Free Curiosity by Joan Thomas Page B

Hall, dark-haired in the sun. He’s dressed in white, his face looking questioningly down to Henry, who’s on the lawn below. Sums – was his father talking sums? And then his father is swallowed up again, swallowed by Alger’s moving mouth.
    “Why, it’s the weight of a sack of flour, isn’t it,” the mouth says. “That’s all you can ask of a labouring man, however stout. Ten weeks, two days and four hours it would take those porters. It’s all here, they’ve worked it all out here.”
    “But where are they carrying it from and to?” Henry asks. “And why are they moving it at all?”
    “Why,
I
don’t know, do I?” cries the mouth, irritated. “To her marriage home, I suppose.” The tumbler is raised to mottled lips, the pleated throat pumps warm port downward. “Now there’s a match for you, supposing she could be prevented from discovering your recent history!” The corners of the mouth turn down; this is in the nature of a joke. “Although the lady in question is twenty-six. Twice your age, what?”
    “No,” says Henry, reaching for his own drink. “I’m fifteen in February.”
    For the first week in Bristol, while Henry’s scabs fall off and his bruises bloom privately brighter by the day, it is Alger whopresents a wounded aspect to the world. His inaugural duty as paterfamilias hangs over them: the speech castigating Henry and all youthful folly, evoking Henry’s honourable, tragically dead father, rendering in dark strokes a life of failure and disgrace. A speech that remains undelivered, although Alger alludes to it from time to time. No doubt he worked it to a perfection of furious rhetoric in his mind and thinks he’s delivered it.
    In any case, Henry’s uniform, which he’s still wearing, is a moment-by-moment reminder of what he was and is no longer. In the famous Marlow mutiny five years back, all conspirators were stripped of every vestige of uniform by drummers – jacket, cap, boots, braid, in full public view – and driven out of town in their underwear. No one spoke of drummers in Henry’s case. Of course, there was real arson in the 1806 mutiny, not just incendiary drawings. But daily, annoyingly, needlessly, Alger forbids Henry to leave the house, banishes him at the sound of the door. Soon Henry will divest himself of the uniform and then it’s just his name that will remind people. For all time. So said the king’s envoy when signing the writ.
    A trunk of Henry’s civilian clothes finally arrives, packed up and sent on by the housekeeper at Dawlish. He can’t get into anything. Alger agrees to communicate to Henry’s mother the extent of her son’s rampant growth. A week later, a bank draft arrives and a list of what his mother deems necessities. A frock coat, a dress coat, an overcoat,
four
morning coats. Alger sends for his tailor. Bolts of wool are carried into the upstairs sitting room and fittings conducted. Gradually, the wardrobe in his bedroom fills. He’s being costumed for a drawing-room life. It is a hermetic life he wants.
    He could weep with relief at having his own room again. Before Marlow, he never contemplated the fact of a barracks. The bodies packed in rows like stalls, the quarrelling and cryingout, the bedbugs, the rats, the foul smells. The insane laughter, the tiresome pranks, your response at every moment scrutinized to decide whether you were more truly a pillock or a ponce. Oh, they were the sultans of minute discrimination! He stands by the window and breathes the vile air of it out of him.
Burn in the flames of hell
, he cries to the barracks at Marlow.
    With its heavy brocade curtains, his bed is a Bedouin tent. Henry opens the tent and sits cross-legged inside it. The tent takes him back to the bed nets of his childhood, hung against mosquitoes. He has no memory of anything before Jamaica. When he woke up to himself, he was running on the road with Belle’s sons Cuthbert and Ben (it’s the road to the boiling-house, they’re