Silver (2 page)

After this I continued to sit in the sun for as long as it took the jasper to recover his wits and his ability to fly. I had meant to rely on the breeze to accelerate this process, but when I heard my father clumping around his bedroom above me, I added my own breath to the warming; I did not want a second conversation with him, because I knew it would result in my receiving further orders to fetch this and carry that. I need not have worried. In the same moment that I heard his window shutters folding back, and started to imagine my father squaring his shoulders so that he could shout down to me, Mr Wasp tottered off from our bench.

The best he could manage was a low, stumbling sort of flight, which I thought might take him across the river – in which case I would have lost him. But he soon discovered his compass and set off towards the marshes, congratulating himself no doubt on a miraculous deliverance, and steadily gaining height. I ran quickly after, keeping my eyes fixed on the vivid thread that made him visible, and feeling relieved that he did not find it an inconvenience. Once my home and the river had fallen behind us, and the outhouses where my father kept his puncheons, and the orchard where we grew apples for cider, we came to open country.

To a stranger, the marshes would have seemed nothing more than wilderness – a bog-land crossed with so many small streams tending towards the Thames that from above it must have resembled the glaze on a pot. Everything was the same cracked green, or green-blue, or green-brown. There were no tall trees, only a few bare trunks the wind had twisted into shapes of agony, and no flowers that a gentleman or lady would recognise.

To me the place was a paradise, where I was the connoisseur of
every mood and aspect. I relished its tall skies and wide view of the approaching weather. I loved its myriad different kinds of grass and herb. I kept records of every variety of goose and duck that visited in spring time and left again in the autumn. I especially enjoyed its congregation of
English
birds – the wrens and linnets, the finches and thrushes, the blackbirds and starlings, the lapwings and kestrels – that stayed regardless of the season. When the tide was full, and the gullies brimmed with water, and the earth became too spongy for me to walk across it, I was like Adam expelled from his garden. When the current turned and the land became more nearly solid again, I was restored to my heart’s desire.

Meandering
was always my greatest pleasure – which I was not able to enjoy on this particular day, with my captive leading me forward. While he flew straight, I jinked and tacked, crossed and returned, leaped and veered, in order to keep up with him. And because I was expert in this, and knew the place intimately, I still had him clearly in sight when he reached his destination. This was one of the stunted trees I have mentioned – an ash that grew in a distant part of the marsh, and had been bent by storms into the shape of the letter C. As soon as this curiosity came into view, I knew where my friend was heading; even from as far away as fifty yards I could see the nest dangling like a jewel from an ear.

A jewel, that is, made of paste or paper and moulded into a long oval. For that is how jaspers manufacture their nests – by chewing tiny portions of wood and mixing them with their saliva until they have made a cone; within this cone they protect their hive and their queen especially, who lays her eggs at every level. It is remarkable: creatures that appear confused to the human eye, and are always buzzing in different directions, or no direction at all, are in fact very well organised and disciplined. Every individual has a part to play in the creation of their society and performs it by instinct.

As I drew closer to the nest, I began to admire it so much I wondered whether I might return to my father and tell him I had obeyed his orders without in fact having done so. I knew he would never search for the thing himself: it lay in a part of the marsh that felt remote even to me. I also knew I would then have to live with the lie, which I would not enjoy, while the wasps themselves would continue to pester us.

These two reasons might have been enough to make me stick to my task. In truth, there was a third that felt even more compelling – albeit one I hesitate to admit, because it appears to contradict everything I have said so far about my likes and dislikes. This was my
desire
to destroy the nest. It intrigued me. I was fascinated by it. But my interest had quickly become a longing for possession – and since possession was impossible, destruction was the only alternative.

I therefore began to gather every fragment of flotsam or small stick the sun had dried, so that by the time I stood beside the ash tree at last my arms were filled with a bundle the size of a haycock. I placed this on the ground beneath the nest, then stood back to fix the scene in my memory. The tree itself was very smooth, as if the wind had caressed it for such a long time, and so admiringly, the bark had turned into marble. The nest – around which a dozen or so jaspers were bobbing and floating, all quite oblivious of me – was about a foot from top to bottom, and swollen in the middle. It was pale as vellum, with little ridges and bumps here and there; these I took to be the individual deposits, brought by each wasp as he worked.

When I had stared for long enough to feel I would never forget, I knelt down, pulled a tinderbox from my pocket, and set fire to the material I had collected. Flames rose very quickly, releasing a sweet smell of sap, and within a minute the whole nest was cupped in a kind of burning hand. I expected the inhabitants to fly out, and
thought they might even attack me since I was their destroyer. But no such thing took place. The wasps outside the nest simply flew away – they appeared not to care what was happening. Those within the nest, which must have been many hundred, chose to stay with their queen and to die with her. I heard the bodies of several explode with a strange high note, like the whine of a gnat; the rest suffocated in smoke without making any sound.

After no more than two or three minutes, I felt sure my job was done; I knocked the nest down, so that it fell into the ashes of my fire and broke apart. The comb inside was dark brown and wonderfully dainty, with every section containing a wrinkled grub; the queen – who was almost as big as my thumb – lay at the centre surrounded by her dead warriors. They made a noble sight, and filled me with such great curiosity, I did not notice how nearly I had scorched myself by kneeling among the wreckage and poring over them.

Eventually, I stood up and faced towards home, knowing my father would soon be expecting my return. After a moment, however, I decided to please myself, not him, and changed my direction. I walked further into the marshes, jumping across the creeks and striding this way and that to avoid the larger gullies, until I had quite lost my way. There, in the deepest solitude of green and blue, I fell to thinking about my life.

I was never a wicked child, but a disappointment to my father all the same. Thieving, deception, cruelty – I left these to others. Mine were faults of a less grievous kind, amounting to no more than a streak of wildness. I often ignored my father’s wishes and sometimes his orders. I resisted the plans he made for me. I preferred my own company to the society he wished me to enjoy.

On reflection,
independence
may be a better word than
wildness
for what I have just described. In either case the question remains: what caused it? In our early days we are blinded by the heat of moments as they pass, and seldom pause to consider. Now my youth is a distant memory, and I have a wider view of my existence, I am drawn more strongly to explanations.

The first is that my mother died of her trouble in bringing me
into this world – which bred in me, as surely as if it had been one of her own characteristics, a tendency to regard myself as someone for whom the whole of life is a battle. Where no fight exists, I am likely to invent one in order to reassure myself of my own courage.

The second, which was solidified by my having neither brother nor sister, was the country in which we lived. By country I do not mean the nation, England, but rather the country
-side –
being the north shore of the river Thames, at a point of no particular consequence between London and the open sea. How this landscape appears now I can only imagine, not having returned home for many years. Most likely it is overbuilt by everything that is necessary for the business of docks and docking. But I can tell how it was then, exactly.

On the landward side of our house, the marshes stood a mere quarter-fathom above the surface of the water, and the quarter of a quarter at high tide. Any buildings thereabouts were hardly buildings at all, but rough arrangements of timber in which fishermen kept their gear, and other more secretive visitors dropped off or collected things that were precious to them. If the mist allowed, these shacks made an impressive silhouette, with spars protruding at strange angles, roofs slumped forward like fringes, and windows completing a lopsided face. To my young eyes they resembled a community of ogres, or at least warty witches all rubbing their hands over a cauldron. None of them stood upright for long. Whatever the wind did not knock flat, the marsh swallowed. As for the tracks that wandered between and beyond them: these soon forgot the destination they had in mind when they began their journeys, and ended in confusion or nothing at all.

If I have made the place sound fearsome, I have good reasons. Many times, walking alone under its vast sky, I heard footsteps behind me where none existed, or felt silence itself seizing my collar like a hand. Yet to tell the truth, the voices of the marsh, and of the river in particular, were never entirely one thing or the other;
they were a mixture of sounds, pitched between sighing and laughter, as though they had never decided whether they meant to convey sorrow or joy. Perverse as it may seem, this is what I especially loved about the place; it was always in two minds.

The picture I have already painted of my father will make him seem straightforward by comparison – and so he was in certain respects. In others he was as contradictory as the landscape that surrounded him. I shall now show why, from the beginning.

My father’s own father had also been an innkeeper – of the Admiral Benbow in the West Country, around the coast from Bristol. Here he died young – whereupon my father found himself at the start of the great adventure that it has been my fate to continue. This adventure began with the sudden arrival at the Benbow of Billy Bones, a battered old salt who once upon a time had been the first mate of the notorious buccaneer Captain Flint, and whose sole possession was an even more knocked-about sea-chest. For a week or two, the presence of this rascal caused no great difficulty at the Benbow – until the appearance of a second stranger, a pale, tallowy creature who, despite his ghostly countenance, went by the name of Black Dog – and soon after him a blind man named Pew, whose effect was so shocking that poor Bones fell dead almost the instant he saw him. To be particular, Pew tipped him the Black Spot; a man cannot long survive, once he has received that fatal sign.

There soon followed a whole history of dramatic episodes: an assault on the inn by pirates; a miraculous escape; the discovery of an ancient map; a perusal of the map; the understanding that treasure had been left by Captain Flint on a certain island; an expedition planned in Bristol and launched to recover said treasure; the treachery of the crew, and especially of a smooth-talking rogue named John Silver, who came ornamented with a parrot in compensation for missing a leg; a very dangerous and thrilling sojourn on
the island; the discovery of some parts of the treasure; and a subsequent return to England and safety.

I have mentioned all this in summary, omitting the names of most of the principal characters and even some parts of the adventure itself, for the important reason that I have heard it told so many hundreds of times by my father, I cannot bear to write it down at greater length. Even the most celebrated stories in the world, including perhaps that of Our Lord himself, weary with the retelling. I will only add, in the interest of illuminating what follows, that close attention should be paid to the phrase
some parts of the treasure
, in order to encourage the idea that certain
other parts of it
were left undisturbed. I will also point out that when my father eventually quit the island, three especially troublesome members of the crew – whom my father called
maroons –
were left behind to meet whatever fate they might find. Much of what remains to be said will depend on these details.

Once my father had returned to Bristol he received his share of the wealth, which was valued in total at the astonishing sum of seven hundred thousand pounds. He often boasted of the amount, using it as an excuse to moralise – in a rather more ambiguous way than he intended – on the wages of sin. Of his own portion he never spoke precisely, referring to it as merely ‘ample’ before running on to say how Ben Gunn, a wild-man he discovered on the island and helped to rescue, had been granted an allocation of one thousand pounds, which he contrived to spend in nineteen days, so that he was a beggar again on the twentieth and given a lodge to keep, which he had always feared.

Whatever the precise amount of my father’s treasure, it was clear that he need lack for nothing so long as he did not follow the example of this Ben Gunn. Accordingly, he returned to his mother, who was now in sole charge of the Benbow in Black Hill Cove, and helped her to manage the place until he gained his majority. At that time,
being tired of living in such an out-of-the-way spot, which contrasted very markedly with the excitement he had known on the high seas, he departed for London and devoted himself for several years to the pursuit of his own pleasure.

It is hard for any son to imagine the youth of his father – to the son, the father will generally be a creature of settled habits and solid opinions. Yet it is clear that throughout his time in the city, my parent lived more dashingly than I ever knew him do in the course of my own existence. Released from the burden of caring for his mother (who now rested her head on the shoulder of an affectionate and elderly sailor, who would shortly become her husband), and provoked by a million new temptations, he became by his own admission a
figure about the town
.