The Solitude of Thomas Cave (10 page)

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H
E SITSCLOSE to the fire as he can be, closes his eyes in his reeling head. Slowly, as the heat penetrates, he begins to distinguish
the separate pains. He sees that he must be thankful. He was lucky, or blessed, to be caught so in the white hands of the
snow. His ankle pains him badly. It is blinding torture to take off his boot but when he examines the injury he is reassured
to see that the joint bends this way and that as far as its swelling will allow and he believes that he will be able to walk
on it again before too long. The colour of the bruising is already violent and he can imagine it will be as bad on his back
and on his ribs though he has not stripped himself of his clothing which belongs on him now like a matted extra skin. How
much worse it could have been. With much discomfort he kneels to pray, thanks God for his deliverance. And then he tries to
find an easy position on the cot and attempts to rest. The silence in the cabin is suddenly so complete that he believes that
the wind outside has entirely dropped.

It is only a short time before he compels himself to move again, flexes his stiffening body and his ankle in an attempt to
keep them supple. He finds himself a stick of a good size and hobbles across the room, hobbles even to the outer door of the
tent to see.

This night the lights have shot across the sky in the most terrible manner, like as the world was bound to end or as if it
had ended already in all places but here. It was as if I might have seen in the heavens the reflection of a distant battle,
the flames, the palls of smoke, the arcs of gunfire, all reversed and distorted and discoloured into faint and indescribable
shades of green and rose, orange and violet, all the violent sound of it reduced at this great distance to a whirring like
that of spinning wings.

In truth it was only a hint of a sound, a whirring or whistling so faint that he did not know if it was in his head or outside
of it, and beneath its strange high hum he seemed to hear a softer tone, a contralto murmur that came and went like waves.
It sounded like a voice, a woman's voice, her voice soothing the child: a lullaby sung beneath the breath in that language
of hers that was so plain and bare to feeling.

He thinks that he does not sleep more than a moment for all the throbbing of his body and his brain. He does not even attempt
sleep for most of that night but sits up at the table in the lamplight as he had in the early days and engrosses himself in
his work, chipping away persistently and mechanically as if by doing so he might make his mind inert as the materials he handles,
dull the pictures in it, make it plain, true, predictable as wood and metal.

The picture of Johanne, laid out, hair spread on to her shoulders. Once the agony was over her face was calm and he knew her
again. And even as he did he wondered how far he had ever known her when he could not begin to understand what had passed
inside, as if she had only ever been an idea to him, a dream, a surface, a texture, not herself but a face, a girl, a wife.

She was never so real as what is in his hands. Wood, metal. These things he can know. Not those others.

Not that creature beside her. He had them cover it so that he did not have to see.

This work he can do without thinking now, he could shape heels with his eyes closed. To better engage his mind he has thought
to make himself a pair of clogs: the bases hollowed out of wood, warm on the cold ground; the uppers of sealskin, well-oiled
and with the fur turned outwards as he has seen on the boots of Lappish traders. He has found a block of beech from off the
ship that will serve well, has taken some sealskin, scraped and steeped it until it is supple.

The indentation of the sole, the rise of the instep; it is true what Hans had told him, that he has an instinct for the craft.
They might have worked well together if he had stayed. They might have expanded the shop to serve the gentry, taken on another
boy or two, hired a servant to greet the ladies: Jakobsen and Cave, shoemakers of Copenhagen. Only he knew, knew as clear
as if he had already lived it, what sort of life that would have been. The hollowness of it, that set a terrible silent clamour
echoing within him. People all around, and the absence of them inside. The faces of the fashionable like masks; the faces
of all, eyes, smiles, voices, false and alien to him. The city in which he had thought to find a home as alien without her
as any place that he had ever been to, any place where he had come to shore with sea-worn eyes out of focus; all its acquired
familiarity, its houses, its spires, its known sights, no more than things he might at some distant time have been shown a
picture of or imagined in a dream.

And yet he had stayed some weeks, two, three months, without the impulse to move. He had stayed at first as he must to see
them buried in the graveyard, mother and child-that-had-not-been, the two in one coffin as if the instant of separation had
never occurred, the one name upon the stone.

Stay, said Hans. In the day, in the shop with work before them, it was well. What he could not bear was the quiet in the evening.

He saw the whale ships leave harbour at the start of the season, the
Gabriel
on which he had sailed the year before. He had refused his place on her yet when he saw her go he suddenly envied the look
of her, sailing out on a fresh breeze one April morning when all the roofs and towers of the city glowed bright behind. It
seemed brave on such a fine spring day to sail out towards the ice when there on the land the grass began to ripple in the
meadows and the blossom blew off the trees. He watched until she was gone from the horizon and knew that before long, somehow,
he also would be gone.

The next ship that would take him was a cargo ship bound for the Shetlands. He did not care where she went. Swiftly he took
his leave, took with him in addition to what he had come with only a shawl that Johanne had embroidered, of fine creamy wool
patterned with coloured threads, and this he used to wrap his violin. He wrapped the instrument with care though he had not
played it since those strange days in the upstairs room, took not a note from it as he folded it in the wool, and the bow
beside it, and packed it at the top of his chest. He could find no suitable words with which to part from Hans Jakobsen, who
had closed his shop and had the apprentice help him all the way to the dock to see him leave. So long as I remain there is
place for you here, Hans told him, and it was pathetic to see him lean so on the dull boy's shoulders.

Good Hans. Goodbye Hans. He could explain nothing. There was no one else from whom he felt the need to take his leave. None
on the new ship would know that the English sailor they took on board had any more than a passing connection with the city
nor any but the most elementary knowledge of the Danish language.

They made it quickly to Lerwick, the same fair gale behind them all the way, a quick, fresh voyage that whipped life into
his cheeks if not into his soul. The Shetlands seemed nowhere: plain, bare islands beaten by the sea and suited to his mood.
He left the Danish ship, took his chest and went ashore. He found lodging at an inn. Those he met there asked how long he
would stay but he answered only an indefinite time, as if he were waiting for something to occur. He had there an attic room
with a high view out over the harbour to the sea, and a number of times each day, so many repeated minutes he could not add
and count them, he stood with his long back bent beneath the slope of the roof and looked into the grey distance, feeling
inside himself that same blank boredom that he had known on the longest voyages. It was, he thought, the way a man feels when
he has been gone so long from the point of departure that the purpose of a journey is lost and with it all sense of the possibility
of arrival.

There were many ships that passed across his view. He observed their passage in and out the harbour with no more interest
than if they had been driftwood on the sea. He could barely have said which was coming and which going, let alone which way
they were headed. He must have seen the
Heartsease
coming in from the south, a sturdy three-masted bark, seventy tons, nothing special about her, no particular reason he should
note her. There were other English ships, other whalers even, putting in for water and last supplies before the final haul
north.

A shaft of sun was all it took, breaking the clouds. He was standing idle by the harbour, and there was a brilliant shaft
of sunlight and into it stepped the figure of Captain Marmaduke. Then he knew the energy of the black-haired Captain, the
force of his smile. We're short a man. The firmness of his handshake.

Two days later he was high in the rigging of the
Heartsease
with the scream of gulls about him. He saw the rocky island recede and marvelled that it could remain so fixed with all the
winds and tides and currents that pressed upon it.

How good it had been at first to come again to the briskness of the North. Somewhere hard and cold. Somewhere that had no
memory. No history of man. Or woman.

Such crispness there was on that ship. She had been held some days before the Scottish coast, made it late to Shetland and
now on the voyage north she sped to make up the lost time. He had heard the name of Captain Thomas Marmaduke even in the
Danish ports, and was impressed to see the boldness of the man and his sureness of the Greenland seas. He took them further
than any of the whalers of the Companies, beyond the scope of charts, east and beyond where only Barents was known to have
been, up a wide fjord where the ice had only just broken up and to the great bay that came to be called Duke's Cove, to which
he had led a trio of Hull ships the previous year. The crew were mostly Hull men with open faces and heavy voices, save for
the Biscayans who did the skilled whaling work and who were dark and popish and crossed themselves for fear and luck and when
they woke in the morning and before they slept.

They got to the bay not a day too soon, for they found that it was already filling with whales. Great herds of them came in
to breed at that time of year as the thaw set in and the ice in the sea cracked and broke apart and made a passage through.
The ship went in and waited, and the great unsuspecting beasts frolicked in with spouts and grand slaps of their tails as
if they gathered to play at a fairground there among the ice.

No fog those first few days and he was light-headed with the brightness and the present moment. It was when they began the
hunting that his mood began to change.

Thomas Cave had been whaling before but never till now had he seen it like this. That winter ashore had marked him and put
him at a distance from men. He saw his fellows with a strange objectivity as they went about their work, as if he saw them,
and himself also, from a distance and without connection. He saw the hugeness of the landscape and of the whales, how small
the men and their boats were beside them, small as if they could be picked up and crumpled in God's hand. He saw the dark
Biscayans with their harpoons, like pictures he had seen of little devils with their forks, and he saw the leviathans slaughtered;
saw, with a strange and dawning horror, the whirlpools about them, the streaming wakes of their flight, the red fountains
of blood that spouted up as they died, then the great red stain that spread across the bay, heavy with blubber-oil and the
debris of death, and slapped against the ship's side, and the screeching hordes of gulls that dived amongst it. It came to
him like an image almost of hell. He saw it and yet he worked on at the heart of the thing, worked on the carcases that they
brought in and tied to the side of the ship, climbed the slippery, lice-encrusted bodies and cut the blubber off them. He
worked through bright day and light night. He talked little to the others of the crew. When the work stopped and they went
on shore, he brushed by them in silence. They sat before a fire and ate the rich whale and walrus meat and drank their ale
and talked and swore, but Thomas Cave sat apart.

There was a lad of fourteen who made them laugh, a fresh-faced boy still with a touch of the land to him, who could as well
have been an acrobat as come to sea, who somersaulted and turned cartwheels and tumbled before them. He would turn himself
over a half-dozen times and land on his hands instead of his feet and walk away like that with his feet in the air and his
hair down over his face, or bend his body back so that he was like a crab and scuttle sidelong down to the water's edge, then
back up again and turn his head and grin upside-down at the man who stood above him.

'Would you catch a crab, sir?'

Cave did not joke but only shook his head, and the boy sprang upright again, for he was a kind boy and was sobered by an intuition
of the sadness in him.

'My name is Thomas Goodlard, I think we have not spoken before. I've been working on one of the whaleboats. It's my first
time out.'

'And what do you think of it?'

'It's hard, isn't it, but grand?' The boy was like a puppy and could not sit still. 'Like it's all new and there's no past
here and everything's still to happen. I never imagined there could be a place in the world like this.'

Thomas Cave heard the East Anglian inflection in the boy's voice, looked about him at the other men, at the oddity of the
gathering on the beach, at the mountains that stood so cold and serene above them in the light of the night. He saw that the
boy was wrong: each man before the fire had brought his past with him, a history there whether it was wanted or not, in each
face and each voice, and he realised that even here where there were none to remind him he would not forget. He understood
that she had come to Greenland with him.

He works the night through. He has gouged out from the wood the shape of his foot, curved the ends of it so that it will roll
beneath his step. He takes up a second piece of beech and begins the reverse form for the other foot. Every now and then he
makes a test, turns quickly in case she is there in the corner of his eye. Can she really have gone? Was it not just now,
this same night, that he saw her out there beneath those whirring lights, walking in the snow with the child on her hip, singing
to him?