Jim Crace - Signals of Distress

Nor did she really want to speak to Aymer Smith. But he was so insistent with his greetings and his enquiries on her welfare when they coincided on the quay that she had little choice. Besides, hadn’t he promised her ‘a small payment’? She didn’t like to mention it outright. But when he asked how she was looking forward to America, she said, ‘I’m looking forward to it well enough, so long as we have pennies for our supper.’

‘You’ll not find pennies in America,’ he said. ‘The coin there is called the dollar, Miss Bowe. You will not discover the sovereign’s head on it, nor will you find it divides into farthings. The farthing in America is called the cent, though the scent of money is the same, both here and in America …’

‘I’ve seen a dollar.’ She didn’t look at him. He wasn’t thistledown. This man was badger hair. She knelt and stroked the little bitch which — God knows why — had taken quite a fancy to him. It seemed a lifetime since the dog had first come up to their cottage, the ship’s ensign in its collar.

‘You’ve seen a dollar? So then you understand, Miss Bowe.’ He stood back to let a length of timber through. ‘I see the Belle is getting shipshape. How soon before she leaves?’

‘Ralph says three days or four.’

‘So Tuesday, then? Are you prepared for your encounters with the sea? I promise you — and I have voyaged both in tranquil waters and in rough — that there is nothing you must fear except, perhaps, unsteady feet. Keep your stomach full and sickness will not bother you.’

Seeing Ralph up in the renewed rigging of the Belle , she walked away and said (she hoped, she feared, that Aymer overheard): ‘It’s only money’ll keep our stomachs full.’

Aymer hadn’t forgotten his promise to the Bowes. But he would wait until the day the Belle set sail. Then he could make his payment to this girl and her mother in public view. He might be required to stand beyond the chapel wall in Wherrytown, but they would see who was charitable and who was not. He didn’t think that Mr Phipps would hand out coins on the quay. He might hand out tracts. Or New Commandments for America. And Mr Walter Howells, on all the evidence, was more likely to collect than give: a penny tax for walking on his quay, a halfpenny for breathing his salt air, another penny for the screaming concert of his gulls, a shilling for the hire of sea.

Aymer felt unusually well, apart from aching legs. His chest had cleared. His throat was sweet. And his greatest fear, that Otto would be found and sent back to America, had disappeared, now that the hunting parties were returned with nothing but a pigeon, and now that he’d discovered George with his lantern, walking on the walls towards the little hut. Aymer was in a celebratory mood. ‘There is no better doctor than the sea,’ he told himself.

And he was getting all the sea he could. Katie Norris had expressed a plan to put the voyage to Canada to good use. She’d make a two-loop necklace from the shells near Wherrytown. She’d have to bore a needle hole in each and then work through the thread. That would keep her busy on the Belle . And then she’d always have a little bit of home to wear around her neck in Canada. She and Robert could be seen each morning with their backs bent, searching along the shore in front of the salting hall for matching, tender-coloured shells. If the Norrises were there, then Aymer was as well. He used Whip as an excuse. She had to have her exercise. She loved the beach. So while the dog played in the surf or made life difficult for crabs and sanderlings, Aymer joined the Norrises and made life difficult for them. He had the name of everything. He knew his winkles from his whelks. The pink and glossy chink-shell that she had chosen for her necklace, he explained to Katie, was Lacuna vincta . No, he didn’t know the common name. Nor did he know the common name for what it was brought him and Whip down to the beach. He might pretend it was Amicitia platonica , and that his affections were directed equally at both of the Norrises. But there was a simpler word, as ever. Even in Latin. It was amor .

So Aymer picked amongst the seaweeds for her, glad of every chance — when he found an unblemished chink-shell for her throat — to put his fingers in her palm. She would reward him with a smile: ‘I thank you, Mr Smith. A lovely one.’ Sometimes a strand of sandy-coloured hair would lift up from her forehead in the breeze and reach across to Aymer’s face. Sometimes the breeze would sway her skirts at Aymer’s legs, or tug the ribbons on her shawl. He spoke most to her husband, but hardly took his eyes away from Katie. He didn’t want to miss those times when she bent down to search the sand and displayed her ankles, petticoats, her clothy, apple thighs, her willow back.

His love for her was undeclared, of course. She wasn’t like a Miggy Bowe, uneducated, immature, unlovable, within his reach. Katie was a distant star. Aymer wouldn’t force his lips on hers, nor write her sentimental letters, nor even make her blush with any open display of his feelings. There wouldn’t be a duel between Aymer Smith and Robert Norris, at dawn, with swords. There wouldn’t even be a duel of words. They weren’t the personalities for that — a chilling thought. There wasn’t time. She’d be off to Canada within the week. What Aymer wanted, in these final days in Wherrytown, was simply her proximity. He wanted to store her up, like Rosie Bowe was storing Miggy, to load himself with images of her, to have, if not a country wife, then some lasting, dark companion of the heart. When he was old, the greying bachelor, they wouldn’t look at him and say he’d never loved. They would instead remark on how his silences were her , whoever she might be, however far from home. What would Fidia and Matthias make of brother Aymer sighing?

The Norrises regarded Aymer as a nuisance. Katie threw his shells away where they would not be found again. The whole point of the necklace was that she would only thread the shells she’d found with Robert. She might wish her husband were a little ‘fuller’ in his conversations. She might snub him once in a while, out loud. But that was just to show her power. She loved every blink of his eye. When the necklace was finished, she could tell a rosary of love on every shell, his, hers, his, hers, their lives looped round her throat. She didn’t want a stranger’s shells to interrupt the chain.

By Saturday she and her husband had had enough of Aymer Smith’s unrelenting company. They avoided the nearest foreshores and walked instead along the coast towards more subtle coves. But hardly had they found the path down from the cliff and reached the pebble beach than they heard Whip barking at them from above and turned to find their room companion waving at them with his hat. They were still fond of him, despite his oddities. He was too vulnerable and headlong in his dealings to be disliked entirely. And he clearly regarded them as his friends and equals. That was both flattering and charming from such an educated man. He and Robert had a lot in common, Katie thought. Yet she could not imagine two men less alike in their attractiveness. Aymer wasn’t resolute like Robert. He wasn’t wise. He had, in fact, become an irritant for both the Norrises. They did their best to hide their impatience, though. They didn’t want to be impolite. He meant well, after all.

And surely it was only loneliness that made him hunt them down, that made him join them over breakfast, lunch and dinner, that made him sit on his bed at night, a candle on his knees, engaging them in conversations that had no consequence or end, or reading to them from his book, and asking them to comment on his Mr Paine or Mr Lyell or Mr Know-not-who. He seemed to watch them all the time, and be too ready with his feeble, reedy laugh. Katie didn’t even want to make love anymore. She felt their every movement could be heard and, if she and Robert whispered in the night, the words would bounce around the room and Mr Smith would hear. She wondered if he ever slept. Was that him wheezing, or the dog? She worried that the man was watching her when she took her clothes off for the night, when she crept out for the pot. Did he stand with his candle, looking down on her, when she was unconscious in her bed, her hair across the pillow and her nightdress disarranged? How could she now get pregnant for the Belle with Aymer Smith just yards away?