‘It is quite evident, is it not, Jacky darling?’ said a hopeful voice, and a rather large young woman bent kindly over him (for at this stage in his memory he was only twelve, a stocky little boy, and tall, nubile Queeney sailed high above).
‘Why, no, Queeney,’ said the infant Jack. ‘To tell you the truth, it ain’t.’
‘Well,’ said she, with untiring patience. ‘Try to remember what a cotangent is, and let us begin again. Let us consider the ship as an oblong box…’
For a while he considered the Sophie as an oblong box. He had not seen a great deal of her, but there were two or three fundamentals that he knew with absolute certainty: one was that she was under-rigged – she might be well enough close to the wind, but she would be a slug before it; another was that his predecessor had been a man of a temper entirely unlike his own; and another was that the Sophie’s people had come to resemble their captain, a good sound quiet careful unaggressive commander who never set his royals, as brave as could be when set upon, but the very opposite of a Sallee rover. ‘Was discipline to be combined with the spirit of a Sallee rover,’ said Jack, ‘it would sweep the ocean clean.’ And his mind descending fast to the commonplace dwelt on the prize-money that would result from sweeping the ocean even moderately clean.
‘That despicable main-yard,’ he said. ‘And surely to God I can get a couple of twelve-pounders as chasers. Would her timbers stand it, though? But whether they can or not, the box can be made a little more like a fighting vessel – more like a real man-of-war.’
As his thoughts ranged on so the low cabin brightened steadily. A fishing-boat passed under the Sophie’s stern, laden with tunny and uttering the harsh roar of a conch; at almost the same time the sun popped up from behind St Philip’s fort – it did, in fact, pop up, flattened like a sideways lemon in the morning haze and drawing its bottom free of the land with a distinct jerk. In little more than a minute the greyness of the cabin had utterly vanished: the deck-head was alive with light glancing from the rippling sea; and a single ray, reflected from some unmoving surface on the distant quay, darted through the cabin windows to light up Jack’s coat and its blazing epaulette. The sun rose within his mind, obliging his dogged look to broaden into a smile, and he swung out of his cot.
The sun had reached Dr Maturin ten minutes earlier, for he was a good deal higher up: he, too, stirred and turned away, for he too had slept uneasily. But the brilliance prevailed. He opened his eyes and stared about very stupidly: a moment before he had been so solidly, so warmly and happily in Ireland, with a girl’s hand under his arm, that his waking mind could not take in the world he saw. Her touch was still firm upon his arm and even her scent was there: vaguely he picked at the crushed leaves under him – dianthus perfragrans. The scent was reclassified – a flower, and nothing more – and the ghostly contact, the firm print of fingers, vanished. His face reflected the most piercing unhappiness, and his eyes misted over. He had been exceedingly attached; and she was so bound up with that time…
He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun.
‘Christ,’ he said at last. ‘Another day.’ With this his face grew more composed. He stood up, beat the white dust from his breeches and took off his coat to shake it. With intense mortification he saw that the piece of meat he had hidden at yesterday’s dinner had oozed grease through his handkerchief and his pocket. ‘How wonderfully strange,’ he thought, ‘to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset.’ He sat down and ate the piece of meat (the eye of a mutton chop); and for a moment his mind dwelt on the theory of counter-irritants, Paracelsus, Cardan, Rhazes. He was sitting in the ruined apse of St Damian’s chapel high above Port Mahon on the north side, looking down upon the great winding inlet of the harbour and far out beyond it over a vast expanse of sea, a variegated blue with wandering lanes; the flawless sun, a hand’s breadth high, rising from the side of Africa. He had taken refuge there some days before, as soon as his landlord began to grow a shade uncivil; he had not waited for a scene, for he was too emotionally worn to put up with any such thing.
Presently, he took notice of the ants that were taking away his crumbs. Tapinoma erraticum. They were walking in a steady two-way stream across the hollow, or dell, of his inverted wig, as it lay there looking very like an abandoned bird’s nest, though once it had been as neat a physical bob as had ever been seen in Stephen’s Green. They hurried along with their abdomens high, jostling, running into one another: his gaze followed the wearisome little creatures and while he was watching them a toad was watching him: their eyes met, and he smiled. A splendid toad: a two-pound toad with brilliant tawny eyes. How did he manage to make a living in the sparse thin grass of that stony, sun-beaten landscape, so severe and parched, with no more cover than a few tumbles of pale stone, a few low creeping hook-thorned caper-bushes and a cistus whose name Stephen did not know? Most remarkably severe and parched, for the winter of 1799–1800 had been uncommonly dry, the March rains had failed and now the heat had come very early in the year. Very gently he stretched out his finger and stroked the toad’s throat: the toad swelled a little and moved its crossed hands; then sat easy, gazing back.
The sun rose and rose. The night had not been cold at any time, but still the warmth was grateful. Black wheatears that must have a brood not far: one of the smaller eagles in the sky. There was a sloughed snake’s skin in the bush where he pissed, and its eye-covers were perfect, startlingly crystalline.
‘What am I to think of Captain Aubrey’s invitation?’ he said aloud, in that great emptiness of light and air – all the more vast for the inhabited patch down there and its movement, and the checkered fields behind, fading into pale dun formless hills. ‘Was it merely Jack ashore? Yet he was such a pleasant, ingenuous companion.’ He smiled at the recollection. ‘Still and all, what weight can be attached to…? We had dined extremely well: four bottles, or possibly five. I must not expose myself to an affront.’ He turned it over and over, arguing against his hopes, but coming at last to the conclusion that if he could make his coat passably respectable – and the dust does seem to be getting it off, or at least disguising it, he said – he would call on Mr Florey at the hospital and talk to him, in a general way, about the naval surgeon’s calling. He brushed the ants from his wig and settled it on his head: then as he walked down towards the edge of the road – the magenta spikes of gladioli in the taller grass – the recollection of that unlucky name stopped him in his stride. How had he come to forget it so entirely in his sleep? How was it possible that the name James Dillon had not presented itself at once to his waking mind?
‘Yet it is true there are hundreds of Dillons,’ he reflected. ‘And a great many of them are called James, of course.’
‘Christe,’ hummed James Dillon under his breath, shaving the red-gold bristles off his face in what light could make its way through the scuttle of the Burford’s number twelve gunport. ‘Christe eleison. Kyrie …’ This was less piety in James Dillon than a way of hoping he should not cut himself; for like so many Papists he was somewhat given to blasphemy. The difficulty of the planes under his nose silenced him, however, and when his upper lip was clean he could not hit the note again. In any case, his mind was too busy to be seeking after an elusive neume, for he was about to report to a new captain, a man upon whom his comfort and ease of mind was to depend, to say nothing of his reputation, career and prospects of advancement.
Stroking his shining smoothness, he hurried out into the ward-room and shouted for a marine. ‘Just brush the back of my coat, will you, Curtis? My chest is quite ready, and the bread-sack of books is to go with it,’ he said. ‘Is the captain on deck?’
‘Oh no, sir, no,’ said the marine. ‘Breakfast only just carrying in this moment. Two hard-boiled eggs and one soft.’
The soft-boiled egg was for Miss Smith, to recruit her from her labours of the night, as both the marine and Mr Dillon knew very well; but the marine’s knowing look met with a total lack of response. James Dillon’s mouth tightened, and for