Honey Harlot (10 page)

I thought of the real purport of our conversation and felt my hand tauten involuntarily on his arm. I forced myself to relaxation. ‘And she remembers the launching of the original Mary Celeste!’

He also seemed to relax. ‘She saw a very different ship in those days,’ he said, more conversationally. ‘The brig had then only the one deck…’ And as though bent upon finding some common ground with me, he began to speak again of the sea and ships, instructing me, pointing out the changes that had been made in the brig, the increase in her length and tonnage, her past history which had been none of the happiest—on her very first voyage her master had taken ill and subsequently died, she had ended up at last a wreck in the gales at the mouth of the Gulf of St Lawrence. ‘She fell upon hard times. A ship, you know, to us seamen is like a human being—’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘I understand that, I’ve seen the men at home, they look upon their ships almost as women, as though they had hearts and souls of their own, to be considered and cared for—’

‘A ship cannot have a soul,’ he said, austerely interrupting. ‘The soul belongs to God.’

I was thrown back, out of my foolish eagerness. ‘Well, no, of course. I just meant—’

‘It’s true that men think of this ship or that as though she had a very heart,’ he said, continuing on his own way. ‘Or at least a personality of her own which must be respected and deferred to. When my company took over this brig, she had lost her self-respect. We restored that to her, we renewed her pride in herself, we gave her a new dress—’

‘And a new name,’ I suggested, and wondered if I should ever learn to keep my stupid mouth closed. But I slid it all into easiness, and I think made the transfer very well. ‘It was an inspiration, taking away the bold Amazon image and giving her a soft womanish name, a whole new change of identity.’

He caught at it, thankfully I think; and for a long time he walked with me there, talking agreeably as he had talked two evenings before, as he had conversed with my parents in those happier days and won their respect and mine with it. I suppose I had never loved him; to be respectably married, to be provided for and cared for, to perform one’s wifely duties in return—this was the be-all and end-all of a girl’s existence in those days and I had thought, poor child, that I might have a better chance of self-fulfilment away from the repressions of home. I had been filled with thankfulness and relief at his coming; I had looked no further. Now however as he walked and talked with me for the first time in our lives, freed of that inner pressure, I was filled with yet another new hope. In that foolish way of mine, I thrust behind me all the terrors and cares, I looked to some dream magic to invest me at last with practicality and good sense, I chatted away with eager freedom, asking my artless questions, trying to take in the explanations and answers, trying to learn something for a change. When the boy came to say in his cloddish way that the meal was on the table, I felt that for years I had not known such faith and confidence in myself.

We were well out into the Atlantic now and the ocean had taken on that impression of a boundlessness that to this hour haunts my dreams—as though nothing existed in the wide world but the waste of the rolling sea streaked with white foam, restless, restless, an infinity of heaving grey-green molten glass. The ship rolled with the rolling of the waves as, with a hiss and a rush and a slap, slap, slap of wet hands against her hull, a speck in infinity, she cut her way through. I climbed up the tilt of the deck to the sliding door of the companion-way, my husband’s hand flat against my shoulder supporting me, bent my head to the low doorway, stepping hunched, over the high brass-topped sill and staggering a little, got down the steps and into the saloon. Richardson, waiting for us there, turned his eyes meaningfully to the door of his cabin and hastily averted them as my husband followed me down. He asked, as though the glance were connected with the question, did the captain intend, as he’d said, to take a trick at the wheel himself, after the meal? Two of the men, it seemed, were unwell, they were short of crew…

‘Of course,’ said my husband. ‘If I say a thing, I mean it,’ and as soon as dinner was over, went up on deck to relieve the helmsman. Richardson mouthed at me the words, ‘One—hour—at—least,’ and went up after him.

I waited till the steward was out of the way at last and went and tapped softly at the door. Mary opened it and, smiling, full of fun as though we were two schoolgirls, hiding away to share a stolen apple, took my arm and almost yanked me inside. I was terrified, nevertheless. ‘We’re all right,’ she said. ‘The men are pretending to be sick to give us an hour or two free, I must speak with another woman or die! He’ll stay at the wheel, you know he will; probably throughout the whole watch, and Albert’s above and will stamp on the deck if trouble approaches.’ She laughed. ‘Come, let’s settle down and talk.’

The cabin was no more than a cupboard, how the men lived kennelled up like dogs for the weeks and months at sea I don’t know; though heaven knows, my own was not too large. But this was no more than the length of the wooden bunk against its outer wall, with a chest across one end between the top of the bunk and the inner wall, leaving when the door was closed-to, hardly room for us two to stand, our heavy skirts, much stuffed out by their petticoats, crushed close together. She climbed up on to the bunk and crawling along it, curled herself up in the far corner. I hoisted myself up to sit on the remaining space, feet dangling, facing the door, all ready for flight. ‘Now, come,’ she said, ‘what was this foolish note pushed through the crack? What of all our fine plans for the fall of the Mighty?’

‘I regret it all, Mary,’ I said. ‘When you left me, I prayed. I’d be wrong to betray my husband.’

‘No one asks you to betray him, little idiot! Only to hold the threat above his head that you
might
betray him—so that you’re safe from his bullying.’

I knew that I blushed but I persisted: ‘A man has—rights—over his wife. It’s for his wife to submit.’

She wore today a dress of brilliant green, like the heart of an emerald, heavily scrolled at its hem with white braid—it was ever her habit to pick out one or another colour from the Paisley pattern of her shawl, accent it in her gown and then, as though it were her very signature scrawled about the gown, decorate it with white braid. Beneath the gown was always a froth of petticoats, holding out the skirts to a heavy fullness but edged with lace and frills—my own petticoats were of good white flannel, one upon the other for warmth and decency, but with no more than a little decorative feather-stitching and perhaps some scalloping: my sisters had sat and grudgingly stitched at my modest little trousseau, suitable for a life at sea and as the wife of a sober and respectable man. But Honey Mary! How she had smuggled all these clothes aboard, heaven knew; nor how she kept all the whiteness so brilliantly white could I ever understand; but for all her way of life, no one I ever saw had such a look of health and strength and—cleanliness. Her skin was always clear, eyes bright, hair shining with washing and brushing and under the brilliant gowns with their stark white braiding, her petticoats blue-white and always as though they had been freshly starched; and her bodices… Well, one saw quite enough of
them,
the crisp, laundered lace threaded through with ribbons to match her gowns, frilled over her golden bosom. A time was to come when she would look less than perfectly groomed to the last miracle of perfection; but till that time, she might at any moment of her life have just stepped out of the hands of a lady’s maid. And always she wore a perfume of her own. If one could say that she smelt of the honey of her nickname—then she smelt of honey.

She sat curled up, her arms about her knees, the mass of frilled petticoats frothing like sea-foam about her pretty little lace-up boots—any costume less suited for wear on shipboard could hardly be imagined. ‘But, my honey,’ she said, as though in refusing to betray my husband after all, I spoilt some gleeful childish game, ‘our plan!’

‘Our plan was that you should tell the men of my husband’s—wrong conduct with you, Mary; so that if he failed to please me, I could hold it as a threat over him, that you and they would spread his shame abroad. But—’

‘Failed to please you!’ she said. ‘He treats you by day like a kennelled bitch; and by night—’

I said confused and embarrassed, ‘In that I think he—can’t help himself. He has strong passions—’

‘Then let him wreak them on the likes of me,’ she said, ‘and not on a cringing, innocent little girl like you.’

‘He’s a normal man,’ I said. ‘It’s not his fault if I came to him—unprepared.’

‘No, my honey,’ she said. ‘He is not a normal man. I know something about men and you do not. He is a normal man in the one sense, but in the other, his passions are not what you, in your innocence, call strong, but very violent, very uncontrolled, with a violence and uncontrol that could very soon turn to actual brutality

‘I know all this,’ I said. ‘But surely it’s between himself and his God? It’s not for me to punish him.’

‘I don’t ask you to punish him,’ she said. ‘What would
you
punish him for? Many women would—’ I thought she was about to say something more positive, and I believe now with hindsight that I was right; but she said, instead, ‘Some women would accept, would not object. He’s no monster, he’s just—less controlled than many men. But this is not for you to endure; you should protect yourself.’

‘If I’m patient…’ And I implored her: ‘Do nothing! I’ll accept what I must and—you’ve given me strength, Mary, just by talking to you I’ve gained understanding and strength. I’ve spoken back, I’ve argued my case with him. You see now that I’ve got a corner of my own up on deck. And the rest I begin better to understand and therefore I can deal with it. I came to him—to marriage—so entirely unprepared. My father’s a minister, very good, but very—high-minded, he would never speak of such things; and my mother… She’s a simple woman, occupied with the house; she has little time for silly shrinking violets, stupid and vague, not taking in what they’re told.’

She looked at me pityingly, curled up in her corner there. ‘And what
were
you told?’

‘Well, that I should…’ Up came the flush of colour again. ‘That my—my nightdress would be disarranged, that I wouldn’t understand but I must accept as—right, whatever my husband should do because—men understood these matters and women did not but it was necessary so that one might bear children.’

‘Not a word to suggest that
you
might find some delight in such embraces?’

‘Oh, Mary!’ I said. ‘How could one?’ And yet… I had known that she herself had taken pleasure in my husband’s arms as well as giving it.

She reached out and took my hand and held it in her own, laying her warm cheek for a moment against the curl of my fingers. ‘Poor little Sarah! What’s right for a man—may that not be right for a woman also? In your eyes, Sarah, I’m a bad woman, I know, because I love with men I’m not married to—’

‘Love?’ I cried. ‘Do you call that love?’

‘Yes, I do call it love,’ she said. ‘I lie with no man I can’t at least a little, and for a little while, love. Others do—others have to and perhaps I may one day come to that—that I must offer myself to any low creature who approaches me, simply for my bread—’

‘You told me when first I talked to you that that was what you must do. I saw you go up to a man and actually ask him for food. And then you went with him

She laughed, biting her lip in a sort of self-reproach. ‘Poor little one, don’t you know yet that that was all a game? I made a bet with Davey Morehouse of the Dei Gratia that I would entrap your husband—and the wager was this gold cross that your husband gave back to me when at last I had him, sick with desire for me, flinging himself on my body. And indeed I tell a story when I say that I go with no man I can’t like, for I can’t like
him,
sanctimonious, preaching, self-deceiving prig that he is, and yet I lay with him. But that was not for money; that was for fun, to win my bet with Davey. And Davey—now there’s a man! Do you know, Sarah, that the very first man in my life was a man just like Davey Morehouse—ten long years ago!’

‘Ten years… But, Mary—’

‘I was fifteen,’ she said, shrugging, with that teasing, provocative grin of hers. ‘Does that shock you? But my parents weren’t like yours, my dear, a simple woman and a good man. My mother was a woman of marvellous beauty and my father adored and desired her I think every moment of his waking life; and she would tease him, denying him until at last he actually took up a stick to her…’

‘He
beat
her? Your father beat your mother?’

‘We weren’t people like you, Sarah, honey. We were people of the waterfront, my mother kept lodgings for sailors and only that she was so beautiful, I suppose would have been as low and bedraggled as the rest of her kind. But she
was
beautiful, she kept herself clean and fastidious and my father with his stick kept off all those who might have injured her; he fought her and fought for her and fought over her, and for all her taunting and teasing, she was like an angel in his sight. It astounded me that she could treat him so, how she could deny him when he was so fine, so handsome and so desirable; and so fierce and strong with that great mermaid stick of his. It was a stick that he had brought back from some foreign travel, very heavy, with the head carved into the body of a mermaiden, the tail, sharp-divided, curving round the first length of the stick, and all polished to a glowing gold. A vicious bitch she was too, that mermaid of his and with a taste for blood! Many a scalp I’ve seen, split and bleeding, by her sharp, cutting tail and her blunted head…’

I think we had both forgotten where we were, had forgotten the close little cabin and the pad of men’s bare feet on the deck just above our heads, the flap of the sails, the creak of the rigging, the slap, slap, slap of water against the skimming hull: the monotonous clanging of the clapper against the inside of the bell that marked the passing of the watch. She was far away in the scenes of her childhood, the clapboard house, painted black I daresay, down there close to the docksides, the neat interior, the beautiful woman and the man so fierce and strong, keeping off the other dogs from his bitch with his blood-stained stick. She had let go my hand, her own were clasped in the lap of the brilliant green gown as she sat curled up in her corner with the great amber eyes looking back into that not so distant past. ‘It amazed me,’ she said, ‘that she could refuse him. If I had not been his daughter… But I
was
his daughter; and I could only look on, sick with the guilty longing to be in her place, beaten with that great stick into subjection.’