The Discovery Of Slowness (4 page)

It was raining on Jubilate Sunday, the third Sunday after Easter. John went to the fair with Bob Cracroft. The water dripped from the tents. They splashed about in puddles. John wasn't happy, because he thought about Tom Barker and himself. If there is an ideal human being among us, and not just in Greece, he thought, he has long, shapely limbs, laughs softly, and can be as mean as Tom. Ever since he had started to admire Tom, he had looked at himself with displeasure. The way he came at you, for example: his legs wide apart, his round eyes, his head askew like a dog's. His movements seemed glued to the air, and he talked like an axe thumping on a chopping-block. He didn't find much to laugh at, and when he did he laughed too long. His voice had become hoarse, as though a rooster were crowing inside him. That wouldn't matter at sea. But then there was something else new which kept happening unexpectedly, a swelling which disappeared only very slowly. Of all things, to be conspicuous in such a place! ‘That's normal,' Bob had remarked. ‘Revelations, Chapter 3, Verse 19: “Those whom I love I reprove and chasten.”' Again proof of the Bible's total unintelligibility. John regarded the bustle of the fair with his glassy fixed look, as if he were about to catch a ball. Spavens, the one-legged man who had written a book of seafaring memoirs, stood by the fence. ‘The money has croaked,' he announced. ‘Everything's twice as dear, and my publisher pretends to be deaf.'

Not far from him was the booth with the miracle turntable. If it turned fast enough on its own axis, Harlequin and Columbine, who were painted on opposite sides, were united as a couple. It had to do with speed, but John thought that today he didn't have a head for it. He went back to Spavens, who talked slowly, coming up with one word after another the way one puts pictures up on a wall. ‘Peace, that's God,' he shouted, his nose dripping. ‘But what does He send? War and want.' He pushed out from under his coat the stump of his leg, with its well-turned wooden peg, polished with shoe wax. ‘He sends us those costly victories to test us even
more.' With each sentence he stabbed his peg more deeply into the lawn: he had already stamped so violently that he had scooped out a little ditch, and now muddy water spurted at the bystanders' stockings each time he made a jab. Bob Cracroft whispered, ‘I believe he isn't particularly objective,' and then began to talk about himself.

John had come to be well liked as a listener just because he asked when he hadn't understood. Even Tom had said. ‘If
you
understand something, it must be right.' John wondered what he meant by that and answered, ‘In any case, I understand nothing too soon.'

This time John was not a good listener. At the other end of the fair he had noticed the model of a frigate as tall as a man: its hull was black and yellow, and it had all the guns, yards and rigging it was supposed to have. The model was in the navy's recruiting-tent. John studied every inch closely and asked at least three questions about each detail. The officer asked to be relieved after an hour and dropped into his bunk.

In the evening, John wrote in his notebook: ‘Two friends, one fast, the other slow, get through the entire world. Sagals, Book XII.' He noted it and placed it on top of Tom's linen.

They sat on the bank of the Lud near the mill. Not a soul was near; only now and then a coach rattled across the bridge. Tom had his foot in the water, one of those extremely beautiful feet. He said, ‘They fought about you.' John's heart beat high up in his throat. Had Tom read his ‘Noteworthy Phrases'?

‘Burnaby said there's good stuff in you. You have insight into authority, and your further education would be worthwhile. By contrast, Dr Orme thinks you're someone who learns things by rote, who is done no favour with ancient languages. He wants to speak to your father to see about an apprenticeship for you.'

Tom had eavesdropped in the evenings at the open window of the Wheatsheaf Inn. ‘I didn't hear everything. They didn't say a word about me. Burnaby said––I thought this would interest you.'

‘Yes, very much,' John said. ‘Many thanks for trying.'

‘Burnaby talked about your fine memory. Later he remarked that freedom was only an interim stage. I don't know if that was about you. He shouted in rage, “The pupils love me.” I believe Dr Orme was furious, too, but quieter. He said something about “being God-like” and “equality” and that Burnaby wasn't mature enough yet. Or that the time wasn't. His voice was rather low.'

A coach drove over the bridge out of town. Now John managed to bring out his question. ‘Have you read my book?'

‘What book? Your notes? What should I want with them?'

Then John began to speak about Matthew and how he was determined to become a sailor. ‘Matthew is in love with my aunt. He'll take me along, and you, too.'

‘What for? I'm going to be a doctor or an apothecary. If you want to drown, do it by yourself.' And as though to confirm this Tomtook his beautiful foot out of the Lud's water, in which surely no human being could drown, and put his stocking back on.

Burnaby actually taught mathematics of late, always on Saturdays. It didn't seem to give him any real pleasure that John already knew a lot about it, but his smile remained. When John discovered an error in Burnaby's explanations, the teacher started to talk about education – beseeching, fiery, or a little woebegone, but always smiling. John wanted to try to understand education, for he wanted to make Burnaby very happy.

Dr Orme sat in on Saturdays and listened. Perhaps he knew mathematics better than Burnaby, but a clause in the school's constitution prohibited his teaching anything but religion, history and languages.

Now and then he smiled.

John Franklin sat in detention. When somebody had turned away impatiently and had not waited for his answer he had simply grabbed him and held him tight, without considering sufficiently that the person was Burnaby. I can't let go, John concluded from this, not of any image, any person or any teacher. Burnaby, however, had concluded from this that John must be severely punished.

Detention was the harshest punishment. Not for John Franklin,
who could wait like a spider. If only he could have had something to read! For he had come to love books of all kinds. Paper could wait: that wasn't pressing. He knew Gulliver, Robinson, and Spavens's biography; recently also
Roderick Random
. Just now poor Jack Rattlin would have almost had his leg sawed off. The incompetent ship's doctor, Mackshane, probably a secret Catholic, had already put the tourniquet on him when Roderick Random stopped him. With a venomous glance, the quack fled; six weeks later Jack Rattlin reported back for service on two healthy legs. A good argument against all hasty decisions. ‘There are three points in time: a correct time, a missed time and a premature time.' John wanted to write that in his copybook when he got out.

It wasn't very comfortable in detention. The stones in the cellar were still wintry. Lying on his back, John spoke to Sagals through the vaulted ceiling – to the spirit who had written all the books in the world, to the creator of all libraries.

Burnaby had shouted: ‘That's how you all reward me!' Why ‘you all'? It was only John in whose grip he had wriggled. And Hopkinson murmuring, full of admiration, ‘Man alive, are you strong!'

He wouldn't be able to stay at school. Where could he wait for Matthew? He should have shown up long ago. Better get out as soon as he could. Hide on a barge under a load of grain. Let them think he had drowned in the Lud.

In the port of Hull he could start on a coal-carrying ship, like the great James Cook.

There was nothing doing with Tom. Sherard Lound would have gone along. But he was now hoeing beets in the field.

While John was taking counsel with Sagals, the cellar door opened and Dr Orme entered, his head way down between his shoulders as though he wanted to show that a school cellar wasn't really designed for teachers.

‘I've come to pray with you,' said Dr Orme. He looked at John very carefully, but not in an unfriendly way. His eyelids clapped open and shut as though, under great strain, they were trying to fan air into his brain. ‘Your books and your notebook were delivered to me,' he said. ‘Tell me, who is Sagals?'

N
ow he was on a ship in the middle of the ocean! ‘And I'm not too late for this!' he whispered, and he smiled at the horizon. He joyfully hit the rail with his fist, again and again, as though he wanted to prescribe a rhythm for the ship in which to pitch her way to Lisbon.

The Channel coast was out of sight; the fog was only a thin strip of mist. The rigging stood up straight or ran crosswise from side to side. At some point it always led to the top, making the viewer bend his head and neck back to follow it. It wasn't the ship that bore the masts but the sails that pulled and lifted the ship, which seemed to hold on only with a thousand lines. What ships he had seen in the Channel, elaborately rigged ships with names like
Leviathan
and
Agamemnon
. Since the gravestones of St James's, he had not found so worthy a place for letters as the bow or stern of a ship. In the end, a gigantic ship of the line had emerged from the fog; they had almost been rammed in spite of bells and foghorns.

Before him lay the sea, the good skin, the true surface of the entire planet. John had seen a globe in the library at Louth: the continents were furry and jagged; they locked into each other and spread out to try to cover as much of the globe as they could. In the harbour at Hull he had observed that pyramids of wooden planks were built in the water to prove the land's dominance over the sea. ‘Dolphins,' they called them, to cause even more confusion. The Dutch sailor said: ‘That's no dolphin, that's a
Duckdalbe
– a breakwater.' And since he didn't grin or wink but only spat as usual, it had to be right. John asked him to repeat it and learned the word. He also discovered that the French enjoyed having a long reach and that since the Revolution the concave mirrors of
their lighthouses had been made of pure silver. John felt fine. Perhaps all this was already the longed-for freedom.

In Hull, over a dish of jellied meat, he had mused about freedom. One had it if one didn't have to tell others in advance what one planned to do. Or if one kept quiet about it.

Half a freedom: if one had to announce one's plans in advance. Slavery: if others could foretell what one would do.

All reflections led back to the conclusion that it would be better to come to some understanding with Father than simply to stay away. One could become a midshipman only through connections. Since Matthew had not returned, only Father remained.

Soon they crossed longitude 3 degrees west. The town of Louth was situated at zero; the meridian ran straight through the middle of the market square. Without Dr Orme – John knew that – he'd still sit there and look not upon the sea but into the defensively poised curves of the ear of Hopkinson, who had just been thinking about flannel.

Dr Orme had changed things at school. They now had a piece of meat twice a week and a new assistant master who kept the moderators in line.

Dr Orme! John was grateful to him and knew he always would be. Dr Orme had not maintained that he lived only for him, nor had he talked of love or education, but he had been interested in John's special case, out of curiosity and without a trace of pity. He had tested John's eyes and ears, his comprehension and memory. With Dr Orme, John felt on safe ground. He wasn't usually concerned about the pupils, but when he did show interest it was worth something. He never let on what he thought. If an idea occurred to him, he only laughed. He showed his small, crooked teeth and took a breath as though he had just come up from a dive into deep water.

The wind rose and John started to freeze. He went below and stretched out on his bunk.

After a long, rapid talk with Dr Orme, Father had nodded and said something under his breath that started like this: ‘The first storm will …' John knew what they thought. Dr Orme believed he wouldn't be able to stand the rolling waves and would end
up in the clergy; at least, that was his recommendation. Father hoped he'd be swept overboard. Mother wanted him to succeed in everything but wasn't allowed to say so.

John's look began to penetrate the black plank above his bunk, and soon he was the lost Matthew roaming through Terra Australis in the company of a lion. Later he became John Franklin again and told the people of Spilsby how to make their fields rise up so as to allow the land to sail away. But the wind pushed the land very hard, and along the road fissures opened with a creaking noise; everything burst asunder; everything was shaken up and turned topsy-turvy. John sat up, greatly concerned, and his head hit the black plank. Sweat covered his forehead. Next to his bunk stood a wooden bucket with iron strips round it, built like a small keg but twice as wide at the bottom as at the top. John was on a ship in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, in a storm.

Seasickness was out of the question. He was now set to solve a couple of arithmetical problems.

‘What's the true time in Greenwich,' he whispered, ‘when …' For a moment he imagined those solid piers and imperturbable buildings with their firmly fastened, comfortable benches from which one could watch the ship traffic. He pushed the thought quickly out of his brain. ‘… when at thirty-four degrees, forty minutes eastern longitude …' He bent over the side of his bunk and held on to himself with one hand, to the bucket with the other. ‘… the true time is 8:24 p.m.?' Groaning, he tried to work out the angles in his head. Now whatever was inside him came up. So spheric trigonometry didn't help, either. The brain couldn't outsmart the belly, that woeful traveller. A little later John lay as straight as a rod, head and feet propped up, wanting to find out what made him sick.

First was the pitching round the imagined transverse axis of the ship, lasting for half a minute, up or down in a very irregular rhythm. That seemed to have most to do with the weakness in his stomach but also with that paralysis in his head, which by and by became as numb as the bucket under him. Whatever fitted together effortlessly on land here became differentiated by the degree of inertia with which it reacted to the ship's
movements: the head sooner than the body, the belly sooner than the stomach, and the latter more quickly than its contents. Then there were swayings round the ship's longitudinal axis, a listing and rolling that merged with the up-and-down movements in ever-new combinations. John's brain skidded back and forth like a pat of butter in a frying-pan and seemed to melt altogether. With his last strength he tried to discern any regularity, anything to which head, stomach, heart, lungs and all the rest could cling as a common denominator. ‘What's the use if I can calculate a ship's position but can't stand its motions?' He sighed and went on calculating, the bucket in front of his eyes. ‘Answer: 6:05 p.m. and twenty seconds,' he whispered. Nothing could keep him from completing a problem.

It seemed to him as if the forefoot plunged in too deeply. Perhaps the bow had sprung a leak. The lower the leak's position, the greater the water pressure. Water flowed into a ship at the rate of the square root of its height. So if a ship sank, she sank more and more inevitably from second to second. He'd better go above.

He got through the door after taking careful aim. On deck a fight started between his two poor hands and the rough elements, which, without further ado, put him here, threw him there, and jammed him between the wood and the rigging as it pleased. Each time he found himself again in a new situation, and the heavy seas fed him one huge mouthful of water after another. Now and then he saw people clinging to ropes or spars, looking where to dash for another hold at a precisely chosen moment. That was the only way they could move. It was as if they were trying to trick the storm into thinking they were a fixed part of the ship. They dared to move like humans only behind its back. From the direction of the mainmast the heard a weak bang and furious beating and clattering. Screams, muffled by the storm, reached his eardrums. The main topsail had been up until now; that was over. The sea appeared white, like boiling milk, and waves rolled in large enough for entire villages to find room in them.

Suddenly he was seized by two fists that didn't belong to the storm. They dispatched him below deck with a speed equivalent to that of free fall. A curse was the only comment. In the
midshipmen's berth the boatman's bucket had tipped over after all, despite its wide bottom. John felt as sick as it smelled. ‘Still,' he said as he reeled over along with the bucket, ‘it's the right thing for me.' He sucked his lungs full of air to keep out any possible dejection. He was a born sailor: he knew that for certain.

‘That's the best wind one can have,' said the Dutchman. ‘The Portuguese norther, always beautiful from aft; we're doing better than six knots.' If anyone else had said it, John wouldn't have understood the new word, but the Dutchman knew that his listener understood everything when he was allowed pauses. Besides, they both had a great deal of time on their hands because the sailor had sprained his ankle during the storm.

The weather remained sunny. Off Cape Finisterre they saw a huge mast drifting by, covered with crabs, already three years on the way if the captain was right.

At night they were approaching a brightly lit beacon. ‘That's Burlings,' John heard. An island with castle and lighthouse. Then he noticed something that reminded him of Dr Orme's theories.

The beam rotated round the top of the tower like every single revolving light. John saw the beam wandering, but he also perceived that the light went on being visible on the right side even as the beam was again swinging back to the left, and that it was still on the left side when it turned up again on the right. Present and past – what had Dr Orme said about that? The light was most fully in the present when, flaring up, it met John's eye directly. Whatever else he saw must have been lit up before and now shone only within his own eye – a light of the past.

Just then the Dutchman came up. ‘Burlings, Burlings,' he grumbled. ‘The island is called Berlengas.' John still stared at the lighthouse. ‘I see a trace rather than a point,' he explained, ‘and I see the present only when it flares up.' Suddenly he had a sad suspicion: perhaps his eye was lagging behind by one whole cycle? Then the flare-up would come not from the present but from the previous rotation.

John's explanation took a lot of time; it became too long even for the Dutchman. ‘I see this different,' he interjected. ‘A sailor
has to trust his eyes as much as his arms, or …' He fell silent. Then he picked up his crutches and hauled his swollen leg gingerly below deck. John stayed above. Berlengas! The first foreign shore beyond England. He was doing well again. He put his clenched fist on the plank-sheer, solemnly. Now everything would be different; a little today, all of it tomorrow.

Gwendolyn Traill was thin, with pale arms and a white neck, and so thoroughly wrapped in billowing garments that John couldn't make out anything specific underneath. She wore white stockings; her eyes were blue, her hair reddish. She spoke hurriedly. John noted that she didn't like this herself but felt it was necessary. In this she resembled Tom Barker. She had freckles. John observed the hair on her neck above her lace collar. It was time for him to cohabit with a woman in order to be informed. Later, as a midshipman, he would often be teased for being late, but in this matter he wanted to have a head start. Father Traill was saying something just then; John hoped it was no question. He was talking about a grave. ‘What kind of grave?' asked John. He wanted to pay attention at mealtimes and make a good impression, because Mr Traill would write to Father about everything.

Gwendolyn laughed and Father Traill threw her a glance. The grave of Fielding. John answered that he didn't know him and that altogether he didn't know much about Portugal.

All that burring and hissing that came out of people's mouths here was most unpleasant. People in Lisbon talked as if they would burn their lips with every word they didn't get out at once and they blew out a lot of air before and after each of them. At the same time, they fanned and waved with their hands. When John got lost and found himself at the aqueduct near the Alcántara, he asked to be shown the way. But instead of pointing in one direction which he could have followed without trouble to the Traills' house, they gesticulated. He found himself in the square in front of the monastery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Of course, they were Catholic here; that was to be expected. Not expected, however, was that they
would poke fun at the contrast between mighty England and helpless John. After dinner, the Traill parents retired. John was alone with Gwendolyn. She talked about Fielding. Her freckled nostrils flared; her neck reddened: he didn't know Fielding! The great English poet! She got herself properly inflated, as though she would rise at once like a Montgolfier balloon if no one held on to her. John said: ‘I know great English sailors.' Gwendolyn had never heard of James Cook. She laughed; one could always see her teeth, and her dress rustled because she moved around so much. John learned that Fielding had gout. How can I get her to shut up, he wondered, and how do I manage to cohabit with her? He began to prepare a question but was sidetracked because Gwendolyn never paused. He would have loved to listen to her for a long time if only she had kept silent for a single moment. She talked about someone called Tom Jones. Probably another grave. ‘Let's go there,' he said, and seized her arms. But that was wrong thinking again. Since he was already holding her, he should logically not have talked about going and should have kissed her instead. But he didn't know how that worked. All that had to be planned better. He let go of her. Gwendolyn vanished with a few quick words, which were perhaps not meant to be understood. John knew only one thing: he had reflected too long. That was the disturbing effect of the echo Dr Orme had mentioned; he hung on too long both to the words he heard and to his own words. But a person who always kept on wondering about his own formulations surely couldn't persuade a woman!