Foe Page 8
‘ “I have brought you here to tell you of your parentage,” I commence. “I do not know who told you that your father was a brewer from Deptford who fled to the Low Countries, but the story is false. Your father is a man named Daniel Foe. He is the man who set you to watching the house in Newington. Just as it was he who told you I am your mother, I will vouch he is the author of the story of the brewer. He maintains whole regiments in Flanders.”
‘She makes to speak, but I hush her.
‘ “I know you will say it is not true,” I continue. “I know you will say you have never met this Daniel Foe. But ask yourself: by what agency did the news reach you that your true mother was one Susan Barton who lived at such and such a house in Stoke Newington?”
‘ “My name is Susan Barton,” she whispers.
‘ “That is small proof. You will find many Susan Bartons in this kingdom, if you are willing to hunt them down. I repeat: what you know of your parentage comes to you in the form of stories, and the stories have but a single source.”
‘ “Who is my true mother then?” she says.
‘ “You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”
‘ “Father-born,” she says – “It is a word I have never heard before.” She shakes her head.
‘What do I mean by it, father-born? I wake in the grey of a London dawn with the word still faintly in my ears. The street is empty, I observe from the window. Is the girl gone forever? Have I expelled her, banished her, lost her at last in the forest? Will she sit by the oak tree till the falling leaves cover her, her and her basket, and nothing is left to meet the eye but a field of browns and golds?’
* *
‘Dear Mr Foe,
‘Some days ago Friday discovered your robes (the robes in the wardrobe, that is) and your wigs. Are they the robes of a guild-master? I did not know there was a guild of authors.
‘The robes have set him dancing, which I had never seen him do before. In the mornings he dances in the kitchen, where the windows face east. If the sun is shining he does his dance in a patch of sunlight, holding out his arms and spinning in a circle, his eyes shut, hour after hour, never growing fatigued or dizzy. In the afternoon he removes himself to the drawing-room, where the window faces west, and does his dancing there.
‘In the grip of the dancing he is not himself. He is beyond human reach. I call his name and am ignored, I put out a hand and am brushed aside. All the while he dances he makes a humming noise in his throat, deeper than his usual voice; sometimes he seems to be singing.
‘For myself I do not care how much he sings and dances so long as he carries out his few duties. For I will not delve while he spins. Last night I decided I would take the robe away from him, to bring him to his senses. However, when I stole into his room he was awake, his hands already gripping the robe, which was spread over the bed, as though he read my thoughts. So I retreated.
‘Friday and his dancing: I may bemoan the tedium of life in your house, but there is never a lack of things to write of. It is as though animalcules of words lie dissolved in your ink-well, ready to be dipped up and flow from the pen and take form on the paper. From downstairs to upstairs, from house to island, from the girl to Friday: it seems necessary only to establish the poles, the here and the there, the now and the then – after that the words of themselves do the journeying. I had not guessed it was so easy to be an author.
‘You will find the house very bare on your return. First the bailiffs plundered it (I cannot use a kinder term), and now I too have been taking odds and ends (I keep an inventory, you have only to ask and I will send it). Unhappily I am forced to sell in the quarters where thieves sell, and to accept the prices thieves receive. On my excursions I wear a black dress and bonnet I found upstairs in the trunk with the initials M.J. on the lid (who is M.J.?). In this garb I become older than my years: as I picture myself, a widow of forty in straitened circumstances. Yet despite my precautions I lie awake at night picturing how I might be seized by some rapacious shopkeeper and held for the constables, till I am forced to give away your candlesticks as a bribe for my freedom.
‘Last week I sold the one mirror not taken by the bailiffs, the little mirror with the gilt frame that stood on your cabinet. Dare I confess I am happy it is gone? How I have aged! In Bahia the sallow Portuguese women would not believe I had a grown daughter. But life with Cruso put lines on my brow, and the house of Foe has only deepened them. Is your house a house of sleepers, like the cave where men close their eyes in one reign and wake in another with long white beards? Brazil seems as far away as the age of Arthur. Is it possible I have a daughter there, growing farther from me every day, as I from her? Do the clocks of Brazil run at the same pace as ours? While I grow old, does she remain forever young? And how has it come about that in the day of the twopenny post I share a house with a man from the darkest times of barbarism? So many questions!’
* *
‘Dear Mr Foe,
‘I am growing to understand why you wanted Cruso to have a musket and be besieged by cannibals. I thought it was a sign you had no regard for the truth. I forgot you are a writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how few from a woman cowering from the wind. It is all a matter of words and the number of words, is it not?
‘Friday sits at table in his wig and robes and eats pease pudding. I ask myself: Did human flesh once pass those lips? Truly, cannibals are terrible; but most terrible of all is to think of the little cannibal children, their eyes closing in pleasure as they chew the tasty fat of their neighbours. I shiver. For surely eating human flesh is like falling into sin: having fallen once you discover in yourself a taste for it, and fall all the more readily thereafter. I shiver as I watch Friday dancing in the kitchen, with his robes whirling about him and the wig flapping on his head, and his eyes shut and his thoughts far away, not on the island, you may be sure, not on the pleasures of digging and carrying, but on the time before, when he was a savage among savages. Is it not only a matter of time before the new Friday whom Cruso created is sloughed off and the old Friday of the cannibal forests returns? Have I misjudged Cruso all this time: was it to punish him for his sins that he cut out Friday’s tongue? Better had he drawn his teeth instead!’
* *
‘Searching through a chest of drawers some days ago for items to take to market, I came across a case of recorders you must once have played: perhaps you played the big bass recorder while your sons and daughters played the smaller ones. (What has happened to your sons and daughters? Could they not be trusted to shelter you from the law?) I took out the smallest of these, the soprano, and set it aside where Friday would find it. The next morning I heard him toying with it; soon he had so far mastered it as to play the tune of six notes I will forever associate with the island and Cruso’s first sickness. This he played over and over all morning. When I came to remonstrate, I found him spinning slowly around with the flute to his lips and his eyes shut; he paid no heed to me, perhaps not even hearing my words. How like a savage to master a strange instrument – to the extent that he is able without a tongue – and then be content forever to play one tune upon it! It is a form of incuriosity, is it not, a form of sloth. But I digress.
‘While I was polishing the bass flute, and idly blowing a few notes upon it, it occurred to me that if there were any language accessible to Friday, it would be the language of music. So I closed the door and practised the blowing and the fingering as I had seen people do, till I could play Friday’s little tune tolerably well, and one or two others, to my ear more melodious. All the while I was playing, which I did in the dark, to spare the candle, Friday lay awake downstairs in his own dark listening to the deeper tones of my flute, the like of which he could never have heard before.
‘When Friday commenced his dancing and flute-playing this morning, I was ready: I sat upstairs on my bed, my l
egs crossed, and played Friday’s tune, first in unison with him, then in the intervals when he was not playing; and went on playing as long as he did, till my hands ached and my head reeled. The music we made was not pleasing: there was a subtle discord all the time, though we seemed to be playing the same notes. Yet our instruments were made to play together, else why were they in the same case?
‘When Friday fell silent awhile, I came downstairs to the kitchen. “So, Friday,” I said, and smiled – “we are become musicians together.” And I raised my flute and blew his tune again, till a kind of contentment came over me. I thought: It is true, I am not conversing with Friday, but is this not as good? Is conversation not simply a species of music in which first the one takes up the refrain and then the other? Does it matter what the refrain of our conversation is any more than it matters what tune it is we play? And I asked myself further: Are not both music and conversation like love? Who would venture to say that what passes between lovers is of substance (I refer to their lovemaking, not their talk), yet is it not true that something is passed between them, back and forth, and they come away refreshed and healed for a while of their loneliness? As long as I have music in common with Friday, perhaps he and I will need no language. And if there had been music on our island, if Friday and I had filled the evening with melody, perchance – who can say? – Cruso might at last have relented, and picked up the third pipe, and learned to finger it, if his fingers had not by then been too stiff, and the three of us might have become a consort (from which you may conclude, Mr Foe, that what we needed from the wreck was not a chest of tools but a case of flutes).
‘For that hour in your kitchen I believe I was at ease with the life that has befallen me.
‘But alas, just as we cannot exchange forever the same utterances – “Good day, sir” – “Good day” – and believe we are conversing, or perform forever the same motion and call it lovemaking, so it is with music: we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or so at least it is with civilized people. Thus at last I could not restrain myself from varying the tune, first making one note into two half-notes, then changing two of the notes entirely, turning it into a new tune and a pretty one too, so fresh to my ear that I was sure Friday would follow me. But no, Friday persisted in the old tune, and the two tunes played together formed no pleasing counterpoint, but on the contrary jangled and jarred. Did Friday in truth so much as hear me, I began to wonder? I ceased playing, and his eyes (which were always closed when he did his flute-playing and spinning) did not open; I blew long blasts and the lids did not so much as flutter. So now I knew that all the time I had stood there playing to Friday’s dancing, thinking he and I made a consort, he had been insensible of me. And indeed, when I stepped forward in some pique and grasped at him to halt the infernal spinning, he seemed to feel my touch no more than if it had been a fly’s; from which I concluded that he was in a trance of possession, and his soul more in Africa than in Newington. Tears came to my eyes, I am ashamed to say; all the elation of my discovery that through the medium of music I might at last converse with Friday was dashed, and bitterly I began to recognize that it might not be mere dullness that kept him shut up in himself, nor the accident of the loss of his tongue, nor even an incapacity to distinguish speech from babbling, but a disdain for intercourse with me. Watching him whirling in his dance, I had to hold back an urge to strike him and tear the wig and robes away and thus rudely teach him he was not alone on this earth.
‘Had I struck Friday, I now ask myself, would he have borne the blow meekly? Cruso never chastised him that I saw. Had the cutting out of his tongue taught him eternal obedience, or at least the outward form of obedience, as gelding takes the fire out of a stallion?’
‘Dear Mr Foe,
‘I have written a deed granting Friday his freedom and signed it in Cruso’s name. This I have sewn into a little bag and hung on a cord around Friday’s neck.
‘If Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he? No man can be the slave of a dead hand. If Cruso had a widow, I am she; if there are two widows, I am the first. What life do I live but that of Cruso’s widow? On Cruso’s island I was washed ashore; from that all else has flowed. I am the woman washed ashore.
‘I write from on the road. We are on the road to Bristol. The sun is shining. I walk ahead, Friday follows carrying the pack which contains our provisions as well as some few items from the house, and the wig, from which he will not be parted. The robes he wears, instead of a coat.
‘No doubt we make a strange sight, the barefoot woman in breeches and her black slave (my shoes pinch, the old apeskin sandals are fallen apart). When passers-by stop to question us, I say that I am on my way to my brother in Slough, that my footman and I were robbed of our horses and clothes and valuables by highwaymen. This story earns me curious looks. Why? Are there no more highwaymen on the roads? Were all the highwaymen hanged while I was in Bahia? Do I seem an unlikely owner of horses and valuables? Or is my air too blithe to befit one stripped bare mere hours before?
‘In Ealing we passed a cobbler’s. I took out one of the books from the pack, a volume of sermons handsomely bound in calf, and offered to exchange it for new shoes. The cobbler pointed to your name on the flyleaf. “Mr Foe of Stoke Newington,” I said, “lately deceased.” “Have you no other books?” asked he. I offered him the Pilgrimages of Purchas, the first volume, and for that he gave me a pair of shoes, stoutly made and well-fitting. You will protest that he gained by the exchange. But a time comes when there are more important things than books. “Who is the blackfellow?” the cobbler asked. “He is a slave who is now free, that I am taking to Bristol to find him a passage back to his own people.” “It is a long road to Bristol,” said the cobbler – “Does he speak English?” “He understands some things but he does not speak,” I replied. A hundred miles and more to Bristol: how many more questioners, how many more questions? What a boon to be stricken speechless too!
‘To you, Mr Foe, a journey to Bristol may call to mind hearty meals at roadside inns and diverting encounters with strangers from all walks of life. But remember, a woman alone must travel like a hare, one ear forever cocked for the hounds. If it happens we are set upon by footpads, what protection will Friday afford me? He never had call to protect Cruso; indeed, his upbringing has taught him to not so much as raise a hand in self-defence. Why should he regard an assault on me as of concern to him? He does not understand that I am leading him to freedom. He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than a word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth. His master is dead, now he has a mistress – that is all he knows. Having never wished for a master, why should he guard his mistress? How can he guess that there is any goal to our rambling, that without me he is lost? “Bristol is a great port,” I tell him. “Bristol is where we landed when the ship brought us back from the island. Bristol is where you saw the great chimney belching smoke, that so amazed you. From Bristol ships sail to all corners of the globe, principally to the Americas, but also to Africa, which was once your home. In Bristol we will seek out a ship to take you back to the land of your birth, or else to Brazil and the life of a freeman there.” ’
* *
‘Yesterday the worst came to pass. We were stopped on the Windsor road by two drunken soldiers who made their intention on my person all too plain. I broke away and took to the fields and escaped, with Friday at my heels, in mortal terror all the while we ran that they would shoot upon us. Now I pin my hair up under my hat and wear a coat at all times, hoping to pass for a man.
‘In the afternoon it began to rain. We sheltered under a hedge, trusting it was but a shower. But the rain had truly set in. So at last we trudged on, wet to the bone, till we came to an alehouse. With some misgiving I pushed the door open and led Friday in, making for a table in the obscurest corner.
‘I do not know whether the people of that place had never seen a black man before, or never seen a woman in breeches, or simply never seen
such a bedraggled pair, but all speech died as we entered, and we crossed the room in a silence in which I could plainly hear the splashing of water from the eaves outside. I thought to myself: This is a great mistake – better we had sought out a hayrick and sheltered there, hungry or not. But I put on a bold face and pulled out a chair for Friday, indicating to him that he should sit. From under the sodden robe came the same smell I had smelled when the sailors brought him aboard ship: a smell of fear.
‘The innkeeper himself came to our table. I asked civilly for two measures of small beer and a plate of bread and cheese. He made no reply, but stared pointedly at Friday and then at me. “This is my manservant,” I said – “He is as clean as you or I.” “Clean or dirty, he wears shoes in this house,” he replied. I coloured. “If you will attend to serving us, I will attend to my servant’s dress,” I said. “This is a clean house, we do not serve strollers or gipsies,” said the innkeeper, and turned his back on us. As we made our way to the door a lout stuck out his foot, causing Friday to stumble, at which there was much guffawing.
‘We skulked under hedgerows till darkness fell and then crept into a barn. I was shivering by this time in my wet clothes. Feeling about in the dark, I came to a crib filled with clean hay. I stripped off my clothes and burrowed like a mole into the hay, but still found no warmth. So I climbed out again and donned the sodden clothes and stood miserably in the dark, my teeth chattering. Friday seemed to have disappeared. I could not even hear his breathing. As a man born in the tropic forest he should have felt the cold more keenly than I; yet he walked barefoot in the dead of winter and did not complain. “Friday,” I whispered. There was no reply.
‘In some despair, and not knowing what else to do, I stretched out my arms and, with my head thrown back, began to turn in Friday’s dance. It is a way of drying my clothes, I told myself: I dry them by creating a breeze. It is a way of keeping warm. Otherwise I shall perish of cold. I felt my jaw relax, and heat, or the illusion of heat, begin to steal through my limbs. I danced till the very straw seemed to warm under my feet. I have discovered why Friday dances in England, I thought, smiling to myself; which, if we had remained at Mr Foe’s, I should never have learned. And I should never have made this discovery had I not been soaked to the skin and then set down in the dark in an empty barn. From which we may infer that there is after all design in our lives, and if we wait long enough we are bound to see that design unfolding; just as, observing a carpet-maker, we may see at first glance only a tangle of threads; yet, if we are patient, flowers begin to emerge under our gaze, and prancing unicorns, and turrets.