Pincher Martin (21 page)

“I shit on your heaven!”

The lines and tendrils felt forward through the sea. A segment of storm dropped out like a dead leaf and there was a gap that joined sea and sky through the horizon. Now the lightning found reptiles floating and flying motionlessly and a tendril ran to each. The reptiles resisted, changing shape a little, then they too, dropped out and were gone. A valley of nothing opened up through Safety Rock.

The centre attended to the rock between its claws. The rock was harder than rock‚ brighter, firmer. It hurt the serrations of the claws that gripped.

The sea twisted and disappeared. The fragments were not visible going away, they went into themselves, dried up, destroyed, erased like an error.

The lines of absolute blackness felt forward into the rock and it was proved to be as insubstantial as the painted water. Pieces went and there was no more than an island of papery stuff round the claws and everywhere else there was the mode that the centre knew as nothing.

The rock between the claws was solid. It was square and there was an engraving on the surface. The black lines sank in, went through and joined.

The rock between the claws was gone.

There was nothing but the centre and the claws. They were huge and strong and inflamed to red. They closed on each other. They contracted. They were outlined like a night sign against the absolute nothingness and they gripped their whole strength into each other. The serrations of the claws broke. They were lambent and real and locked.

The lightning crept in. The centre was unaware of anything but the claws and the threat. It focused its awareness on the crumbled serrations and the blazing red. The lightning came forward. Some of the lines pointed to the centre, waiting for the moment when they could pierce it. Others lay against the claws, playing over them, prying for a weakness, wearing them away in a compassion that was timeless and without mercy.

T
he jetty, if the word would do for a long pile of boulders, was almost under the tide at the full. The drifter came in towards it, engine stopped, with the last of her way and the urging of the west wind. There was a wintry sunset behind her so that to the eyes on the beach she seemed soon a black shape from which the colour had all run away and been stirred into the low clouds that hung just above the horizon. There was a leaden tinge to the water except in the path of the drifter—a brighter valley of red and rose and black that led back to the dazzling horizon under the sun.

The watcher on the beach did not move. He stood, his seaboots set in the troughs of dry sand that his last steps had made, and waited. There was a cottage at his back and then the slow slope of the island.

The telegraph rang astern in the drifter and she checked her way with a sudden swirl of brighter water from the screws. A fender groaned against stone. Two men jumped on to the jetty and sought about them for the bollards that were not there. An arm gesticulated from the wheel-house. The men caught their ropes round boulders and stood, holding on.

An officer stepped on to the jetty, came quickly towards the beach and jumped down to the dry sand. The wind ruffled papers that he held in his hand so that they chattered like the dusty leaves of late summer. But here they were the only leaves. There was sand, a cottage, rocks and the sea. The officer laboured along in the dry sand with his papers chattering and came to a halt a yard from the watcher.

“Mr. Campbell?”

“Aye. You’ll be from the mainland about the——?”

“That’s right.”

Mr. Campbell removed his cloth cap and put it back again.

“You’ve not been over-quick.”

The officer looked at him solemnly.

“My name’s Davidson, by the way. Over-quick. Do you know, Mr. Campbell, that I do this job, seven days a week?”

Mr. Campbell moved his seaboots suddenly. He peered forward into Davidson’s grey and lined face. There was a faint, sweet smell on the breath and the eyes that did not blink were just a fraction too wide open.

Mr. Campbell took off his cap and put it on again.

“Well now. Fancy that!”

The lower part of Davidson’s face altered to the beginnings of a grin without humour.

“It’s quite a widespread war, you know.”

Mr. Campbell nodded slowly.

“I’m sorry that I spoke. A sad harvest for you, Captain. I do not know how you can endure it.”

The grin disappeared.

“I wouldn’t change.”

Mr. Campbell tilted his head sideways and peered into Davidson’s face.

“No? I beg your pardon, sir. Come now and see where we found it.”

He turned and laboured away along the sand. He stopped and pointed down to where an arm of water was confined by a shingly spit.

“It was there, still held by the lifebelt. You’ll see, of course. There was a broken orange-box and a tin. And the lineweed. When we have a nor’wester the lineweed gets caught there—and anything else that’s floating.”

Davidson looked sideways at him.

“It seems important to you, Mr. Campbell, but what I really want is the identity disc. Did you remove that from the body?”

“No. No. I touched—as little as possible.”

“A brown disc about the size of a penny, probably worn round the neck?”

“No. I touched nothing.”

Davidson’s face set grim again.

“One can always hope, I suppose.”

Mr. Campbell clasped his hands, rubbed them restlessly, cleared his throat.

“You’ll take it away tonight?”

Now Davidson peered in his turn.

“Dreams?”

Mr. Campbell looked away at the water. He muttered.

“The wife——”

He glanced up at the too-wide eyes, the face that seemed to know more than it could bear. He no longer evaded the meeting but shrank a little and answered with sudden humility.

“Aye.”

Davidson nodded, slowly.

Now two ratings were standing on the beach before the cottage. They bore a stretcher.

Mr. Campbell pointed.

“It is in the lean-to by the house, sir. I hope there is as little to offend you as possible. We used paraffin.”

“Thank you.”

Davidson toiled back along the beach and Mr. Campbell followed him. Presently they stopped. Davidson turned and looked down.

“Well——”

He put his hand to the breast pocket of his battledress and brought out a flat bottle. He looked Mr. Campbell in the eye, grinned with the lower part of his face, pulled out the cork and swigged, head back. The ratings watched him without comment.

“Here goes, then.”

Davidson went to the lean-to, taking a torch from his trouser pocket. He ducked through the broken door and disappeared.

The ratings stood without movement. Mr. Campbell waited, silently, and contemplated the lean-to as though he were seeing it for the first time. He surveyed the mossed stones, the caved-in and lichenous roof as though they were a profound and natural language that men were privileged to read only on a unique occasion.

There was no noise from inside.

Even on the drifter there was no conversation. The only noises were the sounds of the water falling over on the little beach.

Hush. Hush.

The sun was a half-circle in a bed of crimson and slate.

Davidson came out again. He carried a small disc, swinging from a double string. His right hand went to the breast pocket. He nodded to the ratings.

“Go on, then.”

Mr. Campbell watched Davidson fumble among his papers. He saw him examining the disc, peering close, transferring details carefully to a file. He saw him put the disc away, crouch, rub his hands backwards and forwards in the dry, clean sand. Mr. Campbell spread his arms wide in a gesture of impotence and dropped them.

“I do not know, sir. I am older than you but I do not know.”

Davidson said nothing. He stood up again and took out his bottle.

“Don’t you have second sight up here?”

Mr. Campbell looked unhappily at the lean-to.

“Don’t joke, sir. That was unworthy of you.”

Davidson came down from his swig. Two faces approached each other. Campbell read the face line by line as he had read the lean-to. He flinched from it again and looked away at the place where the sun was going down—seemingly for ever.

The ratings came out of the lean-to. They carried a stretcher between them that was no longer empty.

“All right, lads. There’s a tot waiting for you. Carry on.”

The two sailors went cautiously away through the sand towards the jetty. Davidson turned to Mr. Campbell.

“I have to thank you, Mr. Campbell, in the name of this poor officer.”

Mr. Campbell took his eyes away from the stretcher.

“They are wicked things, those lifebelts. They give a man hope when there is no longer any call for it. They are cruel. You do not have to thank me, Mr. Davidson.”

He looked at Davidson in the gloom, carefully, eye to eye. Davidson nodded.

“Maybe. But I thank you.”

“I did nothing.”

The two men turned and watched the ratings lifting the stretcher to the low jetty.

“And you do this every day.”

“Every day.”

“Mr. Davidson——”

Mr. Campbell paused so that Davidson turned towards him again. Mr. Campbell did not immediately meet his eye.

“—we are the type of human intercourse. We meet here, apparently by chance, a meeting unpredictable and never to be repeated. Therefore I should like to ask you a question with perhaps a brutal answer.”

Davidson pushed his cap back on his head and frowned. Mr. Campbell looked at the lean-to.

“Broken, defiled. Returning to the earth, the rafters rotted, the roof fallen in—a wreck. Would you believe that anything ever lived there?”

Now the frown was bewildered.

“I simply don’t follow you, I’m afraid.”

“All those poor people——”

“The men I——?”

“The harvest. The sad harvest. You know nothing of my—shall I say—official beliefs, Mr. Davidson; but living for all these days next to that poor derelict—Mr. Davidson. Would you say there was any—surviving? Or is that all? Like the lean-to?”

“If you’re worried about Martin—whether he suffered or not——”

They paused for a while. Beyond the drifter the sun sank like a burning ship, went down, left nothing for a reminder but clouds like smoke.

Mr. Campbell sighed.

“Aye,” he said, “I meant just that.”

“Then don’t worry about him. You saw the body. He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots.”

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume,
Poems
, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel,
Lord of the Flies
, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961.
Lord of the Flies
was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections
The Hot Gates
and
A Moving Target
. He won the Booker Prize for his novel
Rites of Passage
in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.
The Double Tongue
, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.

Books by

Sir William Golding

1911-1993

Nobel Prize for Literature

Fiction

LORD OF THE FLIES

THE INHERITORS

PINCHER MARTIN

FREE FALL

THE SPIRE

THE PYRAMID

THE SCORPION GOD

DARKNESS VISIBLE

THE PAPER MEN

RITES OF PASSAGE

CLOSE QUARTERS

FIRE DOWN BELOW

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

(comprising
Rites
of
Passage,
Close
Quarters
and
Fire
Down
Below

in a revised text; foreword by the author)

THE DOUBLE TONGUE

Essays

THE HOT GATES

A MOVING TARGRT

Travel

AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL

Plays

THE BRASS BUTTERFLY

LORD OF THE FLIES

adapted for the stage by

Nigel Williams