Sacred Hunger

  It was confident as ever now, while the two different sorts of flame, ruddy and pale in concert, danced assent to his views of the profits to be made in the Africa trade, the voice warm, insistent, with sudden rising inflections, telling his guests assem-was too urgent. Lately the sense of this difference between them had complicated his feelings with a kind of sorrow, though whether for himself or for his father he could not have said.

  He turned back into the room, where silence had now fallen. Some accommodation had been reached—his father’s face was florid and calm. The sailmaker he did not look at. He saw the sheet of canvas over the bar stir and creep a little in some current of air. It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory. New shackles were being forged here, in the light-filled loft, amid smells of oiled canvas and raw hemp and tar, the creeping fringes of the sail-cloth, his feelings for Sarah Wolpert and for his father. bled there that this very time, this year of grace 1752, was the best, the most auspicious possible: “Now that the wars are over, now that the Royal African Company has lost its charter and the monopoly that went with it, now that we can trade to Africa without paying dues to those damned rogues in London…”

  Paris there among the others, silent—he hardly spoke at all; but more physically present than anyone else, solid among shadows, with his big-knuckled hands and awkward bulk and long pale face and the aura of shame and disgrace he brought with him.

  “The trade is wide open. Wide open, I tell you, gentlemen. The colonies grow more populous by the year, by the month. The more land that is planted, the more they will want negroes. It is a case of first come, first served. And who is best placed to take it on? London is away there on the wrong side, with the Thames up her arse.

  Bristol’s costs are twice ours here. I tell you, if God picked this town up in the palm of his hand and studied where best in England to set her down for the Africa trade, he would put her exactly back where she is, exactly where she stands at present.”

  He thumped his fist on the table so that the glasses rattled and sat looking round the faces, challenging contradiction.

  “Why should God want to do Liverpool a kindness?”’

  The source of this levity Erasmus could not afterwards remember, but he remembered the frown of displeasure that came to his father’s face.

  “It was a manner of speaking,” Kemp said.

  “I am not the man to take God’s name in vain.”

  Though profane by thoughtless habit, he was a church-going man and devout, especially now, with his ship on the stocks and his thoughts on the hazardous business of capturing and selling negroes. God is polycephalous, as the diversity of our prayers attests; his aspect varies with men’s particular hopes, and Kemp’s were pinned on fair winds and good prices. “I tell you,” he said, “sure as I sit here, the future of Liverpool lies with the Africa trade. It is patent and obvious to the meanest understanding. The trade goods are all in our own backyard, the cottons, the trinkets, the muskets, everything we -“

  “For my part, I’ll stick to what I know.”

  An old man’s voice, drink-thickened and truculent. Old Rolfson, who died of a stroke not long after, on the steps of the Exchange, leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds, most of it made provisioning the army during the recent wars.

  “And what may that be?”’ somebody asked him.

  Jocular, not very friendly. “We have peace now, Isaac, your contracts are finished. Fortunately for our brave army. I make no doubt your victuals killed more of them than the French did.”

  There was laughter at this, which the old man heard through with a sort of malevolent composure. He was making to speak again, but someone on his right got in first.

  “He means the Spanish trade, don’t you, Rolfson?”’

  “A contraband trade?”’ Kemp waxed scornful. “So you’d found this city’s fortune on smuggled tobacco? I am talking about a commerce that will be worth millions. A lawful commerce—it is sanctioned by the law of the land. Merchants trading to Africa can hold up their heads with the best.”

  In later times, when commercial enterprise came to be a virtue in itself, and a good return on capital was blessing enough, the need to invoke legitimacy was not so much felt, but the men seated around this table still felt it strongly. Kemp had made his assertion with triumphant authority and it was greeted without demur. He waited a moment, then continued more quietly: “Those that get in now will be the ones best situated. I’d be surprised if there are more than twenty Liverpool ships in the trade at present. In the next ten years you’ll see that go up to a hundred. Why, my tailor is in it.

  He was telling me just the other day. He has bought a tenth part in a thirty-ton sloop that will carry you seventy-five negroes to the West Indies.”

  “That’s no more than a fishing-smack.” Paris this, his one remembered contribution to the talk. The voice rather deep, vibrant, softened by the growling inflections of Norfolk. “Hardly longer than a pitch for quoits,” he added after a moment.

  Incredulity in the tone, though what he was questioning—the size of the vessel, the number of negroes— Erasmus couldn’t determine.

  His father, it seemed, had heard quite a different question.

  “Aye,” he said, “that is the beauty of it.

  Ten men can sail her. One prime slave will make you a profit of twenty-five pounds in Kingston market—enough to pay ten men’s wages for two months at sea.”

  Kemp looked smiling round the table. “And look what is happening to sugar,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you gentlemen what raw sugar is worth on the home market nowadays.” He raised a hand and made a rapid sketch of a triangle in the air before him. “Three separate profits,” he said.

  “One in Africa, one in Jamaica, one back here. And each one better than the last.”

  With the exception of Paris, these were all Liverpool men. There could scarcely have been one of them who had not a full understanding of the Triangular Trade, as it was called—cheap trade goods to Africa for the purchase of negroes, these then carried to America or the West Indies and sold there; rum and tobacco and sugar bought with the proceeds and resold in England. Most of them were involved in the trade to some degree, as manufacturers, brokers or wholesalers.

  Kemp was telling them what they already knew. He was aware himself that he was doing so. But he was in fear, and needed these days the temporary sedative of approval to take the edge off it, as one might need a drug, and he was ready to spend his best efforts to obtain this. There were those who afterwards recalled the garrulity that descended on Kemp towards the end of his life, and gave it out that they had always seen the weakness, known he was not sound by the way he sought to involve you in his purposes, get you on his side, working for it, casting round his energetic glances, gesturing with his hands like a confounded Frenchman. Kemp could not keep his own counsel, they said, and that will bring a man to ruin sooner or later.

  These were people who added to their satisfaction at another’s downfall the gloss of worldly wisdom.

  In the period after his father’s death, Erasmus was sometimes aware of it hanging in the air of conversations, in silences, in shifts of subject, too elusive for a cause of quarrel—he would have fought any man of whatever degree who spoke in disrespect of his father’s memory.

  This evening he had not seen anything amiss. Drink had made his father eloquent, but there was nothing wrong in that. He had been proud of the way his father had stared that old ruffian Rolfson down, and dominated the table. He had thought him right in everything he said. It was true that the presence of Matthew Paris had been disturbing; it was hateful to have a jail-bird for a cousin and to be obliged to sit at table with him. But Erasmus had drunk quite a lot too; and something had happened earlier that day which occupied his thoughts and possibly blunted his observation. In the afternoon he had taken his courage in both hands and ridden over to the Wolpert house, ostensibly to see Charles. And there, without quite knowin
g how or why, he, who had always hated acting, had allowed himself to be enrolled in the cast of a play.

  3.

  It had been on the morning of that day—the day of his involvement in these theatricals—that his cousin from Norfolk had arrived, about whom there hung the shadow of failure and disgrace; terrible blemishes to Erasmus, like deformities. If people stayed in their places, he felt, they would not incur such misfortunes. Even Paris’s sufferings, of which he had heard his parents speak, his broken career, the loss of his wife, these seemed shameful too. He had felt, from the first moment, oppressed by his cousin’s presence, as if literally in shadow, as if this meeting existed in shadow time, along with certain other incidents of darkness occurring then, while the ship was being built, which he afterwards remembered.

  “This is your cousin Matthew. Do you remember him?”’

  Erasmus saw a tall, ungainly-looking man with a face deeply marked below the short, bobbed wig.

  He was dressed in a suit of black cloth and his necktie came down in two straight folds like a parson’s.

  “No, I don’t remember him at all.”

  He spoke with his eyes turned towards his father, as if talking of some person not there in the room.

  “You were too young when we last met,” Paris said. “There are ten years between us, I think.” His voice was deep and soft, with a husky vibrance in it, strangely distinctive.

  Erasmus felt a slight prickling sensation at the nape of his neck. He was amazed at this nonchalance. On their last meeting Paris had lifted him, helpless and raging, away from a dam he had been trying to build against the sea, lifted him clear and swung him and set him down yards away.

  The mortal offence of it, the violation of his body and his will, were as vivid now to his mind as they had been thirteen years ago.

  “I am glad to see you, cousin,” he said. “You are very welcome here.” Glancing aside again, he saw that his father was smiling and nodding in a way he had when highly pleased.

  “I am glad of this opportunity to renew my cousin’s acquaintance,” Paris said, with a slight inclination of the head. After this he stood silent for some moments looking from one to the other, from chuckling father to stiff son. “After so many years,” he added heavily. He had felt his cousin’s hostility.

  Suddenly, again, he wondered if he could go through with this visit, had to suppress an impulse to quit the room. Father and son aimed the same level brows at him, had the same staring regard.

  “What I haven’t yet told you,”

  William Kemp said to his son, “because it has only now been finally agreed between us, is that Matthew here will be sailing with the Liverpool Merchant as surgeon.”

  “Will he so?”’ Erasmus had not imagined anyone related to him going with the ship. And that it should be this person, whom he had always hated, who had now compounded his offence by being convicted of sedition—he had brought disgrace on them all—this was a thought intensely disagreeable to him. “You did not tell me you had this in mind,” he said to his father.

  “In case it came to naught when we were building upon it. Matthew is more than qualified.

  He studied three years in Surgeons” Hall in the City of London. Then he was assistant something or other at the Westminster Hospital, what was it…?”’

  ‘Assistant lithotomist,” Paris said gravely. “That was before entering into private practice in Norwich.”

  “And he is, er was, a member of the Royal Company of Surgeon Apothecaries. And he has writ a treatise, entitled Syllabus of Anatomy, which has been published by Blackie and Son of Paternoster Row in London. I trust I have these details right?”’

  Early in this recital Kemp’s face had commenced to glow. There was nothing like a qualified man.

  Each item was a rivet, a strong bolt for the ship’s timbers. “Ah, yes, I almost forgot, he obtained the Bishop of Norwich’s licence as a physician and ran his own practice, with his own premises for retail transactions. Is that not so, Matthew?”’

  “H’m, yes.” Those who knew Paris would have recognized the quality of his hesitation now, and the sudden prominence of his cheekbones. He had enjoined humility upon himself, or, failing that, caution; but he had felt both receding during this catalogue of his virtues. That he was taking his uncle’s charity did not oblige him to take his commendations too, though he was amused in a way to see these enlisted as commercial assets. But it was the unexpected reference to this cleric who had so damaged his life that caused him to break his promises to himself. “Aye,” he said, “you must have your piece of paper with the bishop’s scrawl upon it, there is no doing without that. Though why it should be so I cannot see, as the man knows even less of medicine than of theology. His scrawl was on the paper that sent me to prison too—he knows something about prisons, at least. He owns Norwich Jail at present; not the building, of course— that belongs to good King George. No, the revenue from it, which is quite considerable, you know: people will pay for their comforts inside prison just as they will outside, if they have money.”

  Some moments of silence followed this. Erasmus could not fully credit what he had heard. That Paris should so gratuitously refer to his experience of prison struck him as in such execrable taste that it almost deserved pity. It was as if his cousin had made some terrible blunder which he needed to be saved from. And it was with some sense of coming to the rescue, some urge to cover the offence, that he cast around now for a new topic. “What is a lithotomist exactly?”’ he said at last.

  “Lithotomy is the operation of cutting for stone in the bladder,” Paris said, in his deep, unhurried voice. His face relaxed in a rueful, slightly lop-sided smile that narrowed one eye more than the other. “As for the premises your father speaks of,” he said, “it was a shop.” He raised a large hand in a gesture of repudiation. “My wife and I kept an apothecary’s shop and had rooms above it.”

  The words were merely modest in intention; but they gave Erasmus what he needed, a reason for legitimizing his dislike, giving it official status, so to speak. Antipathy for a fellow-being, like love, is a story that we relate to ourselves, varying in the elements that feed it but always the same in its need for a formal opening, so that it can become properly conscious of itself and not remain for ever inchoate, mere vague repugnance or resentment or prejudice.

  This opening Erasmus found in the twisted smile, in what seemed a sardonic belittling of his father’s enthusiasm; andwiththe opening once found things proceeded apace, as always: what right had this pauper, this recipient of charity, to correct his benefactor, to choose the way he was to be regarded?

  A little later, in the drawing-room, where his mother joined them for tea, he found himself adding his cousin’s strangely unfashionable shoes to the count against him.

  They were large, black, square-toed, with big square buckles—this at a time when buckles of any sort were quite out—and they creaked slightly.

  They somehow completed the suggestion of the necktie, with its two straight folds, and the black, low-crowned hat he had seen hanging in the hall, of some country preacher, a hedge parson dressed up for a visit.

  This seemed like hypocrisy—it was for denying Holy Writ that his cousin had been imprisoned…

  In the smaller space of this room it was impossible not to feel a kind of force emanating from Paris. This lay not so much in any distinction of bearing as in the potential for damage that seemed to invest him, conveyed by something awkward in his movements, something constrained or perhaps not fully coordinated. Sitting there in his thick black suit, impassive now that grimace of a smile had faded, with his pale eyes and long, furrowed face turned attentively to his hostess, the stranger looked somehow as if the space wasn’t enough, as if he might break into disastrous action.

  It was the chief fear of Mrs Kemp, as she afterwards confessed, that her nephew might break something.

  “I was on the edge of my seat the whole time Matthew was in the room,” she said. ‘So unsettling.”
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  Her voice, as always, threatening to expire before the final syllables were reached.

  She had joined them for tea, in this room she loved best in the house, with its pale green brocaded chairs and little oval tables, its lawn curtains admitting a discreet view of the street and the opposite house fronts, its cabinets of things she had had from her mother, things precious to her, tea-sets, Dresden figurines, the prized collection of china pomanders and pill-boxes—all well within reach of her nephew’s arm.

  She was fond of Matthew, who was her sister’s son, and had always followed his career with interest, in spite of seeing him only rarely. She often spoke of him, a fact galling to Erasmus, though his pride would not allow him to show it. Her pity and distress at her nephew’s misfortune she disguised in accustomed weariness and these exaggerated fears that he might break something. With a husband and a son always ready to correct her errors of feeling, she had learned disguise long ago.

  “Yes,” she said in her expiring tones, “I was prepared for the very worst.”

  And yet the movements of his hands were precise enough, his management of shallow saucer and small-handled cup and diminutive spoon beyond reproach. It was an uneasy constraint of body, not any evident clumsiness, that gave others a sense of possible disaster. And it was obvious that he was strong.

  “He quite wearied me out,” Mrs Kemp said.

  “And then, of course, knowing that he had not been long out of prison…”

  “You think his capacity for wreckage was thereby increased?”’ Kemp asked. Though not given to regarding himself with any degree of irony—and perhaps because of this—he had stores of it for his wife.