The Solitude of Thomas Cave (14 page)

19

M
ANY OF US in that time found that we could not sleep, so much the rhythm of night and day had been broken in us. In the tent
where we stayed together there was scarcely a moment of stillness for all the turning and sighs of waking men. Even those
who did sleep were not at peace. We all of us had strange and heavy dreams, and often men muttered in their sleep or moaned
or sometimes woke themselves and the rest of us with a yell.

So it was that fear began to grow in us.

When we slept, there were the dreams. When we woke, there was something else I cannot name. I remember lying there and feeling
the hugeness of the place thud in my soul where the knowledge of God had been, a huge frozen emptiness inside and a fear that
it would expand and consume me. I shared a bunk with William Sherwyn, a restless knotty little man all knees and elbows. When
I opened my eyes I saw that he lay on his back staring upward, and he became aware of me and spoke in a nervous rush. 'You
know what it is, don't you? You know what this means? The ice will come in soon. The currents drive it early up the fjord,
that's why no one but Captain Duke will bring a ship in here. Someone said that to me, back in Hull before we sailed. You
chance your luck with Duke, he said, he's a great whaler of course and he knows those northern seas better than any other
Englishman but one of these days he'll be caught, beset, held fast, and that'll be the end of it. It happens to all the great
navigators, he said. It happened to Barents. It'll happen to him. They all go too far in the end, stay too long. Sail too
close to the ice.'

'It's August,' I said, 'only August.'

'We were gone by this day last year.'

'Last year was colder.'

'Doesn't take long for the ice to come in. All it takes is a change of wind.'

'But it's only a day's sail out to the cape and the sea.' I shut my eyes again and imagined the movement of the ship as it
would be beneath me, the sight of the southernmost cape of those islands receding, the knowledge of open water down to the
coast of Norway. I must then have slept a little. When I was next conscious Sherwyn was holding me.

'What is it, lad? What is it makes you scream?'

Only a piece of my dream stayed in my head: the terrible sensation of falling into utter and endless icy space.

If only the fog had lifted. If there had been light to see by: God's light, God's day. We would have seen the crispness of
the sea where the lost boat had been and known for sure that no one was to come back from it. Captain Duke would have seen
it also. He would have come to the deck and called us to weigh anchor. But the fog held us there suspended, its muffled forms
and sounds offering so many possibilities of denial. It was the sounds most of all: the bark of a walrus that one of us took
for a man's call; the way the screech of gulls would erupt all of a sudden out of intense silence; the creak of footfalls
on snow; the lapping of water against the rocks which was at moments like the plash of oars. Sometimes it seemed that we waited
for men, sometimes for ghosts. There was a murmur went about that the place had bewitched us and would not let us go.

There is power in the Biscay language. I know nothing of it, only that it is different from any others I hear, the people
of that region a race distinct though they have no land but only a sea to call their own, and that the roughest sea in Europe.
Their speech is full of harsh zeds and k's, savage sounds and angry rhythms that make our English by comparison seem soft
and sleepy. Screamed out in a close room it claws and tears at the nerves like no other sound I have ever heard.

It was the flenser, the little bow-legged man who cut the whale. He was out of his bunk in the centre of the cramped room,
half-dressed and screaming at us all wild-eyed. I thought something had happened, that there was a landslide or a bear at
the door, or that he had been out and seen that the ship had gone and left us. Or that there was some quarrel between him
and one of the others of his people, for the rest of them either got down or sat up in their bunks and set to yelling back.
It was truly a scene from Bedlam, this incomprehensible ranting to and fro, and the dazed looks of the rest of us as we stirred
in its midst.

I do not know how many of you have seen a man gone mad. You do not want to look, and yet you do, and when you do he draws
you into his horror. All of us watched as Ezkarra, the tall harpooneer who was often the leader among them, made the others
hush and went and took the little man tight in his arms as if he were a child. For an instant he was silenced, and dropped
the lids on his staring eyes, and I thought that he was soothed, but it was only an instant like the trough of a wave and
then his mouth frothed again and he broke out and struck Ezkarra so hard in the stomach that it doubled him over, and launched
again into such a grotesque stream of words that I knew that they could be nothing but blasphemies and obscenities.

We stood back then, made a way for him as he ran to the door, backing away from him in the cramped space as if from some contamination.
He is possessed, we said, and it was shocking to think that a devil had come and possessed one amongst us and left the rest
of us sane. Ezkarra then called us to silence and spoke to us in his English. The man was the brother of the harpooneer from
the lost boat, he told us. He had the spirit of his drowned brother in him. And he crossed himself and said a popish prayer.
Yet others of the crew whispered as instantly that it was some witch amongst us or some demon of the place who possessed him,
that this man was only the first and that his madness would come to all of us in time. For myself, I did not speculate but
could only watch and follow. I put on my jacket and boots and followed where the man had gone. Some others did likewise. We
went out and kept a watch on him as he threw himself down on the stones before the shore and rolled over and over and beat
his head against them.

He beat himself bloody and then Ezkarra went again to soothe him, and again he would not be soothed, but this time he ran
and took up his flensing knife where it lay among the tools and came back at Ezkarra as if he would slice him in two. I cannot
say why it was that he did not, but stalled with the long-handled knife in the air like a maddened, half-naked Abraham, and
threw it away then so that it clattered on the stones, and ran off barefoot up the shore and on to the mountain.

A case of possession, or madness, whatever you want to call it. These things occur, among a crew of men alone in the North
or on the deep ocean as they do here in our English towns and villages. What I mean to tell you is that it was Thomas Cave
who brought him back. Cave did not let him go on alone but followed at a calm pace. There was visibility enough that day just
to make out the two men on the mountainside, no more, no detail: two moving figures against the grey stillness of the rock,
climbing, turning, tacking upwards, the Biscayan in a strange panicky rush that we could see even at that distance, Cave slow
behind him, deliberate. Cave never once lost track of him though sometimes he took an entirely different path, switching back
and working round where the madman scrabbled up too-sheer walls or unsafe shale in such a hectic way that to us observing
below it seemed at times a wonder, or a symptom of the demonic nature of his possession, that he did not fall.

Cave caught up with him at last on a ledge overlooking the sea. We could not see what passed between them, only that they
were still for a long time and that at last they turned and began a slow descent in single file. When the Biscayan got back
to us he seemed to have forgotten all that occurred and followed Cave quiet as a lamb.

'What did you do?' we asked Cave.

'I read to him.'

He took out his Bible which he had carried inside his jacket.

'It is your Bible, not his. He is a Roman.'

'That need not matter.'

'What passage did you read him?'

'Whatever page I opened at.' He shrugged. 'A genealogy. It had no meaning for him, he does not understand the English. It
would not matter if it were a Bible or a book of tides.'

Men spoke in whispers for fear the sound would carry in the sharpness of the clearing air.

'Before God, how can this be?'

'How is it that he has done such a thing, this man whom we all knew as no more than an ordinary man, like as not to any one
of us? How was that that he alone of all of us could drive this devil out?'

'He came down from the mountain so calm and easy, as if he would have us think that nothing had occurred.'

'He has some power. He hides it from us.'

'Did you hear what he said? He said it would not matter if it were a book of tides from which he read. Did he dare to do this
thing without the help of God?'

'No,' I said, 'it is not that. It is just that the man does not know English, that it matters not what words they were but
what words he believed them to be.'

I thought it wrong that they talked so, that such suspicion might surround an act of goodness which we had each one of us
observed. I did not like the direction in which their words tended. Questions passed from man to man, spun amongst us like
the strands of the thinning mist.

'He knows something about this place that we do not know, something that allowed his survival.'

'No ordinary man could have lived that winter through. Didn't we all say that from the first?'

'Then how?'

'There is some power in this beyond nature.'

'And consider, the extraordinary stillness of the air these past days, is that also of nature?'

'It gives a man the need to pray.'

I heard it said that it was Cave who had held us there beyond our time of departure, that it was in his power to call the
winds to take us away. There was a whisper even, light as vapour and I could not say from whom it had come, that the lost
boat was bewitched by him.

Even when we set sail these thoughts did not die but surrounded Cave and kept him apart.

England

20

A
SLUGGlSH SEA, a smear of green, a grey rivermouth that we rode up with the tide. It was many years since Cave had set foot
in his native land but he did not say how many.

I had thought that England would make him glad. Yet I saw no sign of it, no expression on him but a kind of vague bewilderment.
I saw him on the gangplank, he was so tall and spare that he made a distinct figure among those who surrounded him, and he
stood and hesitated a moment as if he must build up nerve for what would follow. And then he gave a kind of shrug, and stretched
that long body that had been cramped up so many days on the ship, and stepped down on to the crowded quay. For some way his
head showed above the level of the crowd, and he broke a passage through it with determined strides so that the world seemed
to ripple back and did not touch him.

So it was wherever he went in the months that followed. He held himself intact from men and none came close to him. I can
say this because I spent more time with him than anyone. For some months I travelled and lived with him and yet even I could
not have said truthfully that I knew him, that I knew what went on within him, though I observed him closely, with the kind
of close and superficial attention a boy will give to a man who might be his model or his hero, though I could have enumerated
so many of the little intimacies of his life, what were his tics of manner, how he chewed his meat and when his bowels moved,
the way his fingers quivered as they reached for his fiddle or hovered about the narrow bowl of his pipe, how he slept with
a thin snore and mutterings that sometimes seemed so coherent that I looked for meaning in them, only they were in no language
that I have heard before or since.

It was because of the Captain that I went with him. But for Captain Marmaduke I think that Cave would have vanished then and
there from my life, striding out of it with the barrel of heels to sell, and his chest and his violin and his wager. His story
would have remained as a curious memory, no more, maturing into something distant and half-believed like a myth. I would not
have come back to puzzle over him after twenty years, nor been driven as I was last summer to leave my home for a time and
attempt to seek him out.

When the cargo was dispersed each man of the crew came to the
Heartsease —
an ill name it had become - to collect the share that was due to him and take his leave of the Captain, who had remained black
with grief in his cabin all the time since we had come in and scarcely set foot ashore. For Thomas Cave there was the money
from the wager, that we had signed for all of a long year before, in addition to his pay from this voyage and what I had held
for him from the previous one: some considerable wealth this was, all in all, though you would not have thought it for the
meagre look on him. The Captain in parting asked what he would do with it and Cave answered only that it would take him home,
and spoke the word like it was a strange and surprising destination.

'In Heaven's Name, man, it will take you farther than that!' said the Captain, waking for a moment from his sad stupor, and
Cave said only yes, that he trusted so.

There was a pause between them then, each man lost once more in some grim thought of his own, and then the Captain came back
to himself and reached out his hand to Cave and said that he was a brave man and wished him luck.

Then his eye chanced on me and it seemed that he spoke on impulse: 'Take the boy with you, Thomas, as he's headed in the same
direction.' I think that it was a kind of care for me because I made him think of Edward. And he pointed out a ship that was
readying for Yarmouth and said that her master was a friend of his, and we were gone that same day.

We came to Yarmouth and then here to Swole, and for all that time there were others about us, sailors and a couple of others
paying passage like ourselves, and Cave was shy amongst us. Once he heard me begin to tell the story of the wager, too loud
I am sure, I was puffed up with the adventure though I had had in truth only the tiniest piece in it, and Cave interrupted
me then and called me to him; and that was the only time that I can remember him taking an active part in our intercourse.
I thought that he was to tell me off for giving away among strangers the knowledge of the money he carried, knowledge that
might travel about him and bring the thieves on him when we touched land, but it was not that. No, he told me only but in
hard terms that he would have me not speak any further word of what he had done, wager or no wager, nor even to suggest to
any man that such a winter might be lived.

'Not a word, my boy, promise me that. Let no man conceive it possible, no man follow me there.'

'Why? Was it so terrible as that?'

'You misunderstand me,' he said, and there was a bitter note in his voice. 'It is not for the men I say this, but for the
rest. Let the men look out for themselves.'

I confess that I was at first a little afraid of him. Not of any physical aspect of him, but of something else, what he was
or what he knew. I was not altogether without superstition. Yet from Swole we went for two days on foot, the pair of us alone
skirting the marsh and then cutting across the open heath going inland, and in that time we did not speak much, nor did he
say anything particular to put my mind at rest, but only walked, and I learnt that there is no better companionship than to
walk with a man, stride for stride. In the silence of walking I watched him, and as the hours and the miles passed my wariness
faded, and I came to trust him, if for nothing more than the steadiness of his pace, which kept even throughout the day, and
the wintry clarity of his eyes.

When we reached my home my family welcomed us with joy and tears, my little sister shot up like a woman and my mother crying
at seeing another of her children being so grown and travelled. They took Cave in as my friend and he stayed with us till
Christmas but soon as that day was passed he came to some silent decision, took up his few things and said that he would be
gone.

My mother, who was a woman full of heart, took me aside.

'What great sorrow is it in your friend that he has no other person to hold to, that he broods so, all alone?'

I thought that good reason to break my promise, just this once, to my mother alone, and recounted to her the extraordinary
tale of his hermitude.

'There's something more, something behind it all,' she went on, but I told her grandly that such was the life of the sea,
that an adventurer such as Cave had seen more on this earth than a mere woman could possibly imagine, and she laughed and
said what a man I had become, though she looked at me like I was still a child as she said it.

Later she came to me again, and she had packed some provisions, cheese and bacon, and told me that she could see what I wanted,
that it would do no harm and might indeed be kindness to keep company with him a while more before I went back to sea.

'You do not have to go.' Cave hesitated as we walked away, looked at me and back at my family waving. 'Why not stay with them?'

'There are too many of us to make a living there.'

'There's other work besides the sea.'

'It's what I want.'

'What do you want?'

'To travel, see the world. You know how it is.'

'Do I?'

'Oh yes, sir. Think of all the places you and the others have told me of, the wonders in them. The Azores and the islands
of the Indies, the forests of Virginia and the painted people there, the river big as a sea where Raleigh sailed in search
of Eldorado. The beasts and creatures and coloured birds, the naked coal-skinned women whom they sell for slaves. I would
not know about these things if you had not told me of them.'

'But those are only stories,' he said. 'You can hear them at home by the fire.'

I thought that odd in a man that had gone and seen so much as he.

Cave chose our way though I could not tell if there was sense in the road he took. In winter so much of the land looked alike,
the stripped fields, the glassy river that spilled out across the meadows, the bent black arms of the trees, the holes and
ruts that we must watch beneath our feet.

'Where do we go?' I asked.

He looked to the horizon. That's what Cave did, he looked to the horizon or he looked to the ground before him; his eyes rarely
seemed to pause on the level between where they might meet another's.

'Will we go on now to the village that you come from?'

There was a hamlet that we passed through, early, so early that the day was only beginning in it. The steam of morning rose
from the pig pens in the yards beside the road where we walked, rising into the cold air off the animals' backs as they came
out to eat, and from the sheds behind came the lowing of cattle and the shuffle of milking.

Cave stood in the middle of the street and surveyed it, stood so still that the hens came and pecked about the mud where it
was turned by his stick.

'Is this it? Are we there?'

He looked from one house to the next, at door and window and thatch and chimney, looked at the people who passed as if they
also were made of wood and mud and straw. A cold drizzle had begun to fall and put their heads down so that they did not seem
to see us. They were bleary anyway and blinkered before their work that time of day.

'Shall we stop?'

'No,' said Cave, 'it is too early to stop. We might do many miles today.' He wore no hat and already his hair and beard were
dark with the rain and stuck about his face.

When I hesitated he said again, 'Let us go on. I have no business here.'

The rain fell harder as he spoke and the place seemed to contract before us. I was sure that this was it, this must have been
his home, and I felt a terrible disappointment for him. It was so bleak and grey, and on this one morning most of all, full
of blind bent people. I felt young as a child and helpless to speak, though all my nature wished to cheer him.

We had walked some way beyond the village when a cart came up behind and because of the rain it picked us up. We sat in the
back with a sack over our two heads and as long as the rain fell the carter barely spoke to us nor we to him. When the rain
cleared he stopped for the horse to eat, and I remember that I thought to entertain the others by clowning on the grass. I
used to do that in those days. I had quite a skill in tumbling, could have joined a fair, so people said. So I warmed myself
and them by performing my repertory of tricks, and because the ground was wet I slipped and fell about this way and that,
until they began to laugh.

When the cart went on, we talked. 'Where have you been?' the carter asked, and I thought that it was my chance now to impress
him with stories of a frozen sea and mountains made of ice, great white bears and fish as big as houses.

But the man had travelled no further afield than Stow-market and had never seen the sea. 'There are some big fish about, that's
true. They do say you know there's a pike in the river here long as a horse. A great old beast with teeth like a saw. It'll
swallow a duck whole, snatch it down in the water and swallow it, just like that.'

Then it rained again and we were back with the sack above our heads.

'I'm sorry, lad, I could not stop there this morning,' Cave said at last. 'Too much time had passed. The place was full of
strangers. There was no purpose in my being there.'

I was so young then, bold, certain. 'But you cannot say that. You were hardly there a moment. And the people we saw, they'll
be no other than the people that you knew grown older, or at least the children of the people that you knew. If you'd said
who you were, someone would have known you for sure.'

Cave looked out along the road. His face bore a sheen of moisture from the rain.

Was it true, the reason he gave? I have thought many times about it in the years since then, what precisely it was drove Thomas
Cave away: whether it was as he said, the strangeness of the place, or whether it was its very familiarity, that threatened
somehow to close in on him.

I parted from him soon after, to make my way back to Swole. We had come to a place where the river became tidal and we could
begin to smell the sea.

'Will you not come on a little further?' I asked, and Cave said no, that he had come far enough, and looked down to his feet
on the fresh grass. He would keep to the land now. He was done with the sea. There was a church in that village with a roof
like a barn and he laid his things down and his big cloak like a blanket and said that he would sleep in its porch.

At the last moment, in an entirely unexpected gesture, he spread his arms and hugged me, and in that touch I knew all of a
sudden how great my affection for this man had grown. And then I turned as I must and left him in the porch, and walked out
beneath the gulls and the wide sky.

'Lad,' he called, as I reached the gate. 'Take this. I have no need of so much.' He pulled out his purse from inside his shirt
and gave me some coins from it, pressed them into my outstretched flushed hand with his own cold fumbling one. 'I insist.'
Again but tremblingly we embraced, and I walked on two miles before the sun set behind me.

I knew nothing more of him for well on twenty years.