Half a mile away and half an hour later a seaman in a medium state of drunkenness named William Blair was entering an obscure ale-house in a narrow lane close to the docks. He had been paid off two hours previously after eight months at sea. In those two hours he had travelled some three hundred yards from the edge of the water. He was in his best shore clothes, still had most of his money and was poised precariously between jollity and truculence.
As he swaggered up between the tables he tripped over feet that hadn’t been there before and stumbled slightly. ‘Stow them trotters, bonny lad,’ he said, more for the sake of dignity than anything else. Blair was always careful of his dignity, which led him sometimes into quarrels. He was short of stature but very quick. And he was fearless.
The man thus addressed made no answer but he kept his feet where they were. Looking down, Blair saw bright dark eyes set close together and a bitter mouth. Most of the man’s face was shadowed by his hat, which was high in the crown, varnished and polished in sailor’s fashion.
‘Well,’ Blair said, coming up to the counter, brushing the rain from the front of his buff nankeen jacket, ‘still gans on spittin’, I wish to God it would rain and be done.’
The landlord was bald and corpulent, with a greasy apron and an impassive face and dull brown eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is looking at it one way, but a drizzle is good for trade, brings ’em in.’
‘Anythin’ is good for this trade. All weathers. You canna gan wrong, man. Gie us a gill o’ best Jamaican, an’ let us see you fill it up.’
The voice, rudely peremptory, came from behind him as he was taking out his purse to pay. He knew without needing to look that it was the man whose feet he had tripped over. He noticed another man, in a long, ragged cloak, go out through a door behind the counter, but thought nothing of it, being again concerned with dignity, which did not allow him to glance round. It did not permit him, either, to put away his purse other than very slowly. ‘Iggerant,’ he said regretfully to the landlord, loud enough for the other man to hear. ‘The majority o’ persons learn to tell the difference between their arse an’ their elber, but there will allus be them as cannot. There is a class o’ lad that will still gan on tryin’ to shit through his elber joints.’
He listened for the scrape of a chair, some sound of movement behind him, but heard nothing. He drank deeply, felt the heat of the rum in his throat and chest, knew he was on the way to getting good and drunk. ‘I’m fra Sunderland,’ he said loudly. ‘Gie us another, if you please, landlord. A exact copy.’
The landlord nodded. His eyes had been on the purse and its contents and on the pocket to which it had been returned. ‘Just off a ship, are you?’
‘Docked this afternoon. Seventy-five days from Caracas. The Brig Albion, Captain Josiah Rigby. I am bleddy glad to be off her, the first mate was a cannibal in human form.’ Blair fixed the landlord with a belligerent stare. ‘If we meet ashore I will spill him out,’ he said.
The ragged man reappeared and a few moments later two young women came in laughing together, hair wet from the rain. They came directly up to the counter.
‘Goin’ to buy us a drink, my chuck?’
‘I will buy you a drink,’ Blair said handsomely. ‘Billy Blair is not a man to say no to the ladies. But don’t get up yor hopes, as he is not purposin’ to gan on wi’ it all bleddy night long.’
‘Speaks pleasant, don’t he?’ the same woman said. She had an Irish accent, hair the colour of pale carrot and a pretty, anaemic face, darkly bruised on the right side, over the cheekbone. ‘I like a good-spoken man,’ she said. ‘Yer can keep these foul-mouth gits. Gin please, Captain. How about you, Bessie? This here is Bessie. I’m Eve.’
‘Gin,’ Bessie said.
‘Gin for the ladies, rum for me,’ Blair said. ‘By God,’ he added to no one in particular and passed a hand over his face.
‘It goes down on the slate,’ the landlord said. ‘No need to pay every time round. In this type of occupation you gets to be a judge of human nature, you gets to know who you can trust.’
‘Sure, it is not often you find a open-handed feller in these parts,’ Eve said.
‘What about these parts?’ Blair leered and pointed down at himself.
Eve uttered some high mirthless laughter. ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ she said. ‘What parts you hail from, Billy boy?’
‘He’s a wee cockalorum from Scotland.’
Blair turned to meet the dark, close-set eyes and thin smile. The man was still sitting sprawled there. He had taken off his hat, revealing a mop of black ringlets glistening with oil. He was strong-looking, with broad shoulders and thick legs. ‘You again,’ Blair said. His hand strayed a little towards his right hip. ‘Been curlin’ yor hair, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘Bleddy scut-head.’
‘Take no notice, darlin’ Billy,’ Eve said, pressing close against him.
‘I will mince him up,’ Blair said with extreme ferocity. ‘I told him once I an’t a Scotchman.’
‘Have another drink,’ the landlord said. ‘I will stand it. It is not often I take to a man. We got meat pies in the kitchen. Prime beef. You,’ he said to the seated man, ‘you hold your gab or you will go out on your arse.’
The place was more crowded now. The woman called Bessie had gone off to join some others round the table. Billy allowed himself to be pacified. He had more rum and a plateful of pies. He was having some difficulty now in seeing clear across the room and was tending increasingly to reduce the range of his focus. Standing up close against him, Eve gave him a gentle squeeze of his balls.
‘Full o’ grape-shot, them,’ Billy said boastfully, through a mouthful of meat pie. ‘England’s finest.’ He had taken a definite fancy to Eve, with her blue eyes and delicate pallor of underfeeding. ‘Some bastid been cloutin’ you?’ he said, looking at the disfiguring bruise on her cheek.
She laughed on the same high, careless note. ‘I was runnin’ round in circles an’ I bumped into meself.’
‘Have you somewhere we can gan together, just the two of us?’
‘I have got a love-nest all me own, darlin’ Billy. But let’s have a dance first, let’s have a bit of fun for God’s sake, we might all be dead tomorrer, Jemmy, mightn’t we?’
This had been addressed to the landlord who agreed with every appearance of fervour. ‘Where the devil is the fiddler?’ he said. ‘Where is Sullivan?’
The cry was taken up by others – several people wanted to dance, it seemed. The fiddler was found in a dark corner, sleeping with his head on the table. Roused, he came shambling out into the centre of the room, clutching fiddle and bow, a tall, ragged figure with glinting stubble on his cheeks, a dark shock of hair and dazed green eyes that seemed lately to have looked on wonders and to be glancing after them still.
‘Give us a reel!’ somebody shouted.
‘I’ll not play without a drink,’ Sullivan said. ‘Niver a note.’
‘Give him a drink.’
‘I seen you before,’ Billy said. He steadied himself against the counter, took a careful pace forward and looked closely at the long face and beautiful, bemused eyes of the fiddler. ‘We was on shipboard together somewhere,’ he said. ‘Michael Sullivan. Always arguin’.’ He paused for a moment, swaying slightly. Then he had it: ‘The Sarah, Captain McTavish, ’bout five, six years ago, cargo of hides fra Montevideo. Am I right or am I wrong?’
Sullivan paused a long moment as though gathering his wits. ‘I was on that ship,’ he said at last. ‘I will not say that I wasn’t. It was you done all the arguin’, not me. McTavish was for iver blasphemin’.’
‘Dead now. He overdone it on the bottle.’ Feet planted for balance, Billy looked proudly about him. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘there canna be many that has a memory like Billy Blair. Drunk or sober, Blair is razor sharp. You remember me? Come now, you canna have forgot Billy Blair?’
‘I do an’ I don’t,’ the fiddler said. Some change had come over his face. ‘Listen, Billy,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to be dancin’, ’tis a idle pursuit an’ the Pope has frequently spoke out agin it as leadin’ to all manner of sins.’
‘What’s wrong wi’ you?’ Billy screwed up his eyes in order to see the fiddler’s face better. ‘Why you switchin’ yor lamps about?’
‘Stir yourself, Sullivan, give us a reel,’ the landlord said. ‘What do you mean by talking?’
‘He needs another drink,’ Billy said. ‘Once a shipmate always a shipmate, wi’ Billy Blair. Gie us yor hand, man. Have you follered the sea since?’
‘I follered the divil. Listen –’
But then Eve was standing close again and there were two men between Billy and Sullivan, one of them he of the ragged cloak. ‘Stow your gab,’ this man said roughly to the fiddler.
‘Come on, Sullivan darlin’, give us a reel,’ Eve said.
After that events became confused in Billy’s mind. Sullivan made no further attempt at conversation. He played ‘I’ll Away No More’ at a brisk pace and followed it with ‘Sweet William’. There was dancing; the small space was crowded with people jostling together. Eve laughed a lot and touched him intimately. The drink and the dancing had brought colour to her face. After a while she excused herself with a tender smile. ‘I’ll just be away for a piss, darlin’,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you again before you can shake yer peg.’
But she did not come back; and this defection changed the quality of everything in a strange and sudden way. The fiddle fell silent. There were fewer people in the room and these only men. The landlord’s looks grew sullen and disdainful. Billy was sweating and asked for ale but this came slowly and when it came was sour and thin.
These various factors combined to turn his mood ugly. Such sudden lowerings are difficult to take with equanimity, even for milder temperaments than Billy’s. It is one thing to know that pleasure is fleeting, youth ephemeral and the grave just round the corner; it is quite another to have it brought home to you all in the space of five minutes. ‘What taplash piss is this?’ he said. ‘You have served me wi’ the washings o’ the casks.’ And he splashed the rest of his beer down on to the stone floor.
‘Now that was the act of a out-and-out swine,’ the landlord said. ‘I see I was mistaken in you. You can pay up your score and get out. There is three shillings and four pence on the slate.’
‘That is robbery, you fat bouger,’ Billy said. ‘If I come round that bleddy counter you’ll be right sorry. Where is Sullivan? Shipmate, let’s you an’ me cast off from here. I have got money, I will stand treat.’
But it was precisely at this lordly moment that Billy found he had no money, none at all: the purse was gone from his pocket. And when in the shock of this discovery he looked at the landlord’s face and saw the ugly complacency on it, he knew with that power of divination that descends on the cheated, instant and terrible, like a dark afflatus, that from the moment of walking into this ale-house he had been among actors. ‘My purse,’ he said. ‘That Irish crack has stole my purse. We could catch her yet, before she gets it to her scully.’ He made a movement away from the counter.
‘No you don’t,’ the landlord said. ‘Cover the door. What purse? I never saw no purse. Anyone here see a purse? Catch a hold of him, lads.’
He had started round the counter. Two men moved on Billy, one from either side. He put a hand to his hip pocket but the knife was gone too. Drink and shock had slowed him but he had time to throw his tankard into the first man’s face and hear it strike against the teeth, time to take two steps and land a hard kick on the landlord’s kneecap. He was staggered by a wide-angled blow to the side of the head, evaded another by some instinctive cunning of the body, struck back and missed, slipped on the wet flags, recovered. A body fell against him and he struck at it, only to realize it was on its way floorwards anyway, and not by his doing. He took another jolting blow to the face. Someone caught at his arms from behind.
‘Well, my mannikin, how goes it now?’
Billy could feel blood running into his mouth. Someone was groaning behind him. There was a man lying on the floor. Through a bitter film of moisture he saw the smiling face of the man who had baited him. He had a gold band in one ear and smelled of coconut oil. ‘Scut-head,’ Billy said. He made a violent effort to free his right arm so as to strike at the face before him. Without ceasing to smile the man gave him a blow in the stomach which cut off his wind completely.
‘All right,’ he said, when he could speak. ‘I’m done. Let me sit down.’
‘Scut-head, is it?’ the other said softly. His eyes were shining. With the outer edge of his hand he gave Billy a light, almost casual blow across the bridge of the nose, blinding him with tears. When these cleared he saw that the man on the floor was Sullivan; there was blood in his hair. ‘Give the fiddler a sousing,’ someone said.
Billy did not see this done as he was hauled off now into a smaller room and seated on a stool. The same two men stood beside him. One of them had a badly split lip, he noted with satisfaction. ‘There’s yen blaggard earned his shillin’,’ he said. His right eye was half closed up.
‘Now then, Billy boy,’ the dark-complexioned man said. ‘We have had our little difference. It is a simple enough matter I have to put to you. My name is Haines, you will get to know me well. I am bosun on a fine, new-built ship an’ we finds ourselves needing one or two likely lads. Now you are a likely lad an’ no mistake, a fine little strutter, you are. You owe money here that you cannot pay by any manner of means. Where are you going to get three shillings an’ four pence, darlin’ Billy? You signs for the voyage all fair and square, or the landlord calls the officers an’ lays charges agin you. There is plenty of people to swear you never had no purse when you come in. He will swear debt an’ assault agin you, an’ he will put his heart into it – you have near crippled him.’
Billy spat some blood on to the floor. ‘I’m right sorry to hear that,’ he said. He was caught and he knew it. What Haines was telling him was an old story. ‘I walked in the wrong door, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘That gang o’ thieves shares out my purse, you pays the score here an’ docks it out my wages. What manner o’ ship is she? Where is she bound? You are never a bosun of a navy ship.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘If she is not a navy ship,’ Billy said slowly, ‘she must be a Guineaman – you wouldn’t get up to this for a ordinary merchant vessel.’
‘Well, my game cock, which is it to be? It will be proved agin you, never doubt it, you will go to prison till it is paid. An’ how long will that take, my bantam? Men have died in prison for the sake of a shillin’. You been in prison before, Billy?’
Billy looked at the bosun’s face. The narrow-set eyes were observing him with close interest. There was not much cruelty in Billy’s nature and it came to him now, with naive surprise, that Haines was getting pleasure from this. Spattered with blood as he was and still half dazed, he had his dignity to think of. He sat up straight on his stool, gripping the sides for balance. ‘Blair is the name,’ he said. ‘It is only my mates call me Billy.’
Not very far away, in Mount Street, Daniel Calley came in from the rain. He had been working since first light, carrying sheep carcasses and crates of fish up from the quayside to the top of the market in Stone Street. He had ninepence in his pocket and he was wet through and hungry. Also, in an obscure way, he was distressed. As usual the bargeman and stallkeepers between them had cheated him and as usual he had not been able to understand how. The shift to symbolic modes of reasoning, the essential transfer from concrete to abstract normally occurring in the course of childhood, had never occurred at all in Calley’s case. He could not work out what was due to him. He puzzled at it as he toiled back and forth but the figures would not lodge in his head. Sometimes he was driven to ask, but he could not understand the glib explanations. He would clench his big fists in misery – not so much at thoughts of the money but at being derided and treated unkindly. A simple sort of joking was the best way with him then; the men who cheated him knew that. Like a child he could be confused and softened by jokes; but a wrong word to Calley when he was excited or disturbed could have dangerous consequences.
He entered the pothouse where he usually ate when he had money and often slept – they let him sleep in the yard in a little covered space behind the chicken coop. He took off leather harness and back-pads and fish-slimed apron and shook the rain out of his hair. He was squat and very muscular, broader in the nape than the skull, so that his head was tapering and blunt like a seal’s – a resemblance that the rain, by sleeking down his brown silky hair, had made more obvious. In the close, low-raftered room he gave off a steam of wet clothing and sheep’s blood and fish oil, enriching the effluvia of boiled mutton and stale beer already resident there.
He asked the serving girl, whose name was Kate and who was fourteen and had one leg shorter than the other, to bring him mutton broth – all the place offered. While it was coming he thought about his entertainment for the rest of the evening. He knew the cost of certain basic things and on his fingers he could balance accounts. He knew he could have his mutton broth and then some treacle tart from the pastry-cook’s on the corner – he was fond of sweet things – and that Kate would come out into the yard with him for two of his pennies and that he would still have enough for a pancake next morning …
These thoughts were producing a simultaneous salivation and erection, when a man came and sat at his table, a tallish, wiry, sharp-featured man in a blue pea-jacket and wide-bottomed trousers and with his hair in a pigtail.
‘Clammy night,’ this newcomer said. ‘Keeps on rainin’, don’t it?’
Calley smiled but said nothing – he was always shy with strangers. The saliva of his anticipations made little, stretching webs at the corners of his mouth. His eyes held an unchanging radiance, as at some remote delight whose source was long forgotten. He had a complexion a woman might have envied, clear and pale, without the smallest blemish. ‘I got wet,’ he said.
‘Aye, did you so?’ The stranger cast a brisk eye over the harness and the thick leather pads against the wall. ‘Been porterin’?’
The broth arrived and Calley launched a noisy assault on it. ‘I been workin’ in the market,’ he said between mouthfuls.
‘I see it has give you a happytite. You must of got two shillin’ at least for a heavy day like that.’
Calley looked up defensively. Some of his earlier feelings of frustration and distress had returned, but it did not occur to him to lie. ‘I got ninepence,’ he said.
‘What? You have been labourin’ all the livelong day with a saddle on you like a horse an’ you gets ninepence for it? I can scarce believe my ears.’
‘I ain’t a horse,’ Calley said.
‘That is a utterly pernacious state of affairs, it is scandalous.’ The stranger was looking round the room and shaking his head in amazement. He had a peering, sniffing way of seeming to interrogate his surroundings. ‘It is enough to freeze the marrer in a man’s bones,’ he said.
Calley rested his spoon in his broth. ‘You sayin’ I am a horse?’
‘You’re a man an’ a fine strong one an’ good-lookin’ – I’ll wager the ladies is after you, ain’t they? Linin’ up for it, ain’t they?’
‘Kate likes me.’
‘I dare say she does, an’ who would not? I have took to you myself. Here, try this.’ The stranger drew a bottle from the capacious side-pocket of his jacket. ‘Take a swig of this, then tell me if you have tasted a better brandy.’
Calley drank and the liquor coursed through him, bringing with it the knowledge that this man wished him well. ‘Good brandy,’ he said.
The stranger drank and smacked his lips. ‘Nectar of the gods,’ he said. ‘Here, have some more, that’s right. What’s your name?’
‘Dan’l,’ Calley said shyly.
‘Tell me, Dan’l, what is a man like you doin’, slavin’ up hill an’ down dale, for a few pennies? You are not a horse, but they are saddlin’ you up like a horse, they are workin’ you like a horse, see what I mean?’
‘Kate comes out in the yard with me,’ Calley said. He did not want this new friend to think that his portering was the only thing about him.
‘An’ well she might. I expect you show her a good length, don’t you?’
A moment of inspiration came to Calley. ‘Like a horse,’ he said. He saw with delight that the other was laughing at this and he began laughing too.
‘That’s a good ’un. Listen, I have took to you, an’ I want to do you a favour. I am mate on a fine new ship that is bound for Africa an’ I have got the idea that I can obtain you a berth on her by exertin’ my influence with the captain. I wouldn’t do it for everyone, but we are mates, ain’t we?’
Calley smiled. His mouth shone innocently with mutton fat. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
The mate pushed the bottle over. ‘Have another swaller,’ he said. ‘Africa, there’s a place for you. Sunshine, golden beaches, as much palm wine as you can drink, trees loaded with fruit, thick with it; all you have to do is reach up an’ take it. I tell you, it is a earthly paradise. An’ the wimmen! Bigob, they are hot.’ He kissed his fingers with an extravagant gesture and a smacking sound very fascinating to Calley. ‘Sable Venus,’ the mate said. ‘They will do anythin’ you want. Hot – they are always on fire. It is the diet, all them peppers, it is the climate, it is their nature.’
‘Sable Venus,’ Calley repeated softly. Neither of these words meant anything to him, but pronounced together they had a deeply suggestive sibilance that fell on his ear like music. He drank some more from the bottle. ‘What will they do?’ he said.
‘I am goin’ to tell you somethin’ now that I have varrified from personal experience. They have got these highly developed muscles in their cunnies, they can fuck you just by squeezin’. They are trained up to it from earliest infancy.’ He paused for a moment, observing the effects of the brandy. Then he said, ‘You can try them wimmen if you want, Dan’l. Why don’t you come along with me? You gets twenty-five shillin’ a month an’ your vittles. You can leave that harness standin’ there agin the wall an’ come along with me. You will stand up like a man, you will not go creepin’ about with a saddle on your back.’
‘Not like a horse.’ Eagerly Calley waited for his friend to laugh again at the joke. ‘I got two legs, not four,’ he said.
The mate got to his feet. ‘Let’s be goin’ then,’ he said. ‘You needn’t fetch an’ carry for them bastids any more.’
Calley got up too, caught in a wave of enthusiasm. ‘Them bastids,’ he said. ‘They can carry their own sacks o’ turnips.’
‘No more sheep guts for you,’ the mate said. ‘They can get someone else to do it.’
‘Someone else can do it,’ Calley said. He was still laughing but rather uncertainly now.
‘You come along with me, I will see you all right.’
But the mirth had left Calley’s face, to be replaced by a look of anxiety. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t come now.’ He felt unhappy to be disappointing his friend but he had thought suddenly of Kate and the treacle tart.
Barton was a sensitive man in his way and he had noted the change of expression. He put an arm round Calley’s shoulders. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘We are only out in the stream. You come along with me now an’ look the ship over. If you don’t like what you see, you can be back again within the hour.’
The knowledge that Deakin was worth money had been in Jane Britto’s mind for some time, but she did not know that she intended to sell him until he spoke of leaving.
She had been waiting in the cellar where they lived for her husband and Deakin to get back, standing half stupefied in the steam of washing, with the gasping cries of the baby in her ears and no drink and no money to send out for any. But it was only when she heard them that she felt the clutch of rage at her throat.
First came the scrape of their boots in the alley above, then the clatter down the cellar steps. The two of them came through the door, filling the low room with their voices and bodies. Perhaps the rage sprang from this, the intrusion, though there was little here she could have wanted to defend, in this dank place with the mangle and tub against the wall, smells of rank bacon and tallow fat, the sick baby, the two children squabbling together on a mattress in the corner. But there is no world so wretched that it cannot be violated and Jane felt her body stiffen as she looked at the two men. They were wet and smelled of drink and Britto was jovial and Deakin, as usual, serious – this much she took in.
‘What have you got for us to eat?’ Britto said, almost as soon as he was inside the door. ‘Me and Jim in famishin’, ain’t we, mate?’ He was a stocky, dogged man with bad teeth and steady eyes and too much suffusion of blood in his face. The abruptness of his speech she knew for a sign of failure – they had been looking for casual work on the docks.
‘Me and Jim is famishin’,’ she repeated, with a sudden strident mimicry that astonished them. ‘Me and Jim is a pair o’ pisspots.’ She would have liked to go on longer in this oblique, ironical vein, but rage got the better of her. Her voice rose and shrilled. ‘Proud on yerselves, are you? Think you are men? Where is the rest of it?’
The smile left Britto’s face. He looked uncertain for a moment, then angry. ‘Where is what?’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The money what you have kept back for yer fambly. The penny-worth o’ juniper-juice what you have brought home for yer wife.’
‘We didn’t find nothin’,’ Britto said sullenly. He glanced at the silent man beside him but found no support there, in the tanned face, the serious, reckless eyes.
‘No good looking at him. You’d do better to look at them.’ She motioned violently towards the mattress in the corner, and at once, frightened by the gesture or by the prospect of blows to follow, the white-faced little boy and girl began gasping and crying.
‘You trollop, stow your noise. I ain’t got nothin’ to give you.’ Anger at being obliged to state the fact thickened his voice. He took two steps towards her. ‘You loud bitch,’ he said. ‘You better mum your dubber.’
‘My arse.’ She felt rage and fear together. He was not less likely to strike her with the other man there. ‘Where’d you get the drink then? Think I can’t smell it on you?’
‘We went up town,’ Deakin said, in his light, dispassionate voice. ‘We were holding horses’ heads for some gentry. They gave us threepence between us an’ we drank it.’ He paused briefly, then in the same tone said, ‘I’ll be leaving tomorrow – early morning.’
He was taken by surprise himself at the announcement – he had intervened only to avert a row. But the main decisions of his life had been like this, recognitions of some truth, something self-evident, that had to be acted on. ‘Devon,’ he said. ‘That’s where I am going.’
‘Well, there’s a piece o’ news,’ Jane said. ‘More’n two weeks you been here, takin’ up space.’ Once in that time, when she had been drinking alone, Deakin had come back in the afternoon and they had lain together on Deakin’s pallet and coupled without tenderness and she had clutched at his hard body and felt the welts of old floggings on his narrow back. ‘Then you go waltzing off,’ she said, ‘without so much as a kiss my bum.’ Her rage was rising again, directed now at Deakin’s uncluttered life. Casually, just like that, he could walk away, disappear – and the money with him, she thought suddenly: within half a minute of his leaving the price on him would be lost to them for ever …
‘You leave him alone,’ Britto said. ‘He has got the right to go when he likes.’
But she could tell that Britto hadn’t known either. ‘Don’t you talk about rights,’ she said. ‘What is it to me that you was shipmates? Very fine, ain’t it? He’s run from a navy ship, you tell him he can stay here. You does the favour, I gets the extra work.’ The idea expanded steadily in her mind while she was talking. It might be as much as three pounds that Deakin was worth. For twopence a day and keep she could get a girl to mind the little ones. She could buy a grinder, get scraps from the butcher, make sausages and sell them in the street. There was profit in sausages. Perhaps they could save the baby …
‘Little place called Sheepwash,’ Deakin said. ‘That’s where I am going.’
‘No one is askin’ where yer goin’.’
‘You aren’t asking but I am telling you,’ he said mildly. ‘I was born there, see, an’ I’ve not been back since I ran away when I was twelve.’
‘You done some runnin’ in yer time,’ she said bitterly. She paused, looking at Deakin’s composed, fair-browed face, the remote blue eyes that always seemed to look beyond people. The intention to sell him had come to her like sudden hope and blossomed with her rage. Without rage to keep it fresh she was afraid it would wither. ‘Never bring a penny in!’ she shouted. ‘Catch a few bloody fish in the river. I’m killin’ myself at this mangle. They are callin’ me a whore in the court because I have got two men in here. An’ you spent it all, didn’t you? Call yerselves men?’
Britto moved towards her. The voice of the little girl on the bed rose in remonstrance or fear. The woman moved back sharply, felt round behind her for the long-handled pan on the stove. ‘Keep off,’ she said.
‘The bebby’s sick,’ she said. ‘It can’t hardly cry any more.’ A storm of weeping shook her suddenly, even while she felt for a weapon. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I dunno. You could of brought a drop o’ gin back.’
Britto went to the crib in the corner, looked down at the bloodless, crumpled face, with its inflamed lids, the glaze of vomit on its chin. The baby looked up at him with an impersonal solemnity, its hands curled against its breast like tiny, shell-less crabs. After a moment Britto turned away, raising his own hands in a clumsy gesture of helplessness, and he was again the man she knew, dogged and ashamed.
She felt something like pity for him then: he had tried for work all day and come back to this. ‘It has got somethin’ wrong with its stomick,’ she said. ‘It can’t keep anythin’ down.’ She could not tell him what she was going to do. Not then, because she knew he would prevent her; and perhaps never – not only because of the thrashing, but because such a hurt to his pride would make him unpredictable and she was afraid he might leave her. She could conceal the money, she could say it came from somewhere else, she would think of something. ‘You goin’ out again?’ she said, looking at both men.
‘Not me,’ Deakin said. ‘I’ll get my gear together. I want to get an early start. Not that I have got much,’ he added with a faint smile.
‘There is cockfightin’ over behind the Pickerel,’ Britto said. ‘I had a hand in trainin’ two of them. The owner might put somethin’ on for me.’
She knew this indirectness meant he wanted to go but would stay if she liked – the look of the baby had softened him. ‘When’s that then?’
‘Ten o’clock. They’re fightin’ our birds first.’
‘You go,’ she said. ‘You might win somethin’.’
Britto grinned, relieved at her change of tone. ‘That would make a change.’
‘I’m goin’ out to see about some washin’. There is a bit of bacon an’ some ’taters in the stove. You could hot ’em up.’
She put on bonnet and shawl and went out quickly without looking any more at Deakin. The Bell was the inn named on the poster. It was a mile off but the rain had stopped now and the moon rose clear in the sky. At the inn she was directed upstairs, where she found two men at a table.
‘You the ones takin’ on crew for a slaver?’
‘That’s right, my pretty. Hunnerd per cent.’ The man who answered her was sharp-faced and smiling and had an alert, peering sort of way with his eyes. ‘Liverpool Merchant,’ he said, ‘a spanking new ship that anyone would be proud to sail with, only we ain’t takin’ any ladies on, not this partikkler voyage.’
‘Mr Barton, you go too fast,’ the other said in a hoarse monotone. He was in a grey wig and a stiff blue coat with brass buttons and his cocked hat lay on the table before him.
‘You the skipper?’ she said. ‘I know where there is a man for you. I can tell you where you can find him. Once you get a hold of him, he can’t choose but go. He’s run from the navy.’
‘Has he so? Been treating you badly, has he? You tell us where he has put into, my dear, we will take him off your hands.’
‘I can take you,’ she said. ‘I can show you the place. If we was to go now we would find him on his own. How much will you give me for him?’
‘Able seaman, is he? Fore the mast? Sound in wind and limb, is he? How old is he?’
This hoarse questioning caught her unprepared. She met the gaze of raw-looking blue eyes. They were small in the dark red square of the face and they held no kindness for her. “Bout twenty-five,’ she said. ‘I dunno. He’s been on an’ off ships most of his life. I want three pound.’
‘If we can secure him, and if he has got all his arms and legs attached to him, I will give you two pounds. That is the going rate and that is what we are paying.’
‘Haw, that’s a good ’un, arms an’ legs,’ the other man said.
‘I want three pound.’
The man in the wig sighed harshly. ‘Explain to the woman, Mr Barton,’ he said.
‘My pretty, I am afraid you do not unnerstand the finances of it. To take in hand a able-bodied man what has his full copplement of arms and legs and what doesn’t see eye to eye with you as to the tack he should foller and is inclined to be disputacious, that needs three stout men. Them men has to be found and them men has to be paid and that pay has to come out of the price. That leaves two pound for you, or there’s the door.’
She had not wanted to think about Deakin, but now something resigned about his face came into her mind and she remembered the scars she had felt upon his back. Her resolve did not change but the composure that had sustained her so far began to break at last. She felt tears gathering. She wanted gin so badly now that she could hardly keep her limbs still. ‘Blast yer livers an’ yer eyes,’ she said with a sob. ‘You neither of you worth him pissin’ on. Make it guineas, for God’s sake, give me two guineas for him.’
Having assembled his few possessions and made a bundle of them, Deakin lay down on the pallet in the narrow space against the wall at the far end of the cellar. The damp from the wall came against his face. He heard a catch of breath from the exhausted baby. The children on the bed were silent, perhaps sleeping. He began to think about the next day. He had no money and no plans, no sense even of a likely sequence of events. All his programme was imagined sensation, the silent street he would step out into, dawn coming slowly over the tips and brick kilns and dirty pools on the outskirts, then the open fields, and himself moving through luminous spaces, with the sun rising and the fields filling with light and himself always moving, unimpeded, totally free and yet awaited – he knew the impossible ambition of the escaper to find welcome horizons.
He had not been back for fourteen years. He did not know if his mother was still alive. He wanted now to know – she had pleaded for him as far as her fear allowed. Whether his father was alive or dead he did not care. He had a memory of the place he had started from, as simple and brightly coloured as a child’s picture book, soft green folds of hills, lush grass, red earth, brindled cows grazing knee-deep in buttercups. Embedded in this like a splinter was the stone farmhouse on the coomb-side, the dark little shed where his father locked him up after beatings for tasks neglected or badly performed, though this was a dark mystery as the beatings came regularly in spite of all effort, and pardon did not depend on anything he could do or say but had to be wrought by the darkness of the shed – sometimes an hour or two, sometimes whole nights he had spent in the dark, the pain of his stripes receding to make way for fear.
The shed itself had no place in the picture, no shape or form, only the darkness within it and the plenitude of light he had stepped out into the morning of his escape, that dawn he had found a short bar inside and used it to wrench the door off its hinges. He had never forgotten this violent conquest of the dark, the feel of the metal, the joy and fear of the splintering wood, the revelation of light that cold morning with sheep coughing in the field above and the distant sound of a dog barking. Within half an hour he had been on the upland road and begging lifts to Bristol.
He had run away often since then, but all flight had been attended by the radiance of that dawn. He was thinking of it now, when he heard steps on the stairs coming down.