Peyton refused his invitation to dinner. In the morning he would take a coach to Portugal Cove and from there a packet boat to the northeast shore. In the meantime, he made a determined effort to drink himself into a stupor that might lead to something resembling sleep. By half past eleven, that possibility seemed as unlikely as it had at the start of the evening. He settled his bill and went out the door into the dark. There was a new softness in the air, the first unequivocally warm night of spring, no hint of frost in the wind. Lanterns bobbed along the length of Water Street as pedestrians walked from one tavern to another or made their way home.
He headed west, drunk and stumbling often on the rough path in the blackness. He stopped men carrying lanterns and made inquiries and continued along the street until he was directed a little ways north up a dead-end laneway. The door of the tavern was propped open and the noise of it spilled out into the night. A narrow two-storey building stood beside it, the windows unlit. Inside the pub he sat at the only table with a free chair, beside a man who had fallen asleep on his folded arms. Three men stood together singing near the front of the room. Only one of them seemed to know the words of the song and the other two filled out the fragments they could recall with nonsense, half-words, syllables emptied of consonants.
There was something illicit to his being there, to have come through a door forbidden to Cassie. Peyton lifted a hand to signal the bartender, an old man wearing an eye patch. He paid for an entire bottle and sat slowly filling and emptying his tumbler until the singers had all passed out in the straw laid against the wall.
The two or three girls of the class Cassie spoke of walked from table to table, trying to engage the patrons in conversation. They left in the company of a man periodically, sometimes ushered out in a drunken rush, sometimes lugging the weight of a companion to keep him on his feet. Fifteen minutes later, an hour later, they came back alone and began their rounds again. He watched the movement of their hips under their skirts, appalled and aroused by the thought of what he vaguely knew they’d been engaged in only moments before.
Women like these often worked the taverns he and John Senior frequented when they brought the season’s catch into St. John’s, and his father always turned away from them with a seriousness that Peyton at first thought was disgust. But there was something closer to embarrassment in the dismissal, he decided, an old shame. The same embarrassment that made him keep his relationship to Cassie a secret all these years. The thought of John Senior made Peyton furious. The maggoty fucker, he thought. Then he said it aloud to himself.
Each of the women had come to his table through the course of the night and he had turned them away each time. He was so drunk now that he couldn’t distinguish one from the other. They smelled of lavender. For some unknown reason they called him Jimmy. “D’you like some company, Jimmy?” “Want a little time alone with a girl, Jimmy?”
He had his arm across her shoulder and she was keeping him on his feet as they went through the door. He was trying to ask her name but the words would not come out right, they seemed to have no bones or cartilage to them and they flopped around uselessly. The girl led him down an alley between the tavern and the two-storey house beside it, already working at the spair of his trousers with her free hand. “That’s lovely, Jimmy,” the girl said. “That’s lovely.” Everything solid in him seemed to have dissolved but for what was concentrated where she touched him. He didn’t want it and didn’t want it and she pulled him to her where she leaned against the wall, wrapping a bare leg about his waist, his face awash in the sickening smell of lavender. He pumped his cock inside her with furious little motions, grunting into her hair, until his body shook with spasms and then there was nothing at all to hold him up. She let him fall back onto the ground and stood a moment straightening her skirt. In the pitch dark he couldn’t see her, only heard the motion of clothes rustling into place. He tried again to ask her name as she knelt beside him.
“You got something for me, Jimmy?” she asked softly.
She helped him raise his pants around his hips after he slipped several coins into her palm and she left him lying there with the slick oil of her and the soggy mess of his semen turning rank in the tight curls of his pubic hair. He rolled onto his side on the rough ground and held himself until the night finally overtook him and he passed out in the dark.
EIGHT