Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [174]
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 – it 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 papers 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