Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [178]
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.
THIRTY-FIVE
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 north-east trades fell shorter than usual for the season and she