Silver (6 page)

‘You will ask my father how he built the house,’ she told me. ‘He becomes quite expansive on the subject.’

‘I can see why he might,’ I replied. ‘But tell me yourself: when did he first come here?’

‘Before I was born. With my mother.’

‘You have said only a little about your mother,’ I said, thinking I must soon meet her and needed to know as much beforehand as I thought I knew about Mr Silver.

‘Does a person have to say much about their mother?’

‘They do not,’ I said. ‘For instance, I will most definitely not even mention my own mother, because I do not have one.’

A shadow came over Natty’s face, which made me regret I had spoken so crisply. ‘My mother you shall meet soon,’ she said. ‘My father you will not see for long.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, but she did not answer immediately, only looked at me with a frown. It occurred to me then that her silence during our journey upriver had not been a result of indifference, but rather of absorption in herself – a kind of anxiety.

‘My father …’ she began at length, then faltered. I could see from the confusion in her face that a host of different explanations were clamouring for precedence. In the end she settled their
argument by giving a sigh, and saying no more than this: ‘My father is a very old man.’

Although I now felt more bewildered than ever by what Natty was trying to explain, or perhaps to conceal, I told her that I understood – and to make this answer seem as warm as I wished it to be, I reached forward and touched her arm. The upshot was the opposite of everything I meant. Natty flinched as if I had waved a flame at her, and backed away.

‘Understanding, understanding,’ she said impatiently, and avoided meeting my eye. ‘So long as you are ready, that is all I need to know.’

With this she turned her back, pushed open the door, and invited me to follow as she began climbing the stairs that rose before us. I could not help noticing that Spot hopped from the floor of his cage onto his perch as she did so, and closed his eyes so tightly that wrinkles appeared among the feathers around their sockets.

The whole interior of the house was dark, and smelled strongly of damp and mould. It made the place rather disgusting, though whether I would have felt the same if we had entered any of the rooms we passed on our ascent, I had no way of knowing. When we had reached the landing on the first floor, I heard a rumble of conversation and laughter which suggested the taproom was nearby. On the second floor, beyond a door where Natty stopped and pressed her finger to her lips, then whispered, ‘My mother,’ I heard a woman singing. The music was a kind of ditty, a jaunty sound, although the strangeness of its setting made it seem melancholy. One verse in particular came through to me, which I have never forgotten:

I tilted my head, meaning to enquire whether I should enter and introduce myself, but Natty’s eyes widened as though the very idea were ridiculous. Once again, I had no choice but to agree – and so on we went, following the stairs upwards for several more flights in a succession of zigzags until I began to wonder whether we had reached a height that was actually dangerous.

I say this because I could not help noticing as we climbed that a gentle swaying movement began to affect the whole building. Gentle – but definite. It occurred to me that since entering the Spyglass we had somehow contrived to pass from a house onto a ship. Onto the top of a mast, in fact, from which there would be wide views over the river and the city, if only we could find a window to enjoy them. The murmur of the wind, as it tumbled all around us, added to this sensation of being at sea. It was at once absurd and thrilling, and gave me a shiver of excitement.

As we began the last and narrowest flight, Natty glanced over her shoulder and waggled her left hand (while still keeping hold of Spot’s cage with the other) to show I must not make a sound. She meant well, I am sure, but the gesture reminded me of the shadow which had crossed her face when we had been waiting in the street a moment before. Whatever pleasure she had in carrying out her father’s orders was accompanied by a good deal of nervousness, or perhaps even fearfulness. It gave a peculiar urgency to all her actions.

I took some comfort from this, since it suggested that Natty’s feelings about Mr Silver might after all resemble those I had inherited from my own father. And for this reason it did not surprise me that my father now rose into my head like a spectre. ‘Long John Silver,’ I heard him say very distinctly, in the booming voice he used to attract the attention of customers in the fog of the Hispaniola. ‘Long John Silver with his peg leg and his parrot and his plausible ways. Oh, he was a charmer, certainly, if lies and flattery can ever be called
charming. At the end of everything, he was the most damnable villain in the world. I would as soon speak to him again as give my soul to the devil!’

If there had been a chance to think about these things more deeply, I would have seen that my presence in the Spyglass now damned
me
as a villain – and probably as a fool as well. But I was travelling too fast in the stream of my self-importance to feel the reality of such ideas. When Natty at last reached the head of the stairs, and turned to encourage me with a smile of the most melting sweetness, I had no thought in my brain except this: everything we did, we must do together.

When Natty threw open the door to her father’s room, I expected to find myself in some sort of aerial burrow or bolt-hole. The narrowing stairs had predicted this, and so did my father’s opinion: Mr Silver would only have made his dangerous return to England if he had been sure of hiding in shadows.

I found nothing of the kind, but rather a deluge of such brilliant light that for a moment I was dazzled. When my sight returned, I saw I had entered a large cockpit, of which one wall was made entirely of glass, held together by the slenderest bars of wood. This window had been constructed in order to bulge outwards, and gave such an exceptional sensation of looking I could not decide whether it was
like
an eye, or whether I was actually
inside
an eye. In any event, I thought I might as well have been an eagle, because I was
now able to scrutinise the city and everything it contained with the same clarity.

By the time I had taken this into account, and stepped forward to enjoy a precipitous view of the quay directly below me, where I could see our wherry lying like a seed among the larger ships, Natty seemed to have forgotten me. She had moved away as we entered the room, slinking along the wall furthest from the window as though she disdained its vistas, and coming to a halt alongside the figure I now turned to see for the first time.

Thanks to my father’s stories of Treasure Island, Long John Silver had first come into my mind with the appearance and habits of a demon. His only saving grace was the trick of expediency; in all other respects he was entirely evil – a ‘horror’, my father used to say, ‘of cruelty, duplicity and power’. The screech of his parrot – ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’, like the clacking of a tiny mill – was a refrain of my nightmares. Another was the tap-tap-tap of his wooden leg, his left leg, which replaced the original he had lost in his country’s service under the immortal Hawke. Whenever I felt liable for any sort of punishment, and often when I did not, I had a dread of feeling the stab of his wooden crutch, which he would aim and fling with extraordinary ferocity, like a thunderbolt between my shoulder blades.

With the passage of time these childish fears receded – in the way of such things – and in some cases even modified into images I paraded in my mind’s eye, in order to calculate how much braver I was becoming. It impressed me that whenever I belittled Mr Silver my father would call me an ignorant boy who knew nothing of the world. But while these reprimands reduced me to silence, they did not alter my opinion. Long John Silver, I am ashamed to say, had gradually been diminished by familiarity into a feeble form of his original self.

As my eyes lit on him now, I knew at once that I had been a fool to ignore my father’s judgement. I say this in spite of the ways in which time had eroded the contours of the man’s body. He was lying on a chaise longue covered in faded green cloth, the velvet patched here and there with darker swatches, wearing an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, that would have hung as low as his knee if he had been able to stand; the high collar rose up around his ears and pushed them outwards.

To call this body
emaciated
does not do justice to the ravages it had suffered – especially since he had detached his wooden leg (from close by the hip) and laid it on the floor beside him. It would be better to say that his form seemed to be
disintegrating
, even as I looked at it: the collapsed folds of his trousers, the speckled brown stalk of his single leg, where it protruded beside its absent partner; the chest sunk beneath the grimy flounces of his shirt: all these led me to marvel that the spirit governing them was still active, and to suppose it could not endure much longer.

It was the head, and not the body, that made me recognise the menace my father had so often complained about. According to him, Mr Silver’s face had been as big as a ham – smooth and plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Now it was shrivelled and sunken, and capped with hair that had become so extremely sparse it was more like an arrangement of threads than anything natural, and hung greasily from his crown as far as his shoulders. This itself seemed to imply a sort of abandonment, and was made all the more alarming by the fact that his eyes, which I had expected to see fixed on my own with a seductive intensity, boiled from side to side and were completely clouded over. Mr Silver was blind.

While this affliction might have produced an appearance of pathos in other men, and a mood of dependency, in him it had only inspired rage – which he was continually trying to control. His head rocked
on the gold cushion that supported it, while his left hand clenched and unclenched beside his absent leg, as though searching for a dagger he might hurl instead of a greeting.

‘Are you there? Are you there?’ he demanded, scratching the air with his right hand. The voice was not so much exhausted as weathered – scrubbed and ridged and whitened.

‘I’m here, Father,’ said Natty, whose own voice rang very sweetly, although its mollifying tone had no effect. Once again the hand rose impatiently, and now that I looked more closely, I saw it bore the faded mark of a tattoo, blue and purple, running upwards from the knuckles and disappearing beneath the untidy shirt-cuff. I thought it might be a snake, with the mouth open and fangs about to strike.

‘I’m here, Father,’ Natty repeated.

Since entering the cockpit I had been so preoccupied by the magnificence of its view, and the mingled decrepitude and threat of its sightless inhabitant, I had not paused to consider Natty’s behaviour. Now a host of questions rushed into my mind. Why had she not introduced me to her father? Did she want to give the impression that she was alone? She was certainly ignoring me, avoiding my eye as she set down the cage for her bird (on a small round table that was evidently its regular home), and tugging her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. As I watched a frown begin to cloud her face, it seemed there was an element of subterfuge in her actions, as well as of reassurance.

I was confused by these thoughts, which made me wonder who was the governing authority in the room? My uncertainty soon deepened. Instead of taking her father’s hand and planting a chaste kiss on his skull, Natty bent to the still-twitching figure and rubbed her cheek against the side of his face like a cat. At this the old man finally lay still. ‘My love,’ I think he said, although it may have been
‘My
life
’. When this was done, he inched his sparrow-body across the chaise, making a space for her to lie down next to him. This she did willingly, sliding her arm across his chest. I could not see her face, which was buried in the material of his topcoat. His own face continued to stare directly towards the invisible view; it was a mask of bliss.

The embrace continued for at least a minute, during which father and daughter lay in each other’s arms without any acknowledgement of my presence. I have thought about the scene a thousand times since, often unhappily, but however I change the angle of my regard, I end with the same conclusion. The question of control was exceedingly vexed. Mr Silver had no remaining physical power to carry out his wishes, yet he still possessed a determined mind. Natty’s intelligence was not yet independent, but her youth and energy gave her a kind of domination. They appeared to have settled the contest between their abilities by developing an exceptional devotion. A
love
, indeed, that I saw at once might mean the rejection of anyone else who wanted their attention.

As if to confirm the unease provoked by these thoughts, Spot now began to fidget very nervously, scraping his wings against the bars of his cage and repeatedly opening and closing his beak as though about to regurgitate a word or two. When he finally succeeded, he began the same phrase I had heard him utter before, when I first made his acquaintance outside the Hispaniola: ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ In the same instant that he began to speak, Natty suddenly sat upright, keeping her place beside her father’s shoulder, and patted her hair like someone waking from a refreshing sleep.

Although she smiled directly at me, it was her father she spoke to: ‘Now,’ she said quietly, ‘we must get to business. I have brought Mr Hawkins to see you, Father, as you asked.’ Her tone of voice
was absolutely even, and the look in her eye absolutely steady, as if she were daring me to object that I had seen anything strange or disconcerting.

‘Mr Hawkins!’ the old man cawed, as if he were a bird himself, and extended both his arms towards me. The idea that he might expect me to embrace him was something that filled me with revulsion, and I stood my ground – which of course he did not actually see. ‘Mr Hawkins!’ he said again, in the same crooning tone. ‘My-my, boy, here’s a treat for an old man. Come here. Come here and sit by me. Let me
see
you.’ He pronounced the word
see
with a drawling slowness that made me want to shrink away – but as if I had lost the command of my faculties, I now moved forward until I found myself sitting on the chaise longue across from Natty, almost touching the bare brown skin of her father’s leg. At this proximity, I could not help noticing the smell hanging over him – very musty and dark, as if he had lain underground for a while and recently been resurrected.