Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [7]
This evening he had not seen anything amiss. Drink had made his father eloquent, but there was nothing wrong in that. He had been proud of the way his father had stared that old ruffian Rolfson down, and dominated the table. He had thought him right in everything he said. It was true that the presence of Matthew Paris had been disturbing; it was hateful to have a jail-bird for a cousin and to be obliged to sit at table with him. But Erasmus had drunk quite a lot too; and something had happened earlier that day which occupied his thoughts and possibly blunted his observation. In the afternoon he had taken his courage in both hands and ridden over to the Wolpert house, ostensibly to see Charles. And there, without quite knowing how or why, he, who had always hated acting, had allowed himself to be enrolled in the cast of a play.
THREE
It had been on the morning of that day – the day of his involvement in these theatricals – that his cousin from Norfolk had arrived, about whom there hung the shadow of failure and disgrace; terrible blemishes to Erasmus, like deformities. If people stayed in their places, he felt, they would not incur such misfortunes. Even Paris’s sufferings, of which he had heard his parents speak, his broken career, the loss of his wife, these seemed shameful too. He had felt, from the first moment, oppressed by his cousin’s presence, as if literally in shadow, as if this meeting existed in shadow time, along with certain other incidents of darkness occurring then, while the ship was being built, which he afterwards remembered.
‘This is your cousin Matthew. Do you remember him?’
Erasmus saw a tall, ungainly-looking man with a face deeply marked below the short, bobbed wig. He was dressed in a suit of black cloth and his necktie came down in two straight folds like a parson’s.
‘No, I don’t remember him at all.’ He spoke with his eyes turned towards his father, as if talking of some person not there in the room.
‘You were too young when we last met,’ Paris said. ‘There are ten years between us, I think.’ His voice was deep and soft, with a husky vibrance in it, strangely distinctive.
Erasmus felt a slight prickling sensation at the nape of his neck. He was amazed at this nonchalance. On their last meeting Paris had lifted him, helpless and raging, away from a dam he had been trying to build against the sea, lifted him clear and swung him and set him down yards away. The mortal offence of it, the violation of his body and his will, were as vivid now to his mind as they had been thirteen years ago. ‘I am glad to see you, cousin,’ he said. ‘You are very welcome here.’ Glancing aside again, he saw that his father was smiling and nodding in a way he had when highly pleased.
‘I am glad of this opportunity to renew my cousin’s acquaintance,’ Paris said, with a slight inclination of the head. After this he stood silent for some moments looking from one to the other, from chuckling father to stiff son. ‘After so many years,’ he added heavily. He had felt his cousin’s hostility. Suddenly, again, he wondered if he could go through with this visit, had to suppress an impulse to quit the room. Father and son aimed the same level brows at him, had the same staring regard.
‘What I haven’t yet told you,’ William Kemp said to his son, ‘because it has only now been finally agreed between us, is that Matthew here will be sailing with the Liverpool Merchant as surgeon.’
‘Will he so?’ Erasmus had not imagined anyone related to him going with the ship. And that it should be this person, whom he had always hated, who had now compounded his offence by being convicted of sedition – he had brought disgrace on them all – this was a thought intensely disagreeable to him. ‘You did not tell me you had this in mind,’ he said to his father.
‘In case it came to naught when we were building upon