Much later that day, when the anchor of the Charybdis was securely nestled in its bed in the hawse pipe, I realized that ever since Dupont had awakened me that morning I’d barely given a thought to Miriam Galt, the cause of my broken heart.
PASSAGES
1
Early in this voyage I felt sick again, but it seemed to be only plain old seasickness and I got over it quickly. Even though my job kept me busy on deck most of the day painting, scraping rust, and swabbing salt from exposed surfaces, I spent a lot of my free time up there, too, enjoying the ocean’s various moods. When strong winds and whitecaps meant a storm was coming, I was no longer overanxious — I now had more faith in ships and their ability to stay afloat.
Socially, too, things were better for me this voyage. The crew now regarded me as something more than a complete novice. After nightfall, I was often invited as a matter of course to join the other deckhands at poker in their quarters in the fo’c’sle.
Mainly, though, when I was off-duty I read constantly, for the SS Charybdis had its very own library under the rear deck. It consisted of two large cabins, whose well-filled bookcases were a feast to my eyes. Most of the books had suffered some degree of water damage but were still quite readable. A sticker on their inside covers indicated they’d been donated by the Mariners’ Guild for the purpose of providing seamen, over the course of a life at sea, with a basic education.
The top shelves contained a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries as well as a variety of general fiction and poetry. Some of these were “great books” I hadn’t got round to at university, such as War and Peace, Dead Souls, The Magic Mountain, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Charterhouse of Parma, Religio Medici, Remembrance of Things Past, Samson Agonistes, Leviathan, and The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
The books in the middle shelves had no Mariners’ Guild stickers and were the most water-damaged. Surprisingly, considering the crew of the ship consisted of masculine types of men, these books were mainly paperback novels of the popular romance genre. They had dramatic covers and such memorable titles as Sweet Passion of the Prairies, Brides of Belladonna, The Gallant Gambler and the Lively Lass, A Man for the Kissing, The Star-Spangled Mistress, Her Temptress Tongue, Cherished Foe, Blue Moon Blonde Lady, Amazon Amy, Lovelorn My Love, Apache Woman, True Love and the Parson from Moose Jaw, Wife for Rent, The Neurosurgeon and the Nymph, Savage Embraces, Whisper Love in My Earnest Ear, Cupid’s Tangled Heart, Island of Love’s Flame, Lure That Lady, and Affaire Immemoriale.
The bottom shelves contained a number of obscure books of fiction that looked as though they’d never been read. Early in the voyage I skimmed through the pages of some of them and must have stumbled on the worst — even their titles still haunt me: Inspecting the Faults, The Paladine Hotel, The Wysterium, Last Blast of the Cornet, and A Dutch Life. Each of them was as incoherent as dreams.
THE DAY I DISCOVERED the library, no one else seemed to be around, so I took my time looking over what was available. In the midst of my browsing, a woman’s voice startled me: “Would you like to check anything out?”
The voice’s source had been in the library’s other cabin. She now came towards me and shook my hand. She was a short, elderly woman in a flowery dress, her hair short and grey, her face rather serious.
“I’m Mrs. Pradhan, the ship’s librarian,” she said. “So you’ve been having a good look round?”
THAT WAS MY FIRST of many meetings with the librarian of the Charybdis. She was a Londoner and the wife of the first mate, whom she’d met at the Mercantile Law Ministry in London when she was a research assistant there. He’d come to do some work on an impending inquiry and had asked for her help.
“Love at first sight,” she told me.
After their marriage, she sailed with him on all his ships and voluntarily looked after their libraries, which were usually in a state of utter neglect. “My labours of love,” she called her work.
IN MY SUBSEQUENT visits to the library, she grilled me about my life. She was a sympathetic listener and, of course, before long I’d told her my whole story. She was especially fascinated by what she called my “tragic love affair” with Miriam Galt and would ask me to repeat the details of it over and over.
“Talking about it will make you feel better,” she’d say.
In my view, if just talking about a broken heart made the sufferer feel better, it obviously wasn’t all that serious a blow in the first place. But I didn’t tell Mrs. Pradhan that. To keep her happy, I did talk about those days in Duncairn as often as she wished.
“How sad,” she’d say. “But how wonderful!”
By then I’d discovered that she was the one who’d acquired the collection of popular romances for the Charybdis, two years before. They were so noticeably water-damaged because they’d been on a ship that had run aground on a dangerous shoal off Plymouth. A major part of the cargo had been books headed for bookstores abroad. A salvage company had subsequently retrieved whatever it could and auctioned them off by the hundredweight.
“The boxes of love stories were the cheapest,” said Mrs. Pradhan. “I thought they might be especially good for lonely men at sea and help preserve their idealism about love. Don’t you agree?”
To be polite, I did agree. But as far as I could tell from listening to their tales about the various brothels they’d visited, my shipmates were anything but idealistic about love. Nor did I ever see any of them reading her romances, or much else for that matter — aside from the comic books and erotic magazines they’d brought aboard with them.
HER HUSBAND, First Mate Srinivas Pradhan, seemed about the same age as his wife. He was a small, dapper man from Calcutta, with silver hair slicked back. He was always impeccably dressed, unlike many of his fellow officers, who looked more at home in dungarees.
Because I’d become his wife’s favourite client, I was invited on several occasions to either dinner or high tea with them in their cabin. Mrs. Pradhan herself would prepare the meals in the ship’s galley, then bring them to the cabin where a formal table was set up with tablecloth, napkins, wine glasses, and silver cutlery.
The food was always extremely bland, out of regard for the first mate’s stomach. He’d been diagnosed as having a stomach ulcer, which he attributed entirely to the stresses of his job. He often reminisced about the delightful spicy foods of his youth, but his stomach could no longer stand them. Now he was condemned to boiled rice, liver cooked in milk, and custard pudding. His wine glass was used only for water.
So I much preferred it when they asked me to high tea. Then the food was much more palatable, with jam sandwiches and apple tarts specially baked by Mrs. Pradhan.
At all these meals, she would wear her floral dress and the first mate would put on his best uniform. I’d change into a fresh shirt and make sure I shaved. In the stifling heat of the cabin, we’d talk about this and that in the most civilized way, as though we were in some vicarage in the southern counties of England and not sweating it out on a dirty freighter in the southern ocean.