Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

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Balfour looked faintly annoyed; he waved his hand. ‘Let us talk of that in a moment,’ he said. ‘I entreat you, first, to hear the story out.’

‘Certainly I will listen,’ Moody returned, with the slightest emphasis on the last word, as though to caution the other man against expecting, or demanding, anything more. He thought he saw a smirk pass over Gascoigne’s pale face, but in the next moment the man’s features had soured again.

‘Of course—of course,’ Balfour said, taking the point. He put down his brandy glass, laced his knuckles together, and cracked them smartly. ‘Well, then. I shall endeavour to acquaint you, Mr. Moody, with the cause of our assembly.’

JUPITER IN SAGITTARIUS

In which the merits of asylum are discussed; a family name comes into question; Alistair Lauderback is discomfited; and the shipping agent tells a lie.

Balfour’s narrative, made somewhat circuitous by interruption, and generally encumbered by the lyrical style of that man’s speech, became severely muddled in the telling, and several hours passed before Moody finally understood with clarity the order of events that had precipitated the secret council in the hotel smoking room.

The interruptions were too tiresome, and Balfour’s approach too digressive, to deserve a full and faithful record in the men’s own words. We shall here excise their imperfections, and impose a regimental order upon the impatient chronicle of the shipping agent’s roving mind; we shall apply our own mortar to the cracks and chinks of earthly recollection, and resurrect as new the edifice that, in solitary memory, exists only as a ruin.

We begin, as Balfour himself began, with an encounter that had taken place in Hokitika that very morning.

Prior to the dawn of the West Coast rush—when Hokitika was no more than a brown mouth open to the ocean, and the gold on her beaches shone quiet and unseen—Thomas Balfour lived in the province of Otago, and conducted his business from a small shingle-roofed building on the Dunedin harbour front, under a calico banner that bore the legend Balfour & Harnett, Shipping Agents. (Mr. Harnett had since abandoned the joint venture, of which he had owned only a one-third share: he was now enjoying a colonial retirement in Auckland, far from the Otago frost, and the fog that pooled white in the valleys in the chilly hours before the dawn.) The firm’s advantageous location—they were squared with the central wharf, and enjoyed a view towards the distant heads of the harbour—brought distinguished custom, and among their many clients was the erstwhile Superintendent of Canterbury, a spade-handed giant of a man whose reputation was one of conviction, expansion, and zeal.

Alistair Lauderback—this was the statesman’s name—had enjoyed a sense of constant acceleration over the course of his career. He was born in London, and had trained as a lawyer before making the voyage to New Zealand in the year of 1851—setting sail with two goals: firstly, to make his fortune, and secondly, to double it. His ambition was well suited to a political life, and especially to the political life of a young country. Lauderback rose, and rose quickly. In legal circles he was much admired as a man who could set his mind to a task, and not rest until he had seen the project through; on the strength of this fine character, he was rewarded with a place on the Canterbury Provincial Council, and invited to run for the Superintendency, to which post he was elected by a landslide majority vote. Five years after his first landing in New Zealand, the network of his connexion reached as far as the Stafford ministry, and the Premier himself; by the time he first knocked upon Thomas Balfour’s door, wearing a fresh kowhai flower in his buttonhole and a standing collar whose flared points (Balfour noticed) had been starched by a woman’s hand, he could no longer be called a pioneer. He smacked of permanence: of the kind of influence that lasts.

In his countenance and bearing Lauderback was less handsome than imposing. His beard, large and blunt like Balfour’s own, protruded almost horizontally from his jaw, giving his face a regal aspect; beneath his brow, his dark eyes glittered. He was very tall, and his body tapered, which made him seem even taller still. He spoke loudly, declaring his ambitions and opinions with a frankness that might be called hubristic (if one was sceptical) or dauntless (if one was not). His hearing was slightly defective, and for this reason he tended to bow his head, and stoop slightly, when he was listening—creating the impression, so useful in politics, that his attentions were always gravely and providentially bestowed.

In their first meeting Lauderback impressed Balfour with the energy and confidence with which he spoke. His enthusiasms, as he announced to Balfour, did not pertain wholly to the political sphere. He was also a ship owner, having cherished, since boyhood, a passionate love for the sea. He possessed four ships in total: two clipper ships, a schooner, and a barque. Two of the crafts required masters. Hitherto he had leased them on charter, but the personal risk of such a venture was high, and he desired to lease the ships instead to an established shipping firm that could afford a reasonable rate of insurance. He listed the names of the ships in rote order, as a man lists his children: the clippers Virtue and Corona Australis; the schooner Lady of the Ballroom; and the barque Godspeed.

As it happened, Balfour & Harnett was sorely in need of a clipper ship at that time, of the very dimensions and capabilities that Lauderback described. Balfour had no use for the other ship on offer, the barque Godspeed, as that craft was too small for his purposes—but the Virtue, pending inspection and trial, would make the monthly passage between Port Chalmers and Port Phillip very comfortably. Yes, he told Lauderback, he would find a master for the Virtue. He would purchase insurance at a fair premium, and lease the ship on a yearly term.

Lauderback was Balfour’s contemporary in age, and yet from that first meeting the latter deferred to him almost as a son to a father—showing a touch of vanity, perhaps, for the aspects of Lauderback’s person Balfour most admired were the same aspects he cultivated in his own. Something of a friendship formed between the two (a friendship that was rather too admiring on Balfour’s part ever to develop into intimacy) and for the next two years the Virtue ran unimpeded between Dunedin and Melbourne. The insurance clause, for all it had been painstakingly crafted, was never consulted again.

In January 1865 Robert Harnett declared his intention to retire, sold his shares to his partner, and moved north to milder climes. Balfour, with a typical absence of sentiment, relinquished the harbour-front lot immediately. Otago’s boom was past its prime, he knew. The valleys were rutted; the rivers would soon be dry. He sailed to the Coast, purchased a bare patch of land near the mouth of the Hokitika River, strung up his tent, and began to build a warehouse. Balfour & Harnett became Balfour Shipping, Balfour bought an embroidered vest and a derby hat, and around him the town of Hokitika began to rise.

When the barque Godspeed pulled into the Hokitika roadstead some months later, Balfour recalled the name, and identified the ship as belonging to Alistair Lauderback. As a gesture of politeness he introduced himself to the ship’s master, Francis Carver, and thereafter enjoyed a cordial relationship with the man, formed on the nominal bond of their mutual connexion—though privately Balfour thought Mr. Carver rather thuggish, and had pegged him for a crook. He held this opinion without bitterness. Balfour was not awed by force of will—unless it was of the sort that Lauderback displayed: charismatic, even charmed—and he could not love a villain. The rumours that dogged Mr. Carver at his heels did not intimidate him, and nor did they strike a chord of boyish admiration in his heart. Carver simply did not interest him, and he wasted no energy in his dismissal.

In late 1865 Balfour read in the paper that Alistair Lauderback was set to run for the Westland seat in Parliament, and some weeks after that Balfour received a letter from the man himself, requesting the shipping agent’s collaboration once again. In his campaign to win the Westland province, Lauderback wrote, he wished to appear as a Westland man. He entreated Balfour to secure lodgings for him in central Hokitika, to furnish the rooms appropriately, and to facilitate the shipment of a trunk of personal effects—law-books and papers and so forth—that would be of crucial importance to him over the course of his campaign. Each item of business was described in the expansive, flourishing script that Balfour associated, in his mind, with a man who could afford to waste his ink on curlicues. (The thought made him smile: he liked to forgive Lauderback his many extravagances.) Lauderback himself would not arrive by ship. Instead he would make his passage overland, crossing the mountains on horseback to arrive triumphal at the heel of the Arahura Valley. He would make his entrance not as a pampered statesman travelling in comfort in a first-class berth, but as a man of the people, saddle-sore, muddied, and stained with the sweat of his own brow.

Balfour made these arrangements as he was instructed. He secured for Lauderback a suite of rooms overlooking the Hokitika beachfront, and registered his name at all the clubs that advertised craps and American bowls. He put in an order at the general store for pears, washed-rind cheese, and candied Jamaica ginger; he solicited a barber; he rented a private box at the opera house for the months of February and March. He informed the editor of the West Coast Times that Lauderback would be making the journey from Canterbury via the alpine pass, and suggested that a sympathetic mention of this brave endeavour would recommend the newspaper most favourably to Lauderback’s future administration, should he win the Westland seat, as he was likely to do. Balfour then dispatched a message to Port Chalmers, instructing the master of the Virtue to collect Lauderback’s trunk, once it had been sent down from Lyttelton, and convey it to Hokitika on the clipper ship’s next circuit to the Coast. Once all this was done, he bought a demijohn of stout from the Gridiron Hotel, put up his heels, and quaffed it, reflecting as he did so that he might have liked politics—the speeches, the campaigning; yes, he might have liked it very well indeed.

But as it happened Alistair Lauderback’s arrival in Hokitika was not accompanied by the burst of fanfare that the politician had envisaged, when he first set down his plans in his letter to Balfour. His expedition across the Alps indeed captured the attention of the diggers on the Coast, and his name indeed featured very prominently in every gazette and newspaper in town—but not at all for the reasons that he had intended.

The story recorded by the duty sergeant, and published the next morning in the West Coast Times, was this. Some two hours’ ride from their final destination, Lauderback and his company of aides had happened to pass the dwelling of a hermit. It had been hours since their last refreshment, and night was falling; they stopped, intending to request a flask of water and (if the dwelling’s owner would oblige them) a hot meal. They knocked on the door of the hut and received no answer, but by the lamplight and the smoke issuing from the chimney it was evident that someone was inside. The door was not latched; Lauderback entered. He found the dwelling’s owner slumped dead at his kitchen table—so freshly dead, he later told the sergeant, that the kettle was still boiling on the range, and had not yet run dry. The hermit appeared to have died of drink. One hand was still curled around the base of a bottle of spirits, near empty on the table before him, and the room smelled very strongly of liquor. Lauderback admitted that the three men did then refresh themselves with tea and damper on the hermit’s stove before journeying on. They did not stop for longer than a half hour, on account of the dead man’s presence in the room—though his head was resting on his arms, which was a mercy, and his eyes were closed.

On the outskirts of Hokitika their company was further delayed. As they advanced upon the township they came upon a woman, utterly insensate and soaking wet, lying in the middle of the thoroughfare. She was alive, but only barely. Lauderback guessed that she had been drugged, but he could not elicit any kind of intelligence from her beyond a moan. He dispatched his aides to find a duty sergeant, lifted her body out of the mud, and, while he waited for his aides to return, reflected that his electoral campaign was off to a rather morbid start. The first three introductions he would make, in town, would be with the magistrate, the coroner, and the editor of the West Coast Times.

In the two weeks following this ill-starred arrival, Hokitika did not pay the impending elections much mind: it seemed that the death of a hermit and the fate of a whore (this, as Lauderback soon discovered, was the profession of the woman in the road) were subjects with which an electoral candidacy could not be expected to compete. Lauderback’s passage over the mountains was only very briefly mentioned in the West Coast Times, though two columns were devoted to his description of the dead man, Crosbie Wells. Lauderback was unperturbed by this. He was anticipating the parliamentary elections with the same relaxed self-possession with which he awaited all acts of providence, and all rewards. He had determined that he would win; therefore, he would win.

On the morning of Walter Moody’s arrival in Hokitika—the morning we take up Balfour’s tale—the shipping agent was sitting with his old acquaintance in the dining room of the Palace Hotel in Revell-street, talking about rigs. Lauderback was wearing a woollen suit of the lightest fawn, a hue that took moisture badly. The rain on his shoulders had not yet dried, so that it appeared as if he was wearing epaulettes; his lapels had turned dark and furry. But Lauderback was not the kind of man for whom a sartorial imperfection could lessen the impact of his bearing—in fact, the very opposite was true: the damp suit only made the man look finer. His hands had been scrubbed that morning with real soap; his hair was oiled; his leather gaiters shone like polished brass; in his buttonhole he had placed a native sprig of some sort, a pale, bunched flower whose name Balfour did not know. His recent journey across the Southern Alps had left a ruddy bloom of health in his cheeks. In sum, he looked very well indeed.

Balfour gazed at his friend across the table, only half-listening as the statesman, talking animatedly, made his case in defence of the ship-of-the-line—holding up his two palms as main and mizzen, and making use of the salt cellar as the fore. It was an argument that Balfour would ordinarily find engrossing, but the expression on the shipping agent’s face was anxious and detached. He was tapping the base of his glass against the table, and shifting in his seat, and, every few minutes, reaching up to pull hard on his nose. For he knew that with all this talk of ships, their conversation would turn, before long, to the subject of the Virtue, and to the cargo that she had been charged to carry to the Coast.

The crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s trunk had arrived in Hokitika on the morning of the 12th of January, two days before Lauderback himself. Balfour saw that the shipment was cleared, and gave instructions for the crate to be transferred from the quay into his warehouse. To the best of his knowledge, these instructions were obeyed. But by an unhappy twist of fate (so much unhappier, that Lauderback stood so high in Balfour’s esteem), the shipping crate then vanished altogether.

Balfour, upon discovering the crate was missing, was horrified. He applied himself to the project of its recovery—walking up and down the quay, inquiring at every door, and registering queries with every stevedore, porter, mariner, and customs officer—but his effort was to no avail. The crate was gone.

Lauderback had not yet spent two nights together in the suite of rooms on the upper floor of the Palace Hotel. He had spent the past fortnight making his introductions at camps and settlements up and down the Coast, a preliminary tour of duty from which he had only been released that very morning. Thus preoccupied, and believing the Virtue to be still in transit from Dunedin, he had not yet asked after his shipment—but Balfour knew that the question was coming, and once it did, he would have to tell the other man the truth. He swallowed a mouthful of wine.

On the table between them lay the remains of their ‘elevenses’, a term Lauderback used to refer to any meal or dish taken at an irregular hour, whether morning or night. He had eaten his fill, and had pressed Balfour to do likewise, but the shipping agent had repeatedly declined the invitation—he was not hungry, most especially for pickled onions and lamb’s fry, two dishes whose smell never failed to curl his tongue. As a compromise to his host, out of whose pocket he was dining, he had drunk an entire pitcher of wine, and a mug of beer besides—Dutch courage, he might have called it, but the spirits had done little to conquer his trepidation, and now he was feeling very sick.

‘Just one more piece of liver,’ said Lauderback.

‘Excellent stuff,’ Balfour mumbled. ‘Excellent—but I’m quite satisfied—my constitution—quite satisfied, thank you.’

‘It’s Canterbury lamb,’ said Lauderback.

‘Canterbury—yes—very fine.’

‘Caviar of the highlands, Tom.’

‘Quite satisfied, thank you.’

Lauderback looked down at the liver a moment. ‘I might have driven a flock myself,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Up and over the pass. Five pounds a head, ten pounds a head—why, I’d have made a fortune, selling up. You might have told me that every piece of meat in this town is salt or smoked: I’d have brought a month of dinners with me. With a pair of dogs I might have done it very easily.’

‘Nothing easy about it,’ said Balfour.

‘Made myself a killing,’ said Lauderback.

‘Saving every sheep that breaks its neck in the rapids,’ said Balfour, ‘and every one that’s lost, and every one that won’t be driven. And all the miserable hours you’d spend counting them—rounding them up—chasing them down. I wouldn’t fancy it.’

‘No profit without risk,’ returned the politician, ‘and the journey was miserable enough; I might at least have made some money at the end of it. Heaven knows it might have improved my welcome.’

‘Cows, perhaps,’ said Balfour. ‘A herd of cows behaves itself.’

‘Still going begging,’ said Lauderback, pushing the plate of liver towards Balfour.

‘Couldn’t do it,’ said Balfour. ‘Couldn’t possibly.’

‘You take the rest of it then, Jock, old man,’ said Lauderback, turning to his aide. (He addressed his two attendants by their Christian names, for the reason that they shared the surname Smith. There was an amusing asymmetry to their Christian names: one was Jock, the other, Augustus.) ‘Stop your mouth with an onion, and we shall not have to hear any more tripe about your blessed brigantines—eh, Tom? Stop his mouth?’

And, smiling, he bent his head back towards Balfour.

Balfour pulled again at his nose. This was very like Lauderback, he thought; he encouraged agreement on the most trivial of points; he angled for consensus when a consensus was not due—and before one knew it, one was on his side, and campaigning.

‘Yes—an onion,’ he said, and then, to get the conversation away from ships, ‘Mention in the Times yesterday about your girl in the road.’

‘Hardly my girl!’ Lauderback said. ‘And it was hardly a mention, for that matter.’

‘The author had a fair bit of nerve,’ Balfour went on. ‘Making out as if all the town deserved a reprimand on the girl’s account—as if every fellow was at fault.’

‘Who’s to credit his opinion?’ Lauderback waved his hand dismissively. ‘A two-bit clerk from the petty courts, airing his peeves!’

(The clerk to whom Lauderback so ungenerously alluded was of course Aubert Gascoigne, whose short sermon in the West Coast Times would also capture Walter Moody’s attention, some ten hours later.)

Balfour shook his head. ‘Making out as if it was our error—collectively. As if we all should have known better.’

‘A two-bit clerk,’ Lauderback said again. ‘Spends his days writing cheques in another man’s name. Full of opinions that no one wants to hear.’

‘All the same—’

‘All the same, nothing. It was a trifling mention, and a poor argument; there’s no need to dwell on it.’ Lauderback rapped his knuckles on the table, as a judge raps his gavel to show that his patience has been spent; Balfour, desperate to prevent a revival of their previous topic of conversation, spoke again before the politician had a chance. He said, ‘But have you seen her?’

Lauderback frowned. ‘Who—the girl in the road? The whore? No: not since that evening. Though I did hear that she revived. You think I ought to have paid a call upon her. That’s why you asked.’

‘No, no,’ said Balfour.

‘A man of my station cannot afford—’

‘Oh, no; you can’t afford—of course—’

‘Which brings us back to the sermon, I suppose,’ Lauderback said, in a newly reflective tone. ‘That was the clerk’s precise point. Until certain measures are in place—almshouses and so forth, convents—then who’s accountable in a situation like that? Who’s responsible for a girl like her—someone who has no one—in a place like this?’

This was intended as a rhetorical question, but Balfour, to keep the conversation moving, answered it. ‘No one’s accountable,’ he said.

‘No one!’ Lauderback looked surprised. ‘Where’s the Christian spirit in you?’

‘Anna tried to take her life—to end her life, you know! No one’s accountable for that except herself.’

‘You call her Anna!’ Lauderback said reprovingly. ‘You are on first-name terms with the girl; I’d say you have a share of responsibility in caring for her!’

‘First-name terms didn’t light her pipe.’

‘You would shut your door to her—because she is an inebriate?’

‘I’m not shutting any doors. If I’d found her in the thoroughfare I’d have done just as you did. Exactly as you did.’

‘Saved her life?’

‘Turned her in!’

Lauderback waved this correction aside. ‘But then what?’ he said. ‘A night in the gaol-house—and then what? Who’s there to protect her, when she lights her pipe all over again?’

‘No one can protect a soul against themselves—against their own hand, you know!’ Balfour was vexed. He did not enjoy discussions of this kind; really, he thought, it was only marginally better than the relative merits of ship-rigged and square. (But then Lauderback had been a poor conversationalist this fortnight past: despotic in tone, by turns evasive and demanding. Balfour had chalked it up to nerves.)

‘Spiritual comfort, that’s what he means—spiritual protection,’ put in Jock Smith, meaning to be helpful, but Lauderback silenced him with the flat of his hand.

‘Forget suicide—that’s a separate argument, and a morbid one,’ he said. ‘Who’s there to give her a chance, Thomas? That’s my question. Who’s there to give that sorry girl one clean shot at a different kind of a life?’

Balfour shrugged. ‘Some folk are dealt a bad hand. But you can’t rely on another person’s conscience to live the life you want to live. You make do with what you’re given; you struggle on.’

In which remark the shipping agent showed his uncharitable bias, the obstinacy that hung as a weighted counterpoint beneath the lively indulgence of his outward air—for, like most enterprising souls, he held his freedoms very chary, and desired that all others would do the same.

Lauderback sat back and appraised Balfour down the length of his nose. ‘She’s a whore,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? She’s just a whore.’

‘Don’t mistake me: I’ve got nothing against whores,’ Balfour said. ‘But I don’t like almshouses, and I don’t like convents. They’re dreary places.’

‘You are provoking me, surely!’ Lauderback said. ‘Welfare is the very proof of civilisation—it is its finest proof, indeed! If we are to civilise this place—if we are to build roads and bridges—if we are to lay a foundation for the future in this country—’

‘Then we may as well give our road builders something to warm their beds at night,’ Balfour finished for him. ‘It’s hard work, shovelling stones.’

Jock and Augustus laughed at this, but Lauderback did not smile.

‘A whore is a moral affliction, Thomas; you must call a thing by its name,’ he said. ‘You must insist upon a standard, if you stand at a frontier!’ (This last was a direct quote from his most recent electoral address.) ‘A whore is a moral affliction. That’s the end of it. A bad drain for good wealth.’

‘And your remedy,’ Balfour returned, ‘is a good drain for good wealth, but it’s a drain all the same, and money’s money. Leave off the almshouses, and let’s not go turning any of our girls into nuns. That would be a d—ned shame, when they are so outnumbered as it is.’

Lauderback snorted. ‘Outnumbered and outfoxed, I see,’ he said.

‘Responsibility for whores!’ said Balfour. He shook his head. ‘They’ll have a seat in Parliament next.’

Augustus Smith made a rude joke in response to this, and they all laughed.

When their laughter had subsided Lauderback said, ‘Let’s not talk in this vein any longer. We have discussed that day from all corners and all sides—it makes me tired.’ He indicated with a circular sweep of his hand that he wished to return to their previous conversation. ‘With respect to the ship rig. My argument is simply that how one conceives of the advantages depends entirely on where one stands. Jock holds his perspective as a former able seaman; I hold mine as a ship owner and a gentleman. In my mind, I see the sail-plan; in his, he sees tar and oakum, and the breeze.’

Jock Smith responded to this jibe conventionally, but with good cheer, and the argument was revived.

Thomas Balfour’s irritation was revived just as quickly. He felt that he had spoken wittily on the subject of asylum—Lauderback had praised his rejoinder!—and he wished to persist with that topic of conversation, in order that he might seize the opportunity to do so again. He did not have anything witty to say about the ship rig, and its advantages—and neither, he thought sulkily, did Jock, nor Augustus, nor Lauderback himself. But it was Lauderback’s custom to begin and end conversations at whim, changing the subject simply because he had tired of a certain issue, or because his authority had been trumped by another man’s. Thrice already that morning the politician had protested the introduction of a new theme, returning always to his imperious patter about ships. Every time Balfour began to speak of local news, the politician declared himself sick to death of useless brooding about the hermit and the whore—when in fact, Balfour thought with annoyance, they hadn’t discussed either event in any real detail, and certainly not from all corners and all sides.

This internal expression of feeling followed a pattern, though an unacknowledged one. Balfour’s admiration of Lauderback was so vaulting that he preferred to deprecate himself than to criticise Lauderback, even privately, when the two men disagreed—but deprecation always waits to be disputed, and, if the disputation does not come, becomes petulance. Over the past fortnight Balfour had kept his silence on the subject of Lauderback’s encounter with the dead man, Crosbie Wells, though the circumstances of the hermit’s death held a considerable amount of curiosity for him; he had not discussed Anna Wetherell, the whore in the road, at all. He had acted according to Lauderback’s wishes, and had waited for his own to be acknowledged in turn—an event that required a degree more solicitude than Lauderback possessed, and so had yet to come to pass. But Balfour could not see this deficiency in the man he so admired; instead he waited, became quietly impatient, and began to sulk.

(We shall add, in conciliatory tones, that his sulking was of a very superficial sort: at a single kind word from Lauderback, his good humour would be restored.)

Balfour pushed his chair a little further away from the table, wishing in a childish way to make his boredom obvious to his host, and cast his gaze over the room.

The dining room was nearly empty, owing to the uncommon hour of their meal, and through the serving-hatch Balfour could see that the cook had taken off his apron and was sitting with both elbows on the table, playing at solitaire. Before the hearth sat a large-eared boy who was sucking on a stick of jerky. He had evidently been posted there to keep an eye upon the clothes-irons, which were warming in a rack above the coals, for every half-minute or so he wet his finger and held it close to the trestle to test the heat. At the table nearest theirs sat a clergyman—a freckled fellow, none too handsome, with a snub nose and a droop to his lower lip, like a simple child’s. He had taken his breakfast alone; he was now drinking coffee and reading a pamphlet—no doubt rehearsing the sermon he would deliver the following day, Balfour thought, for he nodded slowly as he read, as a man keeping tempo with a silent address.

The large-eared boy wet his finger again, and held it close; the clergyman turned a page; the cook squared a playing card with the edge of the chopping block. Balfour fiddled with his fork. Finally Lauderback paused in his diatribe to take a draught of wine, and Balfour seized his chance to interject.

‘Speaking of barques,’ he said (they had been speaking of brigantines), ‘I’ve seen your Godspeed over the bar a fair few times, this past year. She’s yours, isn’t she—Godspeed?’

But to his surprise, this remark was met with silence. Lauderback only bowed his head, as if Balfour had put to him an issue of the gravest philosophical import, and he desired to meditate alone upon the question.