The North Water

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The next day, Sumner is too feverish to steer or row. As they pull east through layers of thick fog and showers of freezing rain and sleet, he huddles in the stem covered by a blanket, shivering and stomach sick. Every now and then, Cavendish shouts out an order or Otto commences whistling a Germanic air, but there are no other sounds except the death-rattle creak of the oarlocks and the asynchronous plash of the blades in the water. Each man, it seems, is wrapped up in his own silent forebodings. The day is gloomy, the sky dun-colored and raw. Twice, before noon, Sumner has to pull down his britches and hang his arse over the gunwale to sputter out a pint or so of liquid shit into the sea. When Otto offers him brandy, he swallows it down gratefully, then retches it straight back up. The men watch all this without comment or mockery. Bannon’s murder has flattened their resolve, left them stranded warily between equal but opposing fears.

At night, they camp on the floe edge, raise the bloodstained tent, attempt to dry and feed themselves. Near midnight, the bluish twilight thickens briefly to a gaudy and stelliferous darkness, then an hour later reasserts itself. Sumner sweats and shivers, dips in and out of an uneasy and dream-afflicted sleep. Around him bundled bodies grumble and gasp like snoozing cattle; the air inside the tent feels iron cold against his cheeks and nose, and has a stewed and crotch-like reek to it. As his flesh yearns, aches, and itches for the absent drug, his mind drifts and circles. He remembers the solitary journey from Delhi, the humiliations of Bombay and then London in April. Peter Lloyd’s Hotel in Charing Cross: the smell of semen and old cigar smoke; the squeals and shrieks of whores and their customers at night; the narrow iron bed, the oil lamp, the threadbare fauteuil spitting horse hair and grimed with bear fat and Makassar oil. He eats pork chops and peas and lives on questionable credit. Every morning for two weeks he goes out to the hospitals with his diplomas and his outdated letters of introduction; he sits in corridors and waits. In the evening, he seeks out acquaintances from Belfast and Galway — not good friends but men who will at least remember him: Callaghan, Fitzgerald, O’Leary, McCall. They reminisce over whiskey and ale. When the time is right, he asks for their help, and they tell him to try America, Mexico, or possibly Brazil, somewhere where the past does not matter so much as it does here, where the people are more free and easy and more likely to forgive a man’s mistakes since they have made a few themselves. England is not the place for him, they tell him, not anymore; it is too rigid and severe; he must give it up. Although they believe his story, they assure him, others never will. Their tone is friendly enough, comradely even, but he can tell that they wish him away. They greet news of his great failure as a reassuring reminder of their own more modest success, but also, more deeply, as a warning of what calamities might overtake them if they ever lose their vigilance, if they ever forget who they are or what they are about. In their worst imaginings they see in his disgrace a garish prophecy of their own.

At night, he takes opium and walks about the city until he is tired enough to sleep. One evening as he scuffs lopsidedly along Fleet Street, then past Temple Bar and the Courts of Justice, his ferule tapping the pavement as he goes along, he is astonished to see Corbyn coming straight towards him. He is wearing his campaign medals and red dress uniform; his tar-black boots are polished to a mirrored sheen, and he is in conversation with another, younger officer, mustachioed and similarly attired. They are both smoking cheroots and laughing. Sumner stands where he is in the shadow of a castellated doorway and waits for them to reach him. As he waits, he remembers Corbyn’s manner at the court-martial — casual, unconcerned, natural, as if, even as he lied, the truth was in his gift, as if he could make or unmake it exactly as he chose. As Sumner remembers the scene, he feels an avalanche of rage beginning to gather inside his chest; the muscles tighten in his throat and legs; he begins to shudder. The two officers draw closer, and he feels for a ghoulish moment excarnated, transcendent even, as if his body is much too small and slight to contain his furious thoughts. As they pass him, smoking and laughing, Sumner steps out from the doorway. He taps Corbyn on the brass-buttoned epaulette and, when he turns around to see who it is, strikes him across the face. Corbyn topples sideways. The younger officer drops his cheroot and stares.

“What the fuck?” he says. “What?”

Sumner doesn’t respond. He looks at the man he has just hit and realizes with a jolt that it is not Corbyn at all. They are roughly similar in age and height certainly, but apart from that, there is little true resemblance — the hair, the whiskers, the shape and features of the face, even the uniform is wrong. Sumner’s rage dissolves, he returns to himself, to his own body, to the deep humiliations of the real.

“I thought you were someone else,” he tells the man. “Corbyn.”

“Who the fuck is Corbyn?”

“A regimental surgeon.”

“Which regiment?”

“The Lancers.”

The man shakes his head.

“I should find a constable and have you jailed,” he says. “I swear to God I should.”

Sumner tries to help him, but the man pushes him away. He touches his cheek again, winces, then looks carefully at Sumner. The cheek is reddening, but there is no blood.

“Who are you?” he says. “I recognize that face.”

“I’m no one,” Sumner tells him.

“Who are you?” he says again. “Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“I’m no one,” he says. “No one at all.”

The man nods.

“Come here then,” he says.

Sumner steps closer. The man places his hand on Sumner’s shoulder. Sumner smells the port wine on his breath, the bandoline in his hair.

“If you’re really no one,” he says, “I don’t suppose you’ll object too much to this.”

He leans in six inches and drives his knee high up into Sumner’s balls. The pain ricochets through Sumner’s stomach and out into his chest and face. He drops to his knees on the wet pavement, groaning and wordless.

The man, who he thought was Corbyn but isn’t, leans down and whispers gently into his ear.

“The Hastings is gone,” he says. “Sunk. Smashed to little pieces by a berg, and every fucker in her bar none is drowned, for sure.”

* * *

The next afternoon, they find a capsized whaleboat and then, a little while later, an intermittent half-mile-long slew of empty blubber casks and shattered timbers. They row about in slow circles, picking up pieces of the debris, examining them, conferring, then dropping them helplessly back into the water. Cavendish for once is pale and silent, his normal piss and windiness crushed by the weight of unlooked-for catastrophe. He scans the nearby ice floes with the telescope but sees nothing and no one. He spits, curses, turns aside. Sumner, through the green and melancholic haze of his sickness, realizes that their best hope of rescue is now gone. Some of the men begin to weep and others start clumsily praying. Otto checks the charts and takes a reading with the sextant.

“We’re past Cape Hay,” he calls across to Cavendish. “We can reach Pond’s Bay before night. When we get there we’ll find another ship, God willing.”

“If we don’t, we’ll have to winter o’er,” Cavendish says. “That’s been done afore.”

Drax, who is chained to the rearmost rowing bench and is thus the closest man to Cavendish, who is at the steering oar, snorts at this.

“It hant been done afore,” he says, “and it hant been done afore because it can’t be done. Not without a ship to shelter in and ten times the provisions we have left.”

“We’ll find a ship,” Cavendish says again. “And if we don’t find one, we’ll winter o’er. Whichever way it goes, we’ll all live long enough to see you hanged in England, you can be sure of that.”

“I’d be happier hanged than fucking starved to death or frozen.”

“We should drown you now, you cavilling bastard. That’d be one less fucking mouth to feed.”

“You wouldn’t like my dying words too well if you tried that trick,” Drax answers. “Although there’s others here might find ’em interesting enough.”

Cavendish looks at him for a time, then leans forwards, takes a firm handful of his waistcoat, and replies in a fierce whisper.

“You hant got nothing on me, Henry,” he says. “So don’t ever think you do.”

“I int squeezing, Michael,” Drax says calmly. “I’m just reminding. The time may never come, but if it comes, it’d suit you to be ready, that’s all.”

Drax picks up his oar, Cavendish calls out the order, and they begin to row again. To the west, a long line of coal-dark mountains, ashen-tipped, rise up out of the hammered grayness of the sea. The two whaleboats move gradually onward. After several hours, they reach the craggy tip of Bylot Island and enter the mouth of Pond’s Bay. Rain clouds gather and disperse; the light is slowly failing. Cavendish peers eagerly through his telescope, sees first nothing, then, wobbling on the horizon, the black outline of another vessel. He waves and points. He shouts to Otto.

“A ship,” he calls. “A fucking ship. Over yonder. See there.”

They all see it, but it is far away and seems to be steaming south already. The smoke from its stack makes a faint angled smudge against the sky, like a thumbed-out pencil line. They give urgent chase, but the effort is futile. In another half hour, the ship has disappeared into the haze, and they are alone again on the dark, brimful sea, with only the brown snow-clad hills about them and the scuffed and mournful evening sky above.

“What kind of fucking watch are they keeping that they don’t see a whaleboat in distress?” Cavendish says bitterly.

“’Appen the ship is full,” someone answers him. “’Appen they’re heading home with all the rest.”

“No fucker’s full this year,” Cavendish says. “If they had anything about them, any fucking thing at all, they’d still be out here fishing.”

No one answers him. They look out into the pallid misty drabness seeking for a sign but see nothing.

As darkness falls, they pull over to a nearby headland and raise the tent on a thin strip of gravel beach backed by low brown cliffs. After eating, Cavendish orders the men to break up one of the whaleboats with hand axes and build a beacon fire with its salvaged timbers. If there is another ship out there in the bay, he argues, they will see the blaze and come to rescue them. Although the men appear to doubt this reasoning, they do as they are told. They turn the boat over and begin to smash apart its hull, keel, and stern piece. Sumner, wrapped in a blanket, shivering and queasy still, stands beside the tent and watches them at their work. Otto approaches and stands next to him.

“This is how I dreamed it,” he says. “The fire. The broken whaleboat. Everything the same.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Sumner says. “Not now.”

“I don’t fear death,” Otto says. “I never have. We none of us have any idea of the riches that await.”

Sumner coughs violently twice, then retches onto the icy ground. The men gather the broken wood into a pyre and light it. The wind catches the flames and blows them sparkling upwards into darkness.

“You’re the one who survives,” Otto tells him. “Out of all of us. Remember that.”

“I said before, I don’t believe in prophecies.”

“Faith is not important. God doesn’t care whether we believe in Him or not. Why should He care?”

“You really think all this is His doing? The murders? The wrecks? The drownings?”

“I know it must be someone’s,” Otto says. “And if not the Lord, who else?”

While it burns, the bonfire elevates the crewmen’s spirits; its startling brightness gives them hope. As they watch it rage and fork and spit out sparks, they feel sure that somewhere out there other men are also watching, that boats will soon be lowered, help dispatched. They throw the last fragments of wood on the raucous blaze and wait expectantly for their rescuers to arrive. They smoke their pipes and squint eagerly out into the murky distance. Their talk is of women and children, of houses and fields they might still live to see again. Every minute, as the flames gradually reduce and daylight increases around them, they anticipate a boat, but none appears. After an hour more of fruitless waiting, they begin to feel their optimism curdle, and something rank and bitter take its place. Without a ship to shelter in, without enough firewood and food, how can anyone live through the winter in a place like this one? When Cavendish walks down from his seat on the cliff, holding the closed telescope in one hand and a rifle in the other, his expression remote, disgraceful, his eyes turned away, they know for certain that the plan has failed.

“Where are the boats?” someone shouts to him. “Why don’t they come?”

Cavendish ignores the questions. He goes inside the tent and starts counting up their remaining provisions. Even reducing everyone to half rations, two pounds of bread a week and the same of salt meat, there is barely enough to last past Christmas. He shows Otto, then calls the remaining crewmen together and explains that they will need to hunt for their food if they want to survive until the spring. Seals will do, he says, foxes, loons, auks, any kind of bird. As he speaks, it starts to snow outside and the wind picks up and shakes the canvas walls like a prelibation of the coming winter. No one answers him, and no one volunteers to hunt. They look back at him silently, and when he has finished they curl up in their blankets and drift to sleep, or sit about playing euchre with a pack of cards so ancient, limp, and filthy, they might have been cut from the rags of a lazar.

The snow falls steadily outside for the remainder of the day: heavy, wet flakes that sag the tent and clump like barnacles against the remaining whaleboat’s upturned hull. Sumner is racked and shuddering; his bones ache and his eyeballs itch and throb. He cannot sleep or piss although the desire for both is fierce within him. As he lies there, immobile, garbled fragments of The Iliad pass through his beleaguered mind — the black ships, the broken barricade, Apollo as a vulture, Zeus seated on a cloud. When he leaves the tent to shit, it is dark outside and the air is bitter cold. He crouches, pulls apart his raddled arse cheeks, and lets the hot, green liquid sluice out from him. The moon’s light is blurred by lines of cloud; snow sweeps across the outstretched bay, gathering on the extant floes and dissolving down into the black waters between. The cold air clamps and shrivels his bollocks. Sumner refastens his britches, turns, and sees, fifty yards away along the gravel shore, a bear.

The bear’s sharp, snakelike head is upraised; its broad body, heavy-shouldered and vast across the withers, stands fixed and certain. Sumner, shielding his eyes from the falling snow, takes a slow step forwards, then stops. The bear is unconcerned. It sniffs the ground, then turns in a slow pacing circle, ending where it began. Sumner stands and watches. The bear comes closer, but he doesn’t move away. He can see the texture of its coat now, the dark semi-quadrants of its claws against the snow. The bear yawns once, bares his fangs, and then, without warning or obvious purpose, rears upwards on its hind limbs like a circus animal and dangles for a moment, suspended like a limestone obelisk against the pelting, moon-stained sky.

From behind him, blowing down off the mud-brown cliffs, Sumner hears a sudden uprearing bellow, a vast symphonic howl, pained, primeval, yet human nonetheless, a cry beyond words and language it seems to him, choral, chthonic, like the conjoined voices of the damned. Filled with a moment’s terror, he turns around to look, but there is nothing there except the falling snow, the night, and the enormous, empty land off to the west, scarred and unimaginable, wrapping like bark around the planet’s darkened bole. The bear stays poised upright a moment longer, then flops down onto its front paws, swivels, and begins, implacably and without dispatch, to walk away.