The Dutch Wife (27 page)

AFTER THAT, WILL “WON”
the prize in many towns across the country. At first, he was constantly afraid there might be someone from the audience who’d seen him “win” before. Nothing happened. So he stopped worrying and concentrated on trying to improve his boxing, or, at least, his acting skills.

WILL HADN’T BEEN TO TARBRAE
for more than six months. At last, he had some money to take home to Jenny. The Fair stopped in Galahead and he asked Duffy for a couple of days off. He caught an early-morning train via Edinburgh to Muirton. It was a typical Uplands day with a grey sky and a drizzle as he walked the seven miles to Tarbrae. When he got there, he could see that the main street was deserted and a lot of windows were boarded up. Not too many chimneys had smoke coming from them.

He knocked at the door where Jenny’s parents lived.

Her mother opened the door. She’d always been kind to him but now she just looked at him coldly.

“Is Jenny here?” he said, thinking maybe they’d had a falling-out or she’d gone to live somewhere else.

“You’re lucky her father’s not here now or he’d kill you,” she said. “She never heard a word from you and now she’s been dead a month. If you want to see her you’ll have to go up to the graveyard.”

“Dead?” said Will. “Dead? And what about little Will? Is he all right?”

“No, he’s dead too,” she said. “Jenny got pneumonia, then he got it. Just as well, too.” She slammed the door in Will’s face.

Will did go to the graveyard, but he didn’t go in. He stood for a moment, then turned and walked back to Tarbrae to catch the train back to Galahead. The odd thing was, he wasn’t one bit sad. More relieved. That made him feel guilty, so he tried not to think about anything at all.

WORKING AT THE FAIR
, it wasn’t hard to find women. They’d hang around looking for work, or food. Most of them were homeless, runaways from something awful. Duffy sometimes gave them odd jobs, cooking or cleaning.

A month after Will came back from Tarbrae, when the Fair was being set up in Golsway, a town just north of Aberdeen, one of those women showed up. She looked like a Gypsy she was so dark, with brown eyes. She didn’t speak English, but Duffy figured out her name was
Vatua
, an odd word she said several times when he tried to communicate with her. He gave her a job as a cleaner. One of the other barkers knew Spanish, but she didn’t seem to understand him. Others tried bits of French and German and Italian, but she shook her head. Some Gypsies were camped near the town and Duffy asked their Chief to come and try to talk to the girl. But she didn’t understand the Gypsy tongue either.

Three days later, when the Fair left town, she tagged along, and Duffy didn’t mind—she was a good worker. She picked up some English phrases but didn’t seem interested in learning much more than that. She was like a cat, the way she knew her own name and a few more words, and that was enough.

January came in with heavy snow, and Vatua started to hang around Will. He was lonely, and before long, she’d moved into his trailer. She hated the cold weather and would wrap herself round him all night to keep warm. He sometimes talked to her about himself and about Jenny and the dead baby, even though she didn’t know what he was saying. She’d sometimes talk to him, too, and he could only wonder what it was that made her laugh sometimes, and sometimes cry. They didn’t understand each other, but it was very soothing, as though the words didn’t matter as much as the way they were spoken, and the person they were spoken to.

Some other things about her were very unusual for a woman. She had a tattoo around her right ankle of a snake swallowing its tail. Will pointed to it and she said something that didn’t make any sense to him.

Then there was the six-inch hunting knife she kept in her purse. He supposed that, wherever she came from or whatever she’d been through, it was a necessary thing to carry.

A FEW MONTHS LATER
, the thing that was never supposed to happen, happened.

The Fair was set up in Lethian in a park overlooking the Firth, and Will was to appear in the ring. After a couple of regular bouts had gone by, Will challenged for the money. Gentleman Jaco was the opponent, and he did the usual good job of making Will look better than he was. At the end of the bout, the crowd clapped loudly when the challenger’s hand was held aloft by Duffy and he was given the five-pound prize.

Will was climbing down from the ring when he heard a loud voice from the back of the tent.

“It’s a swindle! I saw him do it before!”

It was the drunken Irishman who’d lost to Crusher in Bellsvale, the very night Will began his career.

Some of the crowd may have believed the Irishman, but before they could think of doing anything, Duffy and Crusher grabbed the troublemaker and threw him out of the park.

Duffy came to Will’s trailer later. “It was bound to happen sometime,” he said. “You haven’t done anything wrong.” He could see Will was unhappy. “We’ll just keep you out of the ring till we get to England. Everything’ll be fine there.”

THAT NIGHT, WILL AND VATUA WENT OUT
, as they often did after the Fair closed, to a little pub that looked over the Firth. Will had a pint of beer, Vatua didn’t have anything. She just sat and looked around. She always seemed to enjoy that, though Will had no idea what was going through her mind. They left the pub at midnight and were walking along the dark street when three men came out of the shadows and faced them under a street light.

“Hey, you!” one of them said.

Of course, it was the big Irishman. His friends were as big and as mean-looking as he was.

“Let’s see how tough you are when the fight’s not fixed,” he said.

The three of them dragged Will into a nearby close. The other two held him while the Irishman punched him in the face over and over again. Will felt his nose break. Then they let him drop to the ground and they began kicking. He felt some of his ribs snap. Vatua was shouting at them—he could hear that—but they just kept on kicking. They kicked and kicked and kicked. By the time Will passed out completely, he was sure they’d damaged him so badly there was no possibility he could live.

He was found unconscious the next morning and taken to the Lethian hospital. In his moments of awareness he felt he was nothing but a bleeding wound with a mind attached to it, and he wanted to die. Freedom from pain was just a short leap away. But every time he was going to jump, something in him would rebel. After a few days, the pain was bearable.

At first, he had no idea how he’d come to be in such a state. It was while Duffy was visiting one day that the whole thing came back. He asked for Vatua and Duffy said she was dead. The night Will was attacked, she’d got her knife out and stabbed the Irishman over and over. One of the others grabbed the knife from her and stuck it into her chest. She was found the next morning lying dead beside Will.

As for the three men, they were easily caught by the police. The Irishman was so badly cut he probably wouldn’t live to be hanged.

WILL DRUMMOND WAS IN A BAD STATE
for three months before he started to recover. When he was fit again, the Fair had moved to England and he didn’t want to go back to it. He found odd jobs in Glasgow—even hauling bags of coal to get his strength back. He took a last trip up to Tarbrae and this time went in to see the graves. They, like the rest of the graveyard, were covered in weeds—no one lived in Tarbrae any more. Then he took a last walk over the hills and caught the train at Muirton.

“THAT’S THE TRAIN
you were on,” Will Drummond said to Rowland in their room in the seedy Maclaren Hotel.

Rowland remembered very well that day when he’d first seen Will. They’d been through so much together since then. “I didn’t think you’d noticed me,” he said.

“I did, all right,” said Rowland. “I just didn’t feel like talking.”

They were silent for a while.

“So, will you head for Panama after the Inquiry’s over?” said Rowland. “That was your plan, wasn’t it?”

“I’m not sure any more,” said Will.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Rowland said. He’d been considering certain possibilities. For the moment, he kept them to himself.

ON THE THIRD DAY
of their stay in Halifax—a Friday—the Inquiry into the sinking of the
Derevaun
was held. Only a few hours had been set aside to investigate the loss of a merchant ship whose cargo was of doubtful worth. In the late afternoon, Rowland and Will, wearing the clothes they’d been given by the Sailors’ Aid, were summoned to the offices of the Maritime Commission. They walked there under a cloudy sky and on arrival were brought into the Board Room, a high-ceilinged room with its own little cloud cover of pipe and cigarette smoke. On the walls were gloomy paintings in ornate frames of various dead Admirals. At a long table sat the Commissioners themselves, three elderly men in uniform.

Rowland and Will were shown to chairs facing the Commissioners by a younger officer, who then sat down with a notepad to record the meeting.

The High Commissioner, seated between the two others, wore a heavily brocaded uniform. He called the meeting to order. He was a bent-shouldered man with a tight mouth, extraordinarily large ears and a rather abrupt way of talking. After the swearing-in, he told them the Commission had heard that morning from the Captains of the various ships that had searched the scene of the disaster. It appeared that there were no survivors except for the three who’d reached Wreck Bar.

After this introduction, Eva’s statement was read into the record. Then the High Commissioner appointed Rowland to act as spokesman (“to avoid duplication of verbiage”), unless he and Will had conflicting views of any matter raised. He said the Inquiry must conclude in exactly one hour, so Rowland should give a
brief
(he said this emphatically) accounting of his presence on the
Derevaun
and his impressions of the sinking.

Rowland told how he and Will had been looking for a ship in Glasgow and had heard about the
Derevaun
and its problems on the African voyage. He talked about the circumstances of their joining her. Finally he described the voyage across the Atlantic and the sinking.

The High Commissioner listened, occasionally glancing at the clock on the mantel. When Rowland was finished, he nodded approvingly. Then he asked some questions in his pointed manner. “The master of the ship—was he competent, in your view?”

“I’m not sure I’m able to make such a judgment,” said Rowland. “All I can say is he seemed so to me.”

“Odd behaviour? Signs of derangement?” The High Commissioner was very stingy with his words, Rowland thought, as though he had trouble squeezing them out of that tight mouth.

“Not that I could see,” said Rowland. “All I know is he’d been brought out of retirement to finish the voyage.”

The High Commissioner, at that point, said he had no more to ask. The Commissioner to his right stirred. He had unruly grey hair plastered with oil.

“Tell us more about the fever on the voyage from Africa,” he said. “Talk about that.”

“Well,” said Rowland, “I know some of the crew blamed the animals.”

The Commissioner nodded, encouraging him. He didn’t seem to want the same pithy answers as the High Commissioner. “Go on,” he said.

So Rowland told him everything he’d heard from Eva about the Shaman’s curse as they were leaving the African Coast, about the subsequent fever and how contact with the animals seemed to be at the root of it.

“How interesting,” the second Commissioner said. “Well, I have no further questions.”

The High Commissioner checked the clock. There were still twenty minutes to go.

The third Commissioner cleared his throat. He had a big nose with broken veins, a man who looked as though he enjoyed his rum. “Now,” he said, “what about the weather conditions?”

“At the time of the sinking?” said Rowland.

“Of course,” said the Commissioner.

Rowland described in detail the heat, the fog, or maybe it was steam, the strange smell that day. He told how, after they’d landed on Wreck Bar, the resident scientist there, Froglick, had said that such conditions were the result of an underseas volcanic eruption.

The third Commissioner addressed his colleagues. “I read a report last week from a sailing lugger in that same region,” he said. “When it raised its nets, they were full of thousands of codfish that looked as though they’d been freshly boiled.”

The second Commissioner nodded. “Yes, I read that,” he said. “They were given to the Charity House. But no one would eat them. They said they tasted like sulphur.”

There was silence in the hearing room except for the sound of the clock.

Then the High Commissioner spoke again. “Five minutes to five,” he said. “We’re doing very well.” Then he turned to the officer who’d acted as Secretary and ordered him to write a
brief
(emphatically, once more) official account of the hearing. “So far as this Commission is concerned,” he said, “the master of the
Derevaun
was blameless.” He shook his head. “Who ever heard of such a case? Jungle beasts on ships! Volcanoes under the ocean!” He looked at Rowland.
“Wrong things in wrong places,”
he said to sum it all up. He shook his head again so vigorously Rowland marvelled that those big ears didn’t flap.

Now the High Commissioner looked at Will. “Have you anything to add? You have exactly one minute.”

“No,” said Will.

“Good,” said the High Commissioner. He looked at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand climb towards the hour. At the exact moment it reached its zenith, he pushed back his chair, stood up and said: “Commission adjourned!”

– 3 –

WHEN WILL AND ROWLAND LEFT
the Commission building, it was raining quite heavily. They hurried to a nearby restaurant and ate fish and chips, then went to a bar. This would be their last night together, and they were both conscious of it. They sipped their drinks silently for a while.

“Now you can go home,” said Will. “I envy you.”

This was the moment Rowland had been waiting for. “I’d like to put a proposition to you,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time—something that might be quite attractive to you. Something that might be good for the two of us. And for someone else.” He thought for a moment. “It would be a sort of . . . social experiment.” He then outlined his scheme in some detail.