The Solitude of Thomas Cave (5 page)

'He is good to talk to, your father, I would not have thought a shoemaker would know so many things.'

'Oh, he talks with everyone,' she said, and her affection filled out her voice and made her smile. 'He talks with the people
who come to his shop, like yourself. He's always done that. He gets them talking and they sit there like you do and he makes
their shoes. Here by the harbour he must have met people from every land in the world by now. He says everyone who comes to
him has a story to tell/

A story. Does he have a story? No, the story is hers, all hers. He is outside of stories. He is just a man alone in the dark,
without others to see him and to make him real.

October thirty-first, the Eve of All Souls, and there is a cold glitter in the sky.

Thomas Cave tosses on his cot. The skins are heavy on him but they do not make him warm. He gets out, wrapping the furs about
him, and adds wood to the fire, then goes to his table and sits hunched tight, and watches for the flames to rise and for
their warmth to touch him.

Johanne kneels to tend the fire and a strand of hair falls across her face. She pushes it back and it is golden in the light
of the flames. It is so thick, her hair, he is ever surprised by the weight of it when he takes it in his hand, lifting it
back from her neck and shoulders like so many veils, pulling the strands together and holding them in the ring of his thumb
and forefinger twined like rope.

Since the sea has been frozen I have seen a number of white bears. Since I have not seen such a quantity before I think it
is possible that they have come across the ice, either that or they are hunting farther afield than their usual summer grounds
and have been attracted to the fishery by its scent or even
-
though I fear to think it - by my own presence here. Certainly a number of times I have heard a most menacing snuffling and
exploring about the walls of the tent and when the sounds had gone and I dared to go out, I found the snow disturbed and their
huge pawprints in it. Once I saw a single bear upwind some two hundred yards off. On account of its white fur, its moon shadow
showed almost more clearly than its self, a large bear that held an instant upright like a man and looked about, and then
lowered itself and lolloped off, most lightly and easily for a creature of such cumbersome size, across the ice of the bay
to where there were many lumps or rocks of ice gathered. I took my musket and followed until I could get within range under
the concealment of the blocks of ice. But before I could fire an unfortunate accident befell me. A narrow piece of ice beneath
me broke, it was close to where the river flows into the bay and the movement of water must have made the ice in that spot
unusually thin, and I fell, my legs at least, into the freezing sea. I threw up my musket, which I was able to retrieve later,
and called out, and lean only thank the Lord God that in that moment the bear fled, as I scrambled to find grip in all the
rough ice and pull myself up. What was extraordinary was the speed with which the water froze on my boots and breeches, which
made them seem dry again before I could begin to shiver.

Since that occurrence I have made a loophole in the door of the tent through which I can spy the bears when they come nosing
about. This day for the first time I made use of the hole and by the grace of God it was a success. The bear came so close,
so inquisitive it was that I was able to shoot it in the head at close range. Without moving a limb it sank down into the
snow. I came out tentatively all the same and finished the job with a lance, thrusting it like a harpoon until the blood oozed
velvety black on the moonlit ground. So today I have fresh meat, God be praised, and need not fear the pining of hunger for
some weeks yet.

I have cooked and eaten of the animal's liver, of which I had not partaken before, and found it delicious and as I believe
full of strength. After I had eaten and said my prayer of thanks I took myself out, and the sky being clear and the air still
I took a walk and climbed some way up the mountain where in an earlier month I had gone to look for the sun. This was the
longest walk I have taken since that planet disappeared from view. It is noticeable how the sensation of cold varies considerably
with the quantity of moisture and of wind in the air, in still dry conditions such as this day causing less discomfort than
the cutting sleets of more southerly latitudes. As I walked I beheld an eerie pulsing of lights in the heavens and, on this
night of all nights, was moved once more to prayer.

6

A
SHIVER RUNS THROUGH him that starts from his guts and yet his head is hot. There is a hammer in his head, beating at his
temples. His skin is hot, taut as if it has been burned. He lies half-conscious on the cot, not knowing what is come to him,
not knowing even how long it has been so. The fire inside him may have lasted a minute or hours, it is without sense of time.
Only the fire in the stove knows time. He watches it burn, flames leaping, subsiding, so mesmerising that when he closes his
eyelids they continue to dance through his throbbing brain. And he feels how the delicate skin of his eyelids also is drawn
tight, as if it will blister and snap, as if it too has been burned by the fire. He lifts them open again but only to see
that this is not so and that in reality the flames have burned right down now and the fire must be replenished. Feebly he
gets down from the cot. The shiver runs through him again and his legs are weak as if they were made of paper. Yet before
he can work on the fire he must drag himself urgently to the pot beside the door and shit, empty himself as if he is being
purged, and then after a long pause when the heat subsides and the cold becomes external and real, drag himself back on folding
paper legs, holding first to the table, then the chair, the edge of the cot, barely having the strength to lift a log.

Again he closes his tight-skinned eyes and now drifts into lassitude, into a half-sleep in which the sound of the fire is
lulling and the only sensation that remains is a strange tingling that runs over the surface of his body from the soles of
his feet to the small of his back, to his neck and ears. His temples feel taut as if fingers were stroking and pulling at
the skin, stretching it back to the brain, cool fingers pulling it away, breaking and shedding the first hard layer of skin.
His body lies quivering beneath them, naked as that of a snake in its sloughing, passive and defenceless.

He feels her hands on him, her body beside his, her hair falling on to his chest. And he shrinks away. 'Do not touch me,'
he says. 'My skin. See, my skin is cracking away. Some illness, some poison in my body attacking it both within and without.
My skin cracks and peels away in fine transparent strips. You cannot touch me. My skin cannot stand it.'

She hears him and pulls back, but not so far that he loses knowledge of her presence. She dresses just out of his view behind
the high cot, putting on her white blouse, tying the laces at the back of her dress, plaiting her hair into a single long
braid that she will twist and fix beneath her cap. Then she will sit and wait for him to recover. She knows how to wait as
a wife in port will always wait for a sailor.

'I think that it was the bear meat. Yes it must have been the bear meat, the liver I ate to make me strong. There is some
left, over there in the pan. Do not touch it. I will throw it out when I am well.'

How can it be that she is not cold? She has put on a cherry-red jacket but it is only of a thin wool and its sleeves are folded
back to the elbow with the white linen cuffs of her blouse folded over them, and her neck rises bare from the loose collar,
her skin smooth, soft, glowing with youth. She has left off her shoes and one thinly stockinged foot shows from beneath her
skirt. She gives him a demure half-smile and then takes up from her lap the sewing that has somehow come to be lying there,
a piece of embroidery with the needle threaded and waiting, turns sidelong to him and begins to stitch, holding the embroidery
a little forward of her so that it catches the best of the lamplight.

'When I am well again will you let me show you this place where I live? It is a cold stark place but it is also very beautiful.
I have never had the chance before to show you any one of the places where I have been though I have spoken of them to you
many times. Virginia where there is tall forest green and unbroken for days'journeying along the coast. The Azores whose islands
rise out of the sea like eggshells with villages on white and yellow sands, where the people are brown and swim like fishes
and string necklaces of shells that are beautiful as precious stones. London with its river full of masts, Hull, Aldborow
where I first set sail and which would not seem unfamiliar to you, though it is a meagre place compared with Copenhagen with
but a few fine houses and a wide flat shore, and at its back a long riverrnouth with a lip of land to shield it. And of all
those places nowhere is more strange than here, and do you know why? It is because here there are no people. None. No one
here but our two selves. Yes, when I am well enough again to walk, if the moon be bright - for I do not know what day it is,
in my illness I have lost touch with the phase of the moon - if the moon be bright and the weather clear and not too cold
I shall take you on a little tour of my beach, my mountains, my hinterland, this little part of the island that I know.

'When I have the strength to move we shall go out, shall we not, look in the sky for the stars which now that it is winter
seem sometimes bright as if they are alive, look for God's shimmering in the sky? I shall be strong enough to go out very
soon, I think. Though I am feeble the gripes and the shivers have passed, and I shall drink some spirits and a little of this
broth here, and will soon be back to my old self though a little raw in the skin perhaps, but that symptom too is receding.'

She puts down her sewing and comes and sits on the deerskins beside him, and her arms are soft and rounded, and her belly
bulges slightly where the jacket is unbuttoned, her waist big against the fabric of her dress. She does not touch him on account
of the tenderness of his skin but sits quiet beside him until he sleeps.

The lights break serene, billowing bands of green and yellow and carmine red that glow and contract and fade across the great
arc of sky above the figure of the man, who is so wasted, purified after his illness that he feels he could be drawn up into
them, insubstantial himself as a veil. They glow and transform and quiver, and sudden rays shoot through them, and then as
suddenly they vanish and in the moment's pause which, shot as it is with stars, is more silent and more without colour than
any moment he has ever known, he sees her upturned face beside him, so rapt in the sky that she has forgotten his presence,
her eyes wide, her lips a little apart exhaling a ribbon of condensed breath, her hair fallen from its cap half down her back
as she bends her neck. Tentative as if she too might vanish, he reaches out to touch her hair, to pull his fingers through
it to loosen it further, to move his hand on and let it rest in the warm hollow of her back. Her two hands have till then
been placed soft and flat upon her swollen belly but she moves one now and takes in it the hand that he has free, and without
a word pulls it to her belly, beside her own, so that he too through the pads of his fingers and palm can feel the movement
of the baby within. The lights flare again, tongues of flame that writhe and lick the heights of the sky, then melt away,
and in the moonlight she is no longer there.

That first time he came back from the sea after they were married he had ached for her. He had thought of little but her all
the days since they had first sighted land. Yet when they approached the Sound a moist autumnal wind had blown up against
them, so that the ship had to tack tediously between one low grey shore and another, laying off a whole day and a night before
Elsinore, and he had looked out and imagined her expecting their arrival, waiting even at the quayside with the water black
and empty before her. When at last they did come to port, he was one of the first ashore, jumping on to the quay before the
boat was tied like a man more her age than his, walking as if he was driven through the crowds of men and women; such a clamour,
such a wild explosion of life after six months in the Greenland seas, as if the world had burst into flying shards of figures
and costumes, of wheels and cries and animals and heads and eyes and mouths, and he had looked into every young or half-young
female face he passed for her face, wondering if he might see it, if she might by some chance have known and come for him,
and yet as one woman's features blurred into another's he for a moment panicked and lost the memory of her, and feared that
if she were indeed suddenly before him he would not know her.

She was at home. Hans was deep in talk with a customer so he brushed past with the briefest of greetings, down the steps and
past the birdcage, into the storeroom with its brown smell of leather, and through into the light of the kitchen. She was
there, standing at the table with the light flooding in from the open door behind her. Recognised, there was no trouble about
that: no difficulty in knowing her hair, golden where the light caught it, her happy smile, her raised hands that were white
with flour, all so familiar; but different too, a woman whose full breasts and curve of belly betrayed her as she came away
from the table to greet him, in silhouette before the brightness of the yard beyond the door.

'Don't you know me, Thomas?' She came right up to him where he had stopped, still within the storeroom entrance, and looked
into his face but it did not answer her in the way that she expected.

'Is there something wrong, Thomas? Has something terrible occurred? With the ship, on the voyage? I have been so afraid for
you all these months.'

And then he saw the tears that were flooding to her eyes as if they had waited there primed for all of that time. He felt
a rush of sorrow then and pulled her to him, touched and smelled her familiar skin, her hair, her flouriness: a sweet clean
smell. No, there's nothing wrong my love, all went well, the voyage was a good one and we made much profit. And he crushed
her to him and kissed her deep, held tight to him all the life in her, and yet below the kiss lay a strangeness. It was too
soon for him, too sudden, this new knowledge of her. There was something mechanical in the action, as if he watched himself
embracing his wife, a sailor returning home doing what a sailor does, a sailor kissing the wife who is soon to bear his child,
two figures performing as themselves and yet they were not yet themselves but only acting themselves, as their lips broke
and joined again, two figures re-enacting Thomas and Johanne.