The Glass Ocean (9 page)

N-nothing. We haven’t h-hauled the net yet.

There is fearfulness in him, at her approach. She feels it, draws closer.

Excellent! That means I can watch. I have always watched my Papa at his work, you know. I have helped him with it, too. He tells me I am his only real collaborator—his scientific amanuensis.

Turning from them she leans against the rail, then leans over it toward the water; gazes at the place where the towline disappears. It is a thin, shining gossamer, a spider’s web.

Well—ain’t you going to take up your net?

Commanded, they cannot disobey. Together Leo and Harry take hold of the line, pull. Then pull again.

The net, though, will not come.

I can imagine my mother’s laugh, high and clear and faintly derisive, in the watery darkness.

A further effort on their part, dark pantings at the line. And then it comes, all at once, furiously, dripping black with weed, green with foam, and falls, writhing madly, onto the deck. From among the coils there resonates a fierce, hollow, chopping sound, like the fall of a mallet on a block.

Small things scatter everywhere, shrimps, fishes, snails, angry squids, crabs clinging desperately to knots of bladder as the net twists and thrashes, contorts into a hundred wild figures, writing an alphabet from a dream.

Oh, how my mother enjoys it! She shrieks with laughter, she is filled with delight. And she is the brave one, she the delicate, the golden haired, she with the shawl cascading like foam from around her shoulders bends forward, while Harry Owen and Leo Dell’oro draw back. Bends forward, and reaches down her hand.

Don’t.

This is Hugh Blackstone. His cool, severe observing eye has taken them in and judged them incompetent to cope.

Fetch the oar.

They, though, are paralyzed as at their feet the net turns upon itself in a last violent peristalsis, then disgorges: a great green eel, four or five feet long, jaws snapping, this is the sound they heard, the hollow chop of a mallet on a block.

Fetch the oar.

Still nobody can move but then at last my father does. He runs off up the deck, a glimmering, small figure, they see him struggle with the tarp on the smallboat, trying to lift it up to get at the oars. The eel, though, is quicker; it turns over once, a single sinuous contortion, slides over the side, falls back, there is hardly a splash, it is gone.

In the silence that follows, Harry Owen begins to pick sadly at the remains of his net.

My dear Dr. Owen, was it not magnificent?

My mother is still laughing, flashing her brilliant feathers in the starlight.

Blackstone turns the yellow glare of his bird-eye upon her.

That, madam, could easily have removed your hand
.

Then there is that cold, unpleasant smile. It is admirable, is it not, the cold severity of this Hugh Blackstone? I wonder is he imagining my mother’s hand in the eel’s jaws, and smiling at that? Those pale white fingers, the delicate, pink pearlescent nails. Otherwise, at what does he smile? It doesn’t matter, I suppose. My mother has her hand; and in a moment Hugh Blackstone will be back on the bridge, consulting his sextant as if nothing has happened.

Now at last my father returns exultant with the oar. But my mother, spanked, seeks immediately to spank in turn.

Mr. Dell’oro
, she cries,
it appears you are an oar short!

The air comes out of him at that, humiliated he slackens visibly, the oar held triumphantly upright makes a quick descent toward the deck and in that same moment something else happens, there is a kind of shift, a beat skipped, it is as if the air has gone out of everything, yes, that is it exactly, the air goes out of everything, not just him but everything, in the sails, too, the breeze has died completely, all the bellying white folds fall slack, something somewhere breathing has died, and its breath will not resume.

Hugh Blackstone, on the bridge, utters a soft oath.

My mother, as if conscious of what she has done, runs away then, my father and Harry Owen stand helpless watching the curl of her shawl glimmering in the dark, lessening and lessening like the crest of a wave that breaks and slips back into the sea. In a few minutes they will hear a few notes of the spinet, rising from down below.

•   •   •

But they’re done now. They’re finished. They’ve entered the Trough of Leo’s Despair. A trough that will be deepened, almost before they really realize they’re in it, by a shout from the mainmast the next morning:

Land, Captain! To the south, sir!

There it is, after all those weeks, the sought-after object, land: purple, wavering slightly, miragelike, insubstantial as smoke, seeming, like smoke, to float just above the water, rather than to rest upon or arise from it.

But they are becalmed. Stuck, in the Trough of Leo’s Despair.

•   •   •

Best not make too much of this, nobody’s mood controls the weather, not really.

•   •   •

A cheer rises up from around the ship, there is a sudden flurry of activity, trunks being packed, scientific instruments readied, gear stowed or unstowed (depending), piglets chased into their pen, breeches laundered, hair combed, faces washed, gloves buttoned, for the first time in seven-odd weeks.

It’s a long time to float like a smut in a saucer. Grime builds up, a certain amount of filth that may be ignored while at sea, but must be removed before progressing onto land. Even onto such a land as Punta Yalkubul is likely to be.

There is a shimmer of anticipatory dread, thinking about that. Quickly buried, though, as the decks are scraped with holystone: scoured once, twice, three times, and the barnacles chipped off the hull, in preparation for a landing.

•   •   •

But they will not be landing. The sails will hang slack throughout this very hot day, and through an entire sultry night as well. Nonetheless, optimism runs high. It isn’t until the end of a second day that the truth of the matter is suspected; and even then it doesn’t win wide acceptance. The gloom isn’t widespread until the end of the fourth day.

Hugh Blackstone, of course, is the exception. He’s been scowling consistently since he uttered that oath.

•   •   •

Then begins the murmur. That’s when, on the fourth day.

It arises, first, in the lower parts of the
Narcissus,
those areas which, lying under water, are perpetually dark—beneath the cabins and the workrooms, beneath the space where the men hang their hammocks and stow their trunks, down beneath, where supplies are kept: the casks of water, the biscuit, the salt beef and cornmeal, the bread and the raisins, the peas and molasses, the sacks of dried apples and of rice, of potatoes, cocoa, tea, the barrels of pickles, butter, beer and onions—and lower yet, down below the ballast, in the bilges, where the pumps are manned continuously, day and night (though night from day cannot be distinguished there, and the lantern burns all the time).

That is where the murmur begins. Indistinctly, at first.

At least, on the fourth day it is indistinct. Also on the fifth day, as the sails hang slack, and the viscous, blue-green membrane of the sea clings around the ship, determined to hold her fast. Things are said—indistinct things—in the hold, in the berths, in the cabins; in the companionway, in the galley, in the saloon; on the forecastle, amidships, and astern; up in the rigging, in the crow’s nest, on the mainmast; around the mizzen, and over the boom.

My mother’s name is being mentioned. The eel, too. Bad luck is mentioned, as is ill omen, mermaid’s curse, the mop over the side, the bucket likewise, the tossed stone, the ginger-haired man, the wrong foot forward, the three gulls flying, the mysterious whistle, the trimmed beard, the pared nail, the parson’s collar, the flag through the ladder, the dog at the tackle.

What my father hears he’s never sure he’s heard correctly.

Someone’s got the cat under the basket.

What? What?

It’s nothing, a whisper around a hatchway. When he looks at them they avert their eyes.

The cat’s under the basket all right.

Someone’s put it there, for sure.

But what does it mean?

•   •   •

Him with that ginger hair. And her.

It’s her that brought the beast out of the sea. But he’s bad, too. That hair’s a sign, for them as has eyes to see it.

You bet it is.

Launch with the devil, sail with the devil, that’s what they say. Ginger hair’s the devil’s hair.

•   •   •

They cross themselves, duck furtively along the passages. They know my father’s heard them, but they don’t want to meet his glance.

•   •   •

And that sea, indifferent as a cat, smiling its noncommittal cat’s smile, barely flicking its cat’s paw in the pitch of a wave: it lies like a cat, languorously, stretching itself without effort in the unbearable heat of the afternoons, through the starlit torpor of the nights; with land just there on the horizon, teasingly beyond reach, insubstantial as smoke. It will make no effort on their behalf, that indolent, smiling sea.

•   •   •

A cormorant, black as pitch, flies above the bows: the men cross themselves; from somewhere down deep the murmur rises—

•   •   •

At last Hugh Blackstone must say what it means.
The men believe the ship’s been cursed—a sea witch has stolen their wind. They blame you, Miss Girard. A woman on board is bad luck, in their eyes. If anything goes wrong she’s bound to be blamed. They’re a superstitious lot, these sailors—and stupid besides. Toss a pebble overboard and they believe it’ll drag the whole ship down with it. It makes no sense. There’s no logic in it. But once they get these ideas, they never let ’em go.

•   •   •

The explanation itself falls like a stone. There is nothing to do but wait.

•   •   •

My father bears up poorly in the heat. Eventually he concedes to remove his dark jacket and yellow waistcoat, to appear on deck in his shirtsleeves. But he keeps faith with his formerly proper, formerly starched collar and cuffs, he will not remove these, though they wilt sadly around his neck and wrists in the overwhelming humidity. He would not want
her
to see him without them—such a sweating, suffering fool. She does nothing but laugh at this, he in cuffs and collar, stifling in a tropical heat that demands, above all else, a sacrificial progress toward gleaming nakedness.

A progress that she makes gladly, and much to his unease.

•   •   •

Then, too, the sailors affect him. He dislikes being in close proximity to their superstitions, which, after all, are so similar to his own. I imagine him staring at the lifeless sails when nobody else is looking, muttering
Black black bear-away, don’t come down by here-away!
or some other savage nonsense, as if this might lift the curse. Hours and hours he spends, perched on the taffrail as the
Narcissus
lists, first one way, then the other. What is he doing? Brooding upon the traitorous stillness of the sea. Muttering his incantations.

Dark shapes move beneath those waters. He comes away from the taffrail hollow eyed, subdued. Who knows what he is thinking.

•   •   •

But then who knows what any of them may be thinking—floating there, under the weight of the unrelenting sunlight, with land, the merest puff of it—a sliver, a rind, a crust, a peeling like the skin off an orange—stretched out, completely unobtainable, on the far, purpling horizon.

It is a weight in itself, an internal weight, this land that can be seen but not touched, which itself seems not to touch the waves, buoyed above them, rather, by some peculiar alchemy of water and light.

There’s an equation for that.

•   •   •

It floats but does not wander, is tight upon its tether, always there, to the south. Tantalizingly.

But it is not for them. Water is for them. Plenty of that. Water and murmur. Water and murmur and malaise.

•   •   •

It’s inevitable, I suppose, that arguments should begin, under circumstances like these. Have I mentioned that my grandfather, Felix Girard, is of a choleric temperament?

Ginger hair is the devil’s hair. Or so they say.

He is a man addicted to movement, forced now to be still. In tedious times he remembers his old operating theater in l’Hôtel-Dieu, misses it, that hated place, the gleaming sharps, even the sickly, sweet smell, this, too, is a memory. The Saint Jerome Ward, there beneath the shadow of the cathedral. The dutiful Sisters of Bon Secours with their sallow horse-faces, their bound-up hair, their disapproving looks. All that dingy linen.

He flexes his hands, feels the old longing. To cut.
Me next, doctor. Help me.
Three, four, six to a bed they were in that filthy place. They bled them into buckets on the floor. Most could not be helped. He cut, regardless.

Sister—the blade!

He has strong decisive hands, my grandfather. Butcher’s hands. Now idle.

Well. It’s hard on everyone.

•   •   •

If he could cut anything in the current circumstances I think it would be John McIntyre he’d cut. Excise him like a tumor from the otherwise healthy flesh of this expedition. The hatred between them is of long standing, based in professional jealousy. Each having something means neither can have all. This, of course, is unforgivable. And McIntyre is Harry Ellis’s appointment here. A functionary of the museum. Hence: a snitch, a rat, a spy. He with that greasy monocle of his. And the clipped, arrogant
I see.

This is a real irritation.

They bicker together, in the long, hot waste of the days. I wish I could say they didn’t mean it. But they do.

What are they arguing about? Classification of the
Psittaciformes
of British Guiana, in particular the Guianian sun parrot, John McIntyre’s particular discovery. My grandfather, it seems, has found McIntyre’s monograph unconvincing.

Admit it, McIntyre—you have never seen the thing! And why? Because it does not exist! Come, come now, confess! You identify this bird by the cry only, is it not so? By the characteristic
mee-hoo! mee-hoo!
Why, it is not a bird at all, it is a cat; and a domestic cat at that, that came to Guiana in an Englishwoman’s stocking! Of course you have never seen it—admit it, McIntyre, come clean!