Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [11]
‘He would not give it up. We went to ask him to come away, but he would not. He would not speak to anyone. He had mud all over him. He went on plastering over the stones and bits of plank and the sea went on wrecking his efforts. I thought to myself then that what my cousin sets his mind on it will come hard but he gets it.’
Paris paused, swallowing at a feeling of a self-contempt. Was it to ingratiate himself with the mother that he was telling this story of heroic persistence? He had found shelter in her invalidism – was he now trying to creep further into her good graces, trying to cement an alliance of the weak? The truth of his memory was quite different …
‘It was as if you were possessed,’ he said, looking steadily and rather sternly at Erasmus. ‘You were white in the face and staring. I remember that your hands were black with the mud but blood from your fingers showed through it where you had lacerated them scrabbling with the stones. It was … quite a spectacle.’ And no joy in it, he thought, looking with a kind of curiosity at his cousin, no prospect of joy – there would have been no joy in success; that lonely passion had needed defeat as a condition of its being.
‘I do not recollect anything of it.’ Erasmus had quivered internally at the touch of his cousin’s impertinent curiosity, though meeting it with an appearance of indifference and the same obstinate lie. This stranger, with his lined face and pale eyes, the mounds of his knees showing under the cloth of his breeches, was claiming rights which by his disgrace he had forfeited. Worse, he was vindicating his claims: he had brought the episode vividly, irresistibly, back; Erasmus could deny remembering, but he could not defend himself against the memory; he felt it again now, the loneliness of it, the indifferent sky, the gleaming, elusive water, the exquisite rage. He saw himself as the others must have seen him, dogged and ridiculous. And all this he had to endure now again, and at Paris’s bidding. Worst of all, his cousin showed no awareness of the wrong he had done, he made no slightest mention of it …
FOUR
Soon after the midday meal, at which she ate little, Mrs Kemp retired for her afternoon rest. Before she did so she made Paris a present of a very handsome lacquered box, lined with baize and decorated on the outside with a design of gold peacocks on a blue background. ‘ ’Tis Chinese lacquer,’ she said. ‘I have been used to keep recipes in it, but it will serve just as well for your log books and such like.’
‘It is the captain who keeps a log, not the doctor,’ Kemp said.
‘I was speaking of a medical log, not a nautical one,’ his wife said with dignity. ‘Matthew will want to keep notes of the ailments he encounters on the ship. I should much enjoy to read them when he returns.’ She had an abiding interest in illness of every kind.
‘I am sure to find a use for it,’ Paris said, holding the box rather awkwardly between his large hands. ‘It is indeed kind of you, aunt.’
Erasmus too excused himself early. It was a Sunday and he had made up his mind to ride over to the Wolpert house on the pretext of a visit to Charles Wolpert, with whom he had never been on very close terms. The decision had involved a struggle with himself, with his pride, his fear of ridicule, shame at the element of declaration he felt in it – though this was less obvious than it seemed to his exasperated self-consciousness. This travail once over, his intention was cast firm and unalterable. The only element of choice remaining lay in what clothes to wear for the occasion; and in order to give his best attention to this Erasmus repaired to his room at the earliest opportunity.
This left the two men alone, Paris without refuge in a third party, Kemp possessed by a kind of impatience: he would have liked, in the span of this single afternoon, to take this studious, clumsy-seeming nephew of his through all the stages of his own enthusiasm for the slaving venture – an ambition