When they reach the tall walls and slaughterhouse fug of the Admiralty Victualling Yard, Mr Hancock and the cat part ways. She darts into the shadows, her tail standing up like a mast; he strikes out across the fields, where the air swells moist and green-smelling. The birds are clamorous, and three red cows watch from under their eyelashes as he hoists himself over a stile, breeches straining. From here a long tree-lined avenue leads to Greenland Dock, and he idles happily along it, kicking up dust and screwing his eyes so the sunshine glows pink through his lids.
As he draws closer the air takes on an oily weight, which settles on the clothes and layers the nostrils with a greasy, deep-water scent. And the nearer he comes, the worse the smell becomes, until it blooms into the stench of ghastly decay: the blankets of flesh peeled from whales on the Greenland ice have lain for days and weeks upon the ships that bear them home, reeking and sweating and oozing. On the docks, the labourers hoist them one by one from their piles, retching and leaning against one another as they unleash pockets of trapped gas and foul greasy fluid that have hitherto suppurated undisturbed. These unfortunate men have never seen a live whale, but they are experts in its parts: fat for soap and lamps, spermaceti for smokeless candles; baleen for their sweethearts’ corsets.
The rendering ovens in the long brick buildings on the nearside of the dock are already roaring hot, while the labourers fill vats with spongy rashers of blubber. Mr Hancock approaches a group taking air on the quayside.
‘Good morning, boys,’ he says.
‘Morning to you. We don’t see you here so often.’
‘No, indeed. I did not expect to be here today. But I have been summoned on some mysterious business. Is Captain Tysoe Jones about the place?’
One of them jerks his head back, towards the edge of the dock, and there he stands by the water, tall and narrow and all alone in the midst of this industry, his face white and immobile. He is turning his hat around and around in his hands in a constant motion, as if it were some ritual of prayer.
‘He’s not so good,’ says one of the dockers.
‘A bad voyage,’ says another.
‘They do get that way sometimes.’ He taps his temple meaningfully. ‘Crazed.’
‘I see,’ says Mr Hancock, who indeed has seen it before. ‘He needs a rest.’ He approaches his old friend, smiling and reaching out his hand, but although Captain Jones looks as if he is waiting for something, and his eyes are roving and expectant, he does not seem to see him.
‘From the looks of it you have had a hard voyage,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘Eh, Tysoe? But you are home now.’
His friend tears away his eyes from an invisible point in the air, and fixes them with difficulty upon Mr Hancock’s lapel. He is silent for a moment. A muscle in his jaw seems to be working. ‘Yes,’ he says, presently. ‘You might say so.’
‘Here, Tysoe –’ Mr Hancock’s jubilance bubbles up before he can suppress it – ‘much has changed in my circumstances, you will not credit it. I’ve a wife, sir!’
Captain Jones remains impassive.
‘And she has one in the basket already,’ persists Mr Hancock. ‘I’m to be a father. What do you say to that, hey?’ But for perhaps the first time in his life, Captain Jones has nothing at all to say. He nods absently, that is all, leaving Mr Hancock to stammer and cough and then ask lamely, ‘And how were your travels?’
‘Strange.’ His old friend’s eyes will not meet his; he mumbles into his stock. Then his eyes roll off into the middle distance again.
‘Do you know –’ Mr Hancock hesitates, perturbed at his friend’s strangeness – ‘you took far longer to return than you had expected?’ He longs for the gratification of a warm handshake, a clap about the shoulders; he regrets that his old friend does not rejoice in his achieving this most masculine of things. But what signifies more is that something is gravely amiss.
Captain Jones shrugs. ‘What’s time anyway?’
‘And we are not meeting in the usual place,’ prompts Mr Hancock.
‘No. This is not the usual cargo. So …’ They stand for a minute longer, silent. Then Captain Jones says, ‘Come with me.’
He sets off with a little burst of energy, and moves quite rapidly in a sort of lurching shuffle: his limbs wobble like a puppet’s and his feet never quite leave the ground. In this way he leads Mr Hancock along the length of the dock, where the ships jostle gently together like cattle, and towards a tumbledown warehouse beyond. When they are just a few yards away from it, his footsteps falter and cease. He stands still again, looking at the ground.
‘I got you what you want,’ he says. ‘I found her. But I think – I think perhaps you should not have her.’
‘What?’
‘She will not be what you expect. She is not what I expected, Lord knows.’
‘I expect nothing. I expected a dead one.’
‘Well, I can assure you she is not dead.’ He snorts mirthlessly. ‘I do not know if I would call her alive, but she is not dead.’
They step into the shadowy warehouse. Squinting, Mr Hancock sees that one of the big-bellied rendering vats has been dragged from its shed, its passage across the stone floor marked by clawing lines of soot. Mr Hancock advances slowly. To his surprise, Captain Jones keeps talking:
‘Every sailor is heartsick at least sometimes in his life. But this was the most melancholy voyage I ever knew.’
The water – for the vat is surely full of water, and not oil – gives a little plash, as if something very large has rolled gently over in it.
‘We installed her quite comfortably in the hold. At first the crew was in good spirits. I would always catch one or other of my boys down there, just gazing at her. But after a while …’
The vat is as tall as Mr Hancock, and he cannot see inside. He slaps his palm against its scorched side. ‘Have you any steps? I wish to look.’
‘… well, by and by every man on that ship was overcome by grief, a sort of melancholy hollowness. As if each one of us had been gutted like a fish. Everything warm and substantial taken out and thrown away.’ Captain Jones remains in the doorway, just shy of the thin shaft of sunlight that creeps in. He begins again to turn his hat around in his hands. ‘How to describe it if you have never felt it?’ he says softly. Perhaps he is talking to himself. But he wishes to be heard; his voice is high and urgent. ‘It is like realising that one is no longer in love. The restlessness. Nobody looked anybody in the eye. Nobody spoke or sang. It was as if every soul on that ship suddenly knew that somewhere in the world there was a great love just for them, but that the world was so large they would never find it.’
‘I did not know you were so poetical,’ says Mr Hancock. He drags an empty keg up to the vat, climbs onto it, and peers inside.
The water stirs. In the dark it appears quite black, apart from the mica booming through it like stars. At first he thinks, why, there is nothing here. My wife was right: I have been duped. Then the water heaves a great sigh, rainbows glance across the copper, and he sees her. She is indistinct but there is no doubting she is there. She is like a shoal of tiny fish, all surging and flickering together, a great mass that forms and re-forms and thinks all in accord. He can make out sometimes her arms, and often her swirling hair. He sees the silvery rolling-over of her heavy tail. He hangs over the water for many minutes as she sighs and rolls.
‘Oh,’ he says.
‘And when we disembarked last night,’ continues Captain Jones, ‘we all knew – we will never sail together again. We who were like brothers. I do not know where they will all go; not back to their homes for they have no homes that feel like home.’ He contemplates this statement for a moment, before repeating it, turning it over as if it were a curiosity he needed to inspect. ‘They have no homes that feel like home.’ Then he straightens up. ‘Take her away. You are fortunate we did not scuttle the ship, for we’d have done it gladly. I’ve a mind to return to sea again as soon as possible. What is there for me here? What good is money?’
Mr Hancock is not listening. ‘I must tell Angelica,’ he says, squinting into the waters once again. ‘I must go at once.’
Even so, he remains leaning over the vat for many seconds longer.
TEN
‘Urgh,’ says Angelica Hancock, opening her eyes.