Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [33]
TWELVE
Half a mile away and half an hour later a seaman in a medium state of drunkenness named William Blair was entering an obscure ale-house in a narrow lane close to the docks. He had been paid off two hours previously after eight months at sea. In those two hours he had travelled some three hundred yards from the edge of the water. He was in his best shore clothes, still had most of his money and was poised precariously between jollity and truculence.
As he swaggered up between the tables he tripped over feet that hadn’t been there before and stumbled slightly. ‘Stow them trotters, bonny lad,’ he said, more for the sake of dignity than anything else. Blair was always careful of his dignity, which led him sometimes into quarrels. He was short of stature but very quick. And he was fearless.
The man thus addressed made no answer but he kept his feet where they were. Looking down, Blair saw bright dark eyes set close together and a bitter mouth. Most of the man’s face was shadowed by his hat, which was high in the crown, varnished and polished in sailor’s fashion.
‘Well,’ Blair said, coming up to the counter, brushing the rain from the front of his buff nankeen jacket, ‘still gans on spittin’, I wish to God it would rain and be done.’
The landlord was bald and corpulent, with a greasy apron and an impassive face and dull brown eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is looking at it one way, but a drizzle is good for trade, brings ’em in.’
‘Anythin’ is good for this trade. All weathers. You canna gan wrong, man. Gie us a gill o’ best Jamaican, an’ let us see you fill it up.’
‘Hey, Scotch!’
The voice, rudely peremptory, came from behind him as he was taking out his purse to pay. He knew without needing to look that it was the man whose feet he had tripped over. He noticed another man, in a long, ragged cloak, go out through a door behind the counter, but thought nothing of it, being again concerned with dignity, which did not allow him to glance round. It did not permit him, either, to put away his purse other than very slowly. ‘Iggerant,’ he said regretfully to the landlord, loud enough for the other man to hear. ‘The majority o’ persons learn to tell the difference between their arse an’ their elber, but there will allus be them as cannot. There is a class o’ lad that will still gan on tryin’ to shit through his elber joints.’
He listened for the scrape of a chair, some sound of movement behind him, but heard nothing. He drank deeply, felt the heat of the rum in his throat and chest, knew he was on the way to getting good and drunk. ‘I’m fra Sunderland,’ he said loudly. ‘Gie us another, if you please, landlord. A exact copy.’
The landlord nodded. His eyes had been on the purse and its contents and on the pocket to which it had been returned. ‘Just off a ship, are you?’
‘Docked this afternoon. Seventy-five days from Caracas. The Brig Albion, Captain Josiah Rigby. I am bleddy glad to be off her, the first mate was a cannibal in human form.’ Blair fixed the landlord with a belligerent stare. ‘If we meet ashore I will spill him out,’ he said.
The ragged man reappeared and a few moments later two young women came in laughing together, hair wet from the rain. They came directly up to the counter.
‘Goin’ to buy us a drink, my chuck?’
‘I will buy you a drink,’ Blair said handsomely. ‘Billy Blair is not a man to say no to the ladies. But don’t get up yor hopes, as he is not purposin’ to gan on wi’ it all bleddy night long.’
‘Speaks pleasant, don’t he?’ the same woman said. She had an Irish accent, hair the colour of pale carrot and a pretty, anaemic face, darkly bruised on the right side, over the cheekbone. ‘I like a good-spoken man,’ she said. ‘Yer can keep these foul-mouth gits. Gin please, Captain. How about you, Bessie? This here is Bessie. I’m Eve.’
‘Gin,’ Bessie said.
‘Gin for the ladies, rum for me,’ Blair said. ‘By God,’ he added to no one in particular and passed a hand over his face.
‘It goes down on the slate,’ the landlord said. ‘No need to pay every