Sacred Hunger

  “Well, it is my belief that he consulted another doctor for this condition at certain times, for example when you yourself were away from the town or otherwise not available to be visited.”

  The doctor regarded her for a moment in silence.

  Then, still without speaking, he looked down thoughtfully at the signet ring on his right hand. Absently, he turned it this way and that for some little while. Erasmus glanced at his mother in surprise—he had not heard before of a second doctor and was about to say so when he was checked by her slight warning frown.

  The doctor looked up. His face was quite without expression. “Yes,” he said, “I am sometimes away. To take a second opinion would have been quite a reasonable thing for Kemp to do under the circumstances.”

  ‘Well, now, the difficulty is,” she said, “I am so silly and not used to remembering and I cannot for the life of me bring to mind this doctor’s name and I do not know how I can find it out on such short notice. I thought you might know it. You know so many things and have a wide acquaintance among the practitioners of the town…”

  There was another silence. Dr Banks looked straight before him, tapping his long fingers softly together, his face composed in its habitual gravity of expression. “I could support the condition of high blood pressure,” he said at last. “That is, if asked, I could confirm that Kemp received treatment from me for that condition—if asked, let us say, by this other physician your husband had been seeing. That would not be to certify cause of death, you understand. But in the event of a certificate being signed by someone else, it might lend credence. Yes, I should say pretty certainly it would lend credence.” He got up on this and went to his desk, where he spent some time searching in a drawer and a further brief time writing. When he came back to them he held a slip of paper in his hand. “The doctor your husband may have consulted in my absence is this one,” he said. “The address is written here too. He is flexible in his hours, I believe, and can be visited at any time.”

  She had risen to take the paper from him and for a moment she clasped his hand and lowered her head over it and the tears came again. Different now, impeding her thanks. The doctor too knew the difference in the tears and this time used words of comfort to her as he supported her towards the door. “Kemp did not lack for friends,” he said. “There will be those that you can turn to. And you have this fine son as your support.

  If there is anything more that I can do, I trust you will not hesitate to ask. You will understand that I cannot examine the poor fellow’s body or have anything more to do directly with the business. If any should ask why I was not called in, you may say I was indisposed. But it is unlikely.” He smiled at them in farewell. “The proceedings are quite regular, the man whose name I have given you is a qualified medical practitioner.”

  It was only when, long past midnight, they had run the qualified medical man to earth in his ramshackle and evil-smelling quarters above a tavern, that things began to fall into place in Erasmus’s mind. He had listened in silence while his mother bargained with the gaunt, unsteady fellow, whom they had roused, still reeking of spirits, from his sleep.

  Ten minutes’ talk and twenty-five guineas secured for William Kemp an official death from heart failure, the due period of mourning, burial in hallowed ground. From the widow and the son was lifted the spectre of scandal and disgrace. Five guineas more obtained the services of two silent, out-at-elbow ruffians and a covered litter. The merchant was brought home in the dimness of the new day, wrapped in a length of good-quality blue cotton baft from his warehouse.

  She had bargained with that scoundrel—Erasmus could scarcely believe it. “Not for the sake of the guineas,” she told him, “no price can be put on your father’s reputation. But these people expect it.”

  It was her own unexpected knowledge of what people expected that he held against her—that and her resourcefulness when he himself had been floundering. And she had deceived him, she had kept him in the dark. He writhed inwardly when he remembered how she had apologized for him to the condescending Banks.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Mother?”’ he asked her once. “Why didn’t you say what was in your mind to do?”’

  “My poor Erasmus,” she said, “I thought the less you knew the better. You had already lost your father that night.”

  And with this—as he saw it—typical failure of logic on her part he had to be content. The worst of it was that despite his superior logic and the sense of rectitude to which he clung as if it were a mark of loyalty to his father, he knew in his heart that he had been given that night a lesson in the conduct of human affairs that he would never forget.

  The feeling of having been somehow duped poisoned his grief in the days that followed. Forof course his father too had deceived him. With sick incredulity he tried to imagine what his father had felt during the last hours of his life, tried to make the actions of that stranger somehow congruous and explicable. He remembered how his father had avoided his eyes when they had parted that afternoon, an unusual thing—both father and son were direct in their regard. He must have known then. He would have had the rope ready, he would have marked the iron hook in the beam. Perhaps he had known for much longer.

  .. But this was more than Erasmus could bear steadily to contemplate, the loneliness and treachery of it, sitting at meals, discussing business, with the intention of death constant behind the changing face.

  Below his feeling of betrayal was a horror that never left him at the secrecy of the business, the deranged ceremony, locking the door, setting the candle on the table. Somewhere in the midst of this madness his father had removed his shoes so that the last steps of his life would be silent…

  Erasmus was freed from this stricken state, though not yet enough to weep, by the sight of the face in its open coffin on the eve of the funeral. Once again it was by deception that Elizabeth Kemp revealed her love and fulfilled her duty. Alone she had bathed the body and shrouded it. She had waxed away the dark mottles below the skin, and shut the outraged eyes. She had closed Kemp’s mouth over his swollen tongue and held it closed with a binding of linen.

  Death itself is never false, she had merely falsified appearances for the sake of the living. But to Erasmus, kneeling alone in the silent room, it seemed that he was seeing the truth of his father’s face for the first time. The inessentials were gone, the changes of expression, the high colour and the hectic regard, erased by this draining of the accidental blood. Now it could be seen that his father bore the face of a zealot who had been proved right after all. It came to Erasmus, with inexpressible pain, that all he could remember of his father’s life, all his gesture and assertion, all the peculiar vividness of expression that had belonged to him, had been no more than botched rehearsals for this final waxen immobility.

  This pity for his father brought him close to tears. In the determined intensity of his efforts to hold them back —he had not so far wept—his gaze took on a preternatural fixity, blurring the face before him, giving it for the moment a look of merely momentary repose. The eyelids seemed to quiver and the nostrils to distend slightly, as if at the scent of something savoursome. Erasmus was carried back to the winter morning at Dickson’s shipyard, more than a year ago now, when amid smells of cut wood and wet sawdust his father had crouched and advanced his connoisseur’s nose to the fresh-cut timber of the ship’s mast, and pronounced it first-rate. Another smell too there had been, coarser, the odour of decay. Not that day but somewhere near it, the time the ship was building. Eyes from which the light was fading, a startled movement in the half-dark, a mute plea for a death unwitnessed… Another man, adding the rank smell of his death to these milder ones of clean linen and essence of violets… Erasmus rose too hastily and felt a wave of dizziness. In the desolate clarity that came with its passing he understood that his father had been sniffing at his own death, his own decay, that day at the shipyard—it was the ship that had killed him.

  35.

  She was continuing
to kill others; not on a grand scale, but steadily, day by day, as the dysentery gained ground in spite of all Paris’s efforts.

  This second attempt to quit Africa had been hardly more successful than the first. Perhaps the monkey was not deemed sacrifice enough and Thurso’s tutelary spirit, in the arbitrary way of powerful beings, simply abandoned him; or perhaps, having lived longer than any man was supposed to in this trade, he had exhausted luck and credit alike. Whatever the reason, in the following weeks the Liverpool Merchant was subject to every perversity of weather possible in those waters at that time of year. The northeast trades fell shorter than usual for the season and she lay too far south to find them. Less than thirty leagues out she found herself again becalmed, prey to the currents flowing eastward into the Gulf of Guinea, edging her back towards the shoals. Day after day she dawdled in a latitude some points south of seven degrees, in that equatorial region of light currents and whispering convergence of breezes known as the Doldrums, where opposing winds meet and die in slow rises and wandering uplifts of air.

  They had promises of change: light rufflings of the sea were perceived at a distance, like gentle strokes of a cat’s paw over the surface, forerunners of a steadier breeze. From aloft Hughes saw these fugitive traces and following an old superstition he scratched with his nails at the backstays and whistled for a wind.

  But no wind came. The canvas hung slack.

  The negroes were listless and sullen under their awning, whose fringes hardly stirred. The fear that had made them quick-eyed and febrile was quite gone from their faces. Their looks were fixed and heavy now, their limbs slow and reluctant, as if fear had been stilled by something worse.

  Sea and sky joined seamlessly in a single tone of hot white, burnished and slightly smoky. The ship rested on the sea as if in some substance thicker and more inert than water. Yet this lifeless sea had its moments of energy. The clawing strokes across the surface deepened sometimes to a strange rippling or seething motion. Occasionally a line of foam would break in the vicinity of the ship, bearing an evil-smelling, gelatinous scum. A fierce argument, almost leading to blows, broke out in the forecastle between Blair and Lees as to the nature of this stinking freightage, one contending it was dead spawn, the other decayed fragments of jellyfish.

  Tempers were short among the men, with only dirty work to do and not enough to eat—their food was rationed now, on Thurso’s orders. Cavana, whose hatred for the captain had not rested since the murder of his monkey, put it about that Thurso had pocketed the money that should have been laid out on provisions. This was consistent with what they knew of him and was believed for the sake of the grievance it afforded. A muttering grew up against Thurso, though not yet in his hearing.

  To Paris, seeing the strange seething motions that sometimes disturbed this pale and fiery sea without bringing the faintest of breezes, there came the obscene suspicion that creatures were feasting just below the surface, growing fat on the polluted scum—a filth to which the ship herself added daily, tipping the bodies of the dead and the ordures of the living into the placid waste around, obliged from time to time to have her longboat hoisted out so that she could be towed forward, out of the zone she had fouled.

  He was in those days prone to sick fancies, induced in part by the ravages of disease among the negroes, which he found himself powerless to prevent. In the later stages of the dysentery they grew too weak to use the necessary buckets, especially the men, who were still chained together in pairs, and their quarters below and parts of the deck amidships became noisome. Paris used all the means known to him of combating infection, working to keep the slaves washed down and the decks well scraped, and to purify the tainted air below.

  He had the slaves’ rooms swabbed out with vinegar and he smoked the area between decks with tar and brimstone.

  Thurso too played his part, united with the surgeon in his urgent wish to keep as many of the negroes alive as possible. He gave orders for wetted gunpowder to be burned in iron pots in different parts of the vessel—a long-tried disinfectant which he swore by. But in spite of all efforts the deaths continued. And now, to add to his troubles, Paris began to find scorbutic symptoms among the crew.

  McGann was the first. He had just assisted, with Sullivan, in throwing a dead woman slave over the side, and he came to Paris complaining of a disabling feebleness in his knees experienced while doing so.

  “I could hardly hoist her over,” he said, ‘an” she was nae mair than a bag o’ bones hersel’.

  There’s a weakness in a’ me joints.”

  He was a noted malingerer and exploiter of situations, so Paris did not at first take these complaints very seriously. However, his breath was very offensive and upon looking into his mouth Paris found the gums to be of an unusual livid redness and very soft and spongy—the small degree of pressure necessary in the course of the examination caused them to bleed freely.

  ‘Then there is me legs,” McGann said dolefully, beginning to roll up his trousers, which hung even baggier on him now.

  The skin of the legs was marked by several black and livid spots. They were equal to the surface of the skin, Paris saw, and resembled an extravagation under it, as if from bruising.

  “The slightest thing an” I fall to pantin’ an’ catchin’ for breath,” McGann said.

  Paris nodded. ‘allyou have got scurvy.”

  “Oh, aye?”’

  Something in McGann’s manner told Paris he had known this already. “Your present diet is not sufficient,” he said.

  McGann’s voluminous cap, from which he would not be separated, fell forward over his brows. From below it his small, tight-featured face looked up with a kind of dogged tenacity at Paris. “Tis true that I’m a’ways hungry,” he said. “I cannot get enough to eat. If I could get a extry bit o” rice pudden, me strength would come back to me.”

  “I understand that you are hungry,” Paris said, “but if you ate twice the amount it would not make any difference to your condition. The cause lies not in the quantity but in the nature of the food, at least so I suppose.” He paused for a moment, then said rather helpessly, “To be frank with you, McGann, I am not at all sure what it is that causes these symptoms. It is a deficiency of nutriment, as I believe. I have heard that lemon juice can do much for the condition, but we have nothing of that sort aboard.

  I will make you up a gargle and see how that answers.”

  McGann showed himself sceptical of this remedy and generally disappointed and dissatisfied. Only the hope of getting extra rations had brought him, Paris now realized. Though not very confident, he made up a gargle of acidulated barley water and obliged McGann to take it.

  Alerted now, he noticed during the following days a similar bloating of complexion and listlessness in other members of the crew. As far as he could ascertain, none of the negroes showed symptoms of scurvy and after some pondering he came to the conclusion that the reason for this must be the green peppers which had been served with their rice while supplies lasted.

  There had been no other significant difference in diet.

  The prolonged calm and attendant sickness brought out different things in people, depending on temperament and circumstances. To the inward-looking Paris, with his abiding sense of guilt, the stagnation was also moral, and he was prey to depression and morbid imaginings.

  The people of the crew, less privileged in respect to space, grew more quarrelsome among themselves and more resentful of those set over them. Haines and Barton still drove the men but they went more warily and kept a loaded pistol at their belts.

  Thurso too went armed, aware of the feeling against him. The captain was living in a purgatory of his own. He took his meals generally alone, in sombre silence. When on deck he spoke only through Barton. His small, raw-veined eyes darted suspicious glances from under their heavy brows as if seeking in the faces of those around him some clue as to the culprit, the killer of his merchandise, the agent of this blighting calm. He conveyed to Paris a definite i
mpression of derangement.

  Only Delblanc seemed largely unaffected—though this was a mistaken impression, as Paris came afterwards to realize. In fact, in this succession of unchanging days, Delblanc changed more profoundly than anyone, though this was not obvious at the time because he seemed merely to become more definitely himself. Scrupulously shaved, his hair dressed carefully, in cambric shirt and elegant, close-fitting breeches, he moved about the ship, talking in his frank and engaging style to any of the crew with leisure to listen.

  What reflections he made in the silence of his cabin and how far he seriously attempted to foment revolt, or even hoped for it, was never made clear —he did not himself declare it. But there is no doubt that in this waste of the ship dragged her stench through the water and dead negroes continued to be cast over the side, Delblanc underwent a sort of conversion, of profound consequence for all of them, slaves and seamen alike. And the first sign of it was the way he sought to make converts.

  A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself; he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact, because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it. Perhaps this is true for most of us.

  Delblanc had regarded himself as an artist of a sort, a drifting person, rather a failure. He had espoused theories of liberty and equality, as many do who feel they have made no mark on the world; but these had been diluted in society at large and by his own diffidence. Now, in the present circumstances of the ship, he found a world reduced, concentrated, the perfect model of a tyranny. He was driven to question his life’s purposes.

  Quite frequently, on some corner of the deck or in Delblanc’s more spacious cabin, he and the surgeon would continue the discussions that had begun with their first meeting. Paris’s liking for the other persisted, grew stronger. There was a warmth, a personal attractiveness about him and a patent sincerity impossible to resist. Even without this Delblanc would always have held a special place in his affection and regard: it was to Delblanc that he had laid bare his soul that night at the fort, in the moonlit room, with the death-mask of the governor seeming to follow his every word and movement…