David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Jacob remembers the son in his dream. A Chinese junk’s sails swell.

‘Theo’s legal heirs, he avowed, must have “Currency” mothers – white-skinned rose-cheeked flowers of Protestant Europe – because Batavia-born brides all have orang-utans cavorting in the family tree. Alas, his previous wives all expired within months of arriving in Java. The miasma did for them, you see. But Theo was a charming dog, and a rich charming dog, and, lo, it came to pass that between my cabin and my uncle’s aboard the Enkhuizen was accommodated the latest Mrs Theo van Cleef. My “Aunt Gloria” was four years my junior and one-third the age of her proud groom…’

Below, a rice-seller opens up his shop for the day.

‘Why bother describing a beauty in her first bloom? None of the bewhiskered Nabob-hookers on the Enkhuizen could compare, and before we’d rounded Brittany, all the eligible men – and many ineligible ones – were paying Aunt Gloria more attention than her new husband would wish. Through my thin cabin wall, I’d hear him warning her against holding X’s gaze or laughing at Y’s limp jokes. She’d reply, “Yes, sir,” meek as a doe, then let him exact his marital dues. My imagination, de Zoet, was better than any peep-hole! Then, afterwards, when Uncle Theo was back in his own cot, Gloria would weep, so delicately, so quietly, none but I could hear. She’d had no say in the marriage, of course, and Theo allowed her just one maid from home, a girl called Aagje – a second-class fare would buy five maids at Batavia’s slave market. Gloria, you must remember, had rarely gone beyond the Singel Canal. Java was as far off as the moon. Further, in fact, for the moon is, at least, visible from Amsterdam. Come morning, I’d be kind to my aunt…’

In a garden, women drape washing on a juniper tree.

‘The Enkhuizen took a bad mauling in the Atlantic,’ van Cleef pours the last sunlit drops of beer on to his tongue, ‘so the Captain settled upon a month’s stay at the Cape for repairs. To protect Gloria from the common gaze, Uncle Theo took apartments in the villa of the Sisters den Otter, high above Cape Town, up between Lion’s Head and Signal Hill. The six-mile track was a quagmire in wet weather and a hoof-twister in dry. Once upon a time the den Otters were amongst the colony’s grandest families, but by the late seventies the villa’s once-famous stucco-work was falling off in chunks, its orchards were reverting to Africa and its former staff of twenty or thirty reduced to a housekeeper, a cook, a put-upon maid and two white-haired Black gardeners both called “Boy”. The sisters kept no carriage, but sent for a landau from an adjoining farmstead, and most of their utterances began with “When dear Papa was alive” or “When the Swedish Ambassador would call”. Deathly, de Zoet – deathly! But young Mrs van Cleef well knew what her husband wanted to hear, and declared the villa to be private, safe and enchantingly Gothic. The Sisters den Otter were “a treasure-trove of wisdom and improving stories”. Our landladies were defenceless against her flattery, and her sturdiness pleased Uncle Theo, and her brightness… her loveliness… She pulled me under, de Zoet. Gloria was Love. Love was Gloria.’

A tiny girl skips like a skinny frog around a persimmon tree.

I miss seeing children, Jacob thinks, and looks away to Dejima.

‘On our first week at the villa, in a grove of agapanthus run amok, Gloria found me and told me to go and tell my uncle that she had flirted with me. Surely I’d misheard. She repeated her injunction: “If you are my friend, Melchior, as I pray God you are for I have no other in this wilderness, go to my husband and tell him that I confessed ‘inappropriate sentiments’! Use those very words, for they could be yours.” I protested that I couldn’t besmirch her honour or place her in danger of a beating. She assured me that if I didn’t do as she asked, or if I told my uncle about this conversation, then she would earn a beating. Well, the light in the grove was orange, and she squeezed my hand and said, “Do this for me, Melchior.” So I went.’

Fingers of smoke appear from the House of Wistaria’s chimney.

‘When Uncle Theo heard my false witness, he agreed with my charitable diagnosis of nerves damaged by the voyage. I went for a confused walk along the steep cliffs, afraid of what might befall Gloria back at the villa. But at lunch Uncle Theo made a speech about family, obedience and trust. After the blessing, he thanked God for sending him a wife and nephew in whom these Christian virtues blossomed. The Sisters den Otter chimed their brandy glasses with their apostle-spoons and said, “Hear hear!” Uncle Theo gave me a pouch of Guineas and invited me to go and enjoy all the pleasures the Tavern of the Two Seas could offer for two or three days…’

Below, a man leaves from a brothel’s side-door. He is me, Jacob thinks.

‘… but I’d rather have broken a bone than be separated from Gloria. I begged my donor leave to return his Guineas, asking only to keep the empty pouch to encourage me to fill it, and ten thousand more, with the fruits of my own acumen. All Cape Town’s tinsel and baubles, I claimed, were not worth an hour of my uncle’s company, and, time allowing, perhaps a game of chess? My uncle was silent, and I feared I’d over-sugared the tea, but then he declared that, whilst most young men were rascally popinjays who considered it their birthright to spend their fathers’ hard-won fortunes in dissipation, Heaven had sent him an exception for a nephew. He toasted the finest nephew in Christendom and, forgetting to conceal his clumsy test of marital fidelity, “a true little wife”. He enjoined Gloria to raise his future sons with my image in mind, and his true little wife said, “May they be in our nephew’s image, Husband.” Theo and I then played chess, and it taxed my ingenuity, de Zoet, to let the clod outmanoeuvre me.’

A bee hovers around Jacob’s face, and goes.

‘Gloria’s and my loyalties now proven, my uncle felt at liberty to enter Cape Town society himself. These pursuits took him out of the villa for most of the day, and sometimes he even slept down in the town. Me, he set to the task of copying paperwork in the library. “I’d invite you along,” he said, “but I want the Kaffirs hereabouts to know there’s a White man in the villa who can use a flintlock.” Gloria was left to her books, diary, the garden and the “improving stories” of the sisters: a spring that ran dry by three o’clock daily, when their lunchtime brandy plunged them into bottomless siestas…’

Van Cleef’s flagon rolls down the tiles, falls through the Wistaria frames, and smashes in the courtyard. ‘My uncle’s bridal suite lay down a windowless corridor from the library. Concentrating on correspondence, I’ll admit, was harder than usual that afternoon… The library clock, in my memory, is silent. Perhaps it is wound down. Orioles are singing like the choirs of Bedlam, and I hear the click of a key… that pregnant silence, when someone is waiting… and here she is in silhouette at the far end. She…’ Van Cleef rubs his sunburnt face ‘… I was afraid Aagje would find us, and she says, “Haven’t you noticed, Aagje’s in love with the eldest son of the next farm?” and it’s the most natural thing in the world to tell her I love her, and she kisses me, and she tells me she makes my uncle bearable by imagining he is me, and his is mine, and I ask, “What if there’s a child?” and she says Shush…’

Mud-brown dogs race up the mud-brown street.

‘Our unlucky number was four. The fourth time Gloria and I lay together, Uncle Theo’s horse threw him on his way down to Cape Town. He walked back to the villa so we didn’t hear the horse. One moment I was deep inside Gloria, as naked as silk. The next, I was still as naked as silk but lying amongst shards of the mirror my uncle had hurled me against. He told me he’d snap my neck and throw my carcass to the beasts. He told me to go to town, withdraw fifty guilders from his agent and make sure I was too ill to board the Enkhuizen when she sailed on to Batavia. Last, he swore that whatever I’d put inside that whore, his wife, he would be digging out with a spoon. To my shame – or not, I don’t know – I went away without saying goodbye to Gloria.’ Van Cleef rubs his beard. ‘Two weeks later I watched the Enkhuizen embark. Five weeks later I shipped on a maggoty brig, the Huis Marquette, whose pilot spoke with dead spirits and whose captain suspected even the ship’s dog of plotting mutiny. Well, you’ve crossed the Indian Ocean so I shan’t describe it: eternal, sinister, obsidian, mountainous, monotonous… After a seven-week crossing we weighed anchor in Batavia by the grace of God, with little thanks due to the pilot or the captain. I walked along the stinking canal, steeling myself for a thrashing from Father, a duel with Theo, lately arrived on the Enkhuizen, disinheritance. I saw no familiar faces and none saw me – ten years is a long time – and knocked on the shrunken door of my boyhood home. My old nurse, wrinkled, now, like a walnut, opened the door and screamed. I remember Mother hurrying through from the kitchen. She held a vase of orchids. Next thing I knew, the vase had turned into a thousand broken pieces, and Mother was slumped against the wall. I assumed that Uncle Theo had made a persona non grata of me… but then noticed that Mother was in mourning. I asked if my father was dead. She answered, “You are, Melchior: you drowned.” Then there was a sobbing embrace, and I learnt that the Enkhuizen had been wrecked on a reef just a mile from the Straits of Sunda, in a bright and savage sea, with all hands lost…’