Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [170]
But Kemp seemed not to hear this. His eyes were still turned towards the window and the cold reflected light from the river lay along his brows. Erasmus saw an expression of bitterness and sorrow come to his father’s face and heard him say in low tones, ‘What devil was it counselled me to turn to cotton, I wonder? I should have stayed in sugar.’
These muttered words and the drawn mouth of his father made an impression on Erasmus never to be effaced; but for the moment it was their seeming irrelevance that startled him, the sense that his father was following some lonely track of his own. He experienced a sort of foreboding and an impulse of protective love. He sought for words but found none.
‘Well,’ Kemp said heavily after a moment, ‘let us get out the maps.’ It was a favourite occupation of his now to chart the course of the ship and this news of departure had provided fresh incentive.
They spread the map on the table before them, holding down the corners with the jeweller’s weights. ‘This is where they left from,’ Kemp said. ‘Here is situated the Company fort.’ His nail touched the mouth of the Kavalli River, made a faint scraping sound across the flats of mud that Paris had seen transfigured by moonlight, stopped at the point where the two bound girl slaves, both roughly of an age with Sarah Wolpert, had choked and drowned in the surf.
In that quiet room, with its oak wainscoting and Turkey carpet, its shelves of ledgers and almanacks, it would have been difficult for these two to form any true picture of the ship’s circumstances or the nature of trading on the Guinea Coast, even if they had been inclined to try. Difficult, and in any case superfluous. To function efficiently – to function at all – we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statements of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavour and lawful profit. And we have maps.
‘See, my boy,’ Kemp said, ‘Just about here they should be. They have been on the way a month now, near enough. They should be somewhere here, north of Caracas. They will be keeping on a latitude some fifteen degrees above the equator.’ His finger traced the lines, caressed the contours of flying cherubs with puffed-out cheeks, and sportive dolphins, and the hulls of miniature ships with bellying sails that travelled this benign Atlantic. Meanwhile the real ship was beating to westward, packed to suffocation with negroes in irons, its hold swarming with rats, other merchantmen keeping well to windward of the stench. ‘They will have caught the winter trades,’ Kemp said with something of his old enthusiasm. ‘I dare say as we sit here talking of it they are already in sight of the Sugar Islands.’
Erasmus assented to this. It was the best way to look at it. He was glad to see his father returning to a more sanguine mood. Afterwards, after the event, it was to come to him with bitter self-reproach that he had known all the time that more was worrying his father than the progress of the ship, though this became the focus of it. There had been signs – bills deferred, credit renewed on high terms, the abrupt suspending of their policy of buying land adjoining the roads into the city. He could not, of course, have known the extent of his father’s losses. Even the indefatigible Partridge, whom Wolpert had set on to look into Kemp’s affairs, had failed to discover the merchant’s disastrous attempts to recoup himself on the Stock Exchange; none knew of these but Kemp and his broker. And throughout this time Erasmus too had been absorbed in his own insulating dream.
Sarah’s eighteenth birthday was approaching,