Ah, he has them now. They are city-dwellers, men whose lives pass in the shadows of buildings, whose lungs are silted with coalsmoke, and few will ever cross the sea. But they know their river and the great ships creeping up it on the tide; they know the sharp scent of new calico and the musky sweetness of a dried raisin or fig. They know where things come from. Now we can talk about how.
He finishes. There is applause. This, always, is the point at which he feels foolish: what is a man supposed to do with his face, with his hands, while a hundred other men face him and clap? He smiles and bows, or at least, ducks his head. A different kind of man would have practised before the mirror. He ducks again and goes down the three steps to the main body of the hall. Descends the podium.
The boy has been waiting for him outside the door, apparently oblivious to the rain beginning to fall. Tom, still warm as if he has been rowing or running, raises his face to the wet wind. A posh boy, you can tell from his clothes and something about the way he stands, about the angle of shoulders and neck, but all boys want to run away to sea.
‘Excuse me, Mr. Cavendish? Could you spare me a moment? Your lecture was fascinating, sir.’
Fascinating. No, not from around here, nor anywhere Tom’s been.
‘I am glad you enjoyed it,’ he says.
The boy nods. ‘I’m interested in the lenses.’
‘Go on.’
He has underestimated the boy. Of course he wants to sail the high seas and build towers that will shine out across the waves for years to come, but he has also been learning, somewhere, from someone, about the latest experiments, the new kinds of glass. Tom finds himself leaning against the wall, waving his notes around, forgetting his thirst and the rain on his wool coat. Would you, says the boy, do you think you might possibly, I mean, would you consider maybe coming to dinner, at my house?
R
OCKS AT
S
EA
Ally tips her rocking chair forwards, plants her feet on the pale carpet, leafs back through the pages she has just scanned. She cannot find the chapter she remembers. On the ward they have a fever patient causing concern, and she has a hunch that the fever is incidental to the real problem, that the tremors are not rigor but some disorder of the motor functions. She was sure there was something in Hanson’s Disorders of the Nervous System. Here, perhaps.
There are footsteps coming up the stairs, someone faster and heavier than Fanny, and then a pause. She puts down her book and goes to the door.
‘George?’
‘Cousin Ally. Are you very busy?’ He looks uncomfortable, as if his collar pinches. She can’t remember the last time he came up here to find her. Some concern about his health, or the changes of adolescence? He is, after all, well into the awkward age.
She smiles at him and holds the door open. ‘Not so very busy. Come in?’
He nods, comes to a standstill in the middle of the rug, suddenly bulkier and darker among the embroidered whitenesses of her room, a figure in oils superimposed on a watercolour interior. She pulls forward the bow-legged tapestry stool from her dressing table and sits on it.
‘Have the rocker. Is something troubling you, George?’
The rocker tips him backward. He’s begun to sit like a man, legs thrown wide as if his manhood requires a seat of its own. She remembers how he used to leap into the air from the garden wall, from inside the carriage and from far too far up the stairs, confiding himself to the air like a gull. If she were a painter, she would have tried to paint him so, in that moment of rising, before the fall begins.
Frowning, he rolls the edging of a cushion-cover between his fingers. ‘I went to a lecture. Three lectures.’
She nods, waits. Lectures on prostitution? On spiritualism? There are flyers, she recalls, advertising talks about gold-mining in Australia, and George is just the person, just the age, to be seized by the idea of a long voyage and a treasure-trove under a hot sun.
He looks up. ‘About engineering. Lighthouses. He, the lecturer, he works for the Penvenicks.’
Not, then, a discussion of physiology or the joys of married love. ‘The Penvenicks?’
‘It’s a Cornish firm. They build lighthouses. Richard Penvenick used to work for the Stevensons.’
Her gaze wanders towards her medical book.
‘And Richard Penvenick gave the lecture?’
He looks shocked, as if she’s asked if St Peter gave last Sunday’s sermon. She has not been to church for some weeks.
‘Oh, no. Not himself. No, an assistant. He’s called Tom Cavendish. He worked on the Wolf Rock!’
‘The Wolf Rock?’
He nods, smiling, as if at the mention of some Oriental paradise of silk-clad harems and the whisper of scented trees.
‘It’s a rock off the Scilly Isles. Thousands—well, hundreds—of ships wrecked there. Some of them had come all the way from Australia, all those weeks, just to smash at the very entrance to the Channel.’
Bodies washing on the waves, hair floating out from drowned heads. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Her sister May. She shivers.
‘Oh my word, Cousin Ally, I forgot. I mean, not forgot, of course. I’m so sorry.’
He squirms, five years younger than when he sat down.
‘Never mind, George. You didn’t know her well. Keep telling me about the lecture.’
She wants to say that it’s what my sister would have wanted, for your life to unroll as if she had
