The Main Cages Page 9

  Anna was two steps behind him. ‘Hello,’ she said with a half smile. She was wearing her sky-blue headscarf.

  ‘Well!’ Maurice rubbed his hands. ‘How’s the fishing?’

  ‘It’s going well.’

  ‘Off somewhere?’

  ‘Down to Plymouth tomorrow morning, for a few weeks. It’s the turbot season.’

  ‘Well, we should still be here when you get back, shouldn’t we, my dear?’

  Anna nodded.

  ‘Come and see us!’

  Jack told them he would do that. He watched them head along towards the Antalya Hotel. Maurice took off his hat at the door and smoothed down his hair and as she went in Anna looked behind her at Jack. She did not wave.

  Jack liked the turbot. He liked its predictability, the way that it fed precisely at dawn. He liked the way that when a female was caught and pulled to the surface, the male would often be with her, swimming alongside. Before they brought her on board, Hammels would lean over and hook the male with the gaff and grin as he hauled him in: ‘Two for one with lady turbot!’

  For a fortnight at Plymouth the fishing was good. But during the third week the bait started to thin. They tried off the Eddystone, and to the south of Rame Head. Often they were late shooting the line, or could not use its whole length. The catches fell away and Croyden became short-tempered.

  One sunny afternoon, Hammels returned from hawking his wooden warriors in town. Croyden was re-caulking the deck.

  ‘Look, Croy! Look what I buy!’ Hammels held up a pack of cards.

  ‘Get those damned cards away from me.’

  ‘I show you a trick.’

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘No, Croy – you like this trick. This one help us.’

  He cleared a space on the deck and laid out the four aces in a quadrant. ‘North – south – east – west. Where knave of hearts falls, that is where wind blows.’

  Croyden carried on pressing in the oakum.

  ‘Ha!’ cried Hammels.

  Croyden glanced at the cards and saw the knave lying on the southerly ace. The boats at their moorings were pointing out towards the sound – south.

  ‘I do again, Croy!’

  This time Croyden paid more attention. The jack of hearts again fell to the south.

  ‘Just luck,’ said Croyden – but he followed Hammels’s hands as he laid out the cards again.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘This – Bolt Head. This – Start Point. Here Eddystone and Bigbury. Where knave of spade lands, there is fish for bait!’

  Croyden shook his head, but he watched as Hammels dealt out the cards. The jack of spades fell on Bigbury.

  ‘Never be there in these tides,’ scoffed Croyden.

  That night they fished off the Eddystone. Two boats went out into Bigbury and later they saw them burning their flambeaux; they had bait to spare.

  So the following night the Maria V joined a large part of the fleet in Bigbury Bay, but it was those at the Eddystone who were lucky. Hammels claimed that was where his cards had indicated.

  The next evening, Croyden asked casually, ‘What do they cards say?’

  Harry shuffled the cards. He grinned at Croyden and carried on shuffling them a long time.

  ‘Get on with it!’

  Harry flicked out the cards one by one on the deck. Again the knave fell on Bigbury.

  They tried Bigbury Bay. It was a clear night and the moon was a couple of days off full. Shortly before midnight they drew a couple of the nets but there was nothing. Two hours later, the same. They drew them all and shifted up to the Eddystone where they had some luck but by then it was too late. They shot half the line without much conviction and hauled it empty. Dawn was a slit of pale sky astern as they motored back along the coast to Polmayne. They had been just over three weeks at Plymouth. They had each cleared about £10.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was mid-morning when Jack moored his punt and headed back along the front. On the road outside Bethesda, he found Toper Walsh shovelling sand over the cobbles.

  ‘Why the sand, Tope?’

  ‘Whaler’s gone poorly!’

  During the three weeks Jack had been in Plymouth, a strange illness had crept into Polmayne. It was characterised by vomiting and a series of long, thin rashes on the arms and legs. Agnes Thomas said that it was called Reed Fever and that men were particularly vulnerable. Because that was clear, and because the rashes really did look like little reeds, everyone began to talk of it as the Reeds. Where it came from no one knew, but on Parliament Bench they were quick to point out that it appeared at the same time as the visitors.

  Dr White said there was no such disease as Reed Fever and that the illness was caused by a bacillus. Everyone still called it the Reeds.

  Whaler’s bout had passed after forty-eight hours but in its wake it had left a series of complaints that he referred to simply as the ‘old trouble’. Mrs Cuffe rearranged her guests and he came in from his summer shed. He lay in bed drinking cups of lukewarm water and refusing all offers of help. Mrs Cuffe had asked Toper to spread sand outside to deaden the sound of traffic.

  ‘Can’t do nothin’ more for him, Jack,’ she said.

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘He won’t see no one.’

  The following day Jack spent on board the Maria V. He repaired some damage to the wheelhouse door. He spotted in some chipped paintwork. In the afternoon he rowed up to Penpraze’s yard for some new shackles and as he came in towards the yard he saw someone sketching on the wharf. It was Mrs Abraham. Sitting cross-legged, she was looking up and down from her pad to the half-painted hull of an oyster boat. The light was in her hair, and she kept pushing its loose strands back behind her ear. She did not notice him until the bows of the punt bumped into the wharf beneath her.

  ‘Oh! You gave me a start!’

  Standing in the boat, Jack propped his elbows on the wharf and looked at the drawing. She held it out at arm’s length and cocked her head. ‘Tell me, Mr Sweeney, why are boats so difficult?’

  ‘Perhaps you must understand them to paint them.’ There was a faint hostility in his voice.

  ‘Plenty have managed it!’ she said defiantly. ‘It’s only practice.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘How was your fishing?’

  ‘Not good.’

  The punt shifted beneath Jack and he looked down and straightened it with his feet. ‘Mrs Abraham, will you explain to me why did you not want my letters?’

  She put down the pad. ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘You said “write and tell me everything”, and then you said “don’t write at all”. What am I to believe?’

  ‘I was thinking we could just write letters, but – it became more difficult –’

  Just then Maurice appeared at the front of Penpraze’s shed, tapping his wrist. ‘Come on! We’re already late.’

  Anna stood and clutched the pad to her chest. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. Do you forgive me?’

  He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Yes.’

  But she had already gone.

  Each evening when Jack came in he asked Mrs Cuffe about Whaler, and each evening she said: ‘He’s no worse and no better.’

  It was already high season in Polmayne. Groups of visitors flowed back and forth along the front, lingered on the quays and filled the beaches. In Mrs Cuffe’s dining room, she had to lay on an extra table. One Sunday morning at breakfast she came up to Jack and told him, ‘He says he’ll see you.’

  Jack climbed the stairs. He followed a narrow corridor to a room papered in a pattern of faded red cockerels. On one wall was a picture of a woman stranded on a sea-ringed rock and clinging to the base of a cross; the picture was captioned ‘Rock of Ages’. The blinds were down and Whaler was lying in bed with his eyes closed.

  ‘That you, Jack?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sit down.’ He struggled to pull himself up, but did not open his eyes. After ten minutes Jack stood to leave.
r />   ‘You off now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come again, won’t you. I like to talk to someone.’

  The next day Jack found him in better spirits. He was sitting upright, gazing at the open window. ‘Good, good, you’ve come!’

  Jack sat on a stool and leaned against the wall.

  ‘What is happening out there?’

  Jack told him the town was full of visitors, and everyone was grumbling about water and it being so dry.

  ‘I know, I know. She tells me.’

  They talked about Jack’s fishing and then Whaler said: ‘Did I never tell you about Floyd?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well’ – he shifted himself against the pillow – ‘Thing we always liked about Floyd was that he could only count as far as five. He never got the hang of it – 3–4–5 … he’d say, then he’d stop and go into kind of a daze.

  ‘Anyway, one time Floyd’s standing quayside. Portugal, I think it was – maybe Spain. And there’s a thunderstorm and Floyd’s struck on the cheek by a slab a’ lightning! So we all look down at him on the quay and he’s not moving. We carry on looking but he doesn’t move a muscle. “He’s bloody dead!” shouts someone and we all think – Christ, poor old Floyd. But then he jumps up and looks around and he’s right as rain – ’cept for a burn mark, here on his cheek.’

  Whaler started to laugh. ‘But you know what? That lightning’s cured him. He’s so quick now none of us can keep up with him. And the sums! He can do any sum he likes!’

  Jack went to see Whaler whenever he could. There were good days and bad days. On the bad days he’d lie and listen to Jack and he would ask him about his childhood in Dorset and sometimes when Jack was speaking he would interrupt him and ask: ‘Tell me, what’s it look like?’, or ‘What’s she wearing?’, and would not allow him to continue until he had it all fixed in his mind’s eye. On the good days he would sit up and tell Jack about the emeralds he’d seen in Colombia, a crocodile farm in Swaziland, pearl-divers in India, and a man in Panama who sold him the seeds of a ‘miracle tree’.

  The last time Jack saw Whaler was one Saturday in mid-July. The blinds were down and the light was on. Its glow made him feel warm, he said – although the heat of the day itself hung heavy as a shroud in the room. Whaler was weak and pale. He told Jack about the Belfast.

  ‘She was a barque we’d sailed to Australia. Failed to find a return cargo so headed east out into the Pacific. Eighth day out we hit a gale … struck by a wave and knocked down –’

  Whaler started coughing. Jack poured him a cup of his lukewarm water. He sipped at it, then lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. He lay like that for a long time, and Jack stood to leave.

  ‘Wait, I haven’t finished.’ Whaler strained to take a couple of deep breaths. ‘… We was drifting for three days, set up a jury rig and sailed to an island …’

  He took another sip of water. ‘We was two months on that island … no one there but trees and a lot of turtles. I don’t think I ever been happier than on that island.’

  Whaler drank some more water. ‘Open the window will you, Jack.’

  Jack stood and pulled up the blind. He released the casement and felt the breeze on his face. The Petrels were racing in the bay. On the road below the window, the sand that Toper had spread was cut by wheel tracks.

  ‘They don’t believe me, do they?’ said Whaler.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They say I make it all up.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I know what they say. They say Whaler tells fairy tales. But I saw it all, Jack. I saw every last bit.’

  Whaler died three days later. They buried him that Saturday. The weather had closed in and thick fog covered the town. Mrs Cuffe had had her best coat dyed black and sat all morning in the parlour with the coffin beside her. Various women came to be with her.

  ‘Cold as ’ell out there,’ said Brenda Walsh.

  ‘Damper ’n a sponge,’ said Agnes Thomas.

  ‘More like March than July,’ said Eliza Tucker.

  Mrs Cuffe ignored them. She sat straight-backed before the coffin. When Jack and Croyden and the other pall-bearers arrived, she watched in silence as they carried Whaler out and down the steps to Bethesda. She did not follow.

  At the graveside the men sang ‘Rock of Ages’; it had been Whaler’s favourite hymn. They sang it again in the Fountain Inn. Everyone agreed that ‘a good man had gone’, that Whaler had been as much a part of Polmayne as ‘the harbour isself’, and although they had all spent years deriding his stories, using his very name as a measure of exaggeration, they now competed to show their respect.

  ‘What places he saw!’

  ‘And the rest of his life blind.’

  ‘No one’ll ever see the half of what Whaler seen.’

  ‘And he only saw half of what he bloody said he saw –’

  ‘Who was that?’ demanded Toper Walsh.

  Silence.

  ‘Come on, who said it?’

  But the murmur of conversation had resumed, and soon everyone was recalling their best ‘Whaler stories’.

  Outside the fog had thickened. The southerly wind was driving it on in damp and smoky billows. It cut off one end of the town from the other. It blew over the bay and the deserted quays, up through the hillside alleys, over the roof of the chapel, into the empty space that had once been Cooper’s Yard. It rolled in across the damp brown mound of Whaler’s grave and in the pine trees above it the wind made a lonely, distant sound. No one was outside. Every two minutes, from the south-east, came the very faint moan of Kidda Head’s foghorn.

  CHAPTER 14

  On Pendhu Point, Captain Williams was singing. On days like this he liked to sing because here on his own with the fog blowing in over the cliffs and nothing in front but milky-white and nothing above but milky-white and nothing all around him but milky-white, he sometimes found it difficult to remember he was alive.

  Brown cow in the middle of a field,

  Brown cow dreaming of home …

  He scratched his beard and stared ahead. The window of the watch hut, which on good days looked south over the Main Cages to a horizon that was as sharp and distant as the stars, was now all that existed in this wide, white world. From Kidda Head lighthouse came the moaning of the foghorn, and he hated that foghorn with its intermittent, bovine groan because it reminded him of all the other foggy days that he had sat there, singing into the whiteness.

  Brown cow in the sun,

  Brown cow lowing for her love,

  Poor little brown cow left alone …

  In his naval days, Captain Williams did not mind the fog as there were always ratings to talk to. His days on watch here were usually broken by a visitor or two leaning in through the door for a yarn, but not in fog. No one wanted to come out to Pendhu if they could not see.

  Poor little – poor little – poor little brown cow

  All alone …

  At 3.30 Williams heard the third ship’s horn of the day. It was far-off and muted and he thought nothing more of it until it sounded again, much closer. When it sounded a third time, to the east, he pulled on his coat. He took his klaxon and stepped out into the fog.

  For a few minutes he stood on the edge of the cliff. The damp wind left drops of moisture in his beard. He struggled to hear anything but there was only the wind at the flaps of his sou’wester and the waves breaking some eighty feet below. He could see nothing. They had probably heard the bell and readjusted their course. That was the thing about the Cages bell – it might mean you were close to danger but it also told you exactly where you were. Keep in the lower half of the quadrant and all you had to worry about was other ships.

  Then it came again. Something was moving closer, heading towards the cliffs, but he could neither see it nor hear it. He sounded his klaxon – Pah – pah – paa-ah! The letter U: You’re standing in to danger. There was no reply.

  To the east of Williams’s hut, the land dropped awa
y to a stream before rising steeply up the far side. He began the climb down and then he heard the horn again. It boomed off the cliffs around him.

  Pah – pah – paa-aah! he replied.

  He could now see the valley bottom where the waterfall tumbled over a short cliff and the wind was catching its strands as they fell and blowing them back up.

  Pah – pah – paa-aah!

  This time a deep double sound rang around the cliffs – still to the south-east. He began to run. He reached the valley bottom. As he was climbing the other side, zig-zagging up the path, leaning on the boulders to catch his breath, he heard voices through the fog.

  He knew exactly where they were. They were off the Balk – the reef that at low water ran covered in oar wrack out towards the Cages. But he could still see nothing. He stood, breathing heavily. The mist mirrored his own breaths – exhaling great billows of cloud, then thinning. Water was dripping from his sou’wester. The fog came and went, allowing glimpses of the black cliffs, of the grey shifting sea, then smothering them again in cloud. As it thinned so he saw for the first time a darker shade of grey. The fog came in again and all was white and then when it cleared, she was there, where no ship should be. He knew her at once: three-masted barque, high bowsprit – the Constantine.

  Captain Henriksen and his English wife had been in their cabin, playing a game of chess. They had left Plymouth soon after dawn and made good progress; they would be in Dublin in a couple of days.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ There was a knock on the door. ‘Come quick!’

  The Captain pushed his rook into an attacking position, then raised his heavy frame from the chair and pulled on his reefer jacket. ‘Check, my dear.’

  At the door was his First Mate. ‘The compass, sir, it’s gone strange!’

  On deck, Captain Henriksen pulled the collar up to his ears and made his way aft. Fog surrounded his ship and there was a damp southerly wind. At the wheel he tapped the binnacle and the needle flickered and spun. He called for another compass. When that showed the same random spinning, he looked up at the sails and ordered the sheets to be tightened.