Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [259]
He heard a movement and a brief muttering from one of the sleeping children on the other side of the partition. Then silence again. ‘You finish dat now,’ he said, pointing towards the cane seed beside her on the trestle. At once she began to sweep the grain into a clay bowl, tilting the board and using the edge of her hand. Paris watched, remembering the first time he had come to her, the desolation of his desire, standing outside in the dark, a cool wind from the sea, his feet kicking in the debris of fallen palmetto leaves, the loneliness of need possessing him and Ruth’s image lost among the rustling fronds at his feet. The same soft light, the same sense of warmth and safety … He had shared her with several men since those days but nothing had changed the feeling she gave him of having reached a safe haven. Just so had she looked at him then, as he stood dumb before her, with the same steadiness, without subterfuge and yet with a pride and decorum that had survived all the brutalities of the slaveship.
‘Make dead de fire,’ she said softly. She slept naked but for reasons that seemed cogent to her she would not undress before him nor ever make love except in the dark.
They lay together on the bed of rush matting and deerskins. Faint light came through where the woven mats joined the eaves. He could make out the line of her cheek, and her eyes in their shadowed hollows. Her smell came to him and he nuzzled his face against her neck and kissed the pulse in her throat and then the full mouth, which softened to his kisses; having early discovered his eccentric taste for kissing on the mouth she had practised the way of it that pleased him most. She pressed against him, but softly; her first movements of love were always gentle and slow. She moved her hands over his chest and abdomen and traced the bones of the pelvis. Preliminaries between them never lasted long. For him her touch and nearness in the dark were enough and when he turned to her he found her always ready. Tonight as he rode to his peace he muttered that he loved her, loved her, but the only reply that came was in the quickened breath of her excitement.
Afterwards she was asleep almost at once, almost before his weight was off her. Sleep, however, did not come to Paris despite the torpor of his body – indeed his mind seemed the clearer for this. He lay awake for a long time, his thoughts moving outward in concentric ripples from the solitary phenomenon of himself to the human creatures sleeping around him, then to the spaces of the night that wrapped them all.
Once again the wonder of their existence on this remote strand came to him. In terms of odds defeated and probabilities defied it verged on the miraculous. Even the first condition of survival, the unity preserved among them after Thurso’s death, in the aftermath of the mutiny, when staying made them all accomplices in murder, even this had been due to accidental factors, the presence of the gold dust on board, the extraordinary fervour of Delblanc.
No one had known of the gold dust at that time but Barton and Haines – and Haines only because Barton needed his help. The knowledge had been enough to make these two throw their weight behind the mutiny. Fear too, of course – both men were hated; but had they not planned to return to the ship they might have opposed the idea of grounding her. Once she was grounded there had been no turning back.
The presence of the gold, then, had been an accidental blessing. But the man who had done most to keep them together had not been a member of the crew at all. He saw Delblanc’s face before him now, with the starkness on it of a truth belatedly, overwhelmingly, perceived. Delblanc had seen more clearly than anyone that only concerted action could save them, not only from surrounding dangers but from one another. Perhaps there was already present