There was a piercing familiarity about the arrangement as he lifted the album from the floor to the table and sat on a chair to look more closely at these colourful and prize possessions of a cloistered infant, a four-year-old’s view on to the outside world. He remembered putting them in one by one as he acquired them, tensing the muscles of hands and fingers to get them straight, with the feeling each time that he had succeeded triumphantly in creating another world whose colours he could walk among.
One day the album vanished, and his days of hope were over. Childhood was knocked down by a hammer-blow, and replaced by the plodding dullness of common survival till the time when he saw ships on the sea from the haven of Clara’s front window, a vision distant and unreal enough for him to believe once more that there might yet be a way to give meaning to his life.
The cigarette-card album must have been taken away and sent to his grandfather, or to Clara, perhaps as proof that he liked being at the orphanage, that he was at home there and making progress in his separate existence. He is happy, they said. Look how he spends his time. Maybe his senile grandfather had visited the place before he died and, watching from a distance, saw the album and coveted it for reasons best not gone into. The director had removed the tattered object from his bedside one night, and posted it to his grandfather next morning. Why else would they have robbed him of the only thing that made life possible?
In the garden of the orphanage was a wooden one-floored building called the Recreation Room, set among trees and apart from the main house, and on wet weekend afternoons they were sent there to be out of the way. The hours between lunch and tea lasted for ever. He had learned early what eternity meant, so that no long watch kept at sea was ever in the least monotonous.
Inside the room was a large table, and an old upright piano with no lid that one of the boys knew how to play, and a few shelves of mildewed penny-dreadful magazines, and adventure novels by Ballantyne, Conan Doyle, Haggard, Henty and Jules Verne. He had stuck his treasured cigarette cards into the album to the sound of rain dripping on to the roof from trees outside, as they sat the afternoon hours away in an intense smell of pungent soot from a chimney place that had once been lit but now never was, and of damp books and half rotting timber that took a decade of sea-life to get out of his spirit.
Their grey felt hats could be distorted into the sort that Napoleon wore. Porridge at breakfast was sometimes burnt, often cold as well. They were taken blackberrying in the autumn, to get sufficient for jam the whole year. Church was twice on Sunday, and there was Scripture every morning. Each summer they lived in tents for a week by the seaside. Occasionally they walked the streets, and felt like kings.
If his grandfather had hoped to punish him by sending him to an orphanage because his mother had committed the unforgivable sin of giving him birth, then the old man had not succeeded. Rather the opposite, Tom supposed, for to be brought up in such a family would obviously have been many times worse. The one blow he had been dealt, which was so savage that he preferred to put it down to an act of God rather than to any that man could have given, was when he had been deprived of his picture-card album. Even that, considering how quickly he had forgotten it, seemed to have concerned another boy and not him.
In any case, there were other blows to smooth the way to forgetfulness. Never, he recalled it being said at the orphanage, sit with your hands clenched – as by the age of six it had grown to be his habit. When he had done so, once too often for his safety, a cane had smashed across his knuckles. From then on his fingers had remained straight, even when relaxed. But who could now say, he thought, remembering such sharp teaching for the first time in years, that they had ever since been at rest?
On the inside of the album it said in Clara’s handwriting: ‘When you think of your mother, say a prayer for her soul.’ Of all he had seen and read in this morass of tormenting mementoes, these words struck his eyes as if to blind him. Rage spread to the very tips inside his fingers, so that his hands would not stay still from pain. He tore the page from its staples, and crushed it like a poisonous spider.
PART FIVE
Love
1
‘You look as though you’ve been down a coalmine.’
‘I wish I had. It would undoubtedly have been cleaner down there.’
‘Do you feel bitter?’ she asked, after he had related his findings.
He picked up his grandfather’s death certificate, tore it casually in half, and let it drop. ‘Everybody’s gone, so how can I? Getting to know your past for the first time at fifty makes you feel young again, but without the hope you might once have had.’
He pushed a box under the table with his foot. The curtains were closed and all lights on. The shelf clock struck midnight. Traffic noises came from the seafront. She drew the velvet curtains to one side and saw three ships lit up on the sea. When he pulled a book towards him she looked over his shoulder. ‘What kind of writing is that?’
The letters were solid and black, as if they would remain long after the paper had disappeared. They lay in packed lines from top to bottom of the large page. ‘It’s Hebrew,’ he said, ‘the writing of the Jews.’
‘How do you know?’
‘There was once a radio officer who had a theory that the British people were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He read the Bible, and was learning Hebrew. I saw him practising the script.’
‘Can you read any?’
He ran a finger from right to left across the lines. ‘It’s all Chinese to me. But I suppose my mother must have known what it was.’
She touched his shoulder. ‘You’ll have to learn.’
His features were bare and prominent under the light, and he stared at the writing as if the meaning would be made clear, like trying to read hopeful signs in the weather from gathering clouds. She had never seen anyone who seemed so tired, so emptied. There was nothing in him to make life livable except the spirit of his inner self that might or might not revive. Even the sea had gone from him, all the strength he had acquired with so much effort and will. He looked up from the print. ‘I must begin again, unless I’m to die. There’s no other way. I have no option.’
He had been on a longjourney, and had told her about it in order to decide what of value would be preserved from the rubble of the past. She had been of some use, and was glad. One good turn deserved another. What more could he want from her? But she didn’t care to get into a situation from which she might lose the desire to escape. If she began such a life again she would die in captivity. ‘I think I have to go home.’
He jumped as if stung. ‘Home?’
She was frightened at beginning to feel that she lived here. ‘Back to London. I must have some clean clothes at least!’
‘It’s too late to get a train. I’m afraid I lost count of time, which is strange, considering how obsessed I’ve always been by it. When I first studied navigation I discovered that there were ten different kinds of time. I’d chant the words to get them into my brain: solar, apparent solar, mean solar, sidereal, lunar, standard, summer, Greenwich Mean, watch and chronometer time. Lives depended on them perhaps, and to lose track of time seems either a disaster or a luxury – I don’t know which. Searching through oceans of vacant time with landmarks that I’d either forgotten or not known about made me lose all sense of something I thought even my bone-marrow was made of.’