Free Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath Page B

hishands in the air, and gazed at me with an expression of almost comic mystification, accompanied by much shrugging of those bony little birdlike shoulders; and I had had no choice but to accept him at his word.
    But now the voice of skepticism within me could no longer be ignored, even as the story assumed the most somber of tones. Over the next hour or so he brought me forward to what he called the “precipitating accident,” and this event convinced me, if I needed further convincing, that information was being withheld from me. How else to explain the mystery of Harry’s changing habits, his sudden desire to walk by night ?
    Now Harry Peake had always loved to walk. In Cornwall he had tramped across the cliffs or over the moors when he had business to conduct in a distant village, glad of the chance to swing a stout stick and shout at the sky. Since coming to London he had had to abandon these rambles of his, for he could no longer move as he had before his back was broke. But he could still go down to the docks with Martha, and frequently the two were to be seen making their way through the narrow streets of Smithfield, Harry huge and bent in his old black coat, and his hat pulled low, and Martha—who was not bent at all, of course, said my uncle, but seemed rather to crest the morning, like a vessel under sail!—Martha striding along beside him, a shawl flung over her shoulders and her hair pinned up in a chaotic bun. They made a striking couple, he said. Harry had become a familiar figure in this part of the town, and he was warmly hailed by many of those they met; and those who did not know him stared and whispered and were then informed by their companions as to the identity of the great bowed poet in black, and the tall red-haired girl walking with him.
    Why did they go down to the docks?
    They went down to the docks, said my uncle, because the sight of ships gave Harry comfort. To gaze upon the merchant shipping that crowded the Thames in those days, this, he said, somehow, to some degree, satisfied Harry’s yearning to discover the world he haddescribed in his ballad, and the life of simplicity in Nature it seemed to promise him. For he had come to regard London as a corrupt place, indeed all England was corrupt in Harry’s view, because governed by corrupt men; and he dreamed that he and Martha might one day escape that corruption and find a place where the evil inherent in man’s nature—and had he not glimpsed such evil in himself, and worked and suffered these many years to cleanse himself of it?—where human evil withered and fell away, and the natural virtuous man within could stand forth. That place, that great good place, he called America.
    My uncle gazed at me with soured features, licking his lips as though he had just bit into a lemon. He had delivered all this in the ironical tones of an old sniffing cynic for whom the idea of man’s natural virtue was but a chimerical wisp dreamed up by boys and poets.
    The morning was cool and the sky clear as they passed under the slender wooden bridges that connected the great timbered warehouses on either side of the street, and came out onto a broad cobblestoned thoroughfare by the river. Much noise now, cranes creaking and pulleys rattling, men shouting, and the rumble of wheels, as they made their way through the bustle and tumult of the port to a bench in front of the Red Cock Tavern. There Harry smoked a pipe, and Martha peeled an apple, while aproned porters pushed barrows of fish, and plump carters rumbled by atop wagons piled with sacks of grain. And ships! A wilderness of ships! A forest of masts and yards, a chaos of rope and rigging, pennants and ensigns fluttering in the breeze, and all manner of cargo, bales and barrels, sheep and cows, rising from their holds and swinging aloft in nets. For this was the giant’s stomach, and into it flowed the wealth of the world.
    It was the ships they had come to see. Martha knew little enough about