The ship Thurso sent by made quick passage and the letters were in Kemp’s hands within a month.
‘He is leaving without his full complement of negroes,’ Kemp said to his son as they sat together in their office overlooking the waterfront. ‘He declares himself short by twelve.’
They sat at the mahogany table, on whose polished surface objects – jeweller’s scales, a set of weights in silver, an ivory paper-knife, a japanned box – were reflected so deeply and with such lustre that they seemed afloat there. The February afternoon was cold and a banked fire of sea-coal burned in the grate behind them with flickering, rose-blue flames. The sky through the window was gravid with snow and the river ran slate-grey and sullen, half obscured by the warehouses and storage sheds along its nearside bank.
‘Matthew says little beyond that he is well and in good spirits,’ Kemp said, passing over his nephew’s letter. ‘I do not know how Thurso computes that twelve. The commonly accepted figure for capacity is two negroes for every unit of tonnage. The Liverpool Merchant is a hundred and two tons and so he is eight short, not twelve, by my reckoning.’ He had aged in appearance of recent weeks; he had lost colour and the flesh of his cheeks had loosened and sagged. But he was as master of the facts as ever. ‘That is allowing for headroom between the platforms of two foot six inches,’ he added.
Erasmus looked down at the brief lines of his cousin’s letter. He could see no reference to good spirits in it. Paris sent his best respects, was in good health, asked to be remembered to his aunt and cousin. The rather large, angular characters recalled the surgeon’s physical being strongly and disagreeably to Erasmus. He remembered the subfusc suit, the awkward courtesy, the pale, lined face. That disgraced presence at the dinner table … Erasmus almost never revised opinion or reinterpreted experience. Enmity was like a sort of faith with him. After some moments he found that his teeth had clenched hard together with aversion.
‘Of course,’ his father said, ‘Thurso is an experienced man, no doubt he has ways of disposing the negroes so as to make the most of the space. It seems there has been a case of virulent infection among them, very dangerous if it takes hold. A bloody flux. But he has hopes that by a prompt departure now and with God’s grace a favourable passage, he will bring them without more loss to the West Indies.’ Kemp paused a moment, looking up through the window at the charged clouds. Then he said, ‘I hope I have not been mistaken in the reliance I have placed on Captain Thurso.’
Erasmus felt an obscure distress. It was like a betrayal, the breaking of a promise, hearing his confident father express doubts and misgivings. Such moments of discouragement had been frequent with him lately. ‘Diseases among them are rather my cousin’s business,’ he said. ‘It was to look to such things that he went with the ship.’
But Kemp seemed not to hear this. His eyes were still turned towards the window and the cold reflected light from the river lay along his brows. Erasmus saw an expression of bitterness and sorrow come to his father’s face and heard him say in low tones, ‘What devil was it counselled me to turn to cotton, I wonder? I should have stayed in sugar.’
These muttered words and the drawn mouth of his father made an impression on Erasmus never to be effaced; but for the moment it was their seeming irrelevance that startled him, the sense that his father was following some lonely track of his own. He experienced a sort of foreboding and an impulse of protective love. He sought for words but found none.
‘Well,’ Kemp said heavily after a moment, ‘let us get out the maps.’ It was a favourite occupation of his now to chart the course of the ship and this news of departure had provided fresh incentive.
They spread the map on the table before them, holding down the corners with the jeweller’s weights. ‘This is where they left from,’ Kemp said. ‘Here is situated the Company fort.’ His nail touched the mouth of the Kavalli River, made a faint scraping sound across the flats of mud that Paris had seen transfigured by moonlight, stopped at the point where the two bound girl slaves, both roughly of an age with Sarah Wolpert, had choked and drowned in the surf.
In that quiet room, with its oak wainscoting and Turkey carpet, its shelves of ledgers and almanacks, it would have been difficult for these two to form any true picture of the ship’s circumstances or the nature of trading on the Guinea Coast, even if they had been inclined to try. Difficult, and in any case superfluous. To function efficiently – to function at all – we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statements of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavour and lawful profit. And we have maps.
‘See, my boy,’ Kemp said, ‘Just about here they should be. They have been on the way a month now, near enough. They should be somewhere here, north of Caracas. They will be keeping on a latitude some fifteen degrees above the equator.’ His finger traced the lines, caressed the contours of flying cherubs with puffed-out cheeks, and sportive dolphins, and the hulls of miniature ships with bellying sails that travelled this benign Atlantic. Meanwhile the real ship was beating to westward, packed to suffocation with negroes in irons, its hold swarming with rats, other merchantmen keeping well to windward of the stench. ‘They will have caught the winter trades,’ Kemp said with something of his old enthusiasm. ‘I dare say as we sit here talking of it they are already in sight of the Sugar Islands.’
Erasmus assented to this. It was the best way to look at it. He was glad to see his father returning to a more sanguine mood. Afterwards, after the event, it was to come to him with bitter self-reproach that he had known all the time that more was worrying his father than the progress of the ship, though this became the focus of it. There had been signs – bills deferred, credit renewed on high terms, the abrupt suspending of their policy of buying land adjoining the roads into the city. He could not, of course, have known the extent of his father’s losses. Even the indefatigible Partridge, whom Wolpert had set on to look into Kemp’s affairs, had failed to discover the merchant’s disastrous attempts to recoup himself on the Stock Exchange; none knew of these but Kemp and his broker. And throughout this time Erasmus too had been absorbed in his own insulating dream.
Sarah’s eighteenth birthday was approaching, and with it the announcement of their betrothal; and it seemed to Erasmus that the changes in the seasons and all the sights and sounds around him were merely portents of this stupendous event. It was there in the usual din of the streets, in the smells of raw cotton and hemp that surrounded him in the warehouse, as it was in the silver skies of the March evenings, the bright drifts and linings burrowed out by the sun in the banks of cloud over the Mersey and the ruffling breezes over the water. There later in the new crop of dock and nettle in the waste ground and the songs of larks above the fields outside the city, the air full of climbing, singing birds, rending and repairing the sky with song. And the time from that freezing day when he had looked at the map with his father to this joyous stitching of the larks was for Erasmus all one indeterminate period of waiting.
Three days before the event, in the early afternoon, he rode over to the Wolpert house, having asked leave beforehand. Afterwards he could not remember any of the words he had exchanged with his father in parting – commonplace words in any case. But he remembered that his father had evaded his eyes.
It was around the time of year he had first ridden over to the house on the pretext of visiting Charles. He remembered his feelings of humiliation, his failure to understand the ancient footman – still in service there, more doddery than ever now – the clear, unearthly singing that had come to him through the trees and brought him stumbling into the open to be enrolled as Ferdinand …
Things were very different now. On the day of Sarah’s birthday she would be his by tide, by consent, by public acknowledgement. He would never again be required to go against the grain of his nature in order to please her. She would love and respect him too much ever to require it.
In the light of these triumphant feelings familiar sights seemed new this afternoon. The beeches bordering the avenue, in full leaf now, were a fresher green than he could remember, the singing of hidden warblers more deliberately sweet. In the parkland the chestnut trees were candled with blossom and the terraces below the house were vivid with geraniums.
He was early, which meant he could take his tea alone with Sarah and her mother, old Wolpert and Charles being out at business still and the younger brother, Andrew, in the schoolroom under the eye of his tutor. Afternoon sunshine filled the room, entering through the tall French windows. In this radiant light Erasmus looked round him and felt the same triumph, the same sense of newness in familiar things. The water-colours on the walls, the needlework over the chimneypiece embroidered by Sarah’s maternal grandmother, now dead, Mrs Wolpert’s beaded work-box on the low table beside her, the fine set of moulded beakers on their glass shelf, all possessed a special effulgence on this day. It was in this room, he remembered suddenly, that he and Sarah had once come face to face, during rehearsal of the play. He had been looking for his book … He had failed in address that day, failed miserably, but she had known – he remembered the wave of colour that had come to her face. Afterwards she had seemed to disregard everything in her eagerness to play Miranda. How he had hated that transformation, all that posturing and make-believe. And the nonsense of an enchanted island where divisions could be healed and enemies reconciled … He would never allow such a thing to happen again. He caught Sarah’s eye and saw that she was happy.
Most of the time they spent discussing the arrangements. Flowers had been ordered – carnations, red and white. Invitations had been sent out long ago – there were more than a hundred on the list of guests. There was to be a ball, with an orchestra of five. If the weather stayed fine supper would be served out of doors on the terrace.
‘We can dance out of doors, too,’ Sarah said. ‘We can dance on the lawns.’ Her face wore its usual delicate composure, in which there was always something impervious, or perhaps obstinate; but her eyes were bright with excitement.
‘Outside on the grass?’ Erasmus laughed a little at the extravagance of it. ‘That’s an odd notion. Have you forgotten that there is a perfectly good ballroom inside the house?’
‘Yes, but don’t you see, it would be something different, it would be something to remember. People would remember my party for ever. Everyone dances in ballrooms.’
This, Erasmus felt, was precisely the point, but he merely smiled and shook his head, glancing indulgently at Mrs Wolpert. Better to say nothing, she would forget the idea soon – or so he hoped.
However, she was exalted now and took it into her head that he should see her new dress, the one she was to wear for the ball, and not merely see it, but see it on – a suggestion that her mother objected to immediately on grounds of propriety and some alarmed superstition. But Sarah insisted, demanded to be allowed, drawing herself up and raising her delicately moulded chin in the determined way she had when her mind was wholly set on something. In the end the mother gave in, as she generally did when the girl was wrought up in this way; she had learned to recognize the signs. And on this occasion she received no help from Erasmus, who remained silent, divided between his sense of correctness and the desire to view his love.
Sarah was away half an hour or more. When she returned, making an entry through the wide double-doors, Erasmus saw at once that she had done her hair differently, in a braid over the top of her head, and that she had added something to the natural glow of her cheeks. The dress was of silk, a soft apricot in colour, with narrow stripes in a darker shade and a vine pattern of flowers and leaves between, the skirt full, with a short train, and arranged over a hooped petticoat of cream-coloured quilted satin. High-heeled shoes with brocade straps completed the effect.
Sarah paraded before them for some time. She was flushed but serious, as befitted the occasion. For a while there was no sound in the room but the beguiling friction of silk. Having helped in the choice of material and seen the dress fitted at the dressmaker’s, Mrs Wolpert had not many words to say now. She was still far from approving the exhibition and wished it over quickly. Erasmus was silent for so long that in the end Sarah stopped and looked at him in a way that was imperious, yet somehow supplicating too. ‘You look beautiful,’ he said then. ‘It is a beautiful dress.’ His own voice sounded husky and strange to him, so great was the sincerity with which he delivered this verdict. He could hardly believe, even now, that this radiant creature would so soon be promised to him. But even as he spoke something changed in his expression. Another, even so young, even in the joy of possession, might have felt something akin to compassion for what had been patient and somehow helpless in the girl’s display, some quality of subjection in it, in the very vanity itself. But this was a reach of feeling quite beyond him. He had felt the joy – it had taken him by the throat. But below it an obscure feeling of offendedness had grown within him. Though she had looked at him and posed for him, he had begun to feel that this show was not for him only, he was sharing her with other spectators somewhere beyond the room. She was on stage again.
Displeasure at this did not last long, once he was able to assign it to weakness on Sarah’s part – her weaknesses he was confident he could deal with. By the time he took his leave he had quite recovered equanimity. Sarah, restored to her house costume of light blue lutestring, accompanied him to the end of the drive. Walking beside her, leading his horse, he felt unmixed happiness. At the gate they kissed and he held her close. He felt her press against him and the blood rose to his head and obscured his sight for some moments.
She had heard the change in his breathing. ‘My own love,’ she said.
‘Until Saturday then,’ he said. He watched her walk away, keeping his eyes fixed on her until the curve of the drive took her from his sight.
It was nearly six o’clock when he reached home. His mother heard him crossing the hall towards the staircase and called out to him. He found her alone in her small parlour, the tea things still before her.
‘No one cares a fig for my convenience,’ she began at once, before he was properly in the room. ‘That is always the last thing to be studied; my poor father would turn in his grave if he knew, well, I believe he does. I have so long been used in this way, it would be strange if he didn’t, but this goes beyond the bounds.’
From his mother’s hasty, indrawn breaths and the bridling movements of her head, Erasmus saw that she was in one of her states. ‘What is the matter, Mother?’ he asked, and there had unconsciously come into his voice the tone his father habitually used with her, breezy, affectionate, patronizingly brisk.
‘I have not even had the resolution to ring for the tea things to be removed,’ she said on a calmer, more plaintive note.
‘Well, I will do that.’ He saw now that her hair was powdered and set in the rather elaborate coiffure known as French curls, and that she was dressed for going out in a brocade gown in pink and gold, with a lace stomacher. ‘That is a handsome gown,’ he said, in the same tone. ‘You are altogether very elegant this evening, Mother.’
‘Well, but your father is not come home, he will have forgot it.’ Vexation had paled her, so that the rouge on her cheeks showed too prominently. ‘I have had that fluttering,’ she said, on a note of warning, laying a white hand over the brocaded bodice of her dress. ‘Had it not been for the tincture of hellebore your cousin Matthew recommended, I don’t know what would have happened, and now I can’t be sure the apothecary is making it up in the exact same proportions, and Matthew is not here to advise me. I think it a great pity that my nephew must stay away so long and spend his talents on rough seamen and black people.’
‘Well, I hope you do not blame father for that,’ Erasmus said, smiling. ‘You know he has much on his mind these days.’
‘How should I know it? He does not talk to me of what is on his mind. He promised to be home today in time for tea. We were to have dined early and gone to the Mansion House Gardens that are newly opened and a great draw to all the fashion of the town, to listen to the band.’
‘He cannot be much longer now,’ Erasmus said. He stayed with his mother and entertained her with the description of Sarah’s dress – she entirely shared Mrs Wolpert’s feelings about the propriety of the proceedings. They played some hands of whist together. Cards always calmed her nerves. She was a shrewd and accomplished player with a strong desire to win, which sometimes led her into cheating. Light in the room began to fail and the parlourmaid was summoned to light the lamps. Still the merchant failed to arrive. When the clock struck eight Erasmus got up. ‘He must have overlooked it completely,’ he said. ‘If something had come up in the way of business to detain him, he would have sent word. I will go down to the office and see.’
It seemed too much trouble to have the mare brought out and saddled again. There were always chairmen waiting outside the Lion at the corner of Red Cross Street. Almost at once he found two men with a sedan that passed his inspection as not too impossibly verminous.
On the way he thought of little. The slight rocking motion of the chair and the whoops of the foremost man to clear the way made drowsy rhythm in his mind and he fell into a state between musing and dozing.
He paid off the men at the end of Water Street beside the Ram’s Head and walked through the alley behind the inn on to the waterfront. There was a wind rising from across the estuary; he heard the rattle of a loose board somewhere and the creaking of the ropes that held the heavy inn-sign. A barge with a lantern at the stern lay some way out on the water.
There were no lights on the ground floor of the warehouse and the doors that gave on to the street were locked. He went round to the side of the building and ascended the short flight of metal stairs to the watchman’s shed on the landing. He found the man sprawled on a ragged quilt, open-mouthed and oblivious in a thick fume of gin. After locking up below he had obviously deemed his watch over for the night and settled down to the bottle. Erasmus considered kicking him awake, but even that degree of contact was distasteful to him. It would be the brute’s last sleep in the service of the firm, that much at least he promised himself.
From behind the shed a gallery ran the length of the building, giving access to a number of rooms that looked over the warehouse floor on one side and the waterfront on the other. His father’s office and his own smaller, adjoining one were roughly halfway along; both father and son were accustomed to enter and leave the building by this route and each had his own set of keys.
He had taken the small, half-blackened oil lamp from the watchman’s hut to light his way. The gallery itself was in darkness but he could make out a faint crack of light beneath the door of his father’s office. He knocked, waited, tried the door – it was locked. He used his key to open it. There was no one in the room. The stub of a candle in a tall holder on the table burned with an unsteady flame, sending blurred ripples over the polished surface.
Erasmus stood still for some moments, aware of nothing but a sort of mild puzzlement. The room was quiet, at once familiar and strange at this late hour, with its odours of melted candle wax and old papers and the stealthy reek of river water that entered all these buildings in the cool of the night.
He saw now that the flame of the candle was not guttering as he had thought at first, but leaning over in some current of air. This it was that accounted for the tremulous waverings of light over the table and near the wall. Glancing beyond the table, he saw that the door of the small stock-room at the far end of the office was standing half open. Perhaps his father had gone that way for some reason – there was a passage beyond it which led back on to the gallery further along. Still holding the lamp he took some steps round the table and approached the door. ‘Father,’ he called, not very loudly. ‘Are you there?’
He held the door open. Shadows were somehow too long in here. There was his own flickering shadow lying before him, but it extended further than the candle-light could have thrown it. There was another, cast by the lamp. He was holding the lamp too close to his face. He raised it and went forward a little, no more than a pace or two, but enough for him to see the dark bulk hanging above him and to take in, with the helpless particularity that accompanies shock, the exact look of the overturned stool on the floor and his father’s shoeless feet which by some accident of balance dangled one distinctly lower than the other.
Some words broke from Erasmus but he could not afterwards remember what they had been, nor what had been the sequence of his actions after the first one: with the same instinct of secrecy that had possessed his father, he had run to lock the outer door. Everything else, everything surrounding this one deliberate act, was improvised, maladroit, violent, climbing on to a chair, sawing awkwardly at the rope above his father’s head, clutching at the body in absurd scruple that it might be further damaged by a fall, falling with it, heavily, when he could not take the weight. Lying half-embraced there on the floor, he had fumbled to loosen the knot, not in the hope of restoring life – he knew there was no life left in the body – but as if in hope that the relief of it might close his father’s eyes at last. But it did not, and he could not touch the face.
He left the way he had come, locking the door again carefully behind him. The watchman was snoring still in his hut. He took a sedan from the inn and gave directions to the porters in clear and collected tones. The necessity for concealment acted on him like resolution and kept him in a semblance of calm. Only when he was home again did this begin to break down. His mother, still in her brocade gown, sat in the parlour where he had left her, playing patience. She has been here all this time, he thought, here in this one place …
‘Well, you have taken long enough,’ she said pettishly. ‘Is your father there? It is too late now in any case, I have given up all thoughts of it.’
When he failed to answer, she looked up at him sharply. Then her eyes widened and she started forward in her chair. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Where is your father?’
‘Something has happened,’ he said and his voice broke on it, not in grief yet – the death was all horror still – but in distress at not knowing how to tell her, not knowing how to speak of it to his mother, who had always had to be shielded, humoured. For a while he was silent, thinking of words to say. ‘Mother,’ he said at last, ‘you must prepare yourself–’
With a speed that took him by surprise she had flung down the cards and was out of her chair and standing close. Her head came lower than his chin but he felt no difference in height now, so fiercely did she look at him. ‘What is it?’ she said again. ‘Why don’t you speak?’ Her voice rose. ‘Has there been an accident?’
Still with an instinct of concealment or protection he said, ‘I locked the office door. No one can get in.’ It sounded like a boast. Then he felt the sharp clutch of her hands on his arms and he began to tell her but in his desire to be gradual he lost his way in the story; like a child, he grew enmeshed in the nightmare preliminaries, the clues that had led him to that hanging shape, the leaning flame, the half-opened door, the shadows that had seemed wrong, misshapen … ‘He was there, in the dark,’ he said, looking away from her in shame, his own, his father’s.
‘You say you locked the door? Did you bring away the keys?’
The sharpness of the question brought his eyes back to her. The patches of paint on her cheeks looked grotesque now, clownish, against the drained pallor of her face. But her eyes were regarding him closely and her mouth was compressed in a firm line.
‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘I have them with me.’
‘His own will be there with him, if he had locked the door. And the watchman?’
‘Watchman?’
‘Yes,’ she said with sudden angry impatience, ‘the watchman, the watchman. Gather your wits. We must be quick if we are to keep this hid. The watchman, does he have keys?’
‘Only to the storerooms below.’
‘We must have your father brought home tonight, but it cannot be done by any of our own people, it must all be done through Dr Banks. We must see him tonight, at once.’
‘But what use is that?’ He was bewildered. ‘I have told you he is dead,’ he said. ‘Would I have left him otherwise?’
‘For the certificate,’ she said, and he saw that her lips had begun trembling. ‘The doctor must sign to a cause of death. Do as I say, Erasmus. Go and see to the coach. William will be there still, he has been waiting all this while to take your father and me to the Mansion House. He will not have stabled the horses without permission.’ Her voice softened to a full tone of pity for him which he was never quite to forgive. ‘You must come with me,’ she said. ‘My poor boy, nothing will be required of you, but I must have someone … I must have a man with me at this hour of night. Go now. I will change my clothes meanwhile.’
Mutely, as if in a dream, he obeyed her. It was gone eleven when they drew up outside the doctor’s house, a large mansion in the newly opened and fashionable Bold Street. Henry Banks was now one of the leading physicians of the town but he had been doctor to the Kemps since the early days of his practice.
He received them almost at once in the small parlour he used as a consulting-room, apologizing for his evening attire of robe and skull-cap – he had been on the point of retiring for the night. He was a tall, high-shouldered man, deliberate and impressive in manner, with shrewd, equable eyes in a long face.
‘You will take something?’ he said, glancing from one to the other. He had recognized the hush of shock about them from the moment they entered the room. ‘A glass of cordial, perhaps, something to warm you? The nights are cold still. You will not? Well, then, tell me how I can be of service to you.’
At this, Elizabeth Kemp began for the first time to weep. Between bouts of tears she spoke of an accident, a terrible misadventure, she did not know which way to turn, she was sorry it was so late, they were keeping him from bed and she knew he was a man with many calls upon him, but by the time they had got the coach out …
The doctor listened with sober patience, saying little, making no attempt to prompt her or check the weeping, evidently content to let her come to the business in her own time. But Erasmus could not contain himself. This foolish prevarication of his mother’s, this flattering of the doctor, seemed shameful to him. His father was lying there, dead and disgraced and staring in the dark while she wheedled and dabbed at her eyes. Even the tears … He had to take the initiative, speak for both of them.
‘My father has done a violence to himself,’ he said harshly. ‘By misadventure, of course, but it could be taken as design and it is that we want to avoid.’ He paused, clearing some obstacle in his throat. ‘We are come to ask if you will certify to natural causes.’
‘Natural causes?’ The doctor looked sharply and coldly at Erasmus. ‘He is dead, then? And in circumstances of violence? No, I do not wish to know the manner of it. You must save that for the proper authorities. There are people appointed to examine into such things. Did you seriously think I would compound a felony, a man in my position? You would have done better to leave things to your mother.’ He turned to the mother now and his expression softened. She had been coming to him with ailments largely imaginary for upwards of twenty years and he had grown fond of her. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I am deeply sorry to hear of this accident, but really cannot see, under the circumstances –’
‘My son is overwrought,’ she said quickly. ‘He does not know what he is saying. ’Twas he that discovered my poor husband. He is little more than a boy and has got the matter quite wrong. Please forgive him. We came only to seek your advice in this terrible pass we are brought to. I am a mere woman and have small knowledge of the world and my health is far from good, as none knows better then you …’
In fact she looked less sickly, more animated, at this moment than Erasmus could ever remember seeing her. The crisis of his intervention had driven away her tears, leaving her eyes brighter, and a glow had come to warm her cheeks. Sitting upright in her plain cambric dress and trimmed hood, her hands clasped together, she looked more than well, she looked handsome; and Erasmus sensed that Banks thought so too, for all the fellow’s grave airs.
She paused a moment now as if in reflection and when she spoke again it was in a different, more considering tone: ‘My husband, as you will recall, was a high-blooded man and rather short in the neck and suffered from dizzy fits sometimes and rushes to the head.’
Banks nodded slowly. ‘That is so,’ he said. ‘He had a sanguine constitution of body. I remember letting him blood on occasion.’
‘Well, it is my belief that he consulted another doctor for this condition at certain times, for example when you yourself were away from the town or otherwise not available to be visited.’
The doctor regarded her for a moment in silence. Then, still without speaking, he looked down thoughtfully at the signet ring on his right hand. Absently, he turned it this way and that for some little while. Erasmus glanced at his mother in surprise – he had not heard before of a second doctor and was about to say so when he was checked by her slight warning frown.
The doctor looked up. His face was quite without expression. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am sometimes away. To take a second opinion would have been quite a reasonable thing for Kemp to do under the circumstances.’
‘Well, now, the difficulty is,’ she said, ‘I am so silly and not used to remembering and I cannot for the life of me bring to mind this doctor’s name and I do not know how I can find it out on such short notice. I thought you might know it. You know so many things and have a wide acquaintance among the practitioners of the town …’
There was another silence. Dr Banks looked straight before him, tapping his long fingers softly together, his face composed in its habitual gravity of expression. ‘I could support the condition of high blood pressure,’ he said at last. ‘That is, if asked, I could confirm that Kemp received treatment from me for that condition – if asked, let us say, by this other physician your husband had been seeing. That would not be to certify cause of death, you understand. But in the event of a certificate being signed by someone else, it might lend credence. Yes, I should say pretty certainly it would lend credence.’ He got up on this and went to his desk, where he spent some time searching in a drawer and a further brief time writing. When he came back to them he held a slip of paper in his hand. ‘The doctor your husband may have consulted in my absence is this one,’ he said. ‘The address is written here too. He is flexible in his hours, I believe, and can be visited at any time.’
She had risen to take the paper from him and for a moment she clasped his hand and lowered her head over it and the tears came again. Different now, impeding her thanks. The doctor too knew the difference in the tears and this time used words of comfort to her as he supported her towards the door. ‘Kemp did not lack for friends,’ he said. ‘There will be those that you can turn to. And you have this fine son as your support. If there is anything more that I can do, I trust you will not hesitate to ask. You will understand that I cannot examine the poor fellow’s body or have anything more to do directly with the business. If any should ask why I was not called in, you may say I was indisposed. But it is unlikely.’ He smiled at them in farewell. ‘The proceedings are quite regular, the man whose name I have given you is a qualified medical practitioner.’
It was only when, long past midnight, they had run the qualified medical man to earth in his ramshackle and evil-smelling quarters above a tavern, that things began to fall into place in Erasmus’s mind. He had listened in silence while his mother bargained with the gaunt, unsteady fellow, whom they had roused, still reeking of spirits, from his sleep. Ten minutes’ talk and twenty-five guineas secured for William Kemp an official death from heart failure, the due period of mourning, burial in hallowed ground. From the widow and the son was lifted the spectre of scandal and disgrace. Five guineas more obtained the services of two silent, out-at-elbow ruffians and a covered litter. The merchant was brought home in the dimness of the new day, wrapped in a length of good-quality blue cotton baft from his warehouse.
She had bargained with that scoundrel – Erasmus could scarcely believe it. ‘Not for the sake of the guineas,’ she told him, ‘no price can be put on your father’s reputation. But these people expect it.’
It was her own unexpected knowledge of what people expected that he held against her – that and her resourcefulness when he himself had been floundering. And she had deceived him, she had kept him in the dark. He writhed inwardly when he remembered how she had apologized for him to the condescending Banks.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Mother?’ he asked her once. ‘Why didn’t you say what was in your mind to do?’
‘My poor Erasmus,’ she said, ‘I thought the less you knew the better. You had already lost your father that night.’
And with this – as he saw it – typical failure of logic on her part he had to be content. The worst of it was that despite his superior logic and the sense of rectitude to which he clung as if it were a mark of loyalty to his father, he knew in his heart that he had been given that night a lesson in the conduct of human affairs that he would never forget.
The feeling of having been somehow duped poisoned his grief in the days that followed. For of course his father too had deceived him. With sick incredulity he tried to imagine what his father had felt during the last hours of his life, tried to make the actions of that stranger somehow congruous and explicable. He remembered how his father had avoided his eyes when they had parted that afternoon, an unusual thing – both father and son were direct in their regard. He must have known then. He would have had the rope ready, he would have marked the iron hook in the beam. Perhaps he had known for much longer … But this was more than Erasmus could bear steadily to contemplate, the loneliness and treachery of it, sitting at meals, discussing business, with the intention of death constant behind the changing face.
Below his feeling of betrayal was a horror that never left him at the secrecy of the business, the deranged ceremony, locking the door, setting the candle on the table. Somewhere in the midst of this madness his father had removed his shoes so that the last steps of his life would be silent …
Erasmus was freed from this stricken state, though not yet enough to weep, by the sight of the face in its open coffin on the eve of the funeral. Once again it was by deception that Elizabeth Kemp revealed her love and fulfilled her duty. Alone she had bathed the body and shrouded it. She had waxed away the dark mottles below the skin, and shut the outraged eyes. She had closed Kemp’s mouth over his swollen tongue and held it closed with a binding of linen.
Death itself is never false, she had merely falsified appearances for the sake of the living. But to Erasmus, kneeling alone in the silent room, it seemed that he was seeing the truth of his father’s face for the first time. The inessentials were gone, the changes of expression, the high colour and the hectic regard, erased by this draining of the accidental blood. Now it could be seen that his father bore the face of a zealot who had been proved right after all. It came to Erasmus, with inexpressible pain, that all he could remember of his father’s life, all his gesture and assertion, all the peculiar vividness of expression that had belonged to him, had been no more than botched rehearsals for this final waxen immobility.
This pity for his father brought him close to tears. In the determined intensity of his efforts to hold them back – he had not so far wept – his gaze took on a preternatural fixity, blurring the face before him, giving it for the moment a look of merely momentary repose. The eyelids seemed to quiver and the nostrils to distend slightly, as if at the scent of something savoursome. Erasmus was carried back to the winter morning at Dickson’s shipyard, more than a year ago now, when amid smells of cut wood and wet sawdust his father had crouched and advanced his connoisseur’s nose to the fresh-cut timber of the ship’s mast, and pronounced it first-rate. Another smell too there had been, coarser, the odour of decay. Not that day but somewhere near it, the time the ship was building. Eyes from which the light was fading, a startled movement in the half-dark, a mute plea for a death unwitnessed … Another man, adding the rank smell of his death to these milder ones of clean linen and essence of violets … Erasmus rose too hastily and felt a wave of dizziness. In the desolate clarity that came with its passing he understood that his father had been sniffing at his own death, his own decay, that day at the shipyard – it was the ship that had killed him.