sort of discomfort out of a sense of duty to him or even in the interests of her own health. She would, one guessed, almost prefer to die in comfort rather than live without it.

  But there was very little he could say or do. If he had been powerless to influence events before, he was certainly no less helpless now. He comforted himself with the thought that so long as he was going to meet his father it was not really his business to inquire into the motives of the people who went as far as Bristol with him. So long as he was moving, and moving in the right direction, the entanglements would slip off one by one.

  Captain Stevens, although he put a good face on it, did not look pleased at having the owners aboard and had insisted in putting himself right with the Board of Trade by signing them all on as part of his crew at a shilling a day. Anthony wished that Ned Pawlyn had still been a member of the ship’s company.

  That night he spent in uneasy, sickly slumber, listening to Perry snoring and muttering to himself in the opposite bunk, and when he did close his eyes it was usually to start into wakefulness as last night’s detestable scene flashed suddenly before his eyes, or at some unfamiliar sound, the tramp of feet above his head or the clink, clink of glass as Perry poured himself another tot of rum. Perhaps there were others who could not forget what had happened yesterday.

  All the night the barquentine was beating into a tenacious headwind, which increased sharply during the dark hour before dawn. Presently he heard Perry being sick, and shortly afterwards he began himself.

  After that he lost count of time and sequence, except that at some period of his illness a member of the crew came in and turned out the smoky, swinging oil lamp and let in grey fitful daylight through the port-hole.

  Then later, after discovering within himself that he had no further incentive to live, he was sick for the last time and fell asleep.

  When he awoke the colour of the daylight had not changed, but he felt that a considerable time had passed. Uncle Perry was no longer in the bunk opposite. Lightheaded and painfully weak, he pulled himself gingerly out of his bunk and was at once flung on the floor beside Perry’s. He clawed himself slowly upright and looked out of the port-hole.

  The first impression was that all was lost. There was no horizon that he could see and nothing that he had ever visualised as a seascape. The port-hole was crushed down among walls and valleys of racing grey water towering at all angles above his vision and from time to time burying the window in total darkness. There was no such thing as a level, no datum line of balance or equilibrium. It was impossible to tell how far the sea engulfed the port-hole, how far the port-hole buried itself deep in the sea. There was no means of knowing the difference between the two or even of knowing that there was a difference. The sky when it was visible was a low, tattered shawl of brown. All the noises of ship and sea were dominated by a high-pitched variable whine like the heart-beat of an infernal dynamo.

  Giddy and in danger of more sickness, he felt he could exist no longer without some water to moisten his parched throat; so he pulled himself to the other side of the cabin and opened the door.

  Voices greeted him. Perry and Aunt Madge and Captain Stevens were in the dining saloon, which was in a state of chaos and semi-darkness. No one noticed him enter; there was far too much noise to take heed of a little more: rattling doors, straining woodwork, creaking chairs, loose things carrying on a scattered conversation of taps and rattles; above all, the roar of the sea and the scream of the wind.

  ‘Persistent neglect of running gear, ma’am,’ the captain was saying. ‘We’ve got to take that into account. I wouldn’t mention it only … mind you, it’s not a question of danger yet – and these ’ere sharp sou’westers often blow themselves out as quick as they get up. But I’d not fancy tackling the Bay in this weather. Not as things are aboard. Mebbe you remember I asked –?’

  ‘Turning back,’ said Aunt Madge hoarsely to the table. ‘Absurd. Hear no more. Wind’ll go down. Face it out in due time. My dear husband always said, The Grey Cat, utmost confidence, captain and ship.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am. It’s my wish to please you. But I’ve got my crew to consider. I put the facts before you just in case. We can ride this out till nightfall. If it don’t abate we’ll have to turn and run into the nearest port.’

  ‘Think you could make the Sallies?’ Perry asked, pushing his hair back.

  Captain Stevens tapped the water out of his sou’wester. ‘I don’t. And shouldn’t want to.’

  ‘I don’t fancy the Bay meself in this weather,’ said Perry. ‘Stap me, I’ve seen the seas flying as high as the royals. It makes a man cautious. But maybe it’ll abate before morning.’

  ‘Of course it will.’ Mrs Veal put a handkerchief to her mouth and wiped away a hiccup. Apart from the fact that her cheeks seemed looser than ever and to shake with the pitching of the ship, the monument was not yet overthrown. A night of nausea had not prevented her putting on her pearls and her earrings.

  ‘Well, there it is,’ said Stevens. ‘ I trust you’re right. The cook’ll prepare you some hot cocoa if you’ve a mind for it. That’s the best we shall be able to do just at present.’

  By means of various fixtures he pulled himself round to the saloon door and went out. About half a gallon of water came down the companion and slipped about on the floor of the saloon as if seeking a way of returning to its own element.

  Anthony let himself go and brought up with a rush against the table. ‘ I want a drink. Is there any water?’

  Both stared at him suspiciously as if they suspected him of eavesdropping. Perry’s face was yellow with sea-sickness and rum. ‘In there,’ he said, jerking his thumb.

  The boy entered a little wash-up, and found some water in a carafe fixed to the wall. He drank it too greedily and was sick again. He stayed in the wash-up about half an hour, feeling too ill to move, but at last plucked up the strength to crawl up a hill back into the saloon.

  Neither his aunt nor Perry was there; presumably they had gone into her cabin, for the space of movement was very limited. In the din he found a chair and sat on it and leaned his head back and watched the whole saloon at its dizzy acrobatics. After a time he found his eyes accustoming themselves to the changes of position; he was moving in exactly the same relationship and that helped. He began to feel better. The time by the clock above the door was nearly two, so they had been at sea nineteen hours.

  There was a clatter of boots and Mr O’Brien, the mate, came into the room. He took no notice of Anthony but, maintaining his balance in a remarkable way, went over to a cupboard, knelt before it and began rummaging inside.

  Anthony said: ‘This i
s a bad storm, Mr O’Brien.’

  The mate gave him a half glance but did not reply.

  ‘Are we in danger?’ the boy asked.

  Mr O’Brien thumped something back into the cupboard. ‘Not if it was a ship ye was in, me little fellow,’ he snapped. ‘ I wisht I’d never signed on but stayed in Hull with me two feet on dry land. Well, well.’

  There was a crack above them and a thud, and water suddenly came down the companion ladder to join up the pools which already existed.

  ‘Are we far from Bristol yet?’

  O’Brien rose to his feet. His fat red face under the sou’wester gleamed with water. Salt had whitened the stubble of his beard.

  ‘I wish we was nearer. But, Holy Mary, why Bristol? If I could see the colour of Mount’s Bay I should be satisfied.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to Bristol, aren’t we?’

  O’Brien buttoned up his oiler. ‘Not this trip, young feller. Oporto we was making for. But where we shall make landfall if this breeze don’t drop, God only knows.’

  Anthony ran after him as he went to the door.

  ‘I know the ship’s going to Portugal. But we’re calling at – at Bristol first to pick up more cargo. That’s – that’s where I’m getting off.’

  O’Brien pushed away his detaining arm.

  ‘Och, I’ve no time to stand here arguing the toss. Ask your mother, or whatever she is. She’ll set you right.’

  Nightfall brought no abatement of the wind but only a slight shifting of direction.

  At 8 P.M. Captain Stevens came down and with a steady hand entered the following particulars in the log:

  8/12/98. Days on passage, 2. Course SSW. Wind and weather: SW 7–9. Rain squalls; steep seas. Ship taking seas solid over fo’c’sle head, pitching and labouring. Later came three other entries. 9/12/98. Midnight. Wind and weather: SW 9-10. Running before full gale under foresail and tops’l only. Course now approx. NNE by 1/2 E. Heavy squalls. Two helmsmen. Heavy damage on deck. 2 A.M. Wind and weather: W by S 9. Fore topm’st carried away. Seas breaking over all the time. Ship labouring heavily. 4 a.m. Wind and weather: W by N 9–8. Bare poles. Trying to set up jury rig for’ard. Water gaining on the pumps. In much danger of being pooped.