“Do not think you can get away without telling me about it,” Bright said out of the side of his mouth.
“You are the last person I would tell anything to,” I replied, which in appealing to his sense of himself as a rake seemed to satisfy him.
The atmosphere in the office that day was especially close, but our Cantonese visitors and their skillets had gone from the head of the dock (they had left behind a quantity of tea and taken away a load of flax, so that Belfast was a hundred pounds the richer for having tolerated their presence) and, with the tide down, the only smells the windows would admit would be of the town’s own making. It was preferable to stew. By mid-morning I was barely able to hold my head up. I found a reason to go to the chartroom, towards the rear of which was a broad lower shelf, marked “Abnormal Fluctuations Copeland Islands”, where, it was common knowledge among the younger clerks, you could stretch out undetected for a quarter of – or even half – an hour.
When I opened my eyes that day I knew at once, from the foreshortening of the shadows on the floor, that something closer to two hours had elapsed. Ferris made a cutting motion with his finger across his throat as I took my seat again.
“Sir Clueless was here,” he said in a stage whisper. “Twice.”
A few minutes later he appeared a third time. “Mis-ter Rice,” he said, and attempting a showman’s sweep of his arm, indicated the stairs leading up to his office. “If you would be so kind.”
I followed at his worn-down heels. The tide had turned while I slept. From the window facing his chair all that could be seen was water and masts – the port’s problems in that moment utterly erased – and one flank of the steamer Hibernia, which plied the Liverpool route, and which had taken advantage of the favourable conditions to berth at Donegall Quay to the north of us, in the direction of Ritchie’s Dock.
An earthenware jar of quills stood at one corner of the desk and next to it a case, lined with blue velvet, in which lay the pen Sir C reserved for his most important letters. He picked up this pen at moments while he spoke to me, testing the nib against his thumb, turning the ivory shaft in his fingers as though it were a flute and he was looking for the hole to blow into.
I had, he began, always given a good account of myself. Mr Walker, when he had visited last year, had spoken very highly of me: very highly. Of late, however, he, Sir C, had noticed something a little – rolling the pen between his fingertips – wayward in my behaviour. He did not know how to account for it, but at this critical time especially the Ballast Board was no place for idlers and scatterbrains. He placed the pen in its case and closed the lid, clasping his hands to dissuade them from further footering. Seconds, they lasted.
“I hope I will not have occasion to speak to you again, or indeed” – I was saying the words in my head before he spoke them – “to your grandfather.”
I assured him I would give him no such occasion.
“And one other thing,” he said. I turned, halfway to the door. A black-headed gull passed the length of the window, its beak red-inked, its eye on the bald-headed specimen and the tufted juvenile facing each other across the lacquered pool of the desk. “I have been here since I was not much older than you are now. The Copeland Islands Fluctuations shelf was there then. You might inform your fellow clerks.”
“So?” Ferris wanted to know when I had come down. “What did he say?”
“Nothing important,” I replied.
Somehow I got through the rest of that day with my eyes open, although of anything I might have done in it not a single memory survives.
On the morning of the following day a letter arrived for me as I was leaving the house. I had never seen Maria’s handwriting before, but – something in the alien cast of the “l” and “r” – straight away recognised as hers the hand that had addressed the envelope. I tucked myself into an entry up the side of the Castle gardens to read it, although so eager was I for what I hoped to see that it was several moments before I could make sense of what I did.
My Dear Gilbert,
The hour is late and my arm most weary. It is not this, however, that I refer to, but the pain in my heart, when I say I do not for one moment imagine that this letter will be easier for you to read than it is for me to write. But I do not know either what I can have been thinking, last night, putting myself in such a position, exposing the two of us to risk of discovery. I have pledged my love to another, who, I must continue to believe, will send for me soon. We have to be sure that we do not in future allow ourselves to be overtaken in that fashion. Therefore . . .
I tore the page in half, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, and in my fury at not being able to tear it more flung the pieces before me as I stepped out from the entry for the shoes and hooves and wheels of the town to finish off.
How could she? Addressing me as though I were some . . . accident that she had let happen. The tip of my tongue had not yet ceased to smart where in a sudden paroxysm she had caught it between her teeth. Her scent was still ingrained in the lines of my hands, the creases between my fingers, and on other places to where those same fingers had, all through the night just past, time and again strayed.
How could she?
A greengrocer heading to Montgomery’s market with a box of lettuces on his shoulder, and reading in the tearing and scattering what I had read in the letter itself, shouted his sympathy. “You’re better off without, son. The lassies are as alike as these here butterheads.”
Ferris and Bright were getting up a party to go that night to the theatre and on afterwards to whatever entertainment they could devise or divine. A bosom friend – they had no other kind – had been up before the Manor Court the previous day to agree a schedule for the repayment of his old debts and was in a mood to start running up a few new ones. But I had no desire whatever for company, was prepared to go to any length to avoid it. And there was no greater length in town than the Long Bridge, all twenty-five hundred feet of it, over the river into Ballymacarrett and County Down. I crossed directly I was finished work, when the traffic was mercifully all tending in the one direction, for the Long Bridge could with equal merit have borne the name of Narrow Bridge, and I still carried in my head Millar’s hints as to the dire state of its undersides.
I started at the foot of the Donaghadee Road and worked my way up, which is to say east: Miscampbell, McComb, Armstrong, Beatty, Crossan, O’Kane . . . If a sign hung over the door I entered under it. I drank ale, I drank porter, I drank gin, I drank rum. I ate only that I might drink more: some bread and a piece of cheese that had been too long out of the larder, if indeed it had ever seen the inside of one, a plate of something resembling something that had once resembled beef; an egg, about which the less said the better. Between taverns, I passed cottage after cottage from which – even now that the age of great mills and manufactories was upon us, and, more immediately, that the dinner hour was upon us too – the sound of individual wheels and handlooms emanated. The smoke that came with it was pure turf; the floors, glimpsed over the half doors, were mud. I might rather have traversed decades of time than the twenty-one arches of the Long Bridge.
I was above two hours covering the mile to the lesser bridge over the Connswater River, which I now decided had all along been my ambition. I rested my elbows on the parapet, my head on my hands.
How could she?
“Hold steady there!” cried a voice.
Three boys – brothers as I took them to be, the youngest not more than four, the eldest, whose voice I had heard, maybe twice that – were balanced on a flat stone in the middle of the stream, fishing with a bent pin on a piece of string. I assumed at first that they had stripped down to their undergarments against the possibility – the probability, given the precariousness of their perch – of their falling in, but by degrees I recognised in their flimsy attire the vestiges of shirts and breeches, and what had seemed a summer evening’s sport began to take on the aspect of dire necessity, with a twist, for me, of grim parody:
“The river is the key to prosperity, and prosperity is the key to the common good . . .” Their bait was bread, which the eldest supplemented and moulded from a wad in his cheek between each cast. It seemed inconceivable that they should catch anything at all in this way and yet the middle brother toyed with a sharpened stick on which was already threaded one red-tailed specimen, a pound or two in weight.
I lost track of time watching the boys chew, mould, cast, wait, wait, wait more then start all over again. There was not so much as the hint of a bite, so that I began to wonder if they could really have caught the fish on their stick here and not simply brought it with them as a propitious charm. Eventually the midges found me out (they seemed not to bother the brothers) and I turned to begin drinking my way back to town. I had not gone more than a few dozen yards when I heard a smaller voice cry out – in alarm, I feared at first, then heard the other two join in with whoops of joy. However they had done it, the brothers had worked their trick again with the string and the bent pin. And I had not even had the patience to stand and watch.
It was as gloomy now within the cottages I passed as it was without, but the treadles and shuttles had not let up. I entered under a further three signs. Or four. Or, at least, not more than five. And after each stop I was more convinced than I had been before that I really did not care whether I ever saw Maria again. I had had an “Experience”, that was all, with a woman older than I was. (And Dorothy was right: she was, I told myself now, much too old for me ever to have truly loved.) With time it would acquire the shape of Anecdote – I would hold back the rustling of the mouse in the corner by the dresser until . . . later, let us say – before one day becoming That Thing of Which I Did Not Wish to Speak to the young lady (I could almost picture her face, the searching look in her eyes) who was so desperately trying to understand the wound she detected somewhere at the very heart of me.
Crossing the river again, I was forced into the side of the Long Bridge for some minutes while the drivers of two carts that had passed too near to each other in the gathering darkness attempted to disengage their locked wheels: a common enough occurrence for pedestrians on that constricted thoroughfare. The only townsman never to have to give ground was Billy Massey, who was twice as wide as the coal barrow he pushed around all day. When Billy wanted to cross, people said, the horses stood on two legs to let him.
I managed at length to wriggle my way into one of the passing niches in time to see a head break the surface of the water at the foot of the next pier along. “Please let that not be a rat,” I said aloud, for giant rat stories were the stock in trade of the docks and quays, “or even” – for it was swimming in the direction that I must go – “a dog.”
The head disappeared and moments later reappeared, six feet closer to the town side, pale shoulders now visible beneath it. Of course. Neither rodent, nor canine, but human. Tantra Barbus was earning the pennies for the drink to send him to sleep until morning.
All that was left of him by the time I got across the bridge was a trail of wet footprints. I was able to follow them, past a rowboat recently beached, on to Ann Street, where there was, beneath a gas lamp, a mad confusion of prints, as though he had thrown in a dance for his benefactors, or had simply been so spoilt for choice for where to spend his money that he literally did not know which way to turn. I could not decide which was the more distasteful, nor rid myself of the thought that I was not one to be judging Tantra Barbus, having spent the evening as I had spent it, trying to render myself insensible. Tantra was an innocent compared to the hallians who provoked him to such self-abasement. I squeezed the words out between my teeth: “I could swing for that b— Lord Belfast,” and was surprised enough at my vehemence that I forgot for the time it took me to walk through the next tavern door that I had intended to ring down the curtain on my own night’s drinking.
My grandfather was most often shut up with his books or else already in bed by the time I came home in the evenings. As I tried to negotiate the stairs two drinks later, however, I noticed that his study door was ajar, a light burning within. I hesitated on the landing, my hand shielding the candle I had with difficulty lit in the hall.
“Gilbert?” he said. I thought about carrying on to my room. He might have called out ten times already tonight at imagined footfalls, and, besides, I did not trust my mouth and brain to be at all in harmony. I shifted my weight, to counteract a sudden list to the left, and a floorboard creaked. “Gilbert?” said my grandfather a second time. “Is that you?”
I pushed open the door, eleven years old again. The light from my candle fell first on his feet, which protruded from beneath his desk, having worked their way out of the slippers lying crossways on the floor. There was a hole in the toe of one stocking from which something more resembling horn than nail poked out. Who was it – Berris, Fright? – had said that parents were not another generation, but another species? How much more true was that for a grandparent? His own light was hard against the book he had been reading (too small to be the Bible: the Psalms, perhaps) and illuminated his face only to the bridge of his nose.
“‘And the foolish man shall make of the night day and of the day night,’” he recited.
“It is only just gone a quarter past eleven,” I said, or meant to; I managed to drop a sh sound somewhere in the middle. “And,” (I would not be deterred) “you are still up.”
“I am an old man, I have less need of sleep.”
This seemed to me to be entirely the wrong way about. Surely it was the young, with so much still to see of the world, who ought to be the most wakeful? That, though, in my present state, would have been a sentence too far. My grandfather appeared anyway to have become absorbed in his book again.
“I will bid you good night,” I said, or something approaching it.
He looked up, a frown forming, more of concentration than reproof. “Do you remember, one day we were walking on High Street – oh, I suppose you would not have been more than five at the time – and we met a pair of English gentlemen arguing together?”
For a moment I almost fancied that I did . . . for a moment. “No,” I said.
“They had been making a tour of Scotland and crossed the day before from Portpatrick with the intention of walking to the Giant’s Causeway,” he went on, the appeal to my memory audibly dwindling with every word, “and had been assured, on stepping off the boat in Donaghadee, that it was not more than forty-five miles distant from Belfast. A few minutes before we came upon them they had learned that those forty-five miles were in fact Irish miles and to an Englishman would measure something closer to seventy.”
I needed the chamber pot. I needed my bolster. I clenched my teeth and every muscle from my toes to my pelvis.
The two gentlemen, my grandfather was telling me, were divided between going part of the way to the north coast by coach – an expense that the younger, and shorter, did not think their purse could bear, despite their English shillings suddenly being worth thirteen pence – and turning about and walking back to Donaghadee, a mere eighteen miles, or twelve, according to how you looked at it. My grandfather had put himself at their service, offering to bring them back to his house, where they might carry on their discussion in more comfort and, if they did not mind him saying, with heat other than of their own making. The gentlemen, though, were determined to leave one way or the other.
“I do not think that they cared for the town, for anything they had met with in their short time here,” he said, somewhat regretfully. “It surprised them that they felt so foreign in it. It surprised me. We could not even agree on the distance between us.”
His attention seemed to have strayed again. I opened my mouth to speak, but only belched, softly, undetected, I thought, until my grandfather’s eyes appeared suddenly in the lamplight.
“Keats,” he said.
“I beg your pardon.” I meant for the burp.
“John Keats.”
I was confused.
“The younger of the English
gentlemen we met on High Street. His name was not at all familiar to me then.”
It was not at all familiar to me now.
“He and his friend, Brown, introduced themselves. He looked to me to be a troubled young man.” Troubled, in my grandfather’s lexicon, was cognate with “fallen out of Faith”; it was only one step away from Lost. “I went home and prayed very fervently that he might find peace. You prayed with me.”
I summoned the remains of my sobriety (they did not amount to much) to say that I was sure Mr Keats would have thanked him for it. Thanked us.
“He died a short time later,” my grandfather said, his fingers drumming on the Psalms, or whatever it was that he had been reading. “By all accounts still a stranger to God.”
I was obviously invited to take with me up the remaining stairs to my room some moral from the tale. In fact on waking I was able to salvage only one phrase from the wreckage of the night before: “I could swing for that b— Lord Belfast”; and the only “John” on my mind was not Keats, but Bellingham, handing out his lesson to the upper ranks in the person of my grandfather’s sainted Perceval.
*
That patient of Dr Breuer’s in Vienna, who coined the term the “talking cure”, nurtured, as I recall, daydreams to such a degree that they grew into a “private theatre”, attendance at which she was able to combine with her everyday tasks and relationships. At the height of her hysteria, she was given to hallucinating in every particular the exact calendar day one year previously. Though her body moved through the present moment her mind was not so much elsewhere as elsewhen, the details that she let slip in the course of her conversations with Dr Breuer corroborated by her mother’s secret diary. And yet, for all that, there were gaps too, areas of amnesia, just as there were hysterical symptoms that no amount of winding back could unravel: phobias for which no “governess’s dog” could be found.
The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 14
