John Smith was the first. But not her husband. She had been eleven years old when she saw him. He would not live by what he was. He would not live by what she knew him to be. The memory of the forest is not a recent memory. Memory is recognition. The people know this. Fate is memory, memory fate.
Returned to his own country, Smith delayed his visit. There was an awkward interview at Brentwood. ‘You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father, being in his land a stranger. And by the same reason, so must I do you. Were you not afraid to come into my father’s Country? Did you not cause fear in him, and all his people? And fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then, I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman. They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other.’
Betrayal. What is spoken cannot be unsaid. ‘Your countrymen will lie much.’ But when their word is given in the way of business, they believe, it can be taken back. It will not stand. They look for interest, returns. Circumstances alter cases, they say. Each day is new. We wake to a different sun.
For Pocahontas, all this is heresy. A promise is a contract honoured to the final breath. Her beauty was in strength. The firm set of her mouth. The broad nose. Her features held no appeal for the courtiers, the men of affairs. Rebecka. Eleven years old, looking on John Smith (nameless name): divorced at once from her father’s gods. Smith was her father. ‘Okeus, who appeareth to them out of the air. Thence coming into the house, and walking up and down with his strange words and gestures.’ His presence revealed by freak winds, or ‘other awful tokens’. Her desire for him gave him a human shape, an outline she could bear. He came to the forest. He sat at the strings of the death-cutter with Purcell and Mullins. He spoke whatever it was they feared most to hear.
John Rolfe carried her aboard the George, in enforcement of duty. Along with their young son, Thomas. She was his to command. She knew she would die of it. Rolfe brought a dead woman on to the vessel. The houses of the city were grey, limed, huddled: a graveyard. Downriver: the fortified places, the church at Erith. The bleak marshlands, treeless, offered no cover for the spirits.
She was sinking. Lifted ashore in great pain at this hithe. We step aside, make room; we watch. She passes us: carried to the Inn on a seaplank, by four sturdy sailors. Another corpse, beached and scrubbed. Another narrative claimant.
The shadow of the statue in St George’s church fell across her window. A replica of William Ordway Partridge’s Jamestown monument. More Hiawatha than daughter of Powhatan. Single feather, arms open, palms spread: making entrance in some lumberjack operetta. She was divorced from herself. There were two of her.
She opened her hand on the flowered bedspread. Stone entered her heart. What she was offering could not be accepted. The city was half-born, unmade. A plague dish. Let her become a charm against fever. Let her preach a quiet ruin upon the dockyards, the timbers. Soon the forest will march back to claim her. The sap to varnish her cheek. Her breath is wood smoke.
Our fuel tanks were topped and ready. We were invaded by waves of shame and courage, fear and anger: an inhuman desperation. (Like reading a letter from one of those unloved poets who turn rejection into full-blown martyrdom by way of the correspondence columns of the TLS.) ‘Let’s do it,’ said Joblard. ‘Let’s try for Sheerness.’
Together we dragged Jon Kay aboard. If necessary, we would lash him to his own wheeclass="underline" like Dracula’s helmsman. We no longer needed a pilot. We were hot to quit this final landfall. The taint was choking us. There was no more protection in wood and plaster. No tax shelter in memory, in other men’s tales. Out then, out on a running tide. Eastwards.
The engine fired at the first touch of the rope. The Reunion, with previously suppressed reserves of omphh, surged gratefully off the chart. There were no maps for where we were going.
IV
The ductile spread of the waters cooled, in a moment’s narrowing of the diaphragm, into a blanket of unrelieved latex. The pluck and suck that gives fair warning, but does not slow our progress.
Now there were only container ships, hugging the Essex shore, blocking out the oil refineries: Mucking Flats, Lower Horse, Deadman’s Point, Canvey. ‘Cowards!’ howled the resurrected Kay. The tide was with us. The wind. The light. We were expelled, cut loose. Good riddance, said the stones. There was nothing to go back for: the world disappeared in our wash. We skated on the edge of an abyss. Jon Kay had his hands on the wheel. He spat in the face of the Furies. He’d already taken off his dark glasses and flung them over the side. With his winking lidless eye, he looked a thousand years old. His flapping tent-show skin. He was something carried in a cardboard box from the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields. He grinned like a mummy. His teeth were black wood. He haemorrhaged sawdust from every seam. He had locked himself totally into some older journey. Outfoxing the coastguard: Harry Morgan off the Florida Keys. GOPHER IT! We had run beyond our permissions. We were bouncing towards the mystery of Sheerness. It was written. Fate.
The light was infected, a bead curtain of airborne droplets. It was bad light. Bugs burning up. You could smell it. The peculiar intensity of a sunstream revealing a circle of jungle floor better left in dampened shadow. Things crawled. White eyes flashed beneath the wavelets. The clouds were at war, split by the beams of heavy searchlights. Smoke solid skies, bone smoke. Foreclosing this petty adventure. The river became all rivers. The James, the Congo, the Amazon. Eliot’s Mississippi. Let the green vegetation creep down the banks. Let it smother the storage tanks. It will not yield. The river is the agent of transformation.
‘Is that the Isle of Grain?’ I pointed to a headland that shone on the distant Kent shore. Nobody knew. It was unreal, a promise. It could be the beacon at Egypt Bay. It could be Allhallows. The light played with our expectations; offering a visible destination at which to aim our craft. It was all too easy.
Against all mythic prohibitions, I looked back. Black gouts of engine oil were gushing from the outboard into the water. A torn shark. Surely, I thought, this is not right. This shouldn’t be happening. I nudged Joblard. We were bumping against something. Jon Kay had fulfilled his potential. He had run us aground.
‘But this is impossible,’ he bleated. ‘I don’t believe it. The river is three miles wide.’ He gunned the motor to a scream: churning us deeper and deeper into the quaggy filth. With a groan of hurt, and a radical crunch, the propeller-shaft parted from its blades. Kay had done it. Give him his due. He had put us on to the notorious Blythe Sands.
We were not the first. We fought for space in these temperamental paddies, these bury-yourself swamps, with the wrecks of East Indiamen: colonists, convicts, merchants, brides, and rum-soaked soldiery. We hardly merited an entry in the log of nautical disasters. We had nothing to leave in the sands except our bones. Many vessels waited for months at Gravesend: commissioned, provisioned, crewed — needing clearance, a letter from the owners. They came so soon to grief.
An old acquaintance, the Paul Kelver, had anchored on the borders of the sandbank, to wait her turn for the pilot boat. We could see the condemned horses, as they fretted and stamped. Joblard rubbed his hands. Nothing made him happier than the arrival of a long-anticipated trauma. Now it could only get worse. He unzipped a Jacobean gash of teeth.