The Glass Ocean(30)
A progress that she makes gladly, and much to his unease.
• • •
Then, too, the sailors affect him. He dislikes being in close proximity to their superstitions, which, after all, are so similar to his own. I imagine him staring at the lifeless sails when nobody else is looking, muttering Black black bear-away, don’t come down by here-away! or some other savage nonsense, as if this might lift the curse. Hours and hours he spends, perched on the taffrail as the Narcissus lists, first one way, then the other. What is he doing? Brooding upon the traitorous stillness of the sea. Muttering his incantations.
Dark shapes move beneath those waters. He comes away from the taffrail hollow eyed, subdued. Who knows what he is thinking.
• • •
But then who knows what any of them may be thinking—floating there, under the weight of the unrelenting sunlight, with land, the merest puff of it—a sliver, a rind, a crust, a peeling like the skin off an orange—stretched out, completely unobtainable, on the far, purpling horizon.
It is a weight in itself, an internal weight, this land that can be seen but not touched, which itself seems not to touch the waves, buoyed above them, rather, by some peculiar alchemy of water and light.
There’s an equation for that.
• • •
It floats but does not wander, is tight upon its tether, always there, to the south. Tantalizingly.
But it is not for them. Water is for them. Plenty of that. Water and murmur. Water and murmur and malaise.
• • •
It’s inevitable, I suppose, that arguments should begin, under circumstances like these. Have I mentioned that my grandfather, Felix Girard, is of a choleric temperament?
Ginger hair is the devil’s hair. Or so they say.
He is a man addicted to movement, forced now to be still. In tedious times he remembers his old operating theater in l’Hôtel-Dieu, misses it, that hated place, the gleaming sharps, even the sickly, sweet smell, this, too, is a memory. The Saint Jerome Ward, there beneath the shadow of the cathedral. The dutiful Sisters of Bon Secours with their sallow horse-faces, their bound-up hair, their disapproving looks. All that dingy linen.
He flexes his hands, feels the old longing. To cut. Me next, doctor. Help me. Three, four, six to a bed they were in that filthy place. They bled them into buckets on the floor. Most could not be helped. He cut, regardless.
Sister—the blade!
He has strong decisive hands, my grandfather. Butcher’s hands. Now idle.
Well. It’s hard on everyone.
• • •
If he could cut anything in the current circumstances I think it would be John McIntyre he’d cut. Excise him like a tumor from the otherwise healthy flesh of this expedition. The hatred between them is of long standing, based in professional jealousy. Each having something means neither can have all. This, of course, is unforgivable. And McIntyre is Harry Ellis’s appointment here. A functionary of the museum. Hence: a snitch, a rat, a spy. He with that greasy monocle of his. And the clipped, arrogant I see.
This is a real irritation.
They bicker together, in the long, hot waste of the days. I wish I could say they didn’t mean it. But they do.
What are they arguing about? Classification of the Psittaciformes of British Guiana, in particular the Guianian sun parrot, John McIntyre’s particular discovery. My grandfather, it seems, has found McIntyre’s monograph unconvincing.
Admit it, McIntyre—you have never seen the thing! And why? Because it does not exist! Come, come now, confess! You identify this bird by the cry only, is it not so? By the characteristic mee-hoo! mee-hoo! Why, it is not a bird at all, it is a cat; and a domestic cat at that, that came to Guiana in an Englishwoman’s stocking! Of course you have never seen it—admit it, McIntyre, come clean!