Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [303]
All this he sought to lay at his cousin’s door. But to Paris, listening with face averted, it seemed that Erasmus was not accusing, but confessing: he was begging to be released. ‘Nothing that becomes of me can mend these things,’ he said. ‘You will still be where you were.’ He saw that Erasmus had drawn himself up into a position of rigid attention in the course of speaking, as if braced for some ordeal. The pathos of his cousin’s singleness of vision came to him, the terrible emptiness of conquest. ‘Can you not see that?’ he said gently.
Erasmus heard the change of tone, detected amidst the lines of weariness and pain on his cousin’s face traces of an insolent compassion. All his life he had hated to see knowledge of him on any face. After a moment more he turned and walked out of the cabin. Outside the door, at the foot of the ladder, he stood for a short while as if uncertain of his direction. Tears had risen to his eyes, a rare thing with him. Of all the injuries that Paris had done him it seemed to him for a moment that this kindness of tone was the worst.
FIFTY-FIVE
Early in the morning of the following day Paris awoke to pains in the lower region of the chest, on the left side. They lessened after a while but were followed shortly by a feeling of constriction in the lungs, forcing him to take shallow breaths, as any deeper inhalation brought renewed pain. As he lay thus it seemed to him that he could hear an occasional rattle of chains from the deck above; but he was feverish and there was a singing in his ears and so he thought it might have been an illusion. Sullivan, arriving with the morning gruel, heard the quick breaths as he entered and saw that Paris’s face was terribly changed. He could not eat and would not submit to be washed.
‘Will you listen to that now?’ Sullivan said in a voice disguised by scolding. ‘What can I do for you then?’
‘You can stay beside me here.’ Paris saw the other man turn his head aside sharply. ‘It is all right,’ he said. ‘It is only that I don’t want to be moved.’
‘No one will move you,’ Sullivan said.
Paris lay without speaking for a while, then said, ‘I thought I heard the sound of fetters up on deck. I must have been mistaken, there are soldiers enough for a guard.’
‘No, it was no mistake. During the night, two of the sojers took a hold of Dinka an’ started dragging her off, an’ Sefadu tried to prevent them an’ one felled him with the barrel of his musket. Then Hambo, who was standin’ alongside, struck this one with his fist, puttin’ thoughts of ravishment out of the feller’s mind for a good time to come. Then Calley got excited, you know how he is sometimes, an’ he caught hold of a lad standin’ near him, an’ set off to strangle him with the strap of his own hat. But that they are forbid to shoot without the order, Hambo and Calley would be dead. As it is, them and Sefadu are in irons for the rest of the voyage, Sefadu with a split head an’ all.’
‘So,’ Paris said, ‘the wheel has come round in a full circle. They will all be in irons once the troops have been disembarked.’ The pain came again, somewhere just below the breastbone, and he closed his eyes, waiting for it to subside. ‘We are back where we began,’ he said.
‘No, we are not,’ Sullivan said. ‘That is not a thought to be havin’ in your mind now. You can niver come back to where you start. You are a travelled man, Matthew, like meself, an’ as a travelled man you must know things niver join up again once you have gone to any distance. How can they, seein’ as there is a gap of time between? There is twelve years between this craft we are on now an’ the Liverpool Merchant. Even if them years were not everythin’ you wanted them to be, you can’t say they niver happened. Billy is dead but he still had them years of hoppin’ about an’ arguin’ the toss, which is what he liked doin’ most of all. I keep thinkin’ of Koudi an’ that last night when we named the baby. She looked at me, she was impressed