Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [212]
As the leagues mounted between himself and what he had left, the years fell away, became unreal, and he returned to the elemental feelings of childhood. His life dwindled to one intense focus, of such simplicity and power that it reduced the rest to shadows. This falling away was like the slow dismantling of a scaffolding that had never been necessary; but he could not discern the structure it had supported, or seemed to support – that too was an illusion. There was the intense and brilliant focus of his resolve. Outside of this little was visible to him. The blankness of sky and ocean seemed evidence only of more stripping away. But in lieu of possession and identity there was the notion of justice, which deepened and grew abstract and religious, renewed every day in the promise of the dawn, confirmed by the simple sunlight, solemnized by the approach of the dark.
Harvey he questioned from time to time and always closely, as if intent to find him out in some contradiction; but the seaman’s story was too simple for that, and at the same time too vague. Harvey had no picture in his mind of the route that had led him to the creek. He had blundered on to it. ‘I had taken drink, sir,’ he said, always with the same expression, wry and philosophical, as befitted references to this common accident of the human condition. He could remember, so he said, the watering place and the general lie of the coast where they had anchored. And indeed he felt pretty sure of this, though apprehensive of failure; he knew his master well enough by now not to relish the thought of disappointing him.
However, he was not a man who worried overmuch and he was otherwise enjoying the voyage mightily: it was the first time in his life that he had been at sea without having to sweat at the ropes. He messed with the steward and other crew members exempted from watch and regaled them with extraordinary stories about the world of fashion into which he had been introduced. His own simple wonder disarmed his listeners and he was popular with everyone aboard.
The same wonder governed his relations with his employer. That a man with a fine house and servants and money – in short, everything he needed in life – should want to go halfway round the world merely to look at a stinking hulk in a creek bed was so far from reasonable, so opaque to normal understanding, that it placed Kemp on a different level of humanity altogether, lordly, superbly unaccountable, needing to be humoured like the mad.
This humouring Harvey took seriously, conceiving it his duty, part of the terms of his engagement. His story gained in fluency and dramatic colouring without acquiring much more in the way of substance. It was also refined in the direction of virtue: someone else had drawn off the rum from the ship’s stores, someone else again had been for trying to catch the women. To the discovery itself he could add little. The elements after all were few: the drink, the headlong chase, the stumbling through the mangrove swamp, the curving bank of the channel and the tilted wreck lying there amid the debris of her masts, the vegetation trailing over her from the banks on either side. Sometimes he added details. ‘She was a slaveship,’ he said once. ‘I been on slavers. There was the remains of the bulkheads markin’ off the rooms.’
At the same time he tried to defend himself against possible mistake. ‘That bit of coast,’ he said, ‘it never looks the same. Sometimes it an’t even the coast you are seein’. You see what looks like land but it is only shapes of mist built up on the horizon and they disappears as you come closer in.’
As they passed through the Santaren Channel and out into the Florida Stream, these words came to seem prophetic. They struck a season of wandering