Chapter 26

Almost fifty years later the earth still turned and the stars still burned, and Daniel Rooke still looked up and watched them.

He had learned that the naked eye could see things a telescope could not. The exquisite instruments of astronomy could add new stars to the sum of the world’s knowledge, but it took a soul to wonder at the beauty of those already discovered.

They had not hanged him, for which he had gone on his knees and given thanks to God. But when they told him he might continue in the service, on condition that he apologise to James Gilbert and accept a loss of rank to ensign, he refused. By then he knew why he had been spared, and it was not to serve His Majesty. He went straight from the court to offer himself to another cause.

That cause had taken him back to a place he had never thought to revisit: Antigua. He marvelled at the symmetry of it. In Antigua he had once watched a young lieutenant of marines hanged for disobeying. He too had disobeyed but had been spared, and it seemed only right that Antigua should take his life and make use of it.

Now that life was fading, a star at dawn. He lay awake in the dark. Sunrise was some time off, but the window was a grey square. The tropical dawn would come too quickly, that brilliant Caribbean light that an invalid longed to shut out. Waiting for darkness was what he did now, as he had done when he was an astronomer. He thought the final darkness might not be far off.

He lay still, hardly breathing. There was a short space of time in which he was blessedly conscious only of existing. He savoured it. Then the pain returned, the pounding fullness in the head, the pangs behind the eyeballs, the aching in his shoulders, his back, his legs. It was a matter of willing time to pass, so that he might either die or recover.

Beyond the window the parrots chattered in the guava tree. Another day had to be lived through in this hot and weary bed.

The curtain, broken along its rings, still dangled lopsided as it had for every day of his illness, a shred of lining hanging down. He knew the curtain, the broken rings, that tongue of fabric, to the point of weariness. Day after day lying on the bed, he had stitched up the rip, reattached the rings, made it neat and orderly. But only in his mind’s eye. It was weeks since he had had the strength to do anything more strenuous than sit up in bed, move to the commode, creep back again between the sheets.

Now he could make out his other familiars, the constellations of mildew on the ceiling and the cracks in the floor tile that made the shape of France. In his busy mind he had a pail of hot soapy water, a scrubbing brush. The cracks were full of dirt, the tiles themselves clouded across their terracotta surfaces. It was interesting to observe—or had been, the first hundred times—how the pattern of dirt revealed, in a way otherwise invisible, the slight unevennesses in the laying of the tiles. Where one corner was lower than its neighbour by a fraction, the dirt had settled, undisturbed. Where an edge rode high the passage of feet had worn it clean. If for any reason you needed to create an absolutely flat surface—for some experiment involving metal balls and their movement, for example—this would be a way to make sure of it. If he should ever find himself needing such a perfect surface, he would remember how you could use dirt.

He took it as a good sign, that he could still have such orderly and deductive thoughts.

The servant-woman, Henrietta, was good. But she had enough on her hands looking after him. Even before he fell ill, she stayed only out of a sense of honour. He had not been able to pay her for perhaps a year.

‘You have been good for us,’ she always said when he apologised. ‘For me, and for us.’

She meant, of course, the slaves. He had given his life for them.

Well, that was a little melodramatic. He was not yet thirty when he had begun to give his life for them. He was seventy-four now, lying on this hot bed. Call it two-thirds, roughly, something like two-thirds of a life.

Actually, it was twenty-two thirty-sevenths of a life. He wondered how sick he would have to be for numbers to leave him, that craving for the exact.

Two-thirds of a life, then, let us say, that had begun with such promise. Then he had made his choice, and it had brought him here: to this house on the hill above English Harbour.

All those who had exclaimed at his prospects had fallen away long ago and all those he had loved—wife, son and daughter—were dead or elsewhere now. If a man lived as long as he had, he supposed things could not be otherwise. Now it was just himself and Henrietta.

He could hear her clanking downstairs in the kitchen, and the mewing of the cat wanting its breakfast.

Henrietta would bring him a slice of mango from the tree outside, a plate of cold boiled yam from last night. He wanted neither, but she would bring them and scold him, in her quiet way, hold up the mango until he took a bite, wipe his chin for him when the juice ran down.

A bowl of oatmeal would be good. He had loved oatmeal as a child. Portsmouth, forever shiny in the rain, and his mother’s oatmeal, warm and sweet, fat with cream. In Antigua oatmeal was unknown. He supposed it could be bought from the ships that carried other luxuries from England, but only if you had money.

He had bought Henrietta at auction, when he still had money. By then he was used to it, standing with the other men and counting upwards aloud, turn and turn about with them, until they stopped. How many had he bought? He had started a list in the beginning, but left off after a time. For once, the number did not matter. He could only say, I bought as many as I could.

Bought and freed, of course, and how they hated him for that, the men around him in the auction yard. They had agreed among themselves, and bid the price up and up to ruin him faster.

Now there was nothing, just the water in the well, the mangoes on the trees, the yams in the garden.

‘Go,’ he had said, trying to be stern, when the last of the money was gone. ‘I cannot pay you, you must find another place.’ She had not tried to argue, only shaken her head and pressed her lips together like a child refusing medicine.

He supposed he should be sorry for it now, that choice he had made forty-six years ago. He tried out the idea in his mind. Regret. Remorse. He tested the words against what he felt. His head ached, his body pained him in every joint, the light hurt his eyes. He wished his wife were still alive. He would like to see his sister Anne one more time, and taste oatmeal once more, and feel the soft Portsmouth rain on his face.

All these things he felt. But he did not seem to be feeling regret. The words of regret could be summoned, but not the pang.

Regret, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, flickered, flamed, expired.

He heard Henrietta greeting someone downstairs, the rumble of a man’s voice, and could imagine it: Henrietta, a freshly washed once-red bandana bound around her black hair, and Redoubt the postman.

Through the open window he heard sounds of sweeping, and then the regular thump as a rug was beaten. Someone sang a snatch of melody, called out, there was a prolonged splash as water cascaded from something into something else. A rooster crowed triumphantly. Soon Henrietta would come up, would push back the ragged curtain and turn to look at him.

Indeed, here was her footfall on the stairs. The matting had gone long ago, so he could hear every step of her bare feet, quiet though they were. Here she was, and in her hand the old white dish with, yes, the slice of mango and there it was too, the wedge of greyish yam.

He would eat a mouthful, just to bring a smile to her face. There was a mock-hurt she did that he could not bear to see. He knew it was only pretence, as you might pretend for a child, but still he would yield to it. He would eat the yam first, that delicate earthen taste, then the mango, sweet, fragrant, its texture almost meaty.

‘Slow, Mr Rooke,’ Henrietta whispered. ‘Slow now and easy.’

When he had eaten a mouthful of each, he lay back. The mango was sweet to the tongue but it left an aftertaste with a bitter element. He wanted to wash it away with a sip of water but could not find the energy to sit up and drink.

The room was growing hot. He could feel the sweat, a cool drop sliding down his cheek. There was the tiresomely familiar curtain, the cracked tile, the mildew. He thought he could not bear to live through another day of the light crawling around the room, waiting for nightfall.

He heard himself sigh out all his air in a sound that was half groan, half wail. Henrietta leaned forward and she sat for a long time holding his fingers in hers, caressing them. He could feel the skin of her fingers, slippery, smooth, warm against his own.

Putuwa. That was the word Tagaran had taught him. Putuwa, and he had written the meaning into his little book: to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person.

There, on the far side of the world, it would be dusk. Tagaran, if still alive, would be a grown woman with grown children. She might have grandchildren, skinny and laughing like the child she had been when she had made a friend of Daniel Rooke.

She would remember him. Of that he was certain. She would tell her children about him, the Berewalgal who had been her friend when she was a girl. Who had had such difficulty with her name, she had to say it ten times! Who wrote it all down in two blue notebooks, so that the words would be fixed there forever.

Did she wonder what had become of the notebooks, the record of their conversations, written down for anyone who ever opened them and read? She would know, he thought, that he would keep them always.

The books had travelled with him to London on Gorgon, and then to Africa, all those years, and they were with him still, in the top drawer of the dresser in the corner. But he had never got them out, never read them. It was enough for him to know they were there. When he and Tagaran were both dead, when their children’s children were dead, the notebooks would tell the story of a friendship like no other.

He had hoped to go back. He had always hoped that. Here on these islands, with black faces all around, he had seemed closer to her. Had felt himself to be travelling towards her, only a slip of land and a single ocean between him and New South Wales. He knew now, with the clarity of fever, that he would never go back there. New South Wales was as unreachable as any other past.

He did not need to look at the notebooks to remember every detail of New South Wales. He knew how it was there in the twilight. The land lost its light before the sky. The water gathered up the last of the radiance and held it, gleaming and shifting.

If he were to go back to that night on the sand of Botany Bay, would he make the same choice again, knowing that this was where it would lead him: to the raucous birds in the guava tree outside, the voices drifting up to the window, this hot room with the circling flies, the man on the bed looking at the pattern of mildew on the ceiling like dark stars?

On his last morning in New South Wales he had woken before dawn. Through the open door he could see a few stars, although the sky was beginning to lighten around them.

Down in Sydney Cove, Gorgon waited to take him to England. It was bad luck that the long-awaited ships had finally arrived so soon after his interview with the governor. You know I do not have the power to convene a court-martial, His Excellency had said. His voice had trembled with anger. But you will be sent back at the earliest opportunity, Lieutenant, to face the consequences of your actions.

He had once thought to spend the rest of his life in New South Wales, but the earliest opportunity had turned out to be no more than a month.

There was a good breeze, he could hear the harbour slapping itself up against the rocks at the foot of the point. As soon as it was dawn they would ready Gorgon to sail. There would be no timekeeper to be wound on this voyage, and no new land at the end of it, only the unknown years of the rest of his life.

He got up and went outside. There was Betelgeuse and, along with it, as it had always been, the white blaze of Rigel.

They had been there since the beginning. Whatever the beginning was. Would be still there when the speck of matter called Daniel Rooke was no longer even a name on a forgotten gravestone, when the gravestone itself had worn away, grain by grain. Even then, Rigel and Betelgeuse would still be travelling together across the sky.

He had lit his fire, made himself a last dish of sweet-tea. Warraburra. Took his chair outside and sat there with his back to the wall as he had so often before, watching the sun rise one last time. He found himself taking large breaths like sighs and there was a coldness about his heart. A gilded bird, one of the white parrots caught by the sun’s first rays, flapped magnificently across the patch of blue sky between the treetops.

At noon Gorgon cast off from its mooring and the blocks rattled and squealed as the sails were raised. He stood at the stern and looked towards the point the natives knew as Tarra, and which he had tried to name after Dr Vickery, but which people seemed determined to call after himself.

He could see the roof of his hut, and the brave little teepee of the observatory. On the very tip of the point, on the rocks below the hut, he could see a few natives. Among them he could just make out the figure of Tagaran.

She had arrived that morning, not leaping down the rocks as she usually did. They had barely spoken. There was nothing to say. But while he buckled up his bag, and clipped the latches on the sea-chest, and sat on it waiting for the men to come and carry it to the ship, she crouched over his little fire. She held her hands out to it—so close he thought she must have burned her palms—and then came over and sat beside him on the chest.

As she had done on another occasion, she took his hands between hers. He felt her fingers pressing and smoothing, transferring their heat to his. He closed his eyes. His skin had taken on the warmth of hers so he no longer knew which was hers and which his.

When the men came for his sea-chest Rooke and Tagaran looked at each other, looked away. He followed the men up the rocks, along the ridge. At the top he did not turn. He kept his hand closed tight around itself, around the warmth she had put there, and went on, down the hill, along the track to where the boats were waiting.

But now, leaning on the stern rail as the ship gathered way, he could see her down on the very end of the point. She was standing on the rock from which he had once watched a man spear a fish and tuck it into his belt cord. She was so far out that the waves were washing over her feet at each respiration of the water. He found himself smiling: she was as close to Gorgon as she could get while remaining on land.

As the wind filled the sails and Gorgon picked up speed down the harbour, he waved, and she answered straight away, her arm drawing one large shape through the air. Between them across the water a long thread stretched out, spinning out longer and longer as their figures grew small.

Soon Tagaran become indistinguishable from the rocks around her, the rocks indistinguishable from the headland, the headland nothing more than a distant part of the landscape. Tagaran was invisible now, but she was a part of everything he could see, like the faintest, most distant star, sending its steady light out towards him across space.