Jim Crace - Signals of Distress

Mrs Yapp was not the sort to run. Anyway, she didn’t hear the bell. She wasn’t in earshot. She and George were in her sitting room with Aymer’s letters open on her table. Mrs Yapp had read them both out loud.

‘So that explains the soap,’ said George. ‘Take care he doesn’t pay for his lodgings here in bars of soap.’

‘And you take care to pay the gentleman some respect, George. He’s Smith & Sons. We’ll have to treat him sweet. I’d better see if I can find some bed sheets.’

‘What brings a man like that down here?’

‘To talk with Walter Howells, that’s what it said. Go on now, George. You’d better do as you’ve been bid and take these letters round.’ She shook her skirt and pinafore. She checked her stays and laces in the glass. She primped the jug-loops in her hair. ‘I’ll go and see if there is anything he wants.’

‘He’ll have no need of soap.’

When Alice Yapp and George came into the parlour, Aymer Smith and the Norris couple were sitting round the cold grate in happy conversation, or at least the Soap Man was in conversation and the other two were listening politely to his remarks about the beneficial freedoms of the colonies. Katie had loosed her hair and let it hang in one long bunch across her chest. Her husband had removed his boots and had his stockinged feet on a fireside settle, as if they could be warmed and dried by the memory of fire.

‘Mr Smith,’ said Mrs Yapp, as if it were the most aristocratic of names, ‘is it all pleasing to you?’ She made a genteel sweep of her hand.

‘We should like a fire.’

‘George! Lay a fire for Mr Smith. And sheets. I promised sheets.’

‘If that in’t hospitality,’ said George to no one in particular, ‘then what the Devil is?’

Aymer was cheered by the change in Mrs Yapp. So were Robert and Katie Norris. They’d been at the inn for three nights and Mrs Yapp had not so far expressed any word of welcome or shown any sign of hospitality. They had not lodged in inns before and took the Yapp indifference to be normal. But now with Mr Smith she displayed an accommodation to his comforts that was almost worshipful.

George put tinder in the grate and set off by the lane and alley to collect dry kelp and logs from the courtyard for the fire. He’d scarcely reached the courtyard when — happy chance — Walter Howells rode in, his yellow leather breeches, worsted stockings and high-lows caked in mud, his horse a little lame from galloping with a lost shoe. George ran to take the reins and pass on Smith’s letter.

‘Not now, not now!’ said Howells, brushing past George and stamping across the yard towards the alleyway of steps. ‘There’s been a wreck!’

‘What wreck?’

But Walter Howells was out of sight and at the inn’s front door. He didn’t remove his leather hat which, low at the crown and turned up at its eaves, revealed red shock hair and a redder face. Mrs Yapp and three guests whom he had not seen before were in the parlour — a fine-looking young woman and two clerkish men. He didn’t pause for pleasantries but broke into their conversation. ‘Alice. Bake some bread and pull some corks. You’ve got a full house for a night or two. That Yankee ship we were expecting has beached at Dry Manston and all the sailors on it are coming here and seeking beds.’

‘Dear Lord, how many beds?’

‘Oh, sixteen, seventeen. And a little dog! And they’ve got a Negro in a cart.’

‘You’re joking with me, Walter Howells.’

‘I am not.’

‘A Negro in a cart, you say? Well, we’ll see.’

‘You will indeed. You can expect them in the hour and, in that hour, I’ll have to find myself the smith. My horse has dropped a shoe.’

Aymer Smith — somewhat startled that this muddy, florid man should be Howells the kelp agent — stepped forward and offered his hand: ‘Please allow me to introduce myself. You say you need a smith. And I’m a Smith, but not much use with horses …’

‘Then, sir,’ said Walter Howells, ‘you’re not much use to me.’

FOR THAT ONE HOUR between Walter Howells’s ‘You’re not much use to me’ and the arrival of the sailors from the Belle , Aymer viewed his task in Wherrytown with less timidity. The obligations of Duty and Conscience were unchanged, of course. He could not take pleasure in the lecture-with-regrets that he would have to deliver on ‘The Local Implications of Monsieur Leblanc’s Liberties with Salt’. But Walter Howells’s ill-manners in the parlour with Katie Norris there to witness had made the prospect of the lecture sweeter.

Aymer stood at the window of his room. In the courtyard Mr Howells was leading his unshoed horse to the smith that, for the moment, he might imagine more consequential than a Smith. Aymer could be patient. He would let Mr Howells absorb the wincing implications of the letter to him and its signature. How could Aymer know that George still had the letter — both letters — in his pocket and in the fever of ‘There’s been a wreck!’ had forgotten it? The letter was at that moment (he imagined) waiting on the agent’s parlour table. It would not be long, a couple of hours at the most, before Aymer could expect the verbose opportunity to accept the man’s apologies.

‘Matters of propriety and dignity do not engage me,’ he would say. ‘I have not weathered storms at sea in my passage here to Wherrytown to benefit from local courtesies and etiquettes or to test your manners, good or ill. We are plain men, I think, and plainly spoken. Indeed, I already have experience that you can speak your mind. So, sir, you will not take amiss the unhappy news that I must give to you. You may not know of it, but the industry of a Monsieur Nicolas Leblanc, a Frenchman, has made a mark on yours. And you, for all my efforts in your name, must be the poorer for it.’ Aymer could imagine the hunted, baffled, deferential look on Howells’s face as the bad news encircled him and taunted him but would not give its name until the Lecture nearly was complete. ‘I think your already spoken view,’ Aymer could conclude, ‘that I am little use to you assumes a sharper meaning now.’ Mr Howells would have no repartee for that. Aymer’s Duty would be done. Then there would be time to eat a country meal (with the Norris couple as his guests, perhaps; he really was determined to scrape acquaintance with them), to sleep well at the nameless inn and to take the return Sunday passage on the Tar . What further obligations could he have in Wherrytown?

He would, he thought, find Mr Norris and his wife, to enquire if they would like to share his dinner table. He had information on the topography of Canada that they would benefit from hearing, and some advice, too, on Self-Reliance. He took some soap for Katie Norris. Five bars. He imagined they’d serve her well on her long sea voyage. Perhaps she’d save one as a keepsake of her mother country, stored beneath the crapes and linens of her clothes drawer, in the timber bedroom of her cabin, on the virgin land, deep in Canada. Perhaps she’d wash her hair in Smith’s Fine Soap.

The thought of Katie Norris with her hair in suds hastened Aymer, but his bedroom door was opened before he could reach it. Mrs Yapp came in with sheets and bolster cloths.

‘You shouldn’t give no thought to Walter Howells,’ she said. ‘He didn’t know that you were Smith & Sons, the soap. He’ll be back and limping like his horse when he finds out.’

‘I would not waste a second thinking of it, Mrs Yapp.’

‘There, then, there’s no harm done.’ She set about making up Aymer’s bed. ‘We’ll get you comfortable,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll have to shift them other beds. You heard what Walter said. We’ve boatloads coming here and it’ll be a squeeze to find the rooms for them. Those Norrises will have to share, or sleep out in the corridor. I can’t be bothered with a fuss. You should’ve seen his wife when I explained. The blushes on that girl! You’d think I’d asked her to share a bale of hay with horses. I said, “You don’t get private rooms for what you’re paying me, not when there’s other guests to satisfy.” Still, it’ll be a taste of Canadee for her.’