Glave and Casement go to have a pipe at the back of the train.
Casement eyes the bowl of his pipe, which is slow to light. He wonders if his tobacco is damp. “Glave, do you have your funding for the Yukon straightened out?”
“Close. There’s real interest from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and a couple of other places.” Glave spent the last week in New York dodging in and out of newspaper and journal offices. He was pursuing any and all options for financing his Yukon adventure. “You won’t believe what kept popping up.”
“Herbert Ward’s impending marriage to the very wealthy, somewhat older Sarita Sanford?”
“Merely a sidebar, Roddie,” says Glave. “It’s Sanford père who has everyone’s attention. You know Sanford’s got Lord Revelstoke wrapped around his little finger and Barings Bank has underwritten millions of pounds of stock for Sanford.”
“We know this,” says Casement.
“Ah, but do you know what the stocks pertain to?”
“Something in South America.”
“Right. Railroads.” Glave had paused for emphasis. “Railroads in Argentina. If this Argentine stock doesn’t show a profit very soon, Barings Bank is going to be on the hook for all of it.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” said Casement.
“Yes it does. This is the same cocktail that caused the Panic of 1873.”
“I was thinking more of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.” Casement laughs. “Does that make our Herbert Sir Felix Carbury?”
Glave considers. “Felix Carbury was a penniless aristocrat, whereas ‘Our Herbert’ is just penniless.”
Casement is attending Ward’s talk. The hall is packed to capacity. Despite the December chill, the air in the lecture hall is still and hot. Casement sits in the balcony with the family of Ward’s fiancée, these Sanfords: the neurasthenic mother, the avaricious father, the benumbed sister, and her husband—pleasant and dull. The odors of cigar smoke and sweat emanate from the men. The women—when they shift in their seats—lift floral scented clouds into the air. If he were the kind of person who said things were unbearable when they were, in truth, bearable, he would say it of this heat. His discomfort gives his disposition an edge, exaggerated because he is nervous on Ward’s behalf.
A smatter of applause introduces Ward to the stage. You were in a circus, thinks Casement. How hard can this be? Ward begins to speak. Gesticulating in a manic way, he stalks the stage’s perimeters. He will describe all of Africa, as that is what he’s promised to do, and pull it off in the course of a single hour.
Casement is, as he well knows, indulgent towards Ward, but the presentation seems a combination of balderdash, the ravings of an egomaniac, and—awkwardly—the truth. Casement holds his breath through the first few minutes, waiting for Ward to be laughed off the stage. But he isn’t. Although his talk has had an admittedly slow start, Ward quickly finds his pace. Now, he could be talking about anything—or nothing—and the audience would still be mesmerized. Ward struts and harrumphs and enacts—blam, blam of invisible rifle, awed face at felled elephant—and everyone follows along, as if children at a Christmas pantomime. Casement steals a sly look at the Sanfords, gauging their reaction, Mother Sanford, Father Sanford, Sister and Brother-in-Law Sanford, are rapt. But Sarita (surprise, surprise) seems equally bemused as Casement—on the point of laughing. He wonders what she’s thinking and then she catches him—his looking at her—and her face breaks into a broad smile: They share a secret.
On the hall steps as the venue empties, she approaches him. Her vivid eyebrows dart around. “Mister Casement, does our Mister Ward do the Congo justice?”
Which is an odd choice of words, given the rampant injustice that is being unleashed upon its natives. Casement responds, “That’s just what it’s like. Inexplicably hot with Ward leaping around, keeping us entertained.”
She laughs in an unguarded way, as if they’re old friends.
And then her eyes had spark, her voice dropping an octave. “Do you know that man?” she asks. “He seems to be looking at you.”
Casement hazards a look in the direction suggested by Miss Sanford’s gaze. There is the red hair, rosy cheeks, and overly snug jacket of his friend Mr. George. George is accompanied by a thin, insect-like woman—his wife, or so Casement assumes by the way she has her tapering fingers sunk into George’s elbow. He delivers a warm smile and as this smile slides into pity, quickly nods. “I have met him,” says Casement, “over drinks once. He was a bit short on cash.”
Miss Sanford has not worked to charm him. She has tried to win him over with her wit and fun and intelligence. And all this strikes Casement as very strange since wit and fun and intelligence in women certainly appeal to him, but the occasional European ladies who have previously drawn Ward’s attention—the type Ward might marry—are all coy, retiring things, girls who duck behind fans and beneath parasols, daughters of missionaries or consuls who think of marriage as a process of adoption whereby one escaped the clutches of one’s parents by escaping to a husband.
Miss Sanford is attractive—slim, elegant, with expressive gray eyes—but she isn’t charming in the traditional sense. According to Glave, she is nearly thirty. Why, wonders Casement, has she decided to marry now? And why would this woman whose father controls—according to reliable sources—Lord Revelstoke, and therefore Barings Bank, and therefore England and all that that implies, choose Ward?
VIII
Sark
May 1890
He should be writing his story, generously commissioned by Harmsworth, but it is hard to focus knowing that Sarita is in the other room. Ward is going to have to get used to it, because marriage is all about the other person in the other room, or the other person in the same room—the other who, like a volcano, even when not currently commanding attention, can threaten to explode across one’s landscape. Sarita will like this comparison. No. He won’t share it, because, chances are, she feels more this way than he does.
Sarita had wanted to visit the Channel Islands ever since she’d read Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. She found Sark, with its plunging cliffs and surging ocean, preferable to hectic Rome, which she’d envisioned as swinging between gypsy mob madness and museum galleries filled with Londoners and Bostonians. Ward had gone along persuaded by Sark’s remoteness and its promise of poor mail service.
Stanley has taken to lecturing on the horrors of the Rear Guard and Ward is so often implicated that he feels himself to be the Saint Sebastian of insult, martyred to the cause of Stanley’s knighthood. He’s promised Sarita he won’t think about any of this on their honeymoon. So exile it is—exile from his thoughts, escape from reality, a little uncomplicated practice run of what married life is like.
Sark seems to fire up the imagination. And there’s a lot to look at—rustic people, wild landscape. He’s missed his drawing. London does not bear recording in this manner. Ward likes to draw things he might never see again—to save them—and London is proud of repeatedly presenting the same things at the same times: up at half seven, hot water for shaving at eight, dressed and at breakfast by nine, lunch at one . . . as if life were a wheel that hit its marks with numbing accuracy.
Toplis, the local artist, likes to paint the cliffs, which Ward finds strange, because he prefers, when at the shore, to stare out to sea. Doesn’t everyone? He can’t imagine sitting with his back to the waves, sketching more obstruction and less view, although the Sark coastline is dramatic and varied—mysterious. The island coyly gathers its cliffs around it. Ward jogs his foot back and forth, as if it might pedal his imagination off the curb. In Toilers one of the characters is, extravagantly, attacked by an octopus. Shall Ward borrow? He’s leaning hard on his pencil and snaps the lead.
He is two weeks in to a two-month honeymoon, the purpose of which seemed obvious when he embarked on it—to learn about one’s wife away from the predatory curiosity of one’s
in-laws—but now he is less sure. Sarita approaches the bedroom with a sort of cheerful wide-eyed fortitude, but he still isn’t sure that he has the upper hand, even there. If his sexual experience might seem to privilege him in this regard, it somehow doesn’t. He feels that he’s stepped into a role, like a proven stud, although—to his knowledge—he has yet no children. The possibility that he might have fathered one in the Congo is enough to truly make him sweat, but he does not think this to be the case, and if he had done—unless the child were blond—no one would know about it. He imagines Bidi vanishing into the jungle and all traces of his presence in the Congo evaporating like the mists off the surface the river.
“Knock knock!” says Sarita, at the door. “Are you done with that piece for Boys Own Paper?”
Ward rallies his thoughts. “Do you think an octopus would attack a dog?”
“No.”
“Well, then, I have nothing.”
“Whether I think an octopus would attack a dog is beside the point. You’re not writing for me. The readership of Boys Own Paper believe that the ghosts of Spanish pirates kidnap children and that hoards of Arabian treasure can be dug up in Harefield. So, how is it?”
“Why do you ask, Mrs. Ward?”
“I ask because it’s a beautiful day and I want to go fishing.”
“And where do you propose we go?”
“We could go to Creux Harbor. I’ve had luck there with the bream, but it’s such nice weather that it might be fun to walk over to Gouliot Headlands.”
“Let’s do that,” says Ward. “I could use some inspiration.”
Sarita is good at fishing—another surprise—something she says she learned as a child. She’s told him that she wasn’t always wealthy but never supplied the details. Sarita doesn’t like to show weakness. She knows her resilience puts her in a strong light, but that which necessitated this strength might temper it with vulnerability. He’s watched her expertly dig the worms up, set the hooks, and cast. There’s a nimbleness to all this activity—activity that awakens something in her, a memory of action tensing like a muscle—and he knows that once this fishing was more than a hobby.
“You carry the rods, Herbert,” she says. “And don’t poke me in the eye.”
Sarita is lacing her own boots as she (the honeymooning radical) has forsaken her corset for a summer frock that doesn’t require one.
“Let me carry the tackle,” he says.
“What will I carry?”
“You carry the basket.”
“That’s what will be heavy coming home.”
She walks quickly. He imagines if she could whistle, she would, but she doesn’t know how: He’s heard her try. “What are you thinking?” he asks.
“Me? I’m wondering if Garnet’s had the baby yet.”
“I wonder what kind of mother she’ll make.”
“I’ve asked her that,” says Sarita, “and she points out how very attentive she is to her cat.”
They laugh. The sun is high. The wind is stiff. Clouds scudding past cast exact shadows across the sheep pastures and nodding fields of wheat. A shepherd whistles to his dog and the dog comes. Another whistle sends the dog in another direction. The sheep are not around and this must be a lesson. Two horses, side by side, watch, heads at the gate, puffing and whinnying commentary as if they’re two patrons at a bar.
“We are the only two people on earth,” says Ward.
“What about that man with his dog?”
“We and that man with his dog are the only two people on earth.”
Sarita likes this kind of joke.
At the Headlands, Sarita picks her way around the slope. If she slips, she’ll fall a hundred feet down the cliff and into the water. She is confident, however, in her leather boots and heavy skirts, encumbered by the basket. She finds her preferred rock and settles on it. “Come on, Herbert,” she says. He steps along the narrow path, placing one sure foot before another. She takes his rod and baits the hook, weaving the worm onto it.
“You didn’t need to do that,” he says.
“I just wanted to make sure it didn’t slip off.”
He shakes his head at her and then casts, a sure shot flying far across the waves, blown a few feet off course by a sudden gust, and then piercing the surface of the water. And then she casts farther off to the left. They sit and sit.
“You don’t find this a touch uninspiring?” Herbert says after a half hour.
“I’m just waiting for the mackerel. I’m sure they’re out there. Look how clear the water is.”
They sit. And finally, Ward feels the knocking on his line that means that something has, at last, found his bait attractive. “Some luck,” he says.
Sarita touches the line delicately, thinking. “It’s a bream. Let it go a bit, and then strike it.”
Herbert loses the bream—when he pulls up his line, there’s nothing there, not even bait. Later, the mackerel do come in and Sarita hooks about four to Herbert’s one. “You look busy, darling,” he says. “Mind if I wander to the caves?”
“The tide’s still high.”
“I just want a peek. Thinking about my story.”
“Be careful. Those heavy rains last week seem to have worn the edge off of that path.”
“What are you, my wife?” Ward had used that phrase to admonish Casement on an almost daily basis, and Casement always had a response, but Sarita is completely taken with some development at the end of her line and she does not hear.
He moves around the grassy slope, the side of a rounded mound that has resulted from some long-ago geological event. Much of the gorse in the vicinity has been cut away for kitchen fires, but lucky for him, this gorse is in too precarious a position for easy harvest and is clinging along the cliff’s border, holding some of the dirt in place. Agile as ever, Ward walks along the path, although he is aware of the gusting winds that, on more than one occasion, have knocked men into the sea. Here, there’s a slippery bit, and then a few rough rocks, and after the opening to a chasm. If the tide were out, he would scale it downward until he was at sea level, but he spies a ledge. He’ll lower himself in and find his way to it. There’s a benefit to having been an acrobat. His body still responds in the old ways—balance, counterbalance—all of it instinctual and sure. Here on this rocky shelf, he feels safe. The sun struggles in from the mouth of the rock. The waves surge below, softly, softly, and then rise with a smack and spume of water.
He cannot see it, but he knows that all manner of treasure is hidden beneath the surface of the water. There are beadlet anemones—bright as jewels—and languid squid and rocks armored with mollusks. Eels inscribe their progress through the dark, vertical recesses. There are octopi. The shadowed walls of the cave drip with cold and a sense of comfort makes him both wish to stay there forever and to leave. He feels pushed to the edge of life, yet completely stilled. He puts his hand on his heart and feels it beating. Below, the water sings angrily against the rocks and the clash of pebbles raked by waves—an even, harsh hissing—echoes from the shore.
What has brought him here, from the Congo? What has brought him here, from Borneo? He remembers that youth walking on the tightrope in Melbourne, the drunken men jeering below, their stained teeth. He remembers that woman from the pie stand showing herself to him when he returned to his tent to dress. He was seventeen. He remembers shearing sheep in a long shed with Australian black fellows chatting amongst themselves and flies rising in clouds, sinking in waves. He remembers a red pelt flashing behind the trunks and vines of the Asian jungle. He remembers the sound of Jameson’s pen scratching his horrors on the paper, and the thud of a snake falling from the hut’s roof beam. In this cave he is meeting everything—all manner of everything. How does one continue?
In the harsh light and dry wind he approaches his wife. She turns to face him and now she looks quite small.
�
��Herbert,” she says, “I wish the rest of my life could be just like this.”
“Fishing.”
“Fishing with you.”
He’s not sure that she was fishing with him. “Do you know what I’d like to be doing for the rest of my life?”
“What?”
He takes the rod from her and plants it in the ground.
“And then what happens?”
“Well,” says Ward, “one of those waves hits them in the cave and goes and shoots the water up. You’ve seen that happen. There’s a lot of force in that.”
“But what does that have to do with the dog and the octopus?”
“Hendricks is very glad that he saved the dog from the octopus because, when the wave hits, he chucks the dog into the water and the dog gets shot all the way up through the entrance, back on dry land. And then the dog runs and gets help from someone.”
“Maybe a shepherd.”
“Or a farmer. What else is there around here? Anyway, the dog brings the shepherd or farmer back to the caves and Hendricks and Flanders grab on to a lowered rope and are brought to safety, all thanks to Rebel.”
“Rebel is the dog?”
“Who else?”
“How many words is that?”
“About two thousand.”
“Perfect,” she says, “and perfectly preposterous.”
They are walking down the avenue to get their mail, a part of their routine that has epically begun to take the entire morning. There are more visitors to the island and now when they stop at the Victoria Hotel, the tearoom is full of honeymooning couples and fancy families. One sees all manner of people crawling down the long ladders to reach the beach at Grande Greve. There are scrambling parties at Port du Moulin. The Coupee, that long narrow spine that connects to the encephalitic head of Little Sark, is now busy with Londoners—children running too close to the precipice, women obscuring the view with parasols, men rolling up sleeves to reveal unmanly forearms. Oh, she’s been judging everyone. She can do that. Sarita doesn’t need some local to carry her picnic basket and she’s fine to scramble down the rocks free of ladders and ropes. With no Paz to remind her, she has been exposing her face to the sun and does not care should she return to London looking like a walnut.
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