Signals of Distress (10 page)

Aymer kept the silence easily. He didn’t know what he could say. He knew, though, what to do. He’d take the Bowes beneath his wing. A shilling was a paltry sum, a blushing sum. It
was what he’d paid to George for merely fetching Mr Phipps. Aymer would give the Bowes more than a shilling’s worth if he could find the means … to what? To be straightforward
and suggest the benefits for everyone if Miggy … Margaret. He’d have to call her Margaret … would come back on the next
Tar
with him to be his wife. He wouldn’t
mention love. He couldn’t love the girl, not like the love that danced till dawn in fairytales or books. He was too old for dances and for dawn. But he could
liberate
the girl. What
better dowry could there be? He’d break her chains of poverty, just like he’d snapped the chains of slavery for Otto. He looked across the room at Miggy’s silhouette. Her face was
fine enough. Her skin was pale and clear. Mrs Margaret Smith, a healthy country catch, a woman less than half his age. He wouldn’t want a wife too well experienced. He didn’t need to
win her heart. But he could court and win her head. Her body, too. She’d use the bedside chamber pot. He’d run his hands across her thrushy thighs. Her hair would hang in one loose
tress. It would be best, he thought, to talk first to her mother. She’d understand the common sense of his proposal. She wouldn’t have much choice.

Aymer felt light-headed. Excitement? Fish fumes? Or the gin?

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I cannot trust myself to find the way when it is dark.’ And then to Ralph, ‘Will you be walking with me, sir? A companion shrinks the
miles.’

‘Gladly, Mr Smith,’ he said. He couldn’t tell the truth, that he would rather stay and spend the night exactly where he was. Both men stood up, pulled on their coats and
jostled at the door. Whip ran through their legs into the open air.

Aymer made a parting speech: ‘I promise you I will return within a day or two. I will consider some proposals that might ease your condition. You have accepted my shilling with reluctance,
but you will, I hope, accept my friend ship and my help with …’ He could not find the proper words.
With greater deference
, perhaps? Or
with docility
? He left the
farewell uncompleted. For the third time that day he offered his hand to Miggy Bowe. She stretched her arm and touched him on his finger ends, much in the way that she had touched the
African’s toes on the beach the day before, much in the way a child would dare to touch a jellyfish. His hand was damp and hot.

‘I would’ve had that cow if you in’t come,’ she said.

Aymer Smith was not a Revolutionist. He could not abet the theft and slaughter of a cow, and square it with his conscience, or with the excise men, or – more to the point – with
Walter Howells, who’d taken on the task of rounding up the cattle from the
Belle
. But what if the cow was not alive? ‘I saw three dead cows, ready salted, in the shallows of the
wreck,’ he said. ‘That’s flotsam, isn’t it? I do not know the finer points of law. But isn’t wreckage floating in the sea the property of those who find it? And what
is a lifeless cow but wreckage of a sort – just leather, horn and flesh? Who will oppose you taking meat out of the sea? It is fishing by another name. Besides, the flesh will putrefy unless
you rescue it. It is almost a duty to oppose such waste.’

And so they took a handcart, a wood axe and some heavy knives and went down to the sea. The Bowes and Ralph waded in, despite the cold. Whip ran barking at the waves. But Aymer didn’t want
to chance his boots. He used his strapped arm as an excuse for staying idle. One cow was almost beached. Between them and the free help of the waves, the Bowes and Ralph managed to drag it into the
shallows. Its orifices drained of water and lance eels squirted through a thousand punctures in the hide. Its eyes had gone, and crabs were feeding on the titbits of the skull. Its tongue was white
and bloodless. There was some evidence already of putrefaction in the head. The women would not take the tongue or brains. But the clammy, musty, tainted meat from the neck and clod would still be
edible if washed in ashy water and then roasted. They went to work without emotion, beginning at the leg and cutting meat from off the bone up through the topside, silverside and flank into the
aitch bone. The salty water caused the fibres of the open flesh to contract and drew the juices from the cow so that the sea became a rosy brine. The women stood in water that was tumbling with
tiny, feeding fish. By the time they’d reached the rump and sirloin the water and the sand were red. Gulls were circling so close that the mayhem of their wings was louder than the sea.

Aymer found the fish more shocking than the cow. He was used to seeing fish on plates, cooked, gormless, dressed, not tumbling like molten lead, not smelling so. He retreated up the sand. He
couldn’t help. He had only one arm. They posted him to stand with Whip next to their handcart, to keep birds off. No tumbril in Robespierre’s Paris could have been as bloody or macabre,
or smelled as bad. He turned his back to it and looked along the shore, where turnstones and oyster catchers were picking through the beached and draining kelp. Aymer had seen these seaweeds many
times before, and knew their names in Latin:
Ascophyllum nodosum
,
Fucus vesicolosus
,
Laminaria cloustini
. There was a folio in the offices of Smith & Sons, with over fifty
specimens pressed, labelled and isolated on smooth sheets of white paper like doilies or like fans. When they were boys, Aymer and Matthias had learned to recognize each species. ‘I suppose
that now,’ thought Aymer, ‘there’ll have to be a folio with specimens of Monsieur Leblanc’s common salt.’ He knew the
shapes
of the weeds, perhaps. But the
colours
were a shock. The folio seaweeds for all their dry and flattened delicacy were only brown and black. But on the beach the living kelp was as polished and as leathery as a
prince’s boot, in mustards, crimsons, purples, tans. In the shallows, where the tide was frowning white round rocks and bars, the deeper kelps and wracks spread darkly on the surface, or
danced arabesques in undulating groves of weed, like spirit-women at a ball in heavy satin frocks. Aymer looked beyond the kelp, beyond the figures in the sea, beyond the
Belle
abandoned in
the suds, into the feeble, sombre sky. There was so little daylight left, that winter afternoon.

‘We’ll have to go now, Ralph,’ he called.

They left the Bowes to push their meaty handcart home alone, and set off with the dog, at a pace too fast for Aymer, towards Wherrytown. Miggy – her hands as red as two anemones –
called out to them, ‘You’ve got to come again!’ Both men replied, ‘I will!’

At first, Ralph’s shoes made rodent noises as he walked. But soon the sea drained out of them. His legs and feet were wet and cold.

‘We’ve done a decent job today,’ said Aymer. ‘They’ll not want for meat.’

‘We have,’ said Ralph, smiling to himself.

‘Good women, too. That is, when one considers all the deprivations in their life. The daughter, don’t you think, might make a tolerable wife for a man? She has the country
virtues.’ Ralph did not reply.

The path was level as it skirted round the bay, and soft underfoot. First there were dunes which shielded them from the cold and bloody solitudes of the seashore. Then there were salty flats
with skew trees and flood-tide debris, and tracts of open, windblown heath where grasses mocked the sea with mimic waves and clapping stalks matched the distant, wet applause of tumbling pebbles in
the tide. But soon they had to scramble over rocks, and Aymer, with one arm in a sling, made clumsy progress. Ralph waited on the headland for his companion to catch up. Someone had set a wooden
bench across two rocks and Aymer, when he arrived, sat breathlessly on it, while Whip went rabbiting and Ralph displayed the patience of a sailor by carving ‘R.P.’ in the bench with his
clasp knife. Other names were carved in it with dates: Thos. Pearson 1829; C. Stuart, Edinbgh. May ’33; Bartolli, Claudio, R
OMA
1831. There were initials, too, with
hearts and arrows. Aymer, motionless, was feeling cold and hungry and wearied by the ceaseless noise and wind. The inn was still two hours’ walk away. He’d allow himself a minute more
of rest. He tried to make his weariness seem purposeful by identifying, for Ralph, the hornblende and the feldspar which added the white and flesh-red garnish to the granite thereabouts. He grubbed
out coloured stones which enamelled the turf at his feet and rubbed them clean between his fingers. He broke free crusts of salt and mustard lichens. He murmured his familiarity with them, by
naming them in Latin and in English. Ralph shook his head at his companion’s learning. ‘I don’t know names for those,’ he said. And then, ‘I do know other things
…’ Ralph’s was a stranger’s ignorance. Aymer’s was a stranger’s knowledge.

A narrow side path led down from Aymer’s bench, through boulders, to a grassy bowl, and then rose steeply to a tonsured promontory where the granite was too exposed for ferns or lichen or
algae. It was a perfect paradise of rocks, much loved, in summer, by watercolourists and lizards. But in the winter, with so much grey about and so little light, the dull pinks of the exposed stone
were warm and beckoning. No child could pass it by without first attempting to climb the tumbled pyramid to reach the square mass at its summit. If it was natural masonry, then it had been
weathered by a geometric wind and shaped by architectural frosts. This topmost block – the shape and size of a small stone cottage – rested with solid poise on the nipple of a flat but
slightly rounded rock. If anyone sat, like Aymer, on the bench and stared for long enough it could seem the block was hovering an inch above the world. It had a tarred cross on its side.

‘So that’s the Cradle Rock,’ Aymer said, pointing.

‘What is the Cradle Rock?’

‘A rock that moves when it is pushed. Let’s go and see. I think we can afford the time.’ Even Aymer couldn’t pass it by.

They found a way between granite slabs marked by tarred arrows and climbed to the rounded platform where the Cradle Rock rested on its pivot. Reaching it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Aymer
couldn’t find footholds. He had to accept the sailor’s hand around his wrist, and then his palm against his bottom. The Rock, they saw, was not a square on every side. Its hidden part
was thinner and irregular. Ralph clambered up twelve feet or so and soon was standing on its summit, testing where the balance was. But Cradle Rock was so exactly poised that Ralph’s weight
only deadened it. He couldn’t make it move. Both men searched the two sides where they could find safe footholds. At one point, on the southern face, the stone was worn away. The feet and
shoulders of a thousand visitors had rubbed it bare.

‘Try here,’ Ralph said.

‘I’ll need both arms.’ Aymer shook off his sling and threw it to the ground. His shoulder didn’t hurt at all although his arm was a little stiff from its confinement in
his coat. The wind picked up the sling and turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.

They put their backs against the naked stone, wedged their feet and pushed. At first their task seemed hopeless. But on their third and fourth attempts they sensed the softness of the mass. They
moved across a foot or two and tried once more. Again the Rock seemed to give a quarter-inch against their backs. They found a rhythm to their exertions, with Ralph, experienced at team-work on the
Belle
, calling out, ‘And push! Let-her-go. And push! Let-her-go.’ The quarter-inch expanded on each push, and soon the Cradle Rock made grinding sounds as it ascended and
declined at its own pace. Ralph and Aymer were redundant now. They stepped back to a safer spot and watched as eighty tons dipped and rose like a child’s cradle, with a displacement at its
outer edges of nine or ten inches. Ralph was laughing at the joy of it. And Aymer, too, had seldom felt such unselfish pleasure. With just their backs, and half a dozen curses from the American,
and some barks from Whip, they had rocked the grandest boulder on the coast. And left it rocking.

They were too pleased, at first, to feel the snow. But soon the Cradle Rock, its motion halting imperceptibly, was capped in white. They wanted to stay where they were until the Cradle was at
peace. But the snow came driving in too thickly; soft snow, not wet. It fell inertly for a few minutes and then was taken up by a gusty wind. Both men were badly provided against such weather. They
had no hats or gloves. Only Aymer’s tarpaulin coat was waterproof.

They climbed down to the path and left the Cradle Rock to tremble in the snow, unwitnessed. Ralph was too cold to talk. Aymer was too nervous and elated to stay quiet. He asked about the
seaman’s family, but couldn’t tell if Ralph had heard. He gave his solo verdict on the Bowes, on ‘rocks that rock’, on emigration, the American ‘language’,
slavery, the beneficial properties of sea air, everything except the aching wetness of his knees and calves and boots. He pointed at and named the trees, the rocks, the fleeing birds, until there
was nothing left to see or name excepting snow. Their path had disappeared. Their legs and faces nagged with cold. Their clothes and hair turned white. They couldn’t see the sea. It boiled
with pilchards which would, at least, be safe until the Sabbath ended. On this God-flinching coast it was bad luck to catch or eat a Sunday fish. But then – at midnight – all the boats
would put to sea for this godsend of oily flesh. It wouldn’t matter that it snowed. Snow can’t settle on the sea. They’d shoot their nets into the lanes of pilchards and pack
their stomachs, lamps and purses with the catch. ‘Meat, money and light, All in one night.’ And what a night, for fishermen! Snow. Pilchards. Floating cows. The flotsam of the
Belle
. And twenty yards below the Cradle Rock the sea-logged, bloated body of a man. Not the African. He has his first experience of snow. But Nathaniel Rankin, the Bostonian, drowned for
almost two days now, and ready for the nets.

T
HE SAILORS
from the
Belle
were bored. The Sabbath was a torment. What could they do all day, except sit round an idling fire and regret their
ship had not been grounded off some other town, where there were breweries and brothels, or, at least, the liberty to work on Sundays? After breakfast they’d watched the
Tar
dimming
out at sea. With the backing of a westerly it chased its own steam trail and then it was evaporated by the light. That was the entertainment for the day. They should have volunteered to walk with
Ralph Parkiss to check the fortunes of the
Belle
at Dry Manston. At least there would’ve been flirting on the coast, and some amusement to be had with rocks and cattle. At least
there’d have been some noise, if only gulls and wind.