The Solitude of Thomas Cave (7 page)

Christmas Day. In celebration I have cooked the last of my hung store of venison stewed with plums. I have awarded myself
a flagon of wine and seven inches of tobacco. It has been a mild day, for which God be praised, and I have forsaken my habitual
chores and eaten generously and sat long at my table like a lord. At noon I left the cooking upon the stove and took a stroll
outside. For a brief time I saw a faint white glow on the horizon that tells me that the glorious sun shines on the day far
to the south. I take comfort from knowing that December nears its close and the deepest of this long night is passed.

Strong, heavy food it was, a hunter's food, the meat a little high but the plums and spices and the long cooking made it tolerable
enough. Sometimes his gut pines if not with hunger then with need of some other thing to eat. The grasses he gathered lasted
well but he has nothing left of them now but a handful of dry and brittle strands. All that he has is dried, salted, preserved,
rancid. It is almost a pain to him to imagine greenness, the first bite of an apple, or to think of the freshness of milk,
butter, new cheeses, white foods soft as women.

Johanne drank much milk. She had a child's milky breath, a fringe of white about her upper lip. And he brought her sweetmeats
as if she were a child, exotic foods, cakes cooked with cinnamon. Any delicacy she wanted, he would go out into the city and
find it for her. He allowed himself a little money for luxuries from what he had put by.

'These I got from a sailor from Portugal, candied plums. They are said to be the finest in all of Europe.'

The fruit was the size of a bantam's egg, green like an artificial jewel and glistening with sugar. She ate it delicately,
savouring its strangeness. 'You must not do this, Thomas Cave. Not only will you make me fat but you will spoil me for a lady.'

But giving it to her was like giving a sweet thing to a child. He could not resist the way she glowed at a treat. Her eyes
lit up and her cheeks became all the pinker, so touchingly young and round beneath her little cap.

That January ice stretched right out across the Sound and the city authorities paid gangs of vagrant men to cut a channel
more than a sea mile in length, from the edge of the ice all the way into the town. Down this came a brave Dutch vessel laden
with other precious goods from Spain, fancy metalwork and tooled leathers as well as foods and wines. This ship became the
centre of a great market on the ice to which all kinds of pedlars came, and also the farmers of the district bringing their
produce in carts and sleighs. He thought it a fine and memorable sight, the festive crowd spilling out from the quay on to
the frozen sea, lone figures of skaters in the flat white distance, the tall buildings of the town behind, the static ship
at the heart of the crowd, sails furled, masts bare, tall like a building itself above the ice.

'Come out this once, Johanne, it'll do you good.'

In two weeks she had barely left the house. She said that her head ached and that she felt a throbbing in her, and her legs
hurt when she stood, for all that the old woman had pressed and soothed with her fingers and fed her ales and potions. 'No,
I shan't come with you,' she said, 'not into such a crowd. But you go, go and then tell me all about it after.'

'Then what shall I bring you?'

'How can I say until I know what there is?'

'Just give me a hint, my love, of what you would most like. The ship's come from Spain, you know. A land of sun and gold,
the richest country in the world.'

Johanne laughed at his eagerness and looked about her at the simple room, the whitewashed walls, the wooden floor, the square
glassless window with the shutter half across it and the grey chill of winter outside.

'Bring me a piece of its sun then!'

So he went out alone and saw the spectacle. The ice was frozen right across to Sweden and from there came sledges pulled by
tough shaggy ponies that looked far too small for the weight behind them, for the drivers who were huge men in wolfskins and
for their loads of furs and meat and wood; and other sledges driven by men and women in coloured and fur-trimmed felts who
sold hunting knives and fish hooks carved out of bone. There were braziers where men stood and warmed themselves from the
inside with fiery shots of liquor, and he stopped at one of these and went on with sparkling eyes and bought himself bread
and charred meat to satisfy the sudden sharp hunger that came upon him.

Close beneath the ship he found a crowd gathered about three of the Spanish sailors who played pipes and drums, and in the
space before them was a tiny creature dancing. At first he thought it must be a very small child, but fine and nimble and
not sturdy like the toddlers he was used to knowing, a delicate child in a green silk dress weaving gloved hands in the air
and hopping from one little fur boot to the other. Then the creature turned its head to the sound of the drum and he saw that
the look on its face was weirdly still, its blue eyes, despite the sinuous movement of its body, fixed and quite unblinking.
For a second he looked and did not understand, and then at some apparent signal from the pipe, the creature set its little
hands to its neck as if to lift away its head. One, two, a roll of drums, and the blue-eyed baby face came off, and beneath
it was another one, the wizened, brown, wide-grinning face of a monkey: the dainty dancer was no child at all but a monkey,
wearing the head of a life-sized doll. He was so disturbed by the sight that he was suddenly glad that Johanne had not come
and seen it. At another sound from the pipe the monkey made a bow, to the right, to the left, to the crowd before it, and
took up a red-lined box to collect its pay. Thomas Cave held out a coin and when it came close he thought that its grin seemed
a grimace and saw how its arm shivered and its teeth were chattering, and he felt pity that it had its nature taken from it
and that it was so far removed from home and climate. What were men to take a free creature so and play with it and make it
like a human? When he went on he was sobered so that the cold began to get to him and drive him in.

For Johanne all he bought was an orange. It was one that he chose with care from a tall pile, and big enough to fill his hand.

He brought it home and gave it to her, and for three days she treasured her piece of sun on the stone window-sill until she
could resist no longer. She took it down then and peeled the skin with clumsy fingers and broke it open, and the tang of its
scent shot through the room.

8

A
GAIN SHE IS there about him. During this spell of hard still days he has relaxed his vigilance and let himself think about
her, and his thoughts have brought her back. Even if he does not see her he knows her presence, the slow rustle of her movement
about him, her soft breath. 'Oh Johanne, who would have thought it could be like this? The cold is not at all as I could have
imagined. The sensation of it when I step outside, how it strikes deep in the stomach, how my muscles seem sore from the effect
of it as from a beating, the way it burns as if God made my nerves and sinews to react to fire but never to know this degree
of cold. Even here inside the cabin I have touched a piece of metal so cold that it burns and clings to the fingers like birdlime
and I must warm it or tear my skin before it can be released. Once too hastily I put a stoneware mug to my lips to drink and
it stuck to my beard and lips. It is more intense than anything I could have anticipated but at the same time more bearable.
It astonishes me how the time passes and the fire burns down and is built up again and I shape my day between sleep and work
and meals and prayer and continue to endure. I eat little, sleep much. I become like an animal that hides itself through the
winter and sleeps until spring.'

Beneath the weight of his rugs, he knows her. He knows the hardness of her pregnant belly. That had surprised him at first,
its hardness. Her belly is taut like clenched muscle; it has not the softness of woman to it. And because of it he must take
her differently and she must come on him. Slow she comes on him, taut, hard, strong, like a ship climbing a wave. Her face
is strange and her eyes are closed and her breasts full as sails, the veins showing in them, the nipples dark and roughened
and distended, and he closes his eyes also and has no thoughts in the surf.

After, there are words again, easy words.

'Do you remember last winter, Johanne, how cold we thought it? How we said to each other that it was one of the coldest we
had known? Day after day of biting north-easterlies and the sky leaden and damp above us. On the streets within the town,
ice froze layer upon layer so that walking out was like walking on uneven bubbled glass, and horses slithered and people fell
and broke their limbs. It became worse as the weeks passed, with every further melt or snow fall or new freezing, and down
every alley the tipped water from household pots made hazards or thin-iced traps. You of course stayed inside most of that
time. You wore that red jacket that you loved, with only the top buttons fastened now as you were so big, and a dark shawl
over it sometimes and a heavy dark woollen skirt. You sat in a pool of warmth with your swollen ankles up upon a stool and
stitched or made tidy pieces of lace. I remember that I thought your stillness very beautiful, the huge wrapped calm of you.
Even so there were times when you shivered and looked pinched and you complained of chilblains in your fingers that made it
hard to handle the little wooden bobbins.'

He speaks to her in his mind, not breaking the silence. He would not dare to, as if he knows that the brashness of his voice
would drive her out. He is aware of her unreality even as the words rise within him.

'I think that I had never lived in such a way before. Not since I was a child in a home I never told you of, in a village
two days' walk from the sea, and when I was young I did not see it thus. I was impatient then to be away and my father sent
me at the age of twelve to learn the sea from a cousin, his mother's sister's son, in the major port along that stretch of
coast. It was where in a sense my life, my life as myself, my life as I could tell the story of it, began. Not in the village,
not as the small child I was. I have little memory of him, only a picture of a sober boy who had a mother who was gentle and
carried about with her ever smaller children than himself, until one day she died and was not there, and left him with his
father and five brothers. I do not think I could tell you more about that early time.'

He is surprised at himself. He begins to be carried away on his words. In this solitude he has begun to look within himself
and into his past in a way that he has never done before. He has always been a silent, contained man, but not a thinker. He
has lived a life of action surrounded by other men and he has vested his interest in material things. That has been his philosophy:
to act, to work, to understand the mechanics of what he does. Not to indulge in pictures and dreams and chameleon memories.
Now he feels almost a guilt at what she has tempted him to do, as if it is a sin.

He opens his eyes. He has had them closed to let the pictures run through his head. He wills himself to rise. As though if
he did, if he acted like a man beginning an ordinary day, the sun itself would rise, the world melt and come to life outside,
the stream run again across the beach, the sea begin to swell and move. But for now his will lies frozen. He seems to have
the strength only to turn on to his back and look up to the rough wooden ceiling. He feels his stillness on him like a weight,
like the furs holding him down. Something in the fire hisses and draws his attention, and though he does not look he pictures
her there seated beside it, seated upright in the chair gently making lace. It has not occurred to him before but perhaps,
now he thinks of it, she is a little like his mother.

'It was so very different, that winter when I was with you and the Sound froze over. The type of cold so very different my
love from here. Here cold is wholly another sensation.'

His thoughts turn, repeat. What is he doing, talking to someone who is not there? He is tired. He huddles in the furs on his
cot. It is not the cold that he fears most now but the inertia of his existence. It may be that the inertia itself is a product
of the cold and the incessant dark and of his poor rations, but it is that which he feels crushing his soul: inactivity, enervation,
indolence. He lives in constant fatigue, he drifts between waking and sleeping, his brain turning without focus, his identity
becoming frozen, clear and yet thick, opaque as ice. Speaking to Johanne reminds him who he is. Was. Again he sees her, gazing
vacantly now at the fire with the circle of lace forgotten on her round belly.

'Did I tell you, Johanne, of the time I went to the Americas? We sailed across the mouth of a great river so wide that it
was like a sea, and on its shores was a jungle so dense that a man could not step into it. Captain Duke when I was talking
with him here - just the other day it seems, though it was in truth many months ago now but they have passed without time
- Captain Duke spoke of this very same river and made mention of a boy who was left there by Raleigh, not there where my ship
went but far inland along its banks. I think of him in these days because of some similarity and at the same time contrariness
in our situation. I wonder if the ship went back, if he survived to see it, if anyone ever found out what became of him.'

It is such a small thing, one boy's fate beside the great brown river and the hugeness of the jungle. He has tried to imagine
the boy walking alone in the heavy green heat. He pictures an impossible tangle of vegetation, a rich and rotten smell, a
seething abundance of life, but he cannot see the boy there. The boy is insubstantial to him, a wisp, a wavering mirage before
the substantiality of the place.

Just then he hears a great crack like a gunshot reverberating across the island. It is the sound of the ice cracking: whenever
the temperature dips sharply the place resounds with the writhe of the ice.

And who is he, Thomas Cave? A man from Suffolk strayed into the empty enormity of the North. A man of experience, unlike that
boy, with a life behind him. A grown man without love or issue. A wintry stalk of a man, dried-up and hollow inside. A man
who makes the wooden heels of shoes, who used to be a sailor, who once played the violin. A man who lets a ghost draw his
thoughts, and speaks to her as if she is real as himself.

He cries out suddenly in fear. 'Johanne, why do you come to me? Did you come with the lights? I have heard men say that there
are souls in the lights, the souls of the unborn but perhaps those of the dead also. Or do you come from my mind? Is it that
I am so astonished with the snow?'

Is this the beginning of it, then? Is this how a man falls prey to what is in his mind, how the madness and the scurvy will
get to him? But Thomas Cave has always been a resourceful man, rational and pragmatic. He will not give way so easily.

A man is what he does, God is his witness to his actions. A man who does nothing is nothing. So he will go out. He will hunt.
He will not let her take him.

There are sealskins in the outer cabin, scraped and dried, frozen in a pile stiff as planks. He breaks one off and brings
it in, and when he has melted and softened it he cuts it to make a mask. He fits it around his head, cuts slits for his eyes
and a round hole for his mouth, ties it with cord. He wraps his neck and head in a woollen shawl and puts on his hat and great
coat of wolfskin over all, fits his hands into fingerless woollen gloves with clumsy skin mittens above. When he steps outside
he is scarcely human in appearance, a slow cumbersome beast with a musket on his shoulder.

For three successive nights there has been a great white ring about the orb of the moon. The light is so bright that he casts
a neanderthal shadow on the snow. He seeks other moving forms in the stillness. For minutes at a time he watches an upstanding
rock to see if it will move, or a cask left on the beach and blanketed in snow that may at a distance be a lurking bear. He
examines shadows, scours the white ground for the patterns of prints. He believes that there are bears about. In the last
few days he thinks he has heard them snuffling about the walls of the cabin though he has not caught sight of one. But either
he imagined them or the wind must have swept away their tracks and there are now only the marks made by his own feet in their
broad snowboots, meandering out towards the mountain and then back along the ice. He does not return until his fingertips
begin to burn with the frost inside their gloves. His stomach feels bruised but he does not know if it is with the cold or
with the longing for fresh meat.