The Voyage of the Dolphin (23 page)

‘You know we can't take him with us,' Crozier announced at last, hanging back a little.

‘What? Why not?' Fitzmaurice stopped in his tracks. ‘He'll make up for not having Bunion, he'll get on with the cabin boy – they're both mad for the ladies, he'll…'

‘For the same reason that his grandfather couldn't stay. He'd be eaten alive.'

‘But, we made a deal.'

‘Walter's right,' Phoebe said, ‘he can't come to Ireland with us. He'd die like a dog.'

‘But surely – Frank, give me some help here.'

Rafferty gazed down at the oblivious back of the young giant, skidding and stumbling below them in his seven-league boots and bear-sized hat. He sighed.

‘I'm afraid I have to agree with the others, Fitz. People can be cruel. It wouldn't be fair to him.'

At the foot of the slope, Ossian was sitting on a boulder waiting for them, an expectant grin on his face. As they drew closer and he began to perceive their grim expressions, this faded. They explained the situation.

‘You tricked me,' he wailed, putting his head in his hands.

‘Believe me,' Crozier said, squeezing his shoulder, ‘we don't feel good about this.'

The giant began to bawl in earnest. Fitzmaurice took Phoebe to one side.

‘We need something to distract him,' he told her. ‘Give him something.'

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know. What does he like?'

‘
Ladies
,' said Rafferty phlegmatically. ‘He likes the colleens. The ladies.'

‘That's right.' Fitzmaurice's eyes bulged. ‘Phoebe, quick – give him something from you. Whatever it was you chucked at the Prime Minister. Give him one of your undergarments.'

Phoebe stared at him.

‘… I beg your f—ing pardon?'

‘Go on, it'll take his mind off things.'

‘I certainly will not.' She was breathing heavily through her nose. ‘Here's a better idea – why don't you give him that watch you stole from your uncle? With the mucky picture on it. He'll like
that
.'

Fitzmaurice glowered at her, then glanced at the bereft giant. He fumbled in his pack. He stepped forward.

‘Ossian, old man, I have a present for you, something special, something to remember us by.'

The deviant pocket watch was received blindly into a massive hand. It was a moment or two before the giant, who was in the grip of long shuddering sobs, was able to focus. As the dial's fleshy scene began to take form, he faltered, peered more closely. The convulsions of his mighty chest slowed, and finally, ceased.

‘That's a genuine heirloom,' Fitzmaurice continued. ‘My uncle, who was squashed by a rock, wanted me to have it. Now I'm entrusting it to you. I hope you'll look after it and, who knows, perhaps pass it down to the next generation. And the generation after that.'

The giant, transfixed, did not reply.

‘So,' Crozier said after a moment. ‘I suppose this is it. We'd better get on.'

‘Yes, Ossian, thanks for everything. You've been lovely.'

‘Say goodbye to your grandfather for us.'

‘Chin up, big fellah.'

They turned and headed for the plain. When they looked back, the young giant, despite his enormous fingers, had prised the back off the watch and was holding it aloft and shaking it, as though the tiny couple inside might fall, still in their amorous embrace, down from its silver casing and into his open palm.

 

By the time they arrived at the coast, the sun was low in the sky behind them, and their shadows reached the cliff-edge a minute before they did. The
Dolphin
was still at anchor in the bay.

‘There she is,' Rafferty said. ‘Look, there's McGregor.'

A figure moving on the ship's deck stopped and stared up in their direction.

‘What are we going to tell them, I mean about the giants?' Phoebe said.

‘Absolutely nothing.‘ Crozier lowered the flaps of his Savage Newell snow helmet against the biting sea breeze. ‘I don't think we should say a word to anyone. Agreed? We'll say we were lost in the mountains and lived on hares and snow geese.'

‘Another thing,' said Fitzmaurice. ‘Who's going to break it to him about a certain canine?'

‘Not me.'

‘Nor me. Crozier?'

‘Don't worry, he'll just be glad to see us back safely, he won't be bothered about Bunion. Anyway, Bunion's a father now and has had more than enough of life on the ocean wave.'

They scrambled down the scree and made their way out along the floe towards the
Dolphin
. As they approached, the crew appeared on deck and the ladder was lowered onto the ice.

‘Ahoy there!' Fitzmaurice called.

McGregor, gripping the gunwale with mittened hands, stared down at them.

‘Permission to come aboard, sir!'

The Scot looked older, his moustache, which was rising and falling as if worked by bellows, bigger than they remembered. His eyes were the size of ball bearings.

‘Reporting for duty…' Fitzmaurice faltered.

A wad of expectorate hit the ice.

‘Where the f— is my f—ing dog?'

A fresh fall during the night had given, to those emerging into the turquoise light of morning, the impression of one vast snowfield, of all boundaries blurred and obliterated. Hills and gullies had been levelled out, trees and hedges buried, rooftops caked; from Fair Head to Mizen Head, the whole island lay soundless and gleaming.

By lunchtime, the towns and cities had struggled to their feet, shrugging off enough of the snow to become workable, and citizens tip-toed along frozen thoroughfares. In Dublin the railways had been shut down but a few trams were running, and from one of these, half way along Sackville Street, the College cellarer alighted. Adjusting his woollen muffler, he stepped, with great care, on to the pavement and entered the confectioner's, which smelled of damp breath and aniseed. Sawdust had been scattered on the floor between the doorway and the counter and it was soggy underfoot. The cold of the meltwater penetrated his shoes.

‘It's the farmers I feel sorry for,' a woman in a lambskin coat was saying. ‘And the poor animals, God love them.'

‘Certainly in my memory there hasn't been a winter like it,' the proprietor replied, peering up through the window at the putty-coloured sky. ‘And looks like there's more to come. That'll be tuppence, when you're ready.'

Outside the shop, the cellarer tucked his newspaper under his arm and fumbled in his little bag of liquorice comfits. Up towards the river he could see cushions of snow on the parapets of O'Connell Bridge; opposite him the ragged edges of the once magnificent Hotel Metropole, its innards blackened by fire, were picked out in white. Nearly a year on, cascades of rubble still lay in heaps, and the hollowed shell of the General Post Office remained open to the weather, jangling in the city's consciousness like an exposed nerve. It was odd to see business going on as usual amid such ruination, he thought, but there they were, the bargain-hunters, the bicycles, the trams, the flower sellers; commerce crackling back to life like an electric current. Onward flow.

He stood for a moment, sucking his sweet, watching the passers-by walk as though they were wearing tight skirts. A motorcar laboured through the slush, its wheels spinning. He turned to regard the wrecked façade of Clery's department store. The place was a mess. He would have to go out of his way to purchase the linen cloths he used to polish his wine glasses.

He began to trudge in the direction of the river, pausing at the corner of Abbey Street to let a cart-load of bricks pass. The devastation here was almost total, only jagged foundations and part of a scorched balustrade remaining. He couldn't remember now what had been there originally. On the bridge an icy breeze gusted off the river and a seagull screeched overhead and, as he hurried in the direction of College, fragments of mayhem came back to him: the gunfire on the roof, the pounding of mortars, blood on the cobbles; the body of the dispatch rider, his face as smooth as a boy's, laid out for days in a room behind the porter's office. Even down below, deep in the cellars, dust had trickled from the rock and the precious liquids had shivered in their bottles.

 

The Senior Dean removed his spectacles and dropped them onto the newspaper that lay open on his desk. He rose and crossed to the window. Snow was falling again, flakes melting against the glass, the square below astir with soft movement. He stared up at the sky, at the drifting motes, and let himself be lost briefly, as children are, to a sense of slow and endless proliferation. Change was coming, he thought. Faster than ever. And there was no stopping it.

On the top of the campanile, two pairs of magpies were jockeying for dominance, knocking clumps of snow off the ledges. Some students were leaping about on the lawn, their shouts muffled, distant. The sight made him think of the three young men he had received before they had taken the Queenstown train south from Dublin almost a year ago. He tried to place them back in the square, large as life, but he couldn't quite remember what they looked like. So many had been and gone over the years, borne on the four winds…

He turned, ignoring, out of the corner of his eye, the portrait of himself which had recently returned from its third, expensive re-touch job. The hand that gripped the scroll was no longer puny. It was meaty. With muscular, sausage fingers. And the scroll itself – this, try as he might, he could not now unnotice – appeared, in certain lights, to have an oddly flesh-like tone and to be elevated at a suspicious angle. He tinkered for a few minutes with the fire and was just settling himself when there was a rap at the door and the Regius Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy scurried past and threw himself into the armchair opposite.

‘I know it's early, old man, but any chance of some grog?'

‘Of course. Madeira?'

‘Whatever you have.'

Hefting the decanter, the Senior Dean hesitated for a moment, listening to the snuffling sounds behind him, and poured himself a glass too.

‘There you are, that should do the trick.'

‘You're a gentleman.'

The Regius Professor, pink-cheeked and a little teary, contemplated his drink. His feet, which failed by some distance to reach the carpet, twitched inside their tight black shoes.

‘It's all going to buggery, you know. Cheers.'

‘Indeed… Sorry, what is?'

‘Everything. We're all buggered.'

The Senior Dean waited.

‘The Royal Irish Geographical Society met last night. It's buggered. Finished. The money's gone. No more dinners, no more trips, no more stipends. Twenty years I sat on that board. Some of the others much longer. Poor old Dobbin cried like a baby when the announcement was made. It was heart-breaking.' He took a ravenous slurp. ‘And that's only the beginning. The rot is well and truly setting in. Ireland? Buggered. Beauchamp tells me that in Westminster there's talk of self-government within the year.'

‘I know. It's all over the papers.'

‘Apart from Ulster, of course, but who'd want to live there? I thought that after the uh…
unpleasantness
last Easter they might have thought better of it, but seems not. Home Rule. Within the year! Can you imagine? It's terrifying.'

‘Might not be
that
bad.'

‘Are you out of your mind?' the Regius Professor squealed. ‘There'll be priests at Front Gate faster than you can say “who goes there?” and then where will we be? Buggered, that's where. Next thing you know, Commencements Day will be all wafers and bad wine. Speaking of which, have you heard about what's going on in the cellars?'

‘Buggeration?'

‘Bloody U-boats have kiboshed the Bordeaux route. Cellarer…' he swallowed the catch in his throat, ‘Cellarer's threatening to ration the claret.' He sank back in his chair. ‘I ask you.'

The Senior Dean stood up.

‘Refill?'

‘Go on then. For the nerves.'

Outside, the air was becoming thicker, and snow was beginning to accumulate around the edges of the windows, reducing the panes to ovals. Somewhere, far off, a bell was ringing, and the sound, faint but insistent, brought to the Senior Dean's mind, arbitrarily, his first day at boarding school. He was back in the sunlit dormitory amid the pillars of dust, the acres of buffed wood, lifting the lid of his suitcase on his hairy bed to find the Madeira cake, packed by his mother, wrapped in opaque paper and tied with string, the scent of home assailing his heart. He remembered how he'd eked it out, pinch by pinch, over the weeks until it was just stale crumbs. The memory began to fade and as he snatched at its retreat, he experienced a kind of pain.

‘And as for cricket, you can kiss
that
goodbye,' the Regius Professor said. ‘It's buggered. There'll be camogie bats on the crease, slitters flying all over the place. That's if there isn't livestock trotting to and fro. I've gone a bit far there, but you know what I mean – ah, you're very good. Chin-chin.'

They sipped in silence and the Regius Professor, noticing for the first time his colleague's douleur, checked himself. Wriggling into a more upright position, he coughed, and in a firmer tone of voice said: ‘Sorry for going on, but I'm finding all this rather distressing.' He wiped his lips with a thumb and forefinger. ‘Is there any
good
news? Is there any word of our intrepid trio? Tell me, when's our giant coming home?'

‘Funny you should ask.'

The Senior Dean fetched the
Irish Times
from his desk, folded it in half and handed it to the Regius Professor, who, blinking, skimmed through the latest from the western field of war, the voluminous casualty lists running down as far as the advertisements for cigarettes and Sanatogen, until, at the bottom right of the page, his eyes fastened on the following:

 

ARCTIC EXPEDITION SHIP FEARED LOST WITH
ALL HANDS

(REUTERS AGENCY)

A report of wreckage from the
lifeboat of a ship bound from Queenstown to the Arctic
has raised fears for the wellbeing of her crew and
passengers. Capt. Jacob van Haarlem, of the whaling ship Nautilus
, told maritime authorities in Copenhagen yesterday that he had seen
parts of the hull from a small craft inscribed with
“The Dolphin” in the sea off southeastern Greenland in June
of last year.

The Dolphin, a three-masted schooner-barque
of 320 tons, set sail last March to the Arctic
Archipelago on an expedition funded by the Royal Irish Geographical
Society. On board were three scientists from Trinity College Dublin
, and a crew of six under the command of Capt
. Ewan McGregor of Glasgow. The Dolphin's last contact was
by telegram from Reykjavik a month after leaving Ireland--

‘Oh bugger.'

*

Startled by a sound like the crack of a wet whip, Crozier turned to find Fitzmaurice sitting on a capstan with Bridie draped across his lap. The lizard was holding up a tiny hand and staring, with wall-eyed concentration, into space. It sneezed again.

‘It's the fumes,' Fitzmaurice explained.

Crozier, who had just finished tarring the main-stays, dropped the turpentine-soaked rag with which he had been cleaning his hands into the slush-bucket and leaned against the port bow. He inhaled the breeze. The sea was mineral blue, and they were travelling at a stately five knots. Somewhere not far to the south were the Western Isles, and only a matter of days beyond, was Dublin. Behind them, more than a month of Atlantic was evaporating at the nearing prospect of home.

On the opposite bow, Rafferty and Phoebe were engaged in high-spirited conversation. Crozier couldn't hear what they were saying but as he watched, Rafferty stood on tiptoe, making himself big, and adopted a booming voice; Phoebe was laughing, her hair blowing back from her face, her eyes brimming with ocean light. At the sight of her Crozier felt his heart twang and heat rise in his chest.

‘…a spot of fresh air,' Fitzmaurice was saying. ‘After being cooped up for so long, poor thing.'

The others approached.

‘Not far now,' chirped Rafferty. ‘First stop, home cooking. Pork chops. Irish stew. Maybe even a bowl of coddle.'

Phoebe looked at him askance. ‘What on earth is
coddle?
'

‘That's a secret known only to the mothers of Dublin,' Crozier told her. ‘Though I suspect it may have originated with one of Victoor's ancestors.'

‘You do realise, Phoebe,' Fitzmaurice said, ‘that you will be questioned very closely by a certain Mrs Rafferty regarding your intentions towards her son?'

‘She's a formidable woman,' Crozier warned.

Phoebe laughed. ‘I'm sure I can convince her that my intentions are honourable.'

Crozier smiled at her. The hull of the ship thumped against a random swell, then another.

‘It's going to be strange being back,' Rafferty said. ‘Feels like we've been away for a very, very long time.'

‘Nothing will have changed,' Fitzmaurice caressed Bridie's dewlaps, ‘and after a few days it will be as though we never left.'

‘I wonder when the war ended,' Crozier mused. ‘Presumably we won.'

Mention of the war stopped them in their tracks. They'd almost forgotten.

‘What will you do now, Hugh,' Phoebe said after a while. ‘Will you try and go back to your studies?'

‘No.' Fitzmaurice hoisted the lizard further up his lap. ‘No, I'd say that particular avenue is closed. Actually, I've been thinking I might work my journals up into a book. Exploration memoirs are very popular with the public these days, and I believe my writing has a certain style. Who knows, I might even do a lecture tour – England, the Continent, the United States. I'd have to take Bridie with me, of course.' He patted her flank. ‘Might even have a little outfit made up for her. Something sparkly.'

The reptile, which had been resting its chin dreamily in its hand, jerked to attention, fixing the others with a fiery eye as though daring them to laugh.

‘Or maybe not. We'll see.'

‘The voyage of the
Dolphin
? I'd definitely read it. What about you, Walter, what's in store?'

‘Oh, back to College. But I've decided to give up Divinity. I'm going to apply to read Zoological Studies instead. The natural world – its
outward form and inner workings
— is what really interests me.' He glanced at Phoebe. Then away. ‘And you?'

She shrugged. ‘The struggle goes on, of course. I intend to resume my role as a thorn in the side of His Majesty's government.'

‘
And
to marry a handsome doctor,' Rafferty added.

‘Perhaps. If you play your cards right.'

There was a squeak as the hatchway opened and the bosun, reporting for his shift, ascended the steps to the bridge. After a few minutes, Harris, who had been in the wheelhouse since dawn, emerged yawning. He threw them a weary, three-fingered salute.