The Glass Ocean (11 page)

Lightning seldom strikes a ship at sea. But the saint’s body is a different matter. That means bad luck. My father is a marked man now. But, still sleeping, he doesn’t know it; and by the time he wakes, rather late, it won’t matter anymore.

•   •   •

Hugh Blackstone, on the bridge, observes, with his glass, the horizon’s edge. Land is there, lives being lived, though giving no sign: no lights at night, no sails by day, it is odd is it not, a mode of life difficult to imagine. As he stands one of his men approaches, speaking quickly, with a faint air of emergency.
One of the smallboats is missing. Gone, sir, and the oars, too, sir, gone without a trace.

Gone? What do you mean?

The withering glance of Blackstone.

I don’t know where it’s gone, sir, but it’s gone, and cook says a sack of his best salt fish is gone, too, an’ one of potatoes, and a cask of water.

That’s impossible. I suppose the fairies done it?
The faint derisive smile, this is something to be avoided. Even if Doyle does think the fairies done it, he will not say so now; and as far as Hugh Blackstone is concerned, that is a good thing.

I don’t know, sir.

Very well, Doyle. I’ll deal with it.

Wisp of Doyle, running away.

Blackstone at the rail now, smiling still. Smiling.
Well, I’ll be damned.
Training his glass at the edge of the earth.

•   •   •

By lunchtime it is confirmed that Felix Girard has gone. His bed has not been slept in; John McIntyre has found a note, pinned inside his
Compendium of American Psittaciformes
, which reads
, I will show you, McIntyre, you bastard! You puny man, now you will see!

Clotilde is in tears. She can’t find her dear Papa anywhere. And neither can anybody else. A search of the ship is fruitless, the import of the note clear: he has taken one of the smallboats and some supplies, and set out to row himself to Punta Yalkubul.

God help him
, says Hugh Blackstone, laughing,
he’s just mad enough to succeed!

Everyone’s looking at the horizon now. If the
Narcissus
is a smut in a saucer, then what is Felix Girard in a smallboat?

All that immensity.

And my father, sleeping. He doesn’t even know. He’s dreaming, maybe; of what, who can tell. Far distances, perhaps, or the opposite of that, the delicate pink whorl of one particular ear.

I’ve taken him this far. The rest is inevitable.

He won’t be back, my grandfather. The search party, sent out despite Hugh Blackstone’s reluctance, will run aground on what they think is Punta Yalkubul, finding there, instead, a small island, ten miles in circumference, consisting of an east-facing coral-sand beach and a west-facing red mangrove swamp crouched over a shallow lagoon formed by a coral reef. Sand flats extend prettily, at low tide, perhaps three quarters of a mile to the south. All that will be left here, of my grandfather, is the mark of his keel in the sand, and a plug of tobacco, left behind when he pulled his smallboat through the shrubbery, and rowed off the other side.

All the days they spent, staring out at this crust in the sea. We all have our illusions.

Though Felix Girard could not be produced, the search party brought back samples of what life there was. There were beauties there, in the place where my grandfather disappeared, the place where I, too, now, am bound: honeycombed corals, some growing in thin, perpendicular points, others forming thick, fawn-colored antlers, still others round, green knobs, some convoluted like brains; brittle, whip-legged starfish, delicate shrimps, minute, sparkling amphipods, alive, still, in the jars, before Harry Owen kills them; sea whips and sea fans; the sea cucumber,
Holothuriae
, in bright yellow and brown; sponges in every color, every shape; beautiful shells; and a diminutive sole, two inches long, marbled gold and black above, creamy white below—named, for the first time, by he who catalogued it, Owen’s Darling Solenette,
Monochirus amatus Owenii
.

He would have loved this stuff, my grandfather, if he’d seen it.

There’s solace here for some, for Harry Owen, for my father. He is interested in the smallest finds, in the sand that turns out, beneath the microscope, to contain shells, miniature in size but magnificent in architecture, glorious spires and intricately incised whorls, cathedrals, each one smaller than a grain of rice. I can imagine him, after the wind turned (because it did turn, finally), drawing these, spending many hours on that long journey home hunched by a candle, separating out, with a pin, these tiny beauties from among the dross, then sketching, sketching. I have seen what he found there: entire cities, miniature worlds, ancient and beautiful catacombs, mysterious curving passages leading to who-knows-what-or-where, glimmering opalescent walls signposted with the runes and hieroglyphs of the sea. I imagine he sees, within their pale pink or golden or creamy white curves, curves softer yet: of a certain cheek, the nape of a neck, of the closed and slightly trembling lid of a downcast eye—

For her there is no solace. There will be no miracle, no chance sighting, no encounter with another vessel that has picked up
a ginger-bearded Frenchman, floating
. No matter how many days she spends at the rail, gazing at that empty blue mirror of a sea, she will never find him. She finds nothing but herself reflected there. Felix Girard is lost, as quick and as sure as her blue shawl would be lost, if she flung it upon the water. He will not be retrieved.

•   •   •

You see we have so much in common, she and I.

•   •   •

I turn my face away from what comes next, her loneliness, his obsession, attraction overcoming repulsion, the edging toward and away and toward again, the first touch, then the second, the loss in her, desire in him, that’s it: that they will be together is inevitable now. What else is there for her, after all? Rooms in Bury Place, dead things, and, down below, that vulture Petrook waiting, preening himself, sharpening his claws.

I wouldn’t do that to her. I’ve done enough already.

•   •   •

In the brightness of the day I can see there’s a hieroglyph outside my window, though I cannot read it: two halves of something brilliant that has been broken, and a gesture that says,
Carlotta, it’s time to go
.

THE BIRDCAGE

It is hard to get in; harder yet to get out.

These are first two things my mother, orphaned now, cast ashore, learns about her new home in Whitby, on Bridge Street, above the River Esk. The house is called the Birdcage. Here it perches, above the river, here with my mother in it, the Birdcage, the narrow, whitewashed, pentagonal house where my parents begin their life together; the house with its two cramped, winding staircases, one designated for up, the other for down, since only with difficulty may two persons pass through either at once; with its thick stone walls and stubborn, low-jambed doors, none of which opens the first time—none willing—all must be pushed, pushed hard, with the shoulder, or, in my mother’s case, because she is slight, pushed with the whole of the body. They must be pushed twice, at least, those doors, if they are to yield; and when they yield at last they do it grudgingly, the wood grating against the uneven flagstone floor up to the final sticking point beyond which it will not move at all, the point at which even my mother, small as she is, must turn sideways in order to slip through, whether into the next room or out into the raw cobblestoned outdoors.

Hard to get in, harder yet to get out.

Like everything else in the house, the doors are swollen with the damp. Rusty of hinge. Disinclined. The house shudders above the river as if it would prefer to rise up and run; but, held fast, it receives, reluctantly, through its foundation, through its floors, its walls, its windows, the rush and suck of the tumbling Esk as it carries toward the sea a malodorous cargo of grease and gut, fin and bone, pulp and tar, bitumen and slag, night soil and glue: the runoff of the blubber works, the fishing fleet, the boatyard, the knacker’s yard, the jet works, the privies, the mines. My mother, in the house above the river, is puzzled, perhaps, after so many months at sea, to find that, though cast ashore, she still hears water rushing beneath her all the time; still smells it; still feels the damp of it everywhere, permeating everything, the furniture and food and clothes and bedding, the sheet music that she so seldom touches now, even herself, her skin, her hair, all rich and damp with the unwelcome oily scent of the river, the scent both of life and of death, which no amount of washing will ever remove. Through leaded windows that cry out upon rusty hinges of their own she observes when she so chooses, and also sometimes when she does not, the edge of the harbor, one arm of the breakwater, the cold North Sea beyond. These are dangerous objects—shards of glass upon which she may cut herself if she is not careful.

•   •   •

And my Papa?

•   •   •

Very often my mother turns her back upon the sea. She dislikes it in all its moods, its grey wintry indifference, its boiling infuriated white and green, its bright icy dissimulating blue. She cannot help but sense, no matter what is on the surface, the dark that lies beneath.

My Papa . . .

She cannot think about him. She cannot think about anything else. She cannot think.

His things, of course, are all around her—those, at least, that Petrook, ever calculating his profit and his loss, knew he could not sell. They are her inheritance and her dowry, shipped north from London in a series of packing crates and bundles, crowding now each of the five corners of each of the three rooms of the Birdcage, and rendering more precarious by their presence the screw-tight turning of the two staircases, both down and up. These are her old friends, her playmates, the splayed and grinning confidantes of her girlhood—the elephant’s skull, the stuffed orang-utan, the snakeskins and skeletons, the gaily patterned venomous cone shells, the butterflies and moths askew on their pins, her father’s prized
Morpho telemachus
, his
Attacus atlas
, his box of rotting silkworm pupae, the jar containing a mysterious object labeled “Mermaid’s hand,” the heads and arms, the broken-off chins and noses and fingers of stone idols neglected and fallen—even a single large crate containing nothing but the skins of birds Girard had been interrupted in the process of preserving, shedding now their feathers of crimson and violet and indigo, their delicate beaks shattered, packed in obvious haste, without care. Her father’s hummingbirds arrived in a cage, all dead but one. The single survivor, emerald green above, ruby red beneath, batters itself all along the crooked ceilings, buzzes like a trapped fly in the casements, never resting. Hovering in place it drinks sugar water from a glass that my mother has set out for it, then darts away up the stairs, or tangles itself among the last, dying filaments, cold nipped, of Felix Girard’s remaining orchids, or dodges between the rotting, rolled-up Turkish carpets leaning in the corners; or zooming downstairs makes Mary, the girl-of-all-work, scream aloud when its wing (moving so fast that it does not seem to move at all), grazes her cheek or her hair. For days at a time the hummingbird disappears completely, until some slight motion—a vibration among the white lace of a curtain, perhaps—reveals it; and then it is gone again, until next time.

Señor El Galliñazo is intact, though balder than before, it is true, and rests now upstairs in the bedroom, on top of the chest of drawers, along with a snaggletoothed cayman that used to perch on the shelf above my mother’s bed in Bury Place. Her family gone, these corpses make Clotilde feel at home; she will not throw anything away. What does not fit inside the house is piled, still boxed, in the shed out back where Leopold struggles against the cold to make his studio in an ever-dwindling space, surrounded by
curiosities.

Up to his neck in them.

But then the whole house is a collector’s cabinet without the collector, except as he is reflected in his accumulation. My mother, stroking El Galliñazo’s molting back, or thumbing through the
Conchylien-Cabinet
(from which Arthur Petrook has removed the best of the colored plates with the sharpest and subtlest of knives), or touching the leathery palm of the gorilla’s hand that she keeps hidden in a drawer among her stockings, or arranging the heads of six terra-cotta goddesses along the fireplace mantel in the room that serves the Birdcage as sitting and dining room both, feels the collector’s presence so vividly that she would not be surprised to hear him say:
Ah, Tildy! Why must you tease and torment your poor Papa so?—

But she doesn’t.

She doesn’t hear him; yet his waistcoat, against which she sometimes rests her cheek, still smells like him, and his old watch in its silver case still bears the smooth spot where his thumb rubbed nervously against it, again and again, during the months he spent in her grandfather’s attic, writing
Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak
. If she holds the watch long enough in her palm, it grows warm, almost as if it has just emerged from his waistcoat pocket, warmed by his body, not hers.

Petite! Cannot you allow your poor Papa to write his book? Do not pull so on his whiskers! Let Papa work, my dear!

Inconsolable! Yes, that my mother is: inconsolable over the loss of he who returned from the deserts of Bain Dzak one day to stare at her in her cradle, a desert-stained stranger fingering the frizzy blond ringlets that had only lately exploded upon a blue-veined scalp as delicate as an eggshell.
Ah
, he had said,
there you are, Tildy. There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.

•   •   •

He with whom she had fallen in love, and searched for, in vain, ever since. He who was always leaving.

•   •   •

Gone now, again. She cannot bear to think where he might be. So she turns her back on the ocean, averts her eyes from windows where the blue is contained, in the sitting room, in the bedroom, in the turnings of the staircases both down and up. She catches a glimpse, sometimes, by mistake, in the mirror over the mantel, above the heads of the goddesses, and then she feels something inside herself tighten ominously; she imagines a spring inside her, something mechanical, not human, a vise in her chest that constricts her heart, her lungs, her stomach, until the margins of her vision darken and she must sit down; or else she flies down the stairs into the kitchen, shouting at the girl-of-all-work,
You slattern, you slut, the beef was bad, the dishes were dirty, the bedbugs are back
 . . . thus releasing, for a moment, temporarily, the tension in the spring.

It is winter. The darkness, coming in midafternoon now, relieves her of the burden of vision. The black outside the windows presses close for a while, then Mary draws the shades, ignites the fire, sparking smoking anthracite. My mother sits, her face and breasts and thighs directed toward the dazzle of heat and light and flame. Behind her, shadows gather. Her back is cold. Outside, carts pulled by stolid ponies, their breaths hot upon the air, rumble over icy cobblestones, the lamplighter makes his progress up Bridge Street, gas jets flare in shopwindows, beneath the house the Esk rushes, the vibration is carried up, through the stone foundation, the walls, the floor . . . into my mother’s body, her chest, her spine, her heart.

In the distant steppe, the camels stride . . .

Holding her father’s book on her lap makes her feel better. But she does not read it; holds it, merely. It is her amulet, her talisman. Her hands are idle, her eyes half closed; she resides in a firelight dream. Suddenly a sharp, whirring buzz rouses her; jumping up, she urgently shoos the hummingbird, its gemlike feathers flashing, away from the flames. For this purpose, and this only, does she move.

In the distant steppe, the camels . . .

It is half past three. She will not stir, even to prod the coals when the fire dies. Her face is unwashed, her hair in disarray, the house dirty, the supper uncooked, Leopold’s socks unmended. When he comes in, he will find her sitting, just like this, face forward toward the hearth, hands resting, palms down and open, upon a dog-eared copy of
Felix Girard’s
Ghosts of Bain Dzak
.

I went there with him, you know. I helped him to write this book. My Papa took me with him everywhere . . . to Bain Dzak . . . to Khartoum . . . to Sfax . . . to Morocco . . . to Patmos . . . to Peru . . . Why do you not take me anywhere, Leopold?

She turns upon him blue eyes puzzled, sad, reproachful.
If you loved me you would take me somewhere
, those eyes seem to say; or, perhaps,
Why has my Papa gone away, and left me here, in this terrible place, with you?

Madame Marie-Louise Girard, confronted similarly ten or more years before, responded with indifference, and reached for another slice of bread. This Leopold cannot do. He loves Clotilde . . . loves her to distraction. In the shed in the back garden where, in the cold and dark, surrounded by boxes from Bury Place, he is building his studio, he keeps every drawing of her that he made while on board the
Narcissus
: Clotilde at the taffrail, Clotilde in the saloon, Clotilde at the spinet, Clotilde bending over to button her boot. He still keeps, always, in his breast pocket, the piece of soft textile bearing the woven image of the fair servant girl reaching to place an emerald upon the head of the sultan’s elephant, because the girl looks so very much like Clotilde. He knew it even then, when he stole it:
she is his fate.
And so what can he do? He is not indifferent to her suffering.

I . . . I . . . I will t-take you e-everywhere. . . .

He promises; he means it. But he is still nervous when in her presence. He stutters. Familiarity has not diminished his fear. If anything he is
more
nervous, now that he has seen and touched her luminous white body, her body that seems always to recede before him, no matter how tightly he holds her. Even in the entanglement of the bedsheets she torments him—especially there.

My Papa—

In her grief for Felix Girard she seeks, it seems, something lost that Leopold cannot replace—that he never will replace, no matter how hard he tries. And he knows it.

I used to stand on my Papa’s feet, and we would walk together in the garden . . . Dash was there . . . Where is he now, I wonder? Leo, where is Dash now? Is he with my Papa, do you think?

Leo cannot answer; he hardly knew Dash; Dash, to him, is a dark figure, silent, receding into the jungles of memory.

I d-don’t know—

Her disappointed gaze settles upon him for a moment, then wanders away, searching around all the five fire-lit corners of the pentagonal room, along the walls where her father’s orchids hang dying of the cold; probes the tops of the curtains where sometimes a hummingbird hovers; circles six terra-cotta goddess heads on the mantel; then settles back into the hearth.

My Papa will come for me . . . You’ll see. He would not leave his Clotilde . . . My Papa always comes back.

It is true, Leopold thinks, that sometimes people come back. Himself, for example. He did not intend to come back to Whitby, and yet he has come back. And then, having once come back—having contradicted himself the one time—he had sworn he would not return to the Dell’oro Jet Works, and yet he has done that, too. For one entire afternoon he has stood in Henrietta Street, slightly up and around the corner from his father’s house, pressed into the alley between the millinery and the joiner’s, watching the pony carts laden with stone rumbling into his father’s cobbled courtyard, then rumbling out again, emptied (the ponies, unburdened, tossing with relief their lathered necks, slavering, their hot breaths white on the cold, damp air). He has seen, from a distance, the men with whom he’d grown up, with whom he’d sorted jet and carved it, and one more, a man he doesn’t know, a short, squat, red-faced, scowling figure, directing the carts into and out of the yard with sharp, impatient gestures of his thick hands—Matty Mohun, the man to whom, one day, in the absence of my father’s interest, the jet works shall eventually belong. He has seen Gentilessa emerge carrying a basket, a kerchief tied around her head, obscuring her face; heard Emilio, in the yard, shouting at the men. But he has not seen Anna.