Sacred Hunger Read online

  “Well, it restricts them, doesn’t it?”’ she said in a reasonable tone. “My nephew has been kept within close bounds. Now that he is restored to society, it would not be surprising if he felt a need to move himself about.”

  It astonished Erasmus—who had never understood his mother—that she seemed so little sensible of the disgrace her sister’s son had brought on the family. From her manner of speaking about it Paris might as well have just emerged from some illness.

  “You can say what you like,” she said. “I thought him charming. And his manners, for the occasion, a good deal better than those of some”—this last a rebuke, more direct than she usually had energy for, to her son for his brusqueness, which she had not failed to see.

  The manners were a source of amazement to Paris himself. A man whose heart feels dead within him, whose desire it is to disappear from the face of the earth, who is about to take employment on a slaveship as a first step to this, still balancing his cup, passing the sugar, writhing politely on a hard chair.

  However, such is our nature, what begins as social pretence quite often becomes a reality of feeling. He saw his aunt’s face near his own, marks of sympathy in it as well as petulance and hypochondria, and he found himself drawn to her. The lines of strain on his face softened as he observed her fussing to settle her skirts, watched the play of her scented handkerchief as she leaned forward to converse with him. Nor was it wholly fear for her pretty things that kept Mrs Kemp’s attention on her nephew. It soon became obvious, both to the husband and to the son, that Matthew Paris, in his wincing shoes and subfusc suit and bob wig, was making a distinctly favourable impression.

  “So you are going with the ship?”’

  “As surgeon, yes.”

  “It will be very comforting for us to know that.”

  “I am glad you take that view, aunt.”

  Paris spoke with a sort of solemn courtesy.

  ‘However, I am not entirely clear how you mean it.”

  “Why, sir,” she said, with a little air of wonder at his failure to see, “naturally we shall all feel much better with a member of the family on board.”

  It now appeared that Paris possessed a different smile from the wry one they had seen: it came to his face slowly, lighting it with an expression of great sweetness. “Ah, yes, of course.”

  He was touched by the sentiment as well as amused by what seemed a lapse of logic. Of late he had become very sensitive to kindness, and it was this that the pale, languid woman, who hardly knew him, who seemed half extinguished between husband and son, was seeking to show. “You may rest assured,” he said, traces of the smile still remaining, “that I shall be mindful of my responsibilities.”

  “Good heavens, woman,” Kemp said with a certain testiness, “he is not going as a member of the family, or at any rate not primarily, but as a qualified medical man to ensure the best possible condition of health for the negroes.”

  “And crew,” Paris said mildly.

  “Eh? Oh, aye, the crew too, naturally.

  Matthew has studied at Surgeons” Hall,” he told his wife. ‘He was resident surgeon at one of our great hospitals, he has writ books…”

  “Yes, my dear, you have told us all that. And besides, I knew it before.” Mrs Kemp turned again to Paris. “I have sometimes a kind of fluttering here, below the heart,” she said. She laid a white hand among the lace trimmings that rose above her stomacher. “When I get at all agitated or beyond myself. Do you know of anything for it?”’

  “For palpitations,” Paris said with restored gravity, “I have always found tincture of hellebore to answer very well. I can make one up for you if you wish. And a draught of warm cinnamon water, taken night and morning, is generally soothing to the nerves.”

  Erasmus saw his mother, thus encouraged, preparing to launch on a more detailed account of her symptoms. “Have you been to sea before?”’ he said to Paris.

  “Not what one would call going to sea. I went out with the fishing boats sometimes when I was a boy. At Brancaster on the Norfolk coast.” Paris paused as if in some doubt. His eyes, Erasmus now noticed, were pale green in colour, not blue as he had thought at first; they were set at a slight downward slant, giving his face in repose an expression of mingled obstinacy and melancholy. After some further moments of hesitation, he said, “It was there we last met, all of us—both the families, I mean. You had come on a visit.

  We went down to the sea one day. There was quite a party of us, I remember—some other people too, who lived nearby. I was eighteen that summer, so you must have been eight or perhaps nine. Quite small.”

  “I have no recollection of it.”

  The words came too coldly and emphatically to be altogether trusted; but there was no mistaking the intention to rebuff, the rejection of a shared past his cousin had thus diffidently held out to him.

  “I remember it clearly.” Paris sought refuge once again in his aunt—it was to her that he kept coming back. “I think because of a dam we tried to build that day. My cousin showed great determination of character. He did his very best to stay the tide.”

  He went on to tell her in his gentle baritone about a channel and a reservoir they had built that distant day at the edge of the tide, using stones and driftwood and the thick black mud of the salt flats to line the banks and make a barrier, and how the sea constantly frustrated their efforts, scooping below the foundations so that the walls kept crumbling and the water leaking away, until the others got tired of it and went to divert themselves elsewhere—all but Erasmus.

  ‘He would not give it up. We went to ask him to come away, but he would not. He would not speak to anyone. He had mud all over him. He went on plastering over the stones and bits of plank and the sea went on wrecking his efforts. I thought to myself then that what my cousin sets his mind on it will come hard but he gets it.”

  Paris paused, swallowing at a feeling of a self-contempt. Was it to ingratiate himself with the mother that he was telling this story of heroic persistence? He had found shelter in her invalidism—was he now trying to creep further into her good graces, trying to cement an alliance of the weak? The truth of his memory was quite different…

  “It was as if you were possessed,” he said, looking steadily and rather sternly at Erasmus. “You were white in the face and staring. I remember that your hands were black with the mud but blood from your fingers showed through it where you had lacerated them scrabbling with the stones.

  It was… quite a spectacle.” And no joy in it, he thought, looking with a kind of curiosity at his cousin, no prospect of joy—there would have been no joy in success; that lonely passion had needed defeat as a condition of its being.

  “I do not recollect anything of it.” Erasmus had quivered internally at the touch of his cousin’s impertinent curiosity, though meeting it with an appearance of indifference and the same obstinate lie.

  This stranger, with his lined face and pale eyes, the mounds of his knees showing under the cloth of his breeches, was claiming rights which by his disgrace he had forfeited. Worse, he was vindicating his claims: he had brought the episode vividly, irresistibly, back; Erasmus could deny remembering, but he could not defend himself against the memory; he felt it again now, the loneliness of it, the indifferent sky, the gleaming, elusive water, the exquisite rage. He saw himself as the others must have seen him, dogged and ridiculous. And all this he had to endure now again, and at Paris’s bidding. Worst of all, his cousin showed no awareness of the wrong he had done, he made no slightest mention of it…

  4.

  Soon after the midday meal, at which she ate little, Mrs Kemp retired for her afternoon rest. Before she did so she made Paris a present of a very handsome lacquered box, lined with baize and decorated on the outside with a design of gold peacocks on a blue background. “Tis Chinese lacquer,” she said. “I have been used to keep recipes in it, but it will serve just as well for your log books and such like.”

  “It is the captain who keep
s a log, not the doctor,” Kemp said.

  “I was speaking of a medical log, not a nautical one,” his wife said with dignity.

  “Matthew will want to keep notes of the ailments he encounters on the ship. I should much enjoy to read them when he returns.” She had an abiding interest in illness of every kind.

  “I am sure to find a use for it,” Paris said, holding the box rather awkwardly between his large hands. “It is indeed kind of you, aunt.”

  Erasmus too excused himself early. It was a Sunday and he had made up his mind to ride over to the Wolpert house on the pretext of a visit to Charles Wolpert, with whom he had never been on very close terms. The decision had involved a struggle with himself, with his pride, his fear of ridicule, shame at the element of declaration he felt in it—though this was less obvious than it seemed to his exasperated selfconsciousness. This travail once over, his intention was cast firm and unalterable. The only element of choice remaining lay in what clothes to wear for the occasion; and in order to give his best attention to this Erasmus repaired to his room at the earliest opportunity.

  This left the two men alone, Paris without refuge in a third party, Kemp possessed by a kind of impatience: he would have liked, in the span of this single afternoon, to take this studious, clumsy-seeming nephew of his through all the stages of his own enthusiasm for the slaving venture—an ambition inflamed, if anything, by the Malaga wine he had taken with his meal. But speech lets us down very often, and the merchant found he had nowhere to begin except in a reiteration of his good intentions. “You are welcome to stay here, Matthew, in the days before you join the ship,” he said, not for the first time.

  They were in the room on the first floor of the house which Kemp regarded as his sanctum and sometimes called his study, though nothing much but ledgers were studied there.

  Pipe in mouth, he looked through curls of smoke at the young man sitting opposite, hunched forward in the easy-chair as if set on maintaining a notion of sufferance, his large hands loosely clasped between his knees. “You must regard my house as your own for as long as you choose,” he said.

  “It is indeed kind of you. But I have things to see to at home, as I told you, and must take the stage for Norwich the day after tomorrow at latest.”

  “It is as you choose. All I am intending to say is that the past is the past and you must set it behind you. Nothing that has happened places a term to your welcome here.”

  The sound of his own words animated Kemp with a renewed sense of the excellence of his motives. His spirits rose. He was behaving generously towards his nephew and at the same time gaining the services of a qualified medical man. A less qualified medical man would have done, he knew that: most of the slavers that sailed out of Liverpool would have some sawbones apprentice or drunken quack aboard, or no one; but that was not good enough for the Liverpool Merchant. Moreover, he was killing other pigeons with the same shot: by this kindness to a bankrupt he was dressing his ship in the colours of charity and compassion.

  Kemp held a moral view of the universe.

  God balanced the ledgers. Nothing went unrecognized. A good deed was an entry on the credit side, a bill drawn on destiny which could not fail to be met one day. He saw his ship home in port again, riding at anchor in the Pool, laden with goods high in demand, saw his creditors satisfied, temporarily at least, with the interest on their loans, till the cotton trade took a turn for the better, as it soon must.

  The vision glowed in his cheeks and eyes as he leaned forward. “Africa,” he said, “you will be going to Africa, Matthew. Think of it.”

  “I have thought much of it.” Paris sat up a little, straightening his shoulders in polite response.

  He did not know what to say to his uncle, whom he thought looked rather hectic and high-coloured this afternoon, feverish almost; he would have liked to take his pulse.

  Not feeling able to suggest this, he looked away towards the window. Sunshine had come to the day after a misty start and there was a breeze outside, stirring the new leaves on the elms round the little square. Some pigeons flew up as he watched. The movement of the trees and the flight of the pigeons sent quick shoals of shadows across the room, over the ceiling and walls.

  For some moments he watched this without speaking.

  Despite the inertness of his body, he felt light, without substance. Misty mornings bring fine weather when the season is turning, he thought vaguely, almost sleepily. First songs of warblers through the mist, the sycamores in first leaf. By the river. Ruth and I hand in hand, light raining down on leaf and bud, shadows moving on the water. Light of love in her face. We sat together on the bank. By then she was carrying the child. A day to be remembered, because we knew—and told each other comt we need do nothing but wait. We only had to be as we were. Everything was calm and satisfactory. The house not very grand but with room enough, and the income from shop and practice sufficient. We only had to wait, with our love, for the child to come. Now Ruth is nowhere in the world any more and I am going to Africa. “Yes,” he said, “well, it is very far away. It is a place I had never thought to visit. But it might as well be there as anywhere.” Lest this should sound ungrateful, he added quickly, “I thank you once again for your letter, uncle, and for wishing to do me a service.”

  “Blood is thicker than water.” Kemp’s tone held an increased alertness. He had sensed some reservation in the other’s words. “You did yourself express an interest in what I had to propose,” he added after a short pause. After all, it is why you are here, he was on the point of adding, but refrained, as it might seem to suggest there could be no other reason.

  All the same, the question hung in the air for some moments. Paris did not reply immediately. He was a man who, Kemp suspected, might gnaw at his own purposes indefinitely if left alone to do so.

  “You have taken into account the advantages, of course,” he said. “As I outlined them in my letter. You will be calling at places with many marvels to offer.”

  “Indeed yes.” Paris nodded gravely.

  “It was said by Pliny that out of Africa there comes always something new.”

  “Oh, aye, was it? Well, he was in the right of it. And then, being a man of science you will find a quantity of things to notice.”

  “I have no doubt of it.”

  “I don’t mention money,” the merchant said.

  “You have incurred expenses and these have been met.

  We need say no more about that. But there is something else which I think will interest you.” Kemp leaned forward again, marking a pause. “I had been keeping it till the ship’s articles were signed, but there is no harm in telling you now. I am purposing to allow you three negroes privilege to be paid out of the cargo at cost, your choice of the blacks to be marked at the time of purchase. There now, what do you think of that?”’

  He was disappointed to discern no change of expression on his nephew’s face. “That is in addition to salary,” he added in a tone of reproach.

  After a long moment Paris smiled slightly and said, “That is an unlooked-for generosity on your part.”

  “And then, just now, a break, a period away from home, new fields of endeavour. To dispel those unfortunate associations which must… to an extent at least… I had hoped to have your final answer.”

  “Oh, I am going,” the other replied quickly and, it seemed, almost carelessly, certainly not as though capitulating to argument.

  In fact he had known from the first, from first receiving his uncle’s letter, that he would go. This exile of a long voyage, a commerce he had every reason to believe degraded, and suitable therefore for such as himself—it was a combination, in his wretchedness, impossible to resist.

  He had not doubted since then, was so far from doubting now that he was surprised to see relief show on his uncle’s face. “Certainly, I am going,” he repeated.

  “That’s the spirit, we’ll drink to that,” Kemp said. Next to signatures, he had found brandy the best way of sealing a ba
rgain. Getting out the bottle and glasses, however, he felt suddenly exhausted, as if he had been through an ordeal of some kind. These moments of doubt, just when everything had seemed settled, had brought home to the merchant why this awkward nephew of his exercised such a spell, why he was so set on having him for surgeon. It had little to do with charity, except perhaps to himself. What had befallen Paris was the worst possible thing, the thing most to be feared. He stalked through the rooms of the house in Red Cross Street, a spectre of bankruptcy and ruin, his own, Kemp’s, everyone’s; he was a wincing ghost that had to be, not laid to rest, but rehabilitated, undemonized, brought back into the world of collective enterprise.

  Then the fear that haunted most of Kemp’s dawns might also pass away.

  “Well, nephew,” he said, holding up his glass, “here’s to success!”

  5.

  It took Erasmus an hour to choose his clothes for the visit. He tried on various suits, but all of them were lacking in one way or another. Finally he decided on the claret-coloured satin suit with the white, corded-silk waistcoat to go with it, a sumptuous garment this, embroidered all over with small flowers in a darker shade. His hair was dark and naturally lustrous; he had taken recently to wearing it in a bang across his forehead and tied behind with ribbon. Worn thus, it softened his looks, reduced the impression of fanaticism. In the smoothness of his face the eyes were extraordinary: long, narrow, very dark, with a gaze of singular intensity. This narrowness of regard, and the high cheekbones, gave him an appearance of aiming his eyes at people, which his father had too.

  The day was bright, the air still slightly engrained with the mist of earlier. Going was slow at first: the lanes above the river were miry and fetid and his mare was soon splashed to her knees. There were no pavements anywhere in the town, he had trouble keeping clear of pedestrians and had frequently to rein in for street-vendors with handcarts and for the little broad-backed ponies labouring up from the waterfront, laden below the belly with goods for next day’s market.