“Come,” said Hencher, and took hold of his arm, “we can watch from the shed.”
They leaned against a crate under the low roof and there were rats and piles of dried shells and long dark empty spaces in the cargo shed. There were holes in the flooring: if he moved the toe of his shoe his foot would drop off into the water; if he moved his hand there would be the soft pinch of fur or the sudden burning of dirty teeth. Only Hencher and himself and the rats. Only scum, the greasy water and a punctured and sodden dory beneath them — filth for a man to fall into.
“There … she’s got the current now. …”
He stared with Hencher toward the lights, small gallery of decks and silhouetted stacks that was the Artemis a quarter mile off on the river.
“They’ll have their fun on that little ship tonight and with a moon, too, or I miss my guess. Another quarter hour,” Hencher was twisting, trying for a look at his watch in the dark, “and I’ll bring the lorry round.”
Side by side, rigid against the packing crate, listening to the rats plop down, waiting, and all the while marking the disappearance of the excursion boat. Only the quay’s single boom creaking in the wind and a view of the river across the now empty berth was left to them, while ahead of the Artemis lay a peaceful sea worn smooth by night and flotillas of landing boats forever beached. With beer and music in her saloon she was off there making for the short sea cliffs, for the moonlit coast and desolate windy promontories into which the batteries had once been built. At 3 A.M. her navigator discovering the cliffs, fixing location by sighting a flat tin helmet nailed to a stump on the tallest cliff’s windy lip, and the Artemis would approach the shore, and all of them — boy, girl, lonely woman — would have a glimpse of ten miles of coast with an iron fleet half-sunk in the mud, a moonlit vision of windlasses, torpedo tubes, skein of rusted masts and the stripped hull of a destroyer rising stem first from that muddied coast under the cliffs. Beside the rail the lonely woman at least, and perhaps the rest of them, would see the ten white coastal miles, the wreckage safe from tides and storms and snowy nights, the destroyer’s superstructure rising respectable as a lighthouse keeper’s station. All won, all lost, all over, and for half a crown they could have it now, this seawreck and abandon and breeze of the ocean surrounding them. And the boy at least would hear the moist unjoyful voice of his girl while the Artemis remained off shore, would feel the claspknife in the pocket of her skirt and, down on the excursion boat’s hard deck, would know the comfort to be taken with a young girl worn to thinness and wiry and tough as the titlings above the cliffs.
Michael stood rigid against the packing crate, alone. He waited deep within the shed and watched, sniffed something that was not of rats or cargo at all. Then he saw it drifting along the edges of the quay, rising up through the rat holes round his shoes: fog, the inevitable white hair strands which every night looped out across the river as if once each night the river must grow old, clammy, and in its age and during these late hours only, produce the thick miles of old woman’s hair within whose heaps and strands it might then hide all bodies, tankers, or fat iron shapes nodding to themselves out there.
Fog of course and he should have expected it, should have carried a torch. Yet, whatever was to come his way would come, he knew, like this — slowly and out of a thick fog. Accidents, meetings unexpected, a figure emerging to put its arms about him: where to discover everything he dreamed of except in a fog. And, thinking of slippery corners, skin suddenly bruised, grappling hooks going blindly through the water: where to lose it all if not in the same white fog.
Alone he waited until the great wooden shed was filled with the fog that caused the rotting along the water’s edge. His shirt was flat, wet against his chest. The forked iron boom on the quay was gone, and as for the two tankers that marked the vacated berth of the excursion boat, he knew they were there only by the dead sounds they made. All about him was the visible texture and density of the expanding fog. He was listening for the lorry’s engine, with the back of a hand kept trying to wipe his cheek.
An engine was nearby suddenly, and despite the fog he knew that it was not Hencher’s lorry but was the river barge approaching on the lifting tide. And he was alone, shivering, helpless to give a signal. He had no torch, no packet of matches. No one trusted a man’s voice in a fog.
All the bells and whistles in mid-river were going at once, and hearing the tones change, the strokes change, listening to the metallic or compressed-air sounds of sloops or ocean-going vessels protesting their identities and their vague shifting locations on the whole of this treacherous and fog-bound river’s surface — a horrible noise, a confused warning, a frightening celebration — he knew that only his own barge, of all this night’s drifting or anchored traffic, would come without lights and making no sound except for the soft and faltering sound of the engine itself. This he heard — surely someone was tinkering with it, nursing it, trying to stop the loss of oil with a bare hand — and each moment he waited for even these illicit sounds to go dead. But in the fog the barge engine was turning over and, all at once, a man out there cleared his throat.
So he stood away from the packing crate and slowly went down to his hands and knees and discovered that he could see a little distance now, and began to crawl. He feared that the rats would get his hands; he ran his fingers round the crumbling edges of the holes; his creeping knee came down on fragments of a smashed bottle. There was an entire white sea-world Boating and swirling in that enormous open door, and he crawled out to it.
“You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog!”
He had crossed the width of the quay, had got a grip on the iron joint of the boom and was trying to rise when the voice spoke up directly beneath him and he knew that if he fell it would not be into the greasy and squid-blackened water but onto the deck of the barge itself. He was unable to look down yet, but it was clear that the man who had spoken up at him had done so with a laugh, casually, without needing to cup his hands.
Before the man had time to say it again—“You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog, eh, Hencher? I wouldn’t ordinarily step out of the house on a night like this”—the quay had already shaken beneath the van’s tires and the headlamp had flicked on, suddenly, and hurt his eyes where he hung from the boom, one hand thrown out for balance and the other stuck like a dead man’s to the iron. Hencher, carrying two bright lanterns by wire loops, had come between himself and the lorry’s yellow headlamps—“Lively now, Mr. Banks,” he was saying without a smile — and had thrust one of the lanterns upon him in time to reach out his freed hand and catch the end of wet moving rope on the instant it came lashing up from the barge. So that the barge was docked, held safely by the rope turned twice round a piling, when he himself was finally able to look straight down and see it, the long and blunt-nosed barge riding high in a smooth bowl scooped out of the fog. Someone had shut off the engine.
“Take a smoke now, Cowles — just a drag, mind you— and we’ll get on with it.”
She ought to see her hubby now. She ought to see me now.
He had got his arm through the fork of the boom and was holding the lantern properly, away from his body and down, and the glare from its reflector lighted the figure of the man Cowles below him and in cold wet rivulets drifted sternward down the length of the barge. Midships were three hatches, two battened permanently shut, the third covered by a sagging canvas. Beside this last hatch and on a bale of hay sat a boy naked from the waist up and wearing twill riding britches. In the stem was a small cabin. On its roof, short booted legs dangling over the edge, a jockey in full racing dress sat with a cigarette now between his lips and hands clasped round one of his tiny knees.