Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath Page A

Angel during that time. When he did come back he was in a most pitiable condition indeed. All the money he had had from Lord Drogo was spent, and so was he: his humanity was burnt up inside him, he was nothing but ashes and heat, smouldering with bitterness, now and then flaring without warning, then just as suddenly subsiding into a state of muttering introspection. Explosive energies seethed and roiled within his torched frame, within the ruin he had made of himself in his few days down by the docks.

    Martha had heard her father talk often, in his sober years, about what drink did to him. He said there was a demon at work in him when he drank, he said he could see it, a ghastly black creature that sat on top of him, that hunkered slavering on his spine, urging him to freshexcess, and him a hollow thing in which the demon words reverberated and turned to din without meaning, and nothing left inside him with which to oppose its malign influence. That help must come from Martha. She must never, he said, allow him to drink. It was a responsibility that should never have been placed upon the shoulders of one so young. They were broad shoulders, Martha’s, and she bravely attempted to do what he asked. But in the end the demon was too strong for her.
    Each night of his absence she went into the town to look for him. It was nasty perilous work. A man on gin tends to drift eastward, and the further east a man goes, the lower he sinks. She searched the pot-houses and night-cellars around the docks, to which she guessed he would gravitate, given his old deep attraction to the river. She had only to open the door of those places and glimpse what lay within—the thick smoke, the lifted faces, the haunted eyes—for the insults, the compliments, the invitations, the curses to be flung at her like so many darts dipped in filth. In she went however, fixed in her resolve, she moved through the gloom until she was sure he was not there, and then on to the next one.
    At last she found him. Emerging at dawn onto a deserted dock, by way of a covered alley with an arched opening, she saw a disused wharf stretching into the river on ancient mossy spiles. A light mist lay on the river, the few ships at anchor were spectral and unmoving in the stream. At the end of the wharf sat a humped figure singing a broken ballad. There was a bottle beside him on the planks.
    She approached with some diffidence. Halfway out along the wharf, the damp rotten planks sagging and splintering beneath her feet, he heard her. Wheeling his head about with painful slowness he watched his daughter approach. His eyes were red smears in shadowy caverns, and a hopeless, amiable grin pulled apart his jaw and lent him the appearance of a donkey. He lifted a hand and shouted what might have been “Hail the dawn!”
    Martha could not know his temper. She picked her way along the wharf until she was close to him.
    “Father,” she said.
    Nothing.
    “Father, you must come home now.”
    A streaming confusion of words from Harry now, an incomprehensible stew in which could be detected scraps of poetry and fragments of thought, but all mixed in with nonsense like chunks of beef in a puddle of vomitus. The tone, however—the tone remained friendly.
    “I’ve come to take you home, Father.”
    A last few sputtering ribbons of indigestible verbiage. Then silence. He spoke not to her but direct to the river, which was calm and oily where the mist in patches opened upon its surface. The great head sank forward now, and the hands were limply folded in the lap. A bell clanged mournfully from a ship in the stream, its masts and cross-trees visible above the mist. A breeze came up, and the vessels rocked gently at their moorings. The head sank forward, and the great back lifted. He had no coat, his shirt was torn open at the throat and somewhere he had lost a shoe. Then with a shake of the shaggy head he sat up straight and stretched his arms high above his head, and opened his jaws