Alison’s disappearance out of May’s life seemed such a terrible and random assault that it had put every remaining corner of her world under threat. All the warmth and certainty drained away, leaving a place of yawning shadows and whispers she couldn’t hear.
May remembered the uneasiness that seeped through the apartment, filling the rooms like poison gas. She wondered who was guilty and what it was they were guilty of so that Alison had had to die, then she pinched down on the thought to press it into oblivion. Questions simmered in her head, about the time before her mother’s death and voices behind closed doors and murmured telephone conversations and Ivy’s mute, accusing face, but they were never spoken aloud. When Alison was gone there was no one to answer anything.
Maybe her father had never been very good at looking after people or answering their needs and she had never really noticed the deficiency because Alison had always been there. He made the right movements and gestures, and after the first weeks he found a housekeeper to take care of them all, but he did everything mechanically and painfully, as if he was too disabled by his own grief to attend to May’s. She tried to spare him by keeping still and quiet.
Ivy had been the strongest, but she turned her strength into icy withdrawal. She spent her time with her friends, and would hardly speak to her father and sister at all.
For months May had been afraid every day that Ivy and John would die too and leave her behind. One day she couldn’t keep the fear of it locked inside herself any longer. John was just leaving the apartment, in his business suit with a file of papers under his arm, and May clung to him and howled that she was sure he would be run over or murdered on the way.
He was in a hurry. He needed to get to a meeting and to win a contract; the business wasn’t doing well. ‘Nothing will happen to me, baby, I promise. I’ll be back at six o’clock, just like always.’
And he had handed her over to Carmen the housekeeper, murmuring that May seemed a little spooked and needed some extra attention. Carmen did her best, but May pushed her away. She lay on her bed, waiting and shrinking from the inevitability of the phone, the knock that would bring the news. What had once been safe was now precarious.
A few days later she cut up her mother’s clothes.
Dr Metz had been through all this with her. It was normal, she had told her. It was fine and natural for May to feel what she felt.
‘If it’s fine,’ May had snarled once, ‘why does it feel so bad?’
Dr Metz had smiled at her. ‘We can talk about it next time.’
If I had been Doone, I would have told my mother I loved Lucas. I’d tell Alison now, if she were here. May didn’t know whether she had spoken out loud or not, and the realisation made her feel that she might not even have her solid self to rely on any longer.
Restlessly, searching for an escape from her thoughts, she turned back to the story of the whaler ship.
It was the afternoon of the third day after the crossing of the Line ceremony when the exultant cry came at last from the look-out at the masthead. ‘There she blows!’
Captain Gunnell sprang to attention at once, and the rest of the watch on deck and William Corder with them.
‘Where away?’ the Captain howled.
‘Four points on the lee bow, sir.’
‘How far off?’
‘Two miles.’
‘Sperm whale?’
‘Yes, sir. A large school. There she blows again.’
‘Call all hands. Haul back the main yard and stand by to lower.’
The men from the watch below decks swarmed out of their places and joined the rest in the scurry to the boats. This urgency was like none of their practice games and even William felt the thrill of the chase in prospect, as the bow boat hit the water and he sprang over the rail and landed in his accustomed place. There was great rivalry between the boats to be the first under way and the fastest over the water, and William bent to his heavy oar with great alacrity as the mate sang out, ‘Give way, my lads, give way. A long steady stroke and we’ll have ’em.’
The four boats flew over the water, steadily closing the distance on the school of whales. They had travelled a mile and a half when the whales went down. The oarsmen stopped their work and lay on their oars until the headsmen directed them to paddle gently towards where the great beasts had last been seen. The sudden quiet and the tension prickled at the nape of William’s neck where the sweat- and spray-damped clothing stuck to his skin. He could hear Matthias Plant breathing hard and counting off the seconds into minutes. Then there was a sudden shout as a bull whale blew a great plume of water not a hundred yards away from them. He lay rolling comfortably in a trough of the waves.
William’s boat was caught at right angles to him, dead on the eye as whalemen called it, because the sperm whale has the best field of vision at that angle. As Matthias howled at his men to row round to bring them head to head, the remaining boats scattered in pursuit of the other whales now blowing all around them.
Heggy Burris, the boat steerer, stood up with his first iron grasped in his hand, ready to send it into the whale’s body once the head had slid past. At exactly the right instant he braced his foot against a cleat and set his thigh in a half-circle cut for the purpose in a gunwale plank, bent his body back in an arc and drove the iron through the air and into the whale’s flank. It buried itself deep and an instant later the second iron followed it home.
Pain bent the creature almost double as he flung himself away from them. He thrashed his mighty flukes and sent a column of water high into the air before he sounded. The line ran out so fast as he dived that smoke rose from it and the headsman hollered at William to douse it with water from his canvas bucket. The line had half run out before the whale rose once again and in agony beat the water with his flukes and tail, so that it churned and rocked the little boat like an eggshell. William could not make himself look to see, but he heard the whale’s jaws snapping like cannon fire seemingly inches from his own head.
‘Oh, my boys, my lovely boys, we have him now,’ Matthias was crooning. The lines held fast and blood welled up and clouded the water between boat and prey. The other craft closed in to assist the bow boat with the kill.
The poor whale proved no match for all of them. Soon his thrashing ceased altogether and he rolled belly up. Immediately they had the huge carcass secured Matthias set the signal to the ship. As luck would have it, it was riding to windward of them, so it beat down towards the boats while they rested next to their prize. A leeward wind or a flat calm would have meant a gruelling row back to the ship with the great dead weight of the whale dragging in the water behind them.
William was full of the exhilaration of chase and kill as they made the whale fast against the ship’s side, but he soon found that his day’s labours had hardly begun. Once the whale was properly tethered with hawsers and an iron chain passed around the narrow part of the tail before the spreading flukes, the work of cutting-in commenced. This was the stripping off of blubber, to be completed in the shortest possible time before sharks could begin to feed on the carcass and because the ship could make no further headway towards fresh whales with the unwieldy bulk of the dead cousin dragging alongside.
The Captain and mates began digging with their long-handled cutting spades. After an hour’s work of hoisting oily and bloody strips of blubber over the ship’s side, William knew that any notions of exhaustion he had entertained before this moment were no more than a sweet afternoon’s dream compared with the reality of stink and pain and retching disgust he was experiencing now.
At last the whale’s mangled body, headless and stripped bare of every other valuable shred, was cut adrift and left to the mercy of sharks and circling sea-birds. Matthias patted the crumpled boy on the shoulder as he came aboard from the cutting platform with the last of the animal’s blubber. ‘Well done, lad,’ he said simply. ‘Now you’re one of us good and proper.’
‘I