Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection Page 12

  Restlessly, searching for an escape from her thoughts, she turned back to the story of the whaler ship.

  It was the afternoon of the third day after the crossing of the Line ceremony when the exultant cry came at last from the look-out at the masthead. ‘There she blows!’

  Captain Gunnell sprang to attention at once, and the rest of the watch on deck and William Corder with them.

  ‘Where away?’ the Captain howled.

  ‘Four points on the lee bow, sir.’

  ‘How far off?’

  ‘Two miles.’

  ‘Sperm whale?’

  ‘Yes, sir. A large school. There she blows again.’

  ‘Call all hands. Haul back the main yard and stand by to lower.’

  The men from the watch below decks swarmed out of their places and joined the rest in the scurry to the boats. This urgency was like none of their practice games and even William felt the thrill of the chase in prospect, as the bow boat hit the water and he sprang over the rail and landed in his accustomed place. There was great rivalry between the boats to be the first under way and the fastest over the water, and William bent to his heavy oar with great alacrity as the mate sang out, ‘Give way, my lads, give way. A long steady stroke and we’ll have ’em.’

  The four boats flew over the water, steadily closing the distance on the school of whales. They had travelled a mile and a half when the whales went down. The oarsmen stopped their work and lay on their oars until the headsmen directed them to paddle gently towards where the great beasts had last been seen. The sudden quiet and the tension prickled at the nape of William’s neck where the sweat- and spray-damped clothing stuck to his skin. He could hear Matthias Plant breathing hard and counting off the seconds into minutes. Then there was a sudden shout as a bull whale blew a great plume of water not a hundred yards away from them. He lay rolling comfortably in a trough of the waves.

  William’s boat was caught at right angles to him, dead on the eye as whalemen called it, because the sperm whale has the best field of vision at that angle. As Matthias howled at his men to row round to bring them head to head, the remaining boats scattered in pursuit of the other whales now blowing all around them.

  Heggy Burris, the boat steerer, stood up with his first iron grasped in his hand, ready to send it into the whale’s body once the head had slid past. At exactly the right instant he braced his foot against a cleat and set his thigh in a half-circle cut for the purpose in a gunwale plank, bent his body back in an arc and drove the iron through the air and into the whale’s flank. It buried itself deep and an instant later the second iron followed it home.

  Pain bent the creature almost double as he flung himself away from them. He thrashed his mighty flukes and sent a column of water high into the air before he sounded. The line ran out so fast as he dived that smoke rose from it and the headsman hollered at William to douse it with water from his canvas bucket. The line had half run out before the whale rose once again and in agony beat the water with his flukes and tail, so that it churned and rocked the little boat like an eggshell. William could not make himself look to see, but he heard the whale’s jaws snapping like cannon fire seemingly inches from his own head.

  ‘Oh, my boys, my lovely boys, we have him now,’ Matthias was crooning. The lines held fast and blood welled up and clouded the water between boat and prey. The other craft closed in to assist the bow boat with the kill.

  The poor whale proved no match for all of them. Soon his thrashing ceased altogether and he rolled belly up. Immediately they had the huge carcass secured Matthias set the signal to the ship. As luck would have it, it was riding to windward of them, so it beat down towards the boats while they rested next to their prize. A leeward wind or a flat calm would have meant a gruelling row back to the ship with the great dead weight of the whale dragging in the water behind them.

  William was full of the exhilaration of chase and kill as they made the whale fast against the ship’s side, but he soon found that his day’s labours had hardly begun. Once the whale was properly tethered with hawsers and an iron chain passed around the narrow part of the tail before the spreading flukes, the work of cutting-in commenced. This was the stripping off of blubber, to be completed in the shortest possible time before sharks could begin to feed on the carcass and because the ship could make no further headway towards fresh whales with the unwieldy bulk of the dead cousin dragging alongside.

  The Captain and mates began digging with their long-handled cutting spades. After an hour’s work of hoisting oily and bloody strips of blubber over the ship’s side, William knew that any notions of exhaustion he had entertained before this moment were no more than a sweet afternoon’s dream compared with the reality of stink and pain and retching disgust he was experiencing now.

  At last the whale’s mangled body, headless and stripped bare of every other valuable shred, was cut adrift and left to the mercy of sharks and circling sea-birds. Matthias patted the crumpled boy on the shoulder as he came aboard from the cutting platform with the last of the animal’s blubber. ‘Well done, lad,’ he said simply. ‘Now you’re one of us good and proper.’

  ‘I think not,’ William retorted and turned away, with a display of energy and feeling that surprised them both.

  Already the fires were blazing in the brick furnaces of the try-works. The seamen had fed the hungry iron mouths of the furnaces with wood carried for the purpose and now began the business of feeding blubber into the two huge pots mounted above. It was boiled to release its barrels of oil and when each load had yielded its all the tired-out scraps themselves were used to feed the red heat.

  William sank down, mesmerised with exhaustion, on to the hatch-cover that up until now had protected the try-works. The boat steerers were the ship’s stokers, and they stirred up the roaring flames and used long poles to pitch reeking piles of blubber into the boiling pots.

  The smell was all of terrible singeing, a sick oiliness that filled every throat with a taste of decay and death. Dense clouds of black smoke billowed up from the pots to darken the sails overhead with broad brush-strokes of filth. The ship surged forward in the night, freed from the encumbrance of the whale, with the inferno of fire and smoke blazing on its deck.

  It was a twelve-barrel whale, William had learned. A good enough start to the Dolphin’s voyage

  As he huddled on the hatch he watched the hissing pots and the belching flames of the furnace, and the figures of his shipmates bending and gyrating in the lurid light. Their naked upper bodies gleamed with sweat, their faces were black masks of smoky grime and their exertions drew their lips back from their teeth in a stark grimace so that white teeth shone cruelly out of the tangles of black beard. They looked like the devil’s own imps tending the subterranean fires.

  ‘I am in hell,’ William whispered aloud. ‘Truly I have descended into hell and this is the payment for my sins.’

  He locked his hands together and tried to pray, but no form of prayer would come to him.

  May lifted her head. She could see the dead whale and the oily fires glimmering on the deck of the ship. A shiver crawled over her skin. The sea was greedy and she felt how close it was to her, gnawing and worrying at the shore.

  She thought that if only she listened a little harder she would be able to understand its language; maybe interpret the warning it was whispering to her. It was like breeding an extra sense that was not yet quite ready to use, a painful knob under her skin to which her fingers kept returning, pressing to test the growth.

  The book was more than just a book, but she couldn’t put a finger on why or what it might mean. Hannah Fennymore had lent it to her because she had asked for it, because she was curious about Doone. And beyond Doone’s bedroom window there was nothing to be seen except the beach, and Kevin and the others fooling about on or in the water.

  And Lucas, slant-eyed, who made her feel things she did not understand or welcome.

  May didn’t want to be shut up alone any longer. She left
her chair and ran to the door and for a second it seemed again that there was a weight pressing against it, trapping her in the room. But it yielded and banged open, and May ran down the steep stairs.

  John was sitting by the window overlooking the sea. There was a book on his lap but he was staring out at Moon Island, his chin resting on one hand, as if waiting for something. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’

  May hovered in front of him. She was pricklingly conscious of her father’s outstretched legs and the sinews on the backs of his hands. Her own legs felt thick and over-elongated, and her hips wide and heavy. Her arms hung clumsily at her side.

  He made the little beckoning movement she was waiting for, putting his book aside. May could see that he was afraid she might reject his gesture. She bundled forward and piled herself on to his lap, an awkward mass of jutting elbows and knees.

  John held her, resting his chin on the top of her bent head and stroking her hair. Her weight and size surprised him. It was a long time since she had come asking for a cuddle like a little girl. ‘What’s wrong?’

  May picked dully at a three-cornered tear in the pocket of his chinos. Where to begin? I wish I were like Ivy. I’m afraid I’m turning into someone else. There’s a ghost on the island and now I’m scared of the sea… ‘I don’t like it here,’ she said. It came out as a whine instead of an explanation.

  John sighed. ‘I know that. What do you want to do, May? Go home early?’

  He had unintentionally wrong-footed her, turning her into the saboteur of other people’s pleasure when she had only wanted reassurance. It seemed always to happen this way between them. When he offered his concern it made her feel awkward. She retreated in guilty embarrassment. And when she asked for it he couldn’t interpret the question.

  May shook her head violently, bumping his jaw. ‘No. It’s okay. I don’t mind staying.’

  ‘Is there something going on between you and Ivy?’

  ‘Nuh-uh.’

  She had blocked off the channels already and had no idea how to clear them. They both sat still, locked by the failure of communication.

  ‘Just feeling blue?’

  ‘I guess.’

  At least he was holding her. But as soon as the thought came she was uncomfortable with the weight of his arms, the thump of his heartbeat against her ear. Her flesh shivered. The physical solidity of him was an invasion.

  There was a tap on the door-frame. Leonie was standing there wearing a plaid shirt and hiking boots. She said uncertainly, ‘I was wondering about that walk. But we can easily do it another day.’

  John lifted his hand an inch from May’s head and as soon as he did so May leapt to her feet and backed away, hump-shouldered and frowning.

  ‘May, how about coming with us?’ John asked.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  They made an attempt to persuade her, then John went to put on his boots and Leonie tried to talk to May. May managed to answer every question with a monosyllable, but this victory gave her no satisfaction. At length John and Leonie went out together and May was left to drift out on to the porch, to watch their figures disappear northwards across the headland.

  Ivy came up through the garden from the beach. ‘Hi. What is there to eat?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  Ivy ignored her and busied herself with hauling food out of the refrigerator. ‘I’m starved. D’you want something?’

  May could see that Ivy was wearing her marijuana face. Her eyes were pink and heavy-lidded, and she had a stupid, muzzy smile. She had been smoking with Lucas; it made her obliging and affectionate instead of the way she usually was. And it made her hungry, too.

  Why did John never notice what was so plain? May felt angrier still with his lack of perception. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked her sister sharply.

  Ivy’s shapeless smile widened. ‘None of your business, kid.’

  ‘You’ve been smoking weed.’

  Ivy turned her silky, sun-tanned back. ‘Grow up,’ she drawled.

  The coastline above Pittsharbor and Moon Island Beach became a ragged fringe of wooded promontories and narrow green inlets lined with sloping ledges of granite. By staying close to the tideline it was possible to walk or scramble the two miles to a rocky causeway linking Berry Island to the mainland.

  Leonie knew the route well and most of the owners of the summer cottages that stood back from the water in their secluded clearings. She liked walking and often came this way alone, but John turned out to be a good companion. He didn’t press too close on her heels where the path was narrow and on the strips of shingle beach he moved unobtrusively alongside her. He seemed content not to talk very much. They found a rhythm of step and breath, and stuck to it.

  The causeway itself was a narrow spine of rocks from which the tide dropped to expose shoulders of sand and stone. It was low water when they crossed over, and they walked easily between lacings of driftwood and sea wrack and the occasional battered reminder of a lobster float. The soft, still afternoon had faded into an early evening the colour of smoke and the only sound apart from the chafing of the sea was the regular spoon-in-sugar crunch of their boots on the shingle.

  Berry Island hung at the end of the rock chain like the dot of an exclamation point. There were no trees on it, only a scrub of blueberry and wild raspberry bushes, rocks and rough marsh grass, and the occasional painterly splash of a turks-cap lily. A path led over its mild convex hump to a tiny shelf of sand uncovered by the receding tide.

  When they came to this ghost of a beach they sat down by unspoken agreement on the sand, from where they could look back at Moon Island and the needle spire of Pittsharbor Unitarian Church beyond. Leonie held out her hand and revealed a little heap of raspberries glimmering in their own juice. They took and ate one each, in turn, until they were all gone. The eastern horizon slowly turned the colour of pewter, ready to draw up the darkness.

  ‘They’re biting,’ Leonie said, pinching a mosquito off her wrist. ‘No-see-’ums, the Indians called them.’ She took a bottle of insect repellent out of her pocket and anointed her face and hands with it before passing it to John. He tipped it and went through the same motions, his gestures exactly mirroring hers. When he handed back the little bottle their fingers touched.

  Leonie held herself still. There was a tranquillity about the place and the evening that was at the opposite end of the scale from the way she had felt in the town car-park. She feared the betrayal of some inappropriate gesture or movement, from herself as much as from John.

  He was sitting with his knees drawn up, one hand clasped on the other wrist, gazing across to the bay. It’s like I’m setting both of us a test, she thought. Dare to come to my good place and see if we don’t spoil it.

  She had been disconcerted by John’s casual suggestion to May that she might come along too. But now it came to her that it might have been a good idea. Dreamily, lulled by the repetition of the waves, she imagined how May might even have liked it. They might have talked quietly, about ordinary things. ‘It can’t be easy for you,’ she said, speaking her thoughts without preamble. John did not seem surprised, as if they had all the time been thinking in parallel.

  ‘No. It isn’t easy,’ he agreed. ‘For Ivy and May, or for me.’

  ‘What happened to your wife?’

  ‘It was a cerebral haemorrhage. She was dead within minutes. She was at a friend’s apartment, I wasn’t there. She had had a headache, that was all.’

  Leonie stared ahead of her at the gulls strutting on a rib of rock that jutted out of the sea. When the space grew too crowded one of them would lift away and slide through the air to another vantage point.

  She was imagining the impact of this sudden death. The magnitude of it and the details that must have gone with it. Telephone calls, news to be broken, a funeral, children to be guarded. In an unregarded hollow within herself she felt sympathy expanding, the pressure of it tightening against her chest wall. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a
sudden breathlessness making her inarticulate.

  John ducked his head. ‘She didn’t deserve it.’

  Leonie wondered why he should use those words.

  He went on, looking out to Moon Island and the houses of Pittsharbor, ‘Al was a vivid person. She lived at double the pace of everyone else, at twice the intensity. If she disapproved of something she fought it, if she loved something she would defend it to the end, right or wrong.’

  A picture began to form in Leonie’s head. A woman, not just a shadow of a dead wife and mother. Her fleshed-out presence lent different nuances to the way John sat here on the beach, how their arms didn’t touch, and they both gazed ahead at the birds and the darkening horizon instead of looking at each other. ‘How did Ivy and May deal with losing her?’

  ‘Differently. Ivy grew up too quickly. May was sometimes angry, sometimes withdrawn. You’ve seen something of how she can be.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leonie said. Truthfully, she did not think John’s daughters seemed much different from any of the other children she knew of their age. But she understood nothing about being a parent. It would be presumptuous, she thought, to offer an opinion.

  ‘Sometimes I catch myself saying to her, Alison, I’m sorry. I’ve screwed up with our children. Then I’m surprised at having said her name way inside myself. I guess the truth is I don’t miss her that much, not any more. I did, but she’s so conclusively gone.’

  ‘I think I understand that,’ Leonie said. To be gone didn’t necessarily mean death. There were other withdrawals and disconnections that were no less final.

  ‘And other times I think that the two of them might still have grown into the angry, pained women they seem to be now, even if their mother had been around.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps their anger and pain just seem more pronounced to you, because they allow you to see it. Even expect you to deal with it for them. Which means they have faith in you.’