Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Burton,’ he said, as they met at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Good morning,’ she replied, coldly.

  They were supplied with military bread and watered wine for breakfast and luncheon; and they dined in the early evening in the mess with French officers.

  ‘Mrs Burton,’ said Bates, summoning all his courage. ‘There is something I must communicate to you.’

  ‘I beg you to permit me to go out, Mr Bates’, she replied. ‘We must hold over your conversation to another time.’

  ‘Of course,’ he murmured.

  She left. He wondered: How to begin? How to reach her? But he could not find an answer in his own restless soul.

  And then, miraculously, there came a day when Eleanor smiled upon him. His heart leapt up. It was afternoon, and a bright day. ‘Shall we walk together, Mr Bates? Shall we look upon the sea?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes!’

  Prayers are sometimes answered, you know.

  And so they walked. The sunlight tapped brightly at every wave-peak, and nuggets of brilliance were broadcast over a wide stretch of sea. The sky! That sky!

  ‘We are prisoners,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘And yet,’ said Bates, ‘we may use our time profitably, perhaps.’

  She did not look at him, but her voice was not unkind. ‘How have you been using your time, sir?’

  ‘I have been considering questions of what Aristotle calls ethics,’ he said. It was his way of stepping slyly up to the reason for the breach that had occurred between them.

  ‘How so, sir?’

  Bates asked Eleanor: ‘Do you consider that there are atoms of morality , as there are physical atoms, atoms of materiality? I speak of elemental units of moral behaviour or belief? Perhaps some great immoral act - as, say, murder - is composed of many small immoral acts, accumulated perhaps over time, such that this small act of neglect to another human, or this act of positive cruelty to an insect, cat or horse, with myriad other similars, might not eventually add to a great sin?’

  ‘I had not considered it by that light, sir,’ she replied.

  ‘My thoughts,’ he said, ‘have been perhaps preoccupied with this matter. But I do not wish to tire you with my reflections.’

  ‘Moral philosophy could never bore or tire me, sir,’ she said, and she appeared to speak earnestly, truly. ‘Please: continue with what you were saying.’

  His heart stood straight up. In his wishes they were already married, and were walking husband and wife. ‘Because, you see,’ he said, eagerly, ‘I cannot otherwise understand why one act may be better or worse than another. Without some form of atomism, surely all sins are the same sins, venal and mortal together?’

  ‘It may be,’ she said in a low voice, as if this too were a matter she had pondered long, ‘that thus it appears to God, sub specie eternitus.’

  He did not correct her Latin. It was good enough woman’s Latin. ‘Indeed,’ he said, instead. ‘Indeed, there are theologians who consider it such. For a child to steal an apple from an orchard is wrong, and the boy should be beaten to teach him that theft cannot be countenanced. But it is common sense that to steal an apple is not so severe a sin as to murder a man. Or a thousand men. To murder a thousand must be worse than to murder one, and to murder one must be worse than stealing an apple. To hang a man for murder is just; but to send a boy to his death for stealing an apple would be unjust.’

  She nodded. She was, he was flattered to see, paying very close attention to his words.

  ‘And yet,’ he continued, ‘it was for the theft of an apple that the human race entire was sent to its death. For this is what the infallible Bible tells us.’

  ‘It is a mystery,’ she said. And then, at once: ‘I do not mean the term in its trivial sense.’

  ‘Mysterium tremendum,’ he said, nodding. How exactly their thoughts fitted together! How alike they were! And his heart swept his blood through his limbs and chest and head with a faster thrum. Oh, he loved her. That word, that amor, so soiled with use, so readily found in every mouth, was intarnishable. More, more, amor. It shone anew in his heart, the truth of it, the force of it. How well suited they would have been! If only - if only—

  They were returning now, along the deserted promenade and towards the hotel. They did not walk arm-in-arm, but neither did they walk at too great a remove from one another. Eleanor was genuinely interested in what Bates had to say; indeed, had he realised how profoundly it might well have jangled Bates’s nerves. It was the subject. The subject involved her.

  ‘Yet it would be insupportable,’ she said, ‘for morality to be established on a merely aleatory basis - as if it were mere chance that determined whether a thing be good or bad. Who could bear to live in such a cosmos?’

  ‘I have so often thought so!’ he urged. ‘This must be so. In the Arabian Nights, which - have you read the Arabian Nights, Mrs Bates?’

  ‘I have not much savour for romances,’ she said.

  ‘And I neither, Madam. But I remember reading as a child and being very struck by one tale.’

  They mounted the steps of the hotel and passed into the entrance hall, the sudden gloom framing his tale; from heat and light and into shadow. From the sight-devouring brightness of the desert, and onto the narrow streets of some Eastern city, under the arch, into the shade. ‘A merchant, pausing on his road to Medina,’ he said, ‘stopped by a well to eat dates. He devoured each date and threw the stone down into the well. And then a monstrous genie arose from the well, crying that he must kill the merchant, for one of the date-stones had put out the eye of that same genie’s son. Did the merchant deserve the genie’s wrath? And I believe that this tale touches a profound human fear, that punishment and reward, that goodness and sin - the very bedrock of sentient human life - might be as ... random as this. To throw a date-stone down a well, a death sentence!’

  ‘But this from the East,’ said Eleanor. ‘Can we take lessons in morality from the East? A pasha might murder his sons and be praised for it. A woman might be condemned to death for walking with her head uncovered.’

  They took two seats in the hotel’s empty salon: tall-backed leather chairs with two great lapels rising on each side, and curled to inset balls of wood upon which the hands naturally came to rest. The tall alcove windows gleamed with day’s brightness, deepening the gloom of the rest of the room. It was wholly empty. It smelt vaguely of the previous night’s tobacco.

  They sat in silence for a moment, and then Bates spoke again.

  ‘My belief, Mrs Burton,’ he said, sonorously, putting the palms of his hands together in front of his face as if in prayer, ‘is that some manner of moral atomism must be at the heart of God’s cosmos. Perhaps acts of carelessness or omission, like casting aside a date-stone, as the components of acts of larger commission, such as murder.’

  She went very quiet at this. He felt a rush of recklessness, like a blush, pass up his chest and neck. Without giving himself time to reconsider he plunged on.

  ‘If you’ll permit me to explain my own circumstances, Mrs Burton, and without in the least wishing to stray into impropriety - although - although it might be said that sin is by its very nature a matter of impropriety.’ She had stiffened in her chair, and her face looked blank. But what now? Did he dare unclothe his soul? ‘But I have tried,’ he said, ashamed of the tentativeness in his own voice, ‘tried to do good in the world. And if I have tried, Madam, I say this through no desire to vaunt myself, but out of the understanding that the desire to do good in the world is the very least duty to which all Christians must subscribe. I have tried, for instance, to help the enslaved Pacificans: the Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian creatures, out of a conviction that slavery is immoral. But many of my best intentions have gone astray, Mrs Burton. And perhaps, I now think, such small smuts or grits of sin, as my own selfishness, my weakness of purpose, or my . . . my . . .’ he was thinking of his fleshly indiscretion with Mary the tobacconist’s daughter, but of course it was
impossible to mention such a thing to Mrs Burton. Impossible even to approach the whole sordid, terrible topic of such liaisons. Why did that thought even come to him, at this time? What perversity was there in his soul? ‘My weaknesses of the flesh . . .’ he said, vaguely, and was assaulted suddenly with the fear that she would think this an oblique reference to the unmentionableness that had passed between them, in the coach, her nakedness uncovered to his unworthy unworthy eyes, so he blurted: ‘I do not refer to any particular act or, or, or action. I take it to be self-evident that impure thoughts are as great a danger to the soul as impure deeds. One flake of soot can dirty a pure cup of water, after all.’ He was sweating now. His heart was trilling like a songbird, and there was an unpleasant constriction in his temples.

  But she said, leaning forward and even bringing her hand forward as if to rest it on his; although of course she did no such thing. But the surge of gratitude he felt towards her for this minuscule action was colossal, disproportionate.

  ‘I tried with all my heart to do good - to wage the Lord’s war against slavery - and in consequence of that, with no consciousness of trying to do any further harm against my country, which God knows I love, which anyone who knows me, Mrs Burton, will tell you I love with all my heart. But in consequence of that, in consequence,’ what was he trying to say? ‘In consequence only of devoting myself to the struggle against slavery I find I have wandered into treason against . . .’ And the word was out without him realising, without him planning to say it. He was so shocked at his own words that he stopped dead. He was so shocked at what he had said - treason! - that he felt his eyeballs prickle and a blush spread. It was as if he had uttered an obscenity. But of course he had not. Mrs Burton was still regarding him with the careful appearance of attention to his words, waiting to hear how his sentiment would end.

  He tried to gather himself. Treason. It was the secret he had been keeping from himself; the shout that resounded though the crypt of his soul that he had not allowed himself to hear above ground. It was the chord to which his buried life resonated. Terrible!

  ‘Mrs Burton,’ he said. ‘I am sorry; for there is—’

  She was on her feet. ‘I am sorry, Abraham, but I must go.’ And she swept from the room, so rapidly that he was still sitting there stunned, thinking addressed by my first name! as she passed through the door.

  ‘Eleanor!’ he cried.

  He hurried to the foot of the stairs, and saw the hems of her skirts disappearing round the turn above him.

  ‘Eleanor,’ he called again.

  He took three-step strides and flew up the stairs; but before he could reach the uppermost level he was intercepted by the bearded French officer. ‘Mr Bates,’ he said, holding out his arm. ‘Mr Bates.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Bates, ‘I implore you—’

  ‘One moment, Mr Bates,’ said the officer. Bates looked him full in the face and, for the first time, saw his skin. It was blistered from hairline to neck; the skin boiling with pustules. The Frenchman blinked and Bates saw blisters upon his eyelids. The black hairs of his beard sprouted from little raw-looking divots of skin.

  Bates recoiled.

  ‘We must depart this town,’ said the officer. ‘We cannot board the Sophrosyne, but the English army to the west has pulled back its assault - I do not know why they have, but,’ his voice was cracked and dry, ‘we can move to the south and round. My orders—’

  Bates could not bear to be near him. He ducked to the left and pushed past, running up the stairs. His heart was running faster and harder than he could ever remember it. There was a sensation of ache and tingle in his bowels.

  He knocked loud on Mrs Burton’s door. ‘Eleanor! Eleanor!’

  There was no reply. He tried the handle, and - in his agitated state, not caring how improperly he was acting - he opened the door.

  Eleanor was sitting on her narrow bed. She looked almost demure, with her hands in her lap and her gaze down. Bates stumbled in, and stopped. ‘Eleanor,’ he said.

  Without looking at him, she replied: ‘Close the door, Mr Bates, for there is something I must say to you.’

  He closed the door.

  ‘Eleanor,’ he said again, stepping towards her, one step, two, ‘I cannot contain my - it is love, love for you, and—’

  She did not look up. ‘Abraham,’ she said. ‘Please listen to what I say. It is quite impossible.’

  ‘These are strange days, Eleanor,’ he urged, stepping closer again. ‘My prospects are - but even to talk of prospects seems foolish, in these strange days. Let me, then, talk of love—’

  Her head moved back, and Bates could see her face. Her expression was one of anger. She stood, to face him. ‘You dare, sir, to come in here with such words?’

  ‘Eleanor,’ he cried, in an agony.

  ‘Listen to me now, sir. It cannot be. The Dean has proposed marriage and I have accepted.’

  It was quite impossible for Bates to understand these words. Or, rather, he could hear them and comprehend them, there was understanding at that facile level, but they were so completely at odds with his heart’s racing that they might as well have been a sentence in Sanskrit.

  ‘The Dean?’

  ‘We are to be married. I am espoused to another. Do you see, therefore, how monstrously you are now acting?’

  ‘I had no idea . . . but the Dean?’ He meant: of all the men upon God’s earth, he?

  ‘The Dean is a gentleman.’

  ‘So much older than you.’

  ‘And you are young,’ said Mrs Burton, in a violent voice. ‘And you are handsome. And you expect me to fall giggling at your feet for that?

  ‘Eleanor!’ This was pleadingly said.

  ‘You, sir,’ said Mrs Burton, drawing herself up to her full height, ‘you, sir, revolt me! You revolt me! Think back, sir, at the indignity you made me suffer - or have you forgotten, sir?’

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘but I love—’

  ‘To speak so!’ And her voice grew even more intemperate. ‘To speak such words to a woman affianced to another?’

  Bates felt the urge to run weeping from the room, as a child might. He stifled that, and tried to still his face - his wobbling lips, his hot eyes - but then was almost overwhelmed by the urge to grab Mrs Burton - to throttle her. It was intolerable. The thought flashed upon him of the bearded French officer’s hideous and blistered face. Bates felt his chest grow molten. He felt trapped and tormented. He felt a roar, a lion’s roar, grow in his chest. But when he opened his mouth all that emerged was the noise of a ridiculous mouse. Squeee!

  His mouth was open.

  ‘The Dean has proposed marriage to me and I have accepted,’ Eleanor was saying, as if she were perfectly calm, and as if this were the most straightforward sentence in the lexicon of English expressions. Then she flared: ‘But even if he had not - can you believe that a creature such as yourself, a snivelling gutter creature such as yourself, could capture my heart?’

  Miserably, yet eagerly Bates replied: ‘No, no, of course not—’

  ‘You worm! You are—’

  ‘I am,’ he agreed, miserable and excited. ‘Oh I am!’

  ‘How I despise you!’

  Suddenly they were embracing. Afterwards Bates tried to relive the moment, to separate out who clasped whom; but in the moment it seemed to happen without premeditation on either side. They were simply together. Bates held her hard, even fiercely, and felt the stiffness of her starched dress-body against his own breast. She dug with her nails into the fabric of his shirt. She thrust her face up against his and chewed at his mouth, biting his lips, and - startlingly, repulsive - excitingly - pushing her tongue into his mouth like a wet nurse feeding pap to a baby. He pressed against her and the two of them fell backwards upon the bed. She was making small sobbing noises. Or he was making the noises; it was difficult to tell. She was hurting him, but he cared not. She was drawing blood from his lips, and then she moved her hands from his shoulders to his head and took handfuls of his hair an
d yanked as if trying to pull the hair out. The pain thrilled him. They struggled. They acted out their dumbshow life-or-death fight, there, upon the bed.

  He pulled his face away from hers to breathe, and she grabbed at his ears and pushed him further away. He fell off her, to the left, and she lifted herself and spat upon him - spat in his face. He felt the spittle land on his cheek. Warm, and frothed. ‘Your trowsers,’ she sneered. ‘Your trowsers! Your trowsers!’ He did not know what she meant. He understood the scorn in her voice, but he did not follow her meaning in the words. ‘Take them off,’ she hissed - and, with agitated, febrile fingers he unbuttoned his fly and pushed the garment down his legs. He was lying on his back now, and Eleanor was on her left side, propped on an arm and looking down upon him. His cockstand was flat against his stomach. He sat up a little way, so as to be able to pull his trowsers over his boots and remove them entirely, and his cockstand wagged forward. Eleanor gasped in disgust. ‘Oh, there,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, foul.’