Sacred Hunger

  Sarah was away half an hour or more. When she returned, making an entry through the wide double-doors, Erasmus saw at once that she had done her hair differently, in a braid over the top of her head, and that she had added something to the natural glow of her cheeks. The dress was of silk, a soft apricot in colour, with narrow stripes in a darker shade and a vine pattern of flowers and leaves between, the skirt full, with a short train, and arranged over a hooped petticoat of cream-coloured quilted satin. High-heeled shoes with brocade straps completed the effect.

  Sarah paraded before them for some time. She was flushed but serious, as befitted the occasion. For a while there was no sound in the room but the beguiling friction of silk.

  Having helped in the choice of material and seen the dress fitted at the dressmaker’s, Mrs Wolpert had not many words to say now. She was still far from approving the exhibition and wished it over quickly.

  Erasmus was silent for so long that in the end Sarah stopped and looked at him in a way that was imperious, yet somehow supplicating too. “You look beautiful,” he said then. “It is a beautiful dress.” His own voice sounded husky and strange to him, so great was the sincerity with which he delivered this verdict. He could hardly believe, even now, that this radiant creature would so soon be promised to him.

  But even as he spoke something changed in his expression. Another, even so young, even in the joy of possession, might have felt something akin to compassion for what had been patient and somehow helpless in the girl’s display, some quality of subjection in it, in the very vanity itself. But this was a reach of feeling quite beyond him. He had felt the joy—it had taken him by the throat. But below it an obscure feeling of offendedness had grown within him. Though she had looked at him and posed for him, he had begun to feel that this show was not for him only, he was sharing her with other spectators somewhere beyond the room. She was on stage again.

  Displeasure at this did not last long, once he was able to assign it to weakness on Sarah’s part— her weaknesses he was confident he could deal with. By the time he took his leave he had quite recovered equanimity. Sarah, restored to her house costume of light blue lutestring, accompanied him to the end of the drive. Walking beside her, leading his horse, he felt unmixed happiness. At the gate they kissed and he held her close. He felt her press against him and the blood rose to his head and obscured his sight for some moments.

  She had heard the change in his breathing. “My own love,” she said.

  “Until Saturday then,” he said. He watched her walk away, keeping his eyes fixed on her until the curve of the drive took her from his sight.

  It was nearly six o’clock when he reached home. His mother heard him crossing the hall towards the staircase and called out to him. He found her alone in her small parlour, the tea things still before her.

  “No one cares a fig for my convenience,” she began at once, before he was properly in the room.

  “That is always the last thing to be studied; my poor father would turn in his grave if he knew, well, I believe he does. I have so long been used in this way, it would be strange if he didn’t, but this goes beyond the bounds.”

  From his mother’s hasty, indrawn breaths and the bridling movements of her head, Erasmus saw that she was in one of her states. “What is the matter, Mother?”’ he asked, and there had unconsciously come into his voice the tone his father habitually used with her, breezy, affectionate, patronizingly brisk.

  “I have not even had the resolution to ring for the tea things to be removed,” she said on a calmer, more plaintive note.

  ‘Well, I will do that.” He saw now that her hair was powdered and set in the rather elaborate coiffure known as French curls, and that she was dressed for going out in a brocade gown in pink and gold, with a lace stomacher. “That is a handsome gown,” he said, in the same tone. “You are altogether very elegant this evening, Mother.”

  “Well, but your father is not come home, he will have forgot it.” Vexation had paled her, so that the rouge on her cheeks showed too prominently. “I have had that fluttering,” she said, on a note of warning, laying a white hand over the brocaded bodice of her dress. “Had it not been for the tincture of hellebore your cousin Matthew recommended, I don’t know what would have happened, and now I can’t be sure the apothecary is making it up in the exact same proportions, and Matthew is not here to advise me. I think it a great pity that my nephew must stay away so long and spend his talents on rough seamen and black people.”

  “Well, I hope you do not blame father for that,”

  Erasmus said, smiling. “You know he has much on his mind these days.”

  “How should I know it? He does not talk to me of what is on his mind. He promised to be home today in time for tea. We were to have dined early and gone to the Mansion House Gardens that are newly opened and a great draw to all the fashion of the town, to listen to the band.”

  “He cannot be much longer now,” Erasmus said.

  He stayed with his mother and entertained her with the description of Sarah’s dress—she entirely shared Mrs Wolpert’s feelings about the propriety of the proceedings. They played some hands of whist together.

  Cards always calmed her nerves. She was a shrewd and accomplished player with a strong desire to win, which sometimes led her into cheating. Light in the room began to fail and the parlourmaid was summoned to light the lamps. Still the merchant failed to arrive. When the clock struck eight Erasmus got up. “He must have overlooked it completely,” he said. “If something had come up in the way of business to detain him, he would have sent word. I will go down to the office and see.”

  It seemed too much trouble to have the mare brought out and saddled again. There were always chairmen waiting outside the Lion at the corner of Red Cross Street.

  Almost at once he found two men with a sedan that passed his inspection as not too impossibly verminous.

  On the way he thought of little. The slight rocking motion of the chair and the whoops of the foremost man to clear the way made drowsy rhythm in his mind and he fell into a state between musing and dozing.

  He paid off the men at the end of Water Street beside the Ram’s Head and walked through the alley behind the inn on to the waterfront. There was a wind rising from across the estuary; he heard the rattle of a loose board somewhere and the creaking of the ropes that held the heavy inn-sign. A barge with a lantern at the stern lay some way out on the water.

  There were no lights on the ground floor of the warehouse and the doors that gave on to the street were locked. He went round to the side of the building and ascended the short flight of metal stairs to the watchman’s shed on the landing. He found the man sprawled on a ragged quilt, open-mouthed and oblivious in a thick fume of gin. After locking up below he had obviously deemed his watch over for the night and settled down to the bottle. Erasmus considered kicking him awake, but even that degree of contact was distasteful to him. It would be the brute’s last sleep in the service of the firm, that much at least he promised himself.

  From behind the shed a gallery ran the length of the building, giving access to a number of rooms that looked over the warehouse floor on one side and the waterfront on the other. His father’s office and his own smaller, adjoining one were roughly halfway along; both father and son were accustomed to enter and leave the building by this route and each had his own set of keys.

  He had taken the small, half-blackened oil lamp from the watchman’s hut to light his way. The gallery itself was in darkness but he could make out a faint crack of light beneath the door of his father’s office. He knocked, waited, tried the door comx was locked. He used his key to open it. There was no one in the room. The stub of a candle in a tall holder on the table burned with an unsteady flame, sending blurred ripples over the polished surface.

  Erasmus stood still for some moments, aware of nothing but a sort of mild puzzlement. The room was quiet, at once familiar and strange at this late hour, with its odours of melted candle wax and old pa
pers and the stealthy reek of river water that entered all these buildings in the cool of the night.

  He saw now that the flame of the candle was not guttering as he had thought at first, but leaning over in some current of air. This it was that accounted for the tremulous waverings of light over the table and near the wall. Glancing beyond the table, he saw that the door of the small stock-room at the far end of the office was standing half open. Perhaps his father had gone that way for some reason—there was a passage beyond it which led back on to the gallery further along. Still holding the lamp he took some steps round the table and approached the door. “Father,” he called, not very loudly. “Are you there?”’

  He held the door open. Shadows were somehow too long in here. There was his own flickering shadow lying before him, but it extended further than the candle-light could have thrown it. There was another, cast by the lamp. He was holding the lamp too close to his face. He raised it and went forward a little, no more than a pace or two, but enough for him to see the dark bulk hanging above him and to take in, with the helpless particularity that accompanies shock, the exact look of the overturned stool on the floor and his father’s shoeless feet which by some accident of balance dangled one distinctly lower than the other.

  Some words broke from Erasmus but he could not afterwards remember what they had been, nor what had been the sequence of his actions after the first one: with the same instinct of secrecy that had possessed his father, he had run to lock the outer door. Everything else, everything surrounding this one deliberate act, was improvised, maladroit, violent, climbing on to a chair, sawing awkwardly at the rope above his father’s head, clutching at the body in absurd scruple that it might be further damaged by a fall, falling with it, heavily, when he could not take the weight. Lying half-embraced there on the floor, he had fumbled to loosen the knot, not in the hope of restoring life—he knew there was no life left in the body—but as if in hope that the relief of it might close his father’s eyes at last. But it did not, and he could not touch the face.

  He left the way he had come, locking the door again carefully behind him. The watchman was snoring still in his hut. He took a sedan from the inn and gave directions to the porters in clear and collected tones. The necessity for concealment acted on him like resolution and kept him in a semblance of calm.

  Only when he was home again did this begin to break down. His mother, still in her brocade gown, sat in the parlour where he had left her, playing patience.

  She has been here all this time, he thought, here in this one place…

  “Well, you have taken long enough,” she said pettishly. “Is your father there? It is too late now in any case, I have given up all thoughts of it.”

  When he failed to answer, she looked up at him sharply. Then her eyes widened and she started forward in her chair. “What is it?”’ she said. “Where is your father?”’

  “Something has happened,” he said and his voice broke on it, not in grief yet—the death was all horror still—but in distress at not knowing how to tell her, not knowing how to speak of it to his mother, who had always had to be shielded, humoured.

  For a while he was silent, thinking of words to say.

  “Mother,” he said at last, “you must prepare yourself-“

  With a speed that took him by surprise she had flung down the cards and was out of her chair and standing close. Her head came lower than his chin but he felt no difference in height now, so fiercely did she look at him. “What is it?”’ she said again.

  “Why don’t you speak?”’ Her voice rose.

  “Has there been an accident?”’

  Still with an instinct of concealment or protection he said, “I locked the office door. No one can get in.” It sounded like a boast. Then he felt the sharp clutch of her hands on his arms and he began to tell her but in his desire to be gradual he lost his way in the story; like a child, he grew enmeshed in the nightmare preliminaries, the clues that had led him to that hanging shape, the leaning flame, the half-opened door, the shadows that had seemed wrong, misshapen… “He was there, in the dark,” he said, looking away from her in shame, his own, his father’s.

  “You say you locked the door? Did you bring away the keys?”’

  The sharpness of the question brought his eyes back to her.

  The patches of paint on her cheeks looked grotesque now, clownish, against the drained pallor of her face. But her eyes were regarding him closely and her mouth was compressed in a firm line.

  “Why, yes,” he said, “I have them with me.”

  ‘His own will be there with him, if he had locked the door. And the watchman?”’

  “Watchman?”’

  “Yes,” she said with sudden angry impatience, “the watchman, the watchman. Gather your wits.

  We must be quick if we are to keep this hid. The watchman, does he have keys?”’

  “Only to the storerooms below.”

  “We must have your father brought home tonight, but it cannot be done by any of our own people, it must all be done through Dr Banks. We must see him tonight, at once.”

  “But what use is that?”’ He was bewildered.

  “I have told you he is dead,” he said. “Would I have left him otherwise?”’

  “For the certificate,” she said, and he saw that her lips had begun trembling. “The doctor must sign to a cause of death. Do as I say, Erasmus. Go and see to the coach. William will be there still, he has been waiting all this while to take your father and me to the Mansion House. He will not have stabled the horses without permission.” Her voice softened to a full tone of pity for him which he was never quite to forgive. “You must come with me,” she said.

  “My poor boy, nothing will be required of you, but I must have someone… I must have a man with me at this hour of night. Go now. I will change my clothes meanwhile.”

  Mutely, as if in a dream, he obeyed her.

  It was gone eleven when they drew up outside the doctor’s house, a large mansion in the newly opened and fashionable Bold Street. Henry Banks was now one of the leading physicians of the town but he had been doctor to the Kemps since the early days of his practice.

  He received them almost at once in the small parlour he used as a consulting-room, apologizing for his evening attire of robe and skull-cap—he had been on the point of retiring for the night. He was a tall, high-shouldered man, deliberate and impressive in manner, with shrewd, equable eyes in a long face.

  “You will take something?”’ he said, glancing from one to the other. He had recognized the hush of shock about them from the moment they entered the room. “A glass of cordial, perhaps, something to warm you? The nights are cold still. You will not? Well, then, tell me how I can be of service to you.”

  At this, Elizabeth Kemp began for the first time to weep. Between bouts of tears she spoke of an accident, a terrible misadventure, she did not know which way to turn, she was sorry it was so late, they were keeping him from bed and she knew he was a man with many calls upon him, but by the time they had got the coach out …

  The doctor listened with sober patience, saying little, making no attempt to prompt her or check the weeping, evidently content to let her come to the business in her own time. But Erasmus could not contain himself. This foolish prevarication of his mother’s, this flattering of the doctor, seemed shameful to him. His father was lying there, dead and disgraced and staring in the dark while she wheedled and dabbed at her eyes.

  Even the tears… He had to take the initiative, speak for both of them.

  “My father has done a violence to himself,” he said harshly. “By misadventure, of course, but it could be taken as design and it is that we want to avoid.” He paused, clearing some obstacle in his throat. “We are come to ask if you will certify to natural causes.”

  “Natural causes?”’ The doctor looked sharply and coldly at Erasmus. “He is dead, then? And in circumstances of violence? No, I do not wish to know the manner of it. You must save that for t
he proper authorities. There are people appointed to examine into such things. Did you seriously think I would compound a felony, a man in my position? You would have done better to leave things to your mother.” He turned to the mother now and his expression softened. She had been coming to him with ailments largely imaginary for upwards of twenty years and he had grown fond of her. “My dear,” he said, “I am deeply sorry to hear of this accident, but really cannot see, under the circumstances -“

  ‘My son is overwrought,” she said quickly.

  “He does not know what he is saying. ‘Twas he that discovered my poor husband. He is little more than a boy and has got the matter quite wrong.

  Please forgive him. We came only to seek your advice in this terrible pass we are brought to. I am a mere woman and have small knowledge of the world and my health is far from good, as none knows better then you…”

  In fact she looked less sickly, more animated, at this moment than Erasmus could ever remember seeing her. The crisis of his intervention had driven away her tears, leaving her eyes brighter, and a glow had come to warm her cheeks. Sitting upright in her plain cambric dress and trimmed hood, her hands clasped together, she looked more than well, she looked handsome; and Erasmus sensed that Banks thought so too, for all the fellow’s grave airs.

  She paused a moment now as if in reflection and when she spoke again it was in a different, more considering tone: “My husband, as you will recall, was a high-blooded man and rather short in the neck and suffered from dizzy fits sometimes and rushes to the head.”

  Banks nodded slowly. “That is so,” he said.

  “He had a sanguine constitution of body. I remember letting him blood on occasion.”