Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [211]
‘Lady Danby is little better than a whore and I am sorry to hear you call her friend,’ Erasmus said. ‘I cannot wait that long, we are sailing with the tide.’ He took her listless hand and kissed it. ‘I hope you will take care of your health,’ he said. ‘Your complexion, I see, is in no danger of neglect.’
In the coach, as they jolted past Tower Bridge, it occurred to Erasmus that his wife must have donned the chicken skin shortly before his visit, though she had known he was coming. She had wanted to conceal herself. Her complaint against him had some truth in it: on the occasions, rare enough now, when they slept together, he did not look much at her face; at all other times when they met she was masked or disguised in some way, with fard and rouge and patches or with some charlatan lotion. It came to him that he almost never saw Margaret’s real face. He wondered if he would recognize her passing in the street, or in the midst of a crowd … There was one face he would know instantly, after twelve years or twenty, the green eyes, so pale as to seem like some solution of silver, the deeply marked brows, the patience and obstinacy of the expression … With a sudden rush of detestation Erasmus realized that he knew this face of Matthew Paris more intimately than that of any other person in the world.
It was a face that returned frequently to him during the voyage, accompanied always by further remembered details of his cousin’s appearance and manner, this process resembling a story he repeated to himself, more elaborate with every repetition. But wherever the story began it ended always in the same place, with those stronger arms lifting him, swinging him away, violating his body and his will. He had uttered no sound, submitting in furious silence, making himself a dead weight in his cousin’s arms …
He recalled Paris’s appearance on that last visit, the gaunt and awkward frame, the thick wrists and clumsy-seeming hands that were yet so precise in their smallest movements, the deep voice with the odd vibration in it and the sardonic, lop-sided smile. There had been that disturbing suggestion of physical power, of imperfect control …
The possibility that this face, this bundle of attributes, should have continued in being all this while, surviving his father’s ruin, his own loss of love and home and all the long struggle to pay off his father’s debts, was something he found difficult at first to endure. That the survival had been achieved by such heinous crimes – murder, piracy, the theft not only of the negroes but of the ship itself and then only to abandon her – made it the more monstrous. The thought that his cousin might be alive still was literally monstrous to him, a shape of ugliness and deformity in the natural order of things, something to be extirpated. It subverted all the rules that men lived by. If such wrong-doing was allowed to succeed, what price duty, what price honour? What price his own faithful discharge of obligation to the family name?
But as the days at sea followed one another in monotonous succession, with the wash of waves against the ship’s bows and the slow creaking of her timbers, he found himself in the strengthening grip of paradox. The less Paris seemed deserving of liberty and life, the more Erasmus found himself hoping that he was still in possession of these, so that he could be brought to justice and deprived of both together. For the other miscreants who had been aboard, whom Paris had doubtless persuaded to join him, Erasmus cared little. They were scum in any case. But his thoughts tended always to a passionate preservation of his cousin’s life, until the fear that he was not there, that he might not be able to be found, even that the whole story might still prove to be a fabrication, set him burning with a fever of anxiety as he lay sleepless on his