Master Georgie (7 page)

The food on board was excellent. It would not be going too far to say we dined like kings. For breakfast there was pigeon, rump steak, cold hashed meat, eggs prepared in a variety of ways; hard-boiled, scrambled, coddled, fried. This feast was served up at eight o’clock sharp. Two of the engineers and, as bad luck would have it, the wretched Naughton generally kept me company. Neither George nor the womenfolk ever made it to the table. In George’s case this was due to his having drunk too much the night before. Poor Beatrice, she who had boasted so loudly and so long of a desire to sail before the mast, had a miserable time of it, being confined to her berth, sick as a cat, except for those occasions on which Myrtle dragged her from below and marched her, distinctly green about the gills, up and down the deck. I could have been unkind - God knows, Beatrice has given me enough provocation - but I held my tongue. For all her faults, she had proved a satisfactory helpmate, particularly in regard to those intimate services required of a wife. Unlike Annie, Beatrice positively relishes her conjugal duties and has always brought a touching enthusiasm to her participation in our happy tumbles.

On our fourth day out it became apparent that Naughton was considerably smitten with Myrtle. She, as usual, appeared unaware of it, though she could scarcely move for tripping over him. It wasn’t the first time she had caused a flutter in a manly breast, not that Naughton could by any stretch of the imagination be classified as manly. His lurch towards Myrtle surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought he was discerning enough to appreciate her, he being the shallow sort of fellow susceptible to more obvious charms - a rosy complexion, sparkling eyes, splendid bust, etc. Myrtle was smallish, pale, had a chest as flat as a board, morose eyes of a colour neither green nor brown, and a somewhat sullen pout to her lips. It’s true that when she engaged one in conversation, or was observed playing with the children, or she smiled, it was a different story. Then I do believe she cast a spell. Beatrice adored her, and Annie, who, God knows, had every reason in the world to find her detestable, showed signs of sincere devotion.

Naughton, struck all of a heap, went so far as to take George to one side and make his feelings known. ‘Your sister is remarkably fetching,’ is how he imprudently put it.

 ‘I imagine that she has many admirers.’ To which George rashly replied she had but one, to whom she was betrothed and who was waiting for her to join him in Constantinople.

I say rash, because it was highly likely we would continue to rub shoulders with Naughton when we reached our destination, and what did George intend to do then?

‘Are you going to hire some young hussar to play the part of lover?’ I asked him.

‘I’ll worry about it when we get there,’ he retorted, and then drank so much during the afternoon that he quite forgot to tell Myrtle of her impending marriage.

Result - in the middle of dinner, the infatuated Naughton turned to her and blurted out for all to hear, ‘Your fiance is a fortunate man, Miss Hardy.’

The effect of this startling announcement on our section of the table was comical indeed. Annie, about to fork up a portion of pie-crust, sat with open mouth and implement suspended in the air. Poor Beatrice, already munching, choked on her morsel and might have expired if the veterinary surgeon hadn’t thumped her between the shoulder blades. Myrtle alone stayed calm; gazing steadily at the speechless George, she replied, ‘It’s kind of you, Mr Naughton, but I assure you it is I who am fortunate.’

I don’t know what she said to George afterwards. Nothing, I expect. George could do no wrong. If ever there was a woman with fairy dust in her eyes, it was she. Once, I had appealed to her to put a curb on George’s drinking, which had grown excessive following the demise of his father. ‘It’s not for me to interfere,’ she’d said. ‘Besides, it makes him happy.’

Secretly, I wondered whether she didn’t prefer him half-seas over: possibly it gave her more of a hold. He’d been shaken far more than was necessary at the circumstances surrounding his father’s death. Though he didn’t confide in me until some months later, I already had my suspicions that matters were other than they seemed. A relative of old Mrs Hardy, a Captain Tuckett, had come to the house the night it happened, and he’d told me that George was in a horrid state earlier in the evening, quivering and blubbing, and rambling on about Punch and Judy of all things. Then, of course, there was the sudden intrusion into the household of Pompey Jones - the duck-boy as Myrtle insisted on calling him - not to mention her own unexplained and astonishing elevation, packed off to boarding school as though she was a daughter of the family.

Myrtle was now indispensable. Old Mr Hardy had been a bully and a fraud, and as often happens with sons of such men - sensitive boys, that is - George had feared and admired him in equal proportions. It would not be incorrect to say that George had placed him on a pedestal, and a pretty lofty one at that. Mr Hardy’s topple from the heights had shattered both of them. It was Myrtle’s destiny in life to make George believe he had stuck himself together.

Several days later, when I was taking a turn about the deck, staring out at the monotonous vista of sea and sky, Naughton joined me and began a footling conversation on the construction of violins; the best wood, etc. He was a manufacturer of the things, with a thriving business, so he boasted, not a stone’s throw from the Custom House. I am not a lover of music, though I once had the luck, during the celebrations surrounding the inauguration of the Albert Dock, to attend a piano recital enlivened by the soloist unexpectedly somersaulting from the platform.

Naughton was tedious enough when raving on about instruments, but he soon became even more so; he had the temerity to share his thoughts on the coming war. His ignorance of history was infuriating and his judgements worthless. It was his opinion that our affairs were in the right hands.

‘By that,’ I said, ‘I presume you mean those buffoons who, by reasons solely of wealth and title, control both government and army?’

‘Buffoons -’ he stuttered.

‘Idiots, triflers,’ I elaborated. ‘No national respect for ancient tradition, no adulation of rank, however sincere, can fit an uneducated man for high office.’

‘Uneducated?’ he protested. ‘Lord Aberdeen, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Russell, Lord Raglan -’

‘The want of educated men,’ I thundered, ‘has been the cause of our miseries in the East. They know next to nothing about the vast empire of the Turks. Our consular service, its members recruited from the aristocracy, live in their palaces as though the Thames flowed outside their windows. Their duties consist of home pursuits - the reviewing of parades, the throwing of garden parties, visits to the opera. They might just as well be living in Buckinghamshire. What reports have they sent on the nature of the climate, the terrain, the produce and resources of the country, the state of the roads?’

I was fairly shouting now. He looked affronted, which was gratifying. ‘I suppose you have brought with you samples of building materials to show prospective buyers,’ I continued. ‘Brick...stone, etc. There are, as you know, very few roads in the region.’

‘I have not,’ he said stiffly.

‘Mark my words,’ I said. ‘There’ll be a great call for bricks...none at all for violins...unless, perhaps, you intend Sebastopol to fall to the sounds of music.’

I had thought I’d put him in his place and he’d stalk off and leave me in peace. Not so; he stuck to my side like a burr. It’s uncomfortable, being paced by a man one’s insulted. Just as I was almost reduced to commenting on the waves and the clouds, their particular bounce and shade of colour, etc., he said, ‘Dr Potter, what exactly is the situation of the young man Miss Hardy is to marry?’

‘Situation...?’

‘Position. What is his business?’

‘War,’ I said. ‘He’s a captain in the llth Hussars.’

Then he did leave me, for who could compete with a peacock of the dazzling Light Brigade, however imaginary?

We sailed into Valletta harbour thirteen days on. Nothing would induce Beatrice to stay on board during the twenty-four hours required for the refuelling and restocking of the steamer. She was adamant that she must sleep on dry land, and failed to see the humour in my remark that, should she do so, she would find it somewhat strewn with boulders.

 ‘There isn’t a speck of soil on the whole island,’ I informed her.

‘Nonsense,’ she said, pointing at the glowing fields above the harbour.

‘Not natural soil,’ I said. ‘It was carted in from Sicily and elsewhere. The Knights of Malta allowed ships into the harbour only if they could pay their dues in grit and dirt.’

‘What nonsense,’ she said again. ‘There is never any shortage of dirt, wherever one goes,’ and she insisted I find her and Annie an hotel.

That afternoon our party wandered about the town, the women captivated by the jumble of peoples thronging the narrow thoroughfares. I found the place greatly altered since my visit two decades before. What, to a young man’s eyes, had appeared an ancient stronghold, full of quaint architecture and exotically attired Arabs, Nubians and Jesuit priests, now presented itself as decidedly modern and raffish, the English influence being much in evidence. Time and again the women were forced to gather up their skirts to avoid the careless splatterings of the numerous red-coats who staggered out of the wine-shops and relieved themselves in the streets. I found this alteration disconcerting, and felt the burden of my years.

‘When I first came here,’ I told Beatrice, ‘my hair was carroty -’

‘I know it,’ she replied. ‘There were vestiges when we first met. The grey is a great improvement.’

We hired donkeys before dinner, plodding up the winding paths beside gardens splendid under foliage of date and palm, until we reached fields of barley winking gold in the sunlight. The children, lifted down, tottered round in the dust, swaying to the constant and pretty ringing of church bells floating up from the town. Their mother, safe from prying eyes, rained kisses on their baby cheeks and sang them nursery rhymes.

I spent the night in the hotel with Beatrice and Annie. It was a needless expense, but I don’t sleep well without the warmth of Beatrice at my back.

We sailed the following morning, the talk at breakfast being that war was unavoidable. In two days’ time no fewer than three French transports would enter the harbour en route for Gallipoli, their arrival to be greeted by a turn-out of the Guards and Rifle Brigade - this information from Naughton, who the night before had been up to the batteries-for his supper. One of the engineers, whose word could be trusted, had confirmation that in our absence from England a siege train of eighty heavy guns had been assembled at Woolwich. Though to be expected, I found the news depressing; it is my belief that grim-grinning death is the only victor in war.

I passed the third night of our voyage to Constantinople on deck, having bullied a reluctant Beatrice to keep me company. She grudgingly admitted, when I tickled her from sleep at dawn, that a mattress and covers beneath the stars were in many ways preferable to the cramped confines of our cabin.

It was not a sudden longing to return to nature that caused me to shift us up-top, rather a desire to gaze once again upon the site of the hermit of Malea, a bearded solitary who, fifty years before, had built a shelter upon a promontory on the Cape, from which vantage point, cross-legged, he proceeded to contemplate the heave of the ocean. Twenty years ago it had been the practice of ships and yachts, after first blowing their whistles, to lower boats stocked with biscuits, salt and oil, and deposit such supplies, weather permitting, on the rocky outcrop below his dwelling.

‘Legend has it,’ I further informed Beatrice, ‘that he came from Athens, where he was once a wealthy ship owner. Rather like yourself, his love of the sea’ - here she flashed me one of her looks, of the sort guaranteed to turn a lesser man to jelly - ‘was so great that he always commanded a ship of his fleet. On three occasions, the vessel he steered spun off course...due to vagaries of the wind...and foundered on the rocks off Cape Malea.’

‘What rocks?’ she said. ‘I don’t see any rocks.’

‘They’re out there somewhere,’ I assured her. ‘In despair, and to do penance for his drowned men, he vowed to retreat from the world.’

‘Why the whistles?’ she asked. ‘If he does nothing but stare at the horizon, surely he can see the ships.’

‘The word hermit,’ I reproved, ‘from the Latin eremita, defines a secluded place, a desert. He needs time to hide himself. A hermit cannot be forever hob-nobbing.’

‘Well, he’s certainly in retreat now,’ observed my impatient wife, shivering at the rail and squinting out across the misty waters. Shortly after, she complained the salt spray stung her lips, and made to go below.

‘Do stay,’ I implored her. ‘It gives me pleasure to have you stand at my side.’

 ‘I won’t,’ she retorted crossly. ‘I’m thinking of becoming a hermit,’ and with that parting shot, she left me.

I never caught so much as a glimpse of land, though I stayed at my post for an hour or more, watching the racing sea and dwelling nostalgically on my long-gone bachelor days.

*

There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled. With regard to myself, nothing has affected me quite so brutally as that manifesto of the new sciences, Principles of Geology by Mr Lyell. I was twenty-two years old when I first read it. Result -1 have not been the same man since. Echoing the sentiments of Mr Ruskin, I have often lamented to Beatrice, Those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them through every cadence of the Bible verses.’

It was not so much Lyell’s shattering of the fairy tale of Creation that plunged me into mental turmoil, rather his assertion that the interchange of land and sea is perpetual. Thus, our northern hemisphere, once a vast ocean sprinkled with islands, must, he argued, return to its original state, albeit in the remote future. It is not a comforting notion. Man himself is so buffeted by shifts of thought and mood, not knowing from one day to the next what he truly feels, that a shifting earth is well-nigh the last straw.