Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 9

  Once it was over, Lacroix felt in his coat pocket for coins. Their audience—for the show now had become both of them—waited to see what he would give and when he gave it there was laughter, as if the man had cheated him. He did not feel cheated. He shifted closer to the man. He wanted him to start again, wanted this time to try to hear his story, for he had some idea it would instruct him, and that if he could gather things—could gather, specifically, the last twelve months of his existence—into a story of his own, he could, if it was demanded of him (when?), provide an account of himself that would satisfy. He would be coherent. He would make sense. Was that not how stories served us? But before it could begin again a child appeared at his shoulder and in an accent that came from somewhere up the country, told Lacroix the Jenny would sail within the hour and that Captain Browne wished him to come aboard at once.

  He stood, steadied himself against the table. Brandy on an empty stomach. Brandy in the system of a man who was less strong than he had been. He followed the boy outside. The day was bigger than he had left it, more uncontained, more real. He blinked, then noticed the slick surface of the cobbles and realised it was raining. Ahead of him, the boy, on bare feet, was threading the crowd but Lacroix stopped and turned up his face to feel the rain. He was still there, tilt-faced, the skin of his brow and cheeks growing brighter, when he felt his sleeve tugged, and looking down saw it was the man from the Star, his ship now sheltered under an umbrella of tattered yellow silk.

  “What?” asked Lacroix.

  The man smiled. In his free hand he held out the gunsmith’s parcel. Lacroix stared at it a moment as though he could not understand how it had got there, could not understand at all. Then he took the parcel and placed it under his coat to keep it dry.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  TWO

  4

  From Portsdown Hill, the wind in their faces, they watched the fleet at anchor. Pennants, flags, here and there the streaked cream belly of a sail. The big ships were constantly visited by boats that fought their way, awkwardly but unerringly, across the swell. Further off, beyond the human work (the flogging of malefactors, the swabbing and coiling, the learning of stars, the difficult Arab maths), rain in columns of faint shadow drifted landwards.

  The outing to the viewing place—the trudge out of Portsmouth, the trudge up the hill—was, Medina understood, intended to instruct him, and for the sake of politeness he asked questions about the ships, the town, the history of it all. But Corporal Calley either did not know or did not see fit to trouble himself with answers. They looked out in silence, the Spanish officer of cavalry, the English corporal of foot, both in mufti, both in long horse-coats bought that morning in the Charlotte Street market, until the column of rain advancing up the hill in a series of brightenings engulfed them.

  They started down—the sheep-cropped grass, the London road, then into the town with its low roof of brown smoke, its gangs of sailors in bum-freezer jackets, its herds of cattle aimed at the dockside slaughter houses, the salting rooms, the sea.

  Their boarding house was off the High Street. It was called Mrs. Cooke’s Place, a tall, precarious-looking building opposite a bottle shop in an alley with an open drain down its middle. The house had been Calley’s choice. They had come up yesterday from their ship, the Medusa, had entered Portsmouth through the pewter light of evening, had found themselves on the High Street, and after walking a little one way and a little the other, had turned into the alley. There had been no discussion. Medina followed where Calley led. Calley was an Englishman, they were in England, it made sense that he should take the lead. Also—more decisively, more troublingly—it was Calley who had the money, the whatever it was Captain Henderson had provided. There was a rule perhaps, a law even, that prohibited British army money being put into the hands of anyone other than a serving member of that army. No one had said so but it was likely. Anyway, Medina preferred to think it so. For his own needs he would have to manage with the shillings he had borrowed at the last minute from an English military surgeon for whom, in Lisbon, he had acted as a translator and go-between in an affair of the heart. Later, Calley might offer him money, something for cigars, miscellaneous expenses, though there was little, after eleven days at sea with him, to suggest that he would.

  Their room was on the top floor of the house. They had a view of a bricked-up window, of a ledge where pigeons carried on their ceaseless courting. There was a table, a chair, a bed big enough for two, though Calley made it clear there would be no sharing, that Medina could have the bed to himself. The impression he gave was that a bed—or just lying down—was something for weaker men, men who would, ultimately, come to no good. He spent the night on the chair facing the door, and though he must have slept at some hour, he was awake when Medina closed his eyes and awake when he opened them again in the morning.

  They had horse-coats but no horses. They went back to the market to look for someone they might do business with. Calley picked men out. He clearly had a type in mind—watchful men, men who stood, feet apart, like boxers, who, when they spoke to you, looked at you once, made their judgement, then returned their attention to the street behind you. Men like Calley himself. At the third attempt he found one who would serve, a young blood with a branding scar on his cheek, a bristling, pink-eyed dog by his boots. They followed him to a farm, a place that had been swallowed up by the town, the old farmhouse derelict, the field it stood on converted into a waste ground where small fires burned and men and women camped, cooked, hung out their washing and observed the arrival of strangers.

  Grazing between the fires were horses, a dozen or so in loose groupings, a pair of foals among them, upright as furniture. The man whistled up a boy. The boy fetched two mares, led them without the use of ropes or halters. Calley walked around them. He did not touch them. The man and the boy and the pink-eyed dog watched him. It took them less than a minute to realise he knew nothing about horses. Medina stepped forward. He ran a hand down the horses’ backs, stroked down the backs of their legs.

  “Not these,” he said.

  “Why?” said Calley.

  “This one will be lame in a week. This one is blind in its right eye.”

  The man denied the blindness but had the boy fetch two more. Of these, one was sound, the other had swollen glands in its neck. The fifth horse was too flighty, the sixth had bad teeth, but the seventh, a bay with one white sock, Medina liked. A good top line, a balanced walk, a steady gaze. He stayed with the horses while Calley went to another part of the field to barter. He talked to the bay, murmured to her, as he had, in better times, whispered to girls through the iron grille-work of windows in narrow Cordovan streets. For tack, there was another man, a hoard of stolen leather tumbled out of sacks on to the grass. They bought what they needed. Medina made the horses ready, kept them calm, then he and Calley rode back to the High Street, found a farrier’s behind one of the inns, left the horses there for shoeing.

  It was three o’clock when they returned to the boarding house. Time for dinner. The food was served in a basement refectory by Mrs. Cooke herself, an elderly woman with red hair, a pipe smoker, who dipped her ladle into an iron pot and dribbled the food into bowls. While they ate she read from the Bible, a large edition with a cracked leather binding that she balanced on top of the empty pot. The company, all of them men, sat in rows, the only sounds the working of their jaws and the language of the Gospels. (“What is this?” hissed Medina, pointing with his knife to what lay under a thin shroud of dark gravy. He thought it might be an ear. “Slink,” answered Calley without looking up. End of conversation.)

  The others, when they had finished their food, crossed to the bottle shop, ran there some of them, but Calley did not care for liquor. He had in his pack what he called “a screw of tea” and with this and water from the basement he made, in their room, his afternoon refreshment.

  “Here’s something else you don’t know about,”
he said, when he had done with the fussy work of making the tea, when he had broken off the nose of a little sugar-loaf, then turned his back to hide the tea in some compartment of his pack.

  “I know what tea is,” said Medina.

  Calley grimaced. “I’m not talking about if you know what it is. I know you know what it is. It’s fucking tea. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Medina understood, of course. Tea, the proper making of it, the knowledgeable enjoyment, was, like British sea power, a mystery a foreigner could only gaze upon, awed and confused, an idiot at High Mass. It was not personal. Medina did not think Calley disliked him, or disliked him particularly, it was simply that he loved his country. Or it was not love he felt, but a feverish insistence that seemed to Medina not easily told apart from despair. The cattle, the buildings, the ships, the clothes, the roads, the food, the sky itself, all were the first of their kind. And at the centre of this tangled passion was the army, or more particularly, Calley’s own regiment of foot, whose history he knew from its first being raised in northern shires for the purpose of killing Jacobites. Every battle, every honour, the good colonels and the ones who ought to swing, who ought to be stuck on a fucking pole. When he spoke about the army he was serious, and what he had to say he had considered, on long marches, on long nights squatting at the side of green-wood fires in the rain. Infantry was what counted. Sappers he respected. He did not object to artillery. Cavalry, however, he did not like. Cavalry did not win battles. Cavalry did not know what it was to stand in line while the enemy guns swept away the men on either side of you, made them non-men, butcher’s trash. They thought war was a fox hunt. They were barely soldiers at all.

  To amuse himself, Medina sometimes asked Calley his opinion of the Spanish army. In the last two weeks it had become almost a game between them. Medina would ask and Calley would shake his head as though he could not find the loose end of his derision, did not know how to start. When he did begin he was fluent and looked grateful to have a target worthy of his contempt, relieved, though once—they were on the deck of the Medusa, the English coast newly in view—he said, “At least you’re not Portuguese,” and this, some while later (he was learning, slowly, to translate this man) Medina understood as kindness.

  The next morning when he woke, Medina was alone in the room. He looked quickly to see if Calley’s pack was gone but it was on the seat of the chair, arranged there with a casual precision, so he would know, when he came back, if it had been touched.

  What was it like to trust no one? Was it wise? Or was there a small file, like a watchmaker’s file, that rasped away at the heart until, one day, in the crossing of a street, the middle of a sentence, you ceased to be human at all?

  He lay back in the bed, treated himself to a groan. If Calley had flown off like one of those red-eyed pigeons (he could hear them through the window, their sad, mechanical lust) he would be free. Nothing to do but gather his things and walk out, go down to the water, find a ship for Lisbon or Cadiz. Then make his way back to his regiment—or home? Why not? Had he not earned it? A month with his family, two months perhaps; to hell with the war. As for Don Ignacio Alvarez, why should he ever see him again? And if he did, would Don Ignacio even recognise him?

  When he was summoned to Don Ignacio’s house in Lisbon (or the one he had use of; it belonged, perhaps, to a more powerful man) he had imagined he was about to be thanked for his work at the inquiry, even, conceivably, offered a staff job with the Junta in Seville, aide-de-camp to one of those gentlemen who pretended to run the country while the country’s true rulers sat in the Buen Retiro in Madrid, speaking French. He had followed a servant up a flight of marble steps to a room whose windows, twice the height of a man, were shuttered against the midday sun. In the shade of the room there was the glimmer of a chandelier, and above the double doors the gilded dome of a large clock that either ran soundlessly or had stopped. The servant crossed to the right-hand window, opened the shutters. The house was near the water and the light seemed doubled by reflection. Dazzled, Medina looked down at the polished boards of the floor. When he looked up again Don Ignacio was present, had, presumably, been waiting for him in the shadows.

  This house we are in, said Don Ignacio (the curtain had risen, the opera had begun), was completely destroyed in the great earthquake of ’55. It was rebuilt from its own rubble, all of it, down to the last detail, a perfect replica of what stood before. Is it, then, the same house, or a different one? He cocked an eyebrow, spread his fingers, then, in his gorgeous boots, he stepped towards Medina, close enough to share the scent of the cologne he was wearing. He said he wished they had time to sit down together, drink wine, eat a dish of almonds. Unfortunately he had many, many matters to attend to and he knew the teniente would understand. These days he slept in the saddle, his life was not his own. But while Spain lay on the rack what were they supposed to do? Play cards? Sing songs? So, to business. Your thoughts, please, on the inquiry. You may speak quite openly. There is no one here but ourselves.

  Medina spoke. He had thoughts, but after half a minute Don Ignacio interrupted him. What he wanted to hear, he said, was what the teniente thought should be done about it. How was the insult of Morales to be answered?

  Again, Medina began to speak; again Don Ignacio cut him off.

  I have something for you, he said. An opportunity I can offer only to one I have the most perfect trust in . . .

  Medina, after the briefest of pauses, assured him that he was, in fact, that person.

  You are of course, said Don Ignacio, or I should not have brought you here. He glanced at the doors, or at the clock over the doors. Now that there was light in the room Medina could see the clock was hours out and must, indeed, have ceased to run. Had it too been rebuilt? Did it mark the hour of the earthquake? But the mere sight of a clock seemed to remind Don Ignacio of his many duties. He touched the point of his beard, possessed for an instant the eyes of a cutpurse in some filthy posada in the south, then informed Medina, in three or four sentences, the tone you might use to order your dinner, what exactly was required of him. When he had finished he said, you are astonished. Perhaps you do not think the people of Morales deserve such an effort.

  Medina denied it. The people of Morales deserved whatever justice could be found for them. But surely, he said, the French had done as much, and more than once. In Cordoba . . .

  Don Ignacio waved him to silence. He looked pained, angry even. Did the young teniente think he had forgotten the French? Did he suppose there was a day, an hour, when the names of sacked Spanish towns did not pass through his head?

  Medina apologised. Don Ignacio, with a brief closing of his eyes, forgave him. He called Medina by his given name. Strange how powerful it was, in that room, at that moment. You need, he said, only to accompany the one they send. You have only to see that he does what they have promised us.

  But can we be certain, asked Medina, that this English officer is the one responsible? Was there not some doubt?

  As for that, said Don Ignacio with a shrug, it is for the English to concern themselves with.

  A fly came in. It flew a circuit of the room. The men stood, unspeaking, as if waiting to see if it would find its way out again. It did. Medina drew himself up, stood to attention. He asked, formally, that he might be excused this particular honour. His wish, his only wish, was to meet the enemy in open battle, to fight and if necessary, to die for Spain, as so many of his ancestors had (they had not; they had grown white grapes; they had been thin, hardy, long-lived, gentle). He made a little speech of it, concluding with some flattering references to Don Ignacio and to the people he supposed Don Ignacio served. When he finished, Don Ignacio nodded. He glanced again at the stopped clock, then gestured to the tapestry that hung on the wall between the windows. It was very old, Flemish perhaps, and its colours had faded. In places you could make out only the weave.

  What do you see there? he asked.


  Is it a hunt? asked Medina.

  It may be, said Don Ignacio. Or a procession or a wedding party or an army on the march. He smiled. Someone would know. He reached up and touched Medina’s cheek.

  The honour is yours, he said. If there was someone else who could go, well, that someone would be here now and the teniente . . . somewhere else. Anyway, he was only passing on the orders of another. He was only the messenger. Everything had already been decided. Go and come back, he said. Make us proud. Make your family proud. El honor es tuyo.

  At this (it was a short opera, one act, perhaps a pantomime), the doors were opened and the servant announced a visitor. A woman, of course. Don Ignacio spread his arms. Here was the world again, beating at his door! He smiled once more, then turned away and walked into the depths of the room. Medina bowed to his back. There was no more to be said. Everything had already been decided. He went down the stairs, the heels of his boots clack-clacking on the marble steps, his yellow jacket floating in mirrors that he now saw were riddled with fine cracks as though covered in a film of cobwebs. Outside, in the shade of a flowering jacaranda tree, the English captain, Henderson, was waiting for him. Medina followed him like a lamb. It was the time of day when shadows are more real than the men who cast them.

  Though it was tempting simply to stay in bed, to lounge there listening to the pigeons and watching the pale light exhaust itself, Medina decided to dress and go out. Some sense that the world might speak to him, might have something interesting to say. He nodded to Mrs. Cooke, who was sitting on the front steps of the house, tamping the bowl of her pipe. He walked out of the alley, crossed the High Street, then picked streets at random until he came out at the shore. He was standing on a wall. Below him was a beach, or rather a shelf of black-veined mud that ended in a fringe of foam and the greasy rumpled green of the sea. A man was down there, sliding over the shining mud on a pair of narrow boards strapped to his feet. He had a sack and into it he placed whatever valuable things he could pull out of the mud, bottles mostly. Medina studied him. There was comedy here but he did not laugh. The sight of this man, who moved over the mud so cleverly, who had found a place, ten yards of stinking foreshore, to make his own, impressed him more than the fleet he had seen from the hill. This was the real English genius. This was why, for a hundred years, they would be irresistible. Eventually, of course, they would grow lazy. They would have somebody else strap on the boards. They would become interested in comfort, would lose their barbarian vitality. But for now, everyone else could simply rest in subservience, wait their turn.