The Discovery Of Slowness (13 page)

‘Shoot, will you!' someone shouted behind him. But John Franklin, who had held a rope in the air for hours, also had the time to take aim. He wanted to fire only if he was completely sure he could hit his target. Once more he assembled it all in his mind: the angles, the estimated height, the scruples he had overcome, the better future. Then he fired. He dropped the rifle, grabbed the second one, aimed it, and fired again, then took the third and padded up the stairs. Was the sharpshooter still there? The tangle of rigging was now even denser; the torn French topgallant concealed the exact position. Without cover, John fired once more at the mizzen. Nothing stirred there.

Only Lieutenant Rotherham was standing on the quarterdeck. Walford had gone to the enemy ship with a boarding-party.

Then he saw the wind under the ragged topgallant on the other side waft the three-cornered hat out to sea. Under the mizzen, one foot suddenly appeared dangling. It was only a tiny movement, a foot slipping a few inches lower because it no longer sought a hold. ‘There, see!' cried one of the Irish sailors.

The enemy sharpshooter had slid down, head first. It was as though the head had wanted to go down first and the body were following reluctantly, seeking footholds again and again on spars and masts until it had to get down into the sea.

‘It's got him!' exclaimed the boatswain.

‘No, I did,' said John.

On the poop and quarterdeck of the
Bellerophon
alone eighty men lay dead or mortally wounded. The survivors were too exhausted to cheer. On both ships there reigned silence. It stank.

Simmonds was dead. He knew it now.

‘On that point you may be right,' crowed Walford. ‘The dead see it differently.' He alone seemed to want to regain his composure by making speeches. There was too much to do. Signals had to be deciphered. Admiral Nelson had been shot. Collingwood was now commander-in-chief. Walford went to the French ship
L'Aigle
with the fifth lieutenant and a prize detail, and Henry Walker to the Spanish ship
Monarca
, a ship manned mostly by Irishmen.

A storm came up and raged more violently than the one John had gone through in the Bay of Biscay when he was fourteen, and it sank more ships than the guns had done. Above all, the prizes were lost. The sea had its say. There were leaks to caulk, and they had to pump until they collapsed. All night long they struggled to keep clear of the threatening shore.

Early in the morning, the storm abated. John went to the orlop and sat down among the wounded, apathetically. He was too tired to think or to weep, even to sleep. He let the images come and go, faces of men to whom he had become accustomed in vain: Mockridge, Simmonds, Cooke, Overton, the black sailor – the French sharpshooter got in between and then, suddenly, Nelson. What a waste that was! ‘None of it for the honour of mankind.' And what he himself had done he still had to ponder. One of the women saw him sitting there. She must have thought he was about to weep, and said, ‘Hey hey!' John lifted his fist from his forehead and answered, ‘I can't recall them all any more. They all went too fast.'

‘One gets used to that,' said the woman, ‘and to worse things which you don't even know yet. Here's something to drink.' With their stolid domesticity, the women lent the war an air of matter-of-factness it didn't deserve. This woman was of the pale kind, with freckles. She had belonged to the purser, who was dead now. Hours later John no longer knew whether he had kissed her or had slept with her or whether it had all been merely a fantasy, a vision as suggested by the Bishop of Cloyne. No sun, in any event; no present tense.

He still worked reliably. ‘I can be awake for thirty-six hours and still work,' he said in order to hold on to something, since the victory over the French gave him little. But he did remark that the number of hours that had elapsed was no indication of the amount of time that had passed. Besides, he didn't know whether shooting someone could be considered work. In the distance he observed a signal from the
Euryalus
, Collingwood's new flagship. The schooner
Pickle
was ordered to London to carry victory tidings. For a moment John imagined her commander, Lapenotie ‘re, the man with the long nose, as he appeared in London and, for all his
eloquence, had to say only four words to make everyone leap to his feet: ‘Victory at Cape Trafalgar!'

The
Bellerophon
was anchored at Spithead before Portsmouth. Southsea castle turned toward them brightly with its banners. To the right one could discern with a good telescope the hulls of ships that had been outfitted as prisons – mouldy, worn-out men-of-war which were now to receive the French prisoners of war. Those gigantic old cut-down hulls were painted grey and stripped of their masts, each now equipped with its own pointed roof and several chimneys. They looked like plump houses standing in the water. What is a ship without a mast?

The streets of Portsmouth were still teeming with throngs drunk with victory – or did it only seem so? Perhaps it was just the alcohol. After all, it was Sunday, and the dockworkers did not have to go to the shipyards. On top of the semaphore tower, John noted, the signal flags were being waved busily. Evidently another message to the Admiralty was being produced to be relayed from hill to hill all the way to London. Surely it was still another confirmation of victory – the sort of things admirals liked to hear.

John headed for Keppel Row as quickly as possible, and among the many low houses he immediately found the right one.

An old woman he did not know peered out of Mary's door.

‘What Mary? There's no Mary here.'

John said, ‘Mary Rose. She lived here.'

He had recalled her face again long ago. And the house was the right one.

‘Mary Rose? But she's gone down.' The door slammed shut. Inside, John heard laughter. He pounded until the door was opened once more. ‘Well, then, nobody here's called Mary,' said the old woman. ‘Or are you thinking of the old woman next door – what's she called still …?'

‘No, young,' said John, ‘with high arches above her eyes.'

‘She's dead, isn't she, Sarah?'

‘Nonsense, Mother. She's moved away. She was crazy.'

‘Such arches above the eyes belonged only to one person,' said John.

‘Well, then you'll find her.' With that the old woman went inside again. The younger woman hesitated another moment. Then she added, ‘I'd let it go if I were you. I believe the woman you're looking for was taken away. She is, I think, in a workhouse somewhere. She probably couldn't pay any more.'

Workhouse – that was the poorhouse. There was one on Warblington Street. John went there and asked to speak with Mary Rose. The porter was regretful. They didn't have anyone by that name. In the rear an old man screamed again and again: ‘Help! Rats! Rats!' The porter said only, ‘Try in Portsea. Elm Road.'

Half an hour later John reached that place. Another poorhouse, surrounded by a thick wall. There were no windows, only holes through which the miserable inmates peered and begged from passers-by. Innumerable old hands, twisted by gout, stuck out of the holes; between them, two children's arms. The matron was very friendly. ‘Mary Rose? That's the one who killed her child. We no longer have her here. She'll be in the White House in the High Street. Is anything wrong, Mr Officer?'

John turned back to the city. If this place was a poorhouse, what would a prison be like?

The guard at the White House shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not here, in any case. Perhaps on one of those prison hulks about to be deported to Australia. Or try the new prison. Penny Street.'

John marched there. Darkness had fallen. In Penny Street he found that nothing could be done until morning.

Since he had definitely decided to sleep in a bed that night, he rented a room in an expensive hotel, the Blue Posts – nothing else was available. He didn't much feel like seeing the
Bellerophon
and his shipmates. First he had to find Mary Rose again, even if he had to take her off the hulk.

The next day dawned. Determined, John pushed his way into the prison's workroom accompanied by an official. He saw a few spent, worn people who picked oakum out of tar-stained ropes, their fingers bleeding. Another official arrived. Yes, there
was a Mary Rose in the place, but she was dangerous and uncontrollable. She often screamed for hours. Why did he want to see her? ‘To convey greetings,' John said, ‘from her family.'

‘Family,' the official echoed doubtfully. ‘Well, then, perhaps this will quiet her down a bit.' He went to get her.

The woman wore chains, hands tied behind her back. She was not Mary Rose at all, at least not the one John was looking for. Instead, she was a somewhat plump young woman with a sickly pallor and a completely vacant gaze. John asked her where the other Mary Rose was, the one from Keppel Row. She suddenly gave a laugh. When she laughed she was almost pretty to look at, because she wrinkled her nose.

‘The other Mary Rose. That was me, of course,' she said.

Then she started to scream and was taken away.

John drifted about the city and reflected. At noon he lingered for a long time near a soup kitchen for the needy and asked about Mary's arched eyebrows. Some of them said again, ‘She's gone down.' For there had been a ship by that name.

Otherwise they knew either no one or too many women by that name. Specially constructed eyebrows they did not recall, or they had not looked that closely, anyway. How could they? Not look? They wasted everything good, starting with their dull eyes. But perhaps they thought of themselves as wasted. He noticed that misery repelled him.

For three days John remained in the city. He visited the worst drinking-dens, which mostly bore proud names like the Heroes; he even went to the notorious Ship Tigre in Capstan Square. Nothing! He asked three unemployed dockworkers, but they had other worries. A scoundrel named Brunel had set up a new machine on which ten unskilled workers could produce as many tackle blocks per day as one hundred and ten skilled men. They were looking for gunpowder to blow the thing up. John advised against it and walked on. He asked about a hundred sailors, around thirty streetwalkers, two doctors, a Town Hall clerk. He inquired even at the Methodist Sunday School. In the tavern Fortune of War an old man showed him his wilted arm in place of an answer; one could see on it the tattoo of a beautiful naked
woman, once drawn with brimming breasts and full flowing hair, but now somewhat damaged by the wrinkled skin. Above the tattoo John read ‘Mary Rose,' and below ‘Love.'

At last he found a whore who said, ‘I knew one who looked like that. But her name wasn't Mary Rose. She got married a little while ago – to a tradesman or hatter from Sussex. What she's called now I don't know.'

The soles on John's shoes had worn thin. He felt every cobblestone. At one point during the day he sat on top of a cart at an intersection and didn't know how to go on. He stared in front of him and said, ‘So that's how it is.'

The
Bellerophon
soon sailed away. His sea-chest remained on board. One didn't necessarily have to be where one's sea-chest was. The man who had hoisted the well-known signal on the
Victory
, an able seaman named Roome, had deserted at the first opportunity after the battle. But John didn't want to do that under any circumstances. He couldn't imagine what he would do. They had refused to release him to serve with the East India Company. So what was left for him? Moreover, his shipmates were now all he had. At least he knew them. He found it harder than ever to address anyone, to acknowledge that he knew no way out. He got up to walk to the pier.

‘To defend England,' he said, and smiled that thin smile which he disliked in other people.

The last person he asked about Mary Rose was a little boy. He didn't know her, either, but he made John stay and wanted to know about animals on the other side of the earth. John sat down and told him of a giant monitor, a lizard named Salvator. He had observed the monitor in Timor. But he was now amazed that quite against his will he managed to say so many bitter things about this strange beast.

‘The lizard Salvator doesn't flee. But neither does he like to fight; that's against his nature. He's smart like a human and enjoys friends. But he barely moves – most of the time he just sits – and so he finds few friends. He grows older than all the other animals; all his friends die before he does.'

‘What does he do, then?' the boy asked impatiently.

‘He's modest and good-natured. Only chickens upset him. He gobbles them up whenever he can. At close range, he sometimes doesn't see very well what's ahead of him.'

‘Better tell me what he looks like.'

‘He has high brows that shield his eyes, and nostrils the shape of eggs, and there are yellow dots on his black skin. His tail is long and jagged. His tongue is thin. With it he examines everything very carefully.'

The boy said, ‘I don't think I like this one so well. He's certainly poisonous.'

‘No, poisonous he's not,' John answered sadly. ‘But people think he is. Therefore, he has to suffer so much. The Timorese torture him with rocks and fire.'

‘If he's that slow it's his own fault,' the boy decided.

John got up. ‘Slow? He's only slow apparently. The fastest runner in the world can't catch up with him, and he can see many miles in the distance, to the other side of the horizon.'

With that he went, and that was his farewell to Portsmouth.

He was infinitely tired. He didn't believe he would go down; still, it seemed to him that, in an as yet undetermined way, everything was over even if it went on. He couldn't cry like a child any more, especially since he no longer believed that weeping could change anything in the world. But instead a lasting sorrow nested deep inside him – a sorrow which shunned the light and was universal. It spread out yet remained concealed. It bore the name of Mary Rose within, but it held out its hand to the rest of the world. John did not want to go down: he again decided to endure. He carefully avoided his tendency to disapprove. For that he was praised and made a lieutenant. That was no mean feat.