The Solitude of Thomas Cave (16 page)

And the stranger came down from the tower and with him the sailor whose body trembled all over and whose face was white like
lard. The woman grabbed the baby from his arms, and its cheeks were cold in the rain but it reached out feeble hands to her
and she gave it her breast to suck and she was bursting with milk. The stranger stood apart and none approached him. The people
were more afraid of him than of the other man who seemed now so pale and broken and without power.

'What can I give you?' the woman asked, but her eyes were all for the child, the mouth latched on to her, the eager eyes and
outstretched tiny fists as it revived.

'Nothing,' he said. 'You can give me nothing.'

And as he went to the churchyard gate the cluster of people parted wide to let him through, and the villagers who had come
out of their houses stood back as he limped away and out of sight.

22

I
TOLD MY WIFE.

'I feel sure that it was he.'

My little girl was too lively on my knee, wriggling, pulling at my beard, turning until her thicket of hair was before my
eyes. Her mother sat solemn, waiting for what I had to say, but my talk was all disjointed.

'It would be too great a coincidence that it could be any other. No, I believe that it is him and that he is alive to this
day.'

'Did no one give you hint of where to find him?'

'No one seemed to know. In your uncle's village they said only that he went into the marsh. In other places where I think
he might have been men said he left to go inland, or to the coast, that he had come from Bury or they had heard of him at
Lowestoft, that he was gone into Norfolk or south to Ipswich or to quite other parts. Then a man would mention a little event
that happened somewhere or other, that might have been him, somewhere quite close, and I would follow this up and it would
yield nothing and I would find only another story to take its place. It became hopeless. For many days I heard only gossip
and rumour. Every fact that might be in it seemed embroidered, there was so little that I could recognise as truth.'

'Poor Tom, so you have been gone for nothing then? But it was important to you.'

'Sometimes it has come so that I have wished I had never begun it. You do not know, living here with the family about you
in this one place where you belong, you do not know how it is out there. There is unreason, anger and madness in the world
that I do not understand.'

When we were alone and the children gone to bed, I told her how on my way back I had stopped at a ramshackle village inn and
found people talking in a fever about some witchcraft that had been done there and how a woman and a man were to be put to
the test that next day and swum in the pond before the green.

'It was the kind of story, Mary, that one has heard too many times: a woman who lived alone and was wanton and had a dispute
with her neighbour. She had taken in a man and it was said that these two together had persecuted the neighbour and sent an
imp to stampede his cattle, and bewitched his cart so that four horses could not move it, even making one of the horses to
kick his pregnant wife in the stomach - all such circumstantial nonsense as commonsense would see through in a minute, and
yet I was interested, because the man that was with her, that they blamed for at least the half of this, they described as
an itinerant shoemaker but eerie, and old enough to be her father. So I stayed the night in the village, with just the possibility
in my mind that this could be Cave, and the village was a dismal place, even in summer, set up alone and exposed, and nowhere
better for me to sleep but this same flea-ridden inn.'

'And was it him?'

Excitement in her question, yet it was a time before I could bring myself to tell it all. So soft it was there, sitting in
the house with the light failing outside, with Mary's face half shadowed across the table and the children sleeping silent
on their beds in the other room through the open door. There was such peace and innocence in the moment that I was reluctant
to bring into it the ugly scene.

One of the children stirred and a blanket fell to the floor. Mary went and settled them and sat there a few minutes, and I
recall that I got up and paced about, and came back and sat again as I had all the evening. I did not speak until she was
back beside me. I knew that her eyes were on me though it had become dark.

'I will tell you what I witnessed, as it did meet my eyes. I cannot say how it might have seemed to me if I had only come
by idly and happened upon it. If I had but chanced by, then I might perhaps have thought it, as others did, a diversion and
a spectacle. But you know what thoughts were in my mind, and because of these what I saw seemed only cruel and evil.

'It was a pretty day, even in that dreary place, and the whole village came out to watch, and maybe people from other villages
roundabouts, because I would not have thought those few hovels could have produced such a crowd: men, women, children, all
out on the green as if it there was a fair coming, seated on the grass and plucking daisies between their fingers. And then
this wagon came through and they stood and jeered, and as I was away at the back I could not see well, and there was a tall
man in black like a preacher or a justice, and two dishevelled figures were unloaded from the wagon, a plump woman and a thin
and white-haired man, conspicuously tall though he was bent with age - and at that distance, Mary, and with so many standing
between us, I could not have said if he was or was not Cave or any man that I might or might not once have known.

'I pushed through the crowd and made my way down to the edge of the pond, and by that time they had stripped the pair of their
outer clothing and tied their thumbs and toes together and were throwing them into the water. Just bundles they seemed, but
the woman screamed plenty, and the crowd yelled behind me. A horrid bullying, it was. Devil's whore, they called her, and
other such things. See, they shouted out, there's proof. She floats like a plank. I could not have said if she floated or
no, for she was fat and the water was shallow, and they pulled her out so muddy that you might have thought her behind had
rested on the bottom. And the man had scarcely been in time enough to sink, and yet they pulled him out also.

'I saw his face then, and he was not my Thomas Cave. Just some piteous old man, all wet, and staring and shivering like a
trapped hare. And I left then and came directly home. I did not have the heart to see more.'

That night I had a troubling dream.

I dreamt that I was back there in the North. It was late in the season. I knew that because ice already closed the bay. I
knew that I was stranded, a prisoner for the winter though there were no walls or bars to my prison but only an endless space
cut about by wind. I stood with my back to the mountains and with the sea of ice ahead, and the wind came down between the
peaks and whipped hard-formed grains of snow in waves along the ground and past my feet. In the distance this driven snow
seemed like a knee-high flood swirling above the surface of the beach and the frozen sea.

And then I saw men coming towards me as if they were floating, though I understood that they were walking with their boots
obscured in the snow. Three men in tall black hats, taking form out of the distance, strangely tall because of their hats
and because their feet did not appear to touch the ground. They passed so close that I saw the knuckles of their hands and
the lines of their faces, but they did not seem to see me and went directly to the tent where Thomas Cave lived, which was
close by though I had not noted it before.

When they came out two of the men dragged Cave between them. They had tied him about the arms and the ankles with rope so
that he could not walk but barely hobble. They took him to a point out on the ice and their leader made a hole in it with
the staff he carried, working it around like an auger until the hole was large enough to take a man. And they threw Cave in
head first and then turned their backs and walked away.

By the time I got to him the ice was frozen over again like glass, and its transparency was such that I could see him in the
clear blue water beneath. He held his hands to his sides and swam with all his body like a seal, his uncut hair flowing out
and his beard dividing like a fork beneath his chin, his tied legs making his feet into a seal's tail. He dived down deep,
and seals came up from below to play with him. I cried out but he could not hear me under water, and I hammered with my boot
on the ice to break it but it only became the thicker and more opaque.

When I knew I was awake, I was shivering. My wife wrapped the blankets about us and held me tightly to give me warmth. She
said that she had never felt a man so cold.

She put her hand warm to my lips and quieted my cry. 'Shhh,' she said. 'Do not let the children wake. Breathe slow and let
the warmth spread through you, and then tell me what you have seen.'

It seemed a long time before I could find words. I heard the rustle of the bedding heavy as if it were canvas, heard the children's
sleeping breaths loud and insistent, heard the bark of a dog outside and its cry carried by other dogs about the town, every
sensation heightened and only slowly fading into ordinariness.

At last I told her that it was my horror in my dream that I could not break through and save him.

Again she put a finger to my panicked lips.

'Coming back to us does not mean that you have abandoned your search, only that you do not know where else to look. So go
no further. Continue your search instead from here if you must. See who comes by and talk to them, and when you travel somewhere,
then speak to men there also. Open the subject and tell the story of his winter in the North. Say that he came back here,
and see then what others have to offer. If he is alive and in the district, sooner or later you will find him out.'

23

A
FULL YEAR it took. And then this summer when I was down the coast I met a reed cutter who had news that I believed. He said
that he knew the man of whom I spoke, and had seen where he lived on the edge of the marsh where a village had once been lost
to the sea. There were just a couple of huts left of the village and this old man was the only resident, living alone with
the marsh behind and the sea before him and no other habitation for miles.

I asked where, and how far, and he gave me good directions. I never saw a plainer, more practical-looking fellow than this
reed cutter, blue-eyed, ruddy-faced, all the redder because the day was hot and he was sweating, standing steady on his boat
that was piled so thick across with reeds that it seemed solid as an island. I untied the rope that moored him and helped
him push away.

'You'll be going down to see him?'

'Why, yes,' I said, 'I will.'

'They do say things about him, you know. You can't put too much store on it, the world's full of nervous, chattering folk
saying this and that and all kind of nonsense, but then you can't be sure either. A man who can do what he does, his cures
and such, you never know where it ends, do you?'

He said one other thing that made me shiver.

He told me he had heard it said that the old man had two creatures he kept by him, that some folk said were his familiars
— one of them a fox with fur as white as snow and the other an immaculate white bird that had a cry like a shriek of anger
- and these were seen about him in the winter and when the sea mists spread inland.

'How can this be?' I asked. 'I know these beasts by your description but they are none that belong here.'

He said that he could only repeat what he had heard, and I wondered at it. For it seemed to me that these were beasts from
the whale stations: the beautiful but raucous snowbird, and the northern fox whose fur turns white to blend with the snow.
Was it possible that some other whaler had come by and spoken of them, and the ideas had somehow linked in people's minds?
If not, then I could not think by what coincidence or suggestion these Suffolk villagers might have dreamt such creatures
up.

I went to find him that last week of July. It was the hottest week of all this year. A day of high summer, the tidal mud shimmering
in the sunlight and a flutter of birds in the reeds and along the creeks. I walked from inland where the reed cutter had said
there was a path. He said that if I were to have gone by boat then sure the old man would see me approaching and vanish before
I landed.

An unmarked sky wide as over sea. The marsh wide also, and flat. I had thought that the land I came off was flat but looking
back from the edge of the marsh I saw how it rose behind me, how the horizon rose and bore the softness of trees in all directions
save that of the sea. It was a place in which a man might well disappear, his tracks fine as those of an animal weaving along
the edge of the reeds. All about me the stifling rustle of reeds, the whistle and piping of hidden birds. The path was not
clear, it was so rarely used, though once or twice I found a few blackened boards set above the mud. On these boards my steps
made reassuring hollow thuds. Twice I strayed and found myself stopped before an impassable channel: path gone, a creek before
me, coppery water and polished mud. I must track back and find the way again and hope that I held my bearings.

At last I saw the hut, on a raised slip of land just visible above the reeds. A low hut of daub, a new reed thatch gleaming
in the sunshine.

And there he was, sitting on a stool with his back to the wall and his eyes closed to the sun. It was him. I knew him at once.
It was as if he had only greyed and dried in all the time since we last met, his hair and beard become thin grey strands,
the skin of his face and hands like parchment and deeply drawn with lines. His eyes when he opened them were still strikingly
pale and clear, but so transparent and without recognition that for a moment I wondered if they saw me.

'Thomas Cave.'

His long fingers groped as if for a thought and his brow narrowed in concentration.

'It's Tom Goodlard. It's me. Don't you know me? I see that I am much changed. I think I did not even have a beard when you
saw me last.'

The hut seemed no more than a temporary shelter, its fresh thatch and the patches of new daub rough attempts to hold back
the ruin that had come to the others that had stood beside it, wrecks with walls like broken hulls and rafters spillikined
about them. No intention to permanence in it, as if it would take only a great wind and a rainstorm to tear and melt it down,
or a wave to bite at the sandy cliff so close in front and give it to the sea like the rest of the village that was once there;
as if it might be gone with the first storm of autumn, or the work of a winter at most. And yet the reed cutter had said that
he had been here years; and there was wood cut and stacked, and lobster-pots beside the door, and in a hollow a heap of discarded
crab and cockle shells.

Inside was a single stark room: a table with two loose-paged and broken books upon it; a cot with a once-coloured embroidered
cloth swagged above its head, quite dirtied and faded with the years; the smell of old man and of fish.

I saw that his violin stood propped in a corner and was glad at that.

'You know that your cabin is still there?'

'Is that so?' Cave's words were flat and slow and I could not hear the thinking in them.

'Or it was, six or seven years ago when I went there last, and I cannot imagine things have changed since then.'

'You are still at the whaling then?'

'Not now, not for these past three years. I did well enough out of it in the end, put money by, came back here to live at
Swole.'

'Not far from here.'

'No, not far.'

Cave pointed to the stool before the table, brought in from outside the only other one he had so that we might both be seated.
He did not speak but placed gnarled hands between his knees and looked ahead as if he were still an old man alone.

'There's not so many goes to Duke's Cove any more, not that I know of anyhow. Not to the island, which they now call Edge
Island, to any of those eastern islands and inlets. They say it's too risky, too much chance of getting beset with ice, if
the season runs late and the winds turn; they say there's whales enough and safer hunting along the inlets of the western
coast and have built there great cookeries for the oil. It's different now, it seems to me, they're different men.' I ran
on and saw that he watched my lips as if he were reading them and still he did not speak. I thought that he took in what I
said but I could not tell whether it interested him or not. 'It's changed from those first days of the
Heartsease.
You'd be amazed to see it. The place hasn't changed of course, men can't touch that, but the business has, it's all very organised
nowadays, big fleets from the big chartered Companies, a big trade.'

The window in the far wall had a view down on the beach where the tide was almost at its last ebb, thin waves pulling away
from stones on the wet sand. I could see among these stones recognisable pieces of houses: lintels, hearths, clusters of flints
and of thin red bricks; pieces of the village that was lost. Still I was compelled to speak, rattling on to fill his silence.
'The Dutchmen,' I said, 'have built themselves a great town on the shore of the main island, before the largest of the bays,
a town that has a population of many thousands in the season, a makeshift smoking factory town that has the name of Smeerenberg.
It is such a big town now that it has its own cemetery, as any town must, an island they call Deadman Island, where bodies
are carried by boat and, because the ground is too frozen beneath for digging, left in coffins heaped with piles of stones
or wedged in between in the rocks, and even so the bears get to them. The bodies in that place do not rot from one season
to the next, but dry and thin and whiten like beachcombings.'

'We should not have gone there.'

'What?' The interruption came soft as a breath. I could scarcely be sure that it was meant for me.

'We men. Any men. We should not have gone there. We should have left it be.'

The words came out in little runs, strange and hoarse but gathering power as if he had lost the habit of speech and just found
it again, and now that they came he remembered hospitality and took up a flagon from the floor, and mugs, and laid them on
the table.

'It was not right. I am sure of that now. We went where God did not mean us to go. We went beyond Him.'

'But we won't be there for ever. They say that those seas will be fished out, sometime soon, in a decade or half a century.
You can see that, every year that passes, the whales are fewer, no longer those great heaving herds that filled the bays;
some, but fewer, trailing in, and we must sail further for them, chase them out to the open sea. Sooner or later it'll end
and we'll be gone, and the place will be lonely as it ever was.'

'But not the same.'

'What do you mean?'

'It will be changed, won't it? Just because we were there. Never the same.'

Cave slammed his mug down on the table so that the ale spilt out of it and wet his fingers.

'It was free of us, before. Now, because of us, things have been seen, heard there, that should never have been.'

We went out after that. It was too uneasy, sitting stiff at the table with that odd, hoarse speech echoing into the room.
He stood slowly, unfolding himself as if he were brittle, and took up his stick and led me to where he had built a ladder
against the precarious sand of the cliff and we went down and walked the beach. The sun was hot, the waves soothed as they
pulled back against the shore. Thomas Cave lifted his head and sighed. I gave him my arm, for I could see that the stick was
little support in the sand. His touch was dry and tentative like that of a moth. And after a moment he began to talk again,
and this time his voice was quite different, thin but liquid and fluent.

Now I had the story off him, not of his winter on the island, I think he will never tell that, but of the time since his return.

'Remember where you left me, in that river valley in the spring? I watched you go, watched a long way for I was tempted to
follow. It seemed a long time until the sun set that evening, and not a soul came by after you had left me and I slept in
the porch of the church and did not see nor spoke to anyone, and left in the morning early going back inland in the opposite
direction to that by which you had gone, a bright morning it was and I had the sun behind me. So many mornings in those years
I spent in that way, on the road with the sun low in a coloured sky, already walking out as some village wakes, walking through
that bustling early time when the animals are brought out and the carts begin to pass and men set out for the fields. I stopped
in a place, a town, a city, some lodging, and set up my craft with the tools I carried and worked for a time, for there was
always work for me, leather to be found and feet to be shod, and people came to know me and I them, and soon as things became
close I found that I must move on. Perhaps I had spent too many years already on the move. Or perhaps . . .'

He paused. His mouth was dry. He slapped his lips together and swallowed, closing his eyes a moment to the bright noon light.

'Or perhaps it was that I had set so still all of that year beforehand, that I had spent the winter as if in a prison.' When
he opened his eyes they seemed somehow naked, the pupils down to points and the colour drained out of them. 'Whatever the
cause, the fact was so: I found that I could not settle in any one place on the land but was always restless. To stay somewhere
had me frustrated as if becalmed, the place becoming oppressive to me, my thoughts becoming caged and pacing in my head and
at last driving me on. I was in Halesworth, Bury, Cambridge, lost myself a long time in the wilderness of the fens, saw the
great cathedrals of Ely and Lincoln and Norwich. I must have seen all the towns of eastern England, excepting the ports. I
did not go to the ports. For many years I did not even go to the sea. For many years it went on like this, so long that I
found that I had walked in circles and come back to places where I had been before, and people recognised me and asked me
again to make for them, or do repairs, or help them with some other matter. I knew some cures, you see, and had learnt others
from those that I met. I had herbs that I gathered as I travelled and I knew how to use them. In time my reputation as a healer
became such that people would send to find me for this and not only for my trade, even at times pursuing me from far afield.
As you have.'

And he lifted his hand from my arm and stared at me then. 'Why? What do you want of me?'

'I wanted nothing of you Thomas but to see you again.' I feared that I had lost his trust.

He is old, I thought. This heat will be too much for him and there is no shade. The beach ran featurelessly ahead, featurelessly
behind, the low unstable cliff of shingle and sand, the shingle and the sand beneath it, the white fringe of waves, the shining
sea. Perhaps it was time we turned back; I thought that he would want then to turn back but he did not. He put his hand back
to my arm and took up his pace again and his story.

'These are disturbing times we live in now. I sometimes think that we are on the edge of tumultuous times. Have you noted
how many strange events occur, the storms we've had, the floods, the strange kinds of hail and rain, the thunder unseasonal
in midwinter, the snow in spring? And other things beyond the weather: was it last year or the year before, one year not long
past, a crash in the heavens and a raining of stones from the sky, not hailstones these but rock, some hard rock of a colour
like metal that none had ever seen before, and then one single stone the size of a loaf and hot to the touch, falling on to
the heath before the town of Woodbridge? Myself I cannot suggest any cause for this, save only the idea of some physical change
or realignment in the heavens, but there are many who see other meanings in it all, omens and judgements and warnings, and
are made fearful and thrown into ferment.