Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath Page B

to yawn, and take in a few large gulps of the morning. He turned then toward Martha.
    “Home, is it?” he said, absently scratching his chin.
    “Home, Father.”
    There came now something in Latin, and then, with no small effort, and a good deal of pain, he managed to winch himself onto a knee, and from there, after a heaving pause of several seconds, to his feet. He swayed a moment, like a tree when the saw has come clean through, but the trunk retains a precarious balance on its stump; then flung out an arm, and held on to Martha’s shoulder; and thus crutched by his daughter he began the slow grim lurch through the morning to Cripplegate.

    For some days he barely stirred from his room. He was not drinking hard now. He had gin by him, but he took it sparingly; sufficient to maintain the smouldering husks of a morbid vitality. He paced the floor. He read, and at times scribbled furiously at his table, though he destroyed much of what he wrote, setting it afire in the grate. Martha watched him with wary eyes, ever-vigilant, awaiting an explosion she feared could come at any time from this stooped glowering figure with the dead red eyes. She was living with a wild creature of unpredictable temper; when would it show its claws, its fangs, in anger?
    Martha watched her father in his decline with a grief and at times a rage that remained, however, impotent, for he refused to tolerate for a moment any attempt she made to interfere with his drinking. Ah, she watched the man; she should have watched the bottle. Had she properly understood the pattern of his drinking she would have anticipated the crisis. For there came a quickening, as he tired of whatever control was employed in maintaining the brooding semi-intoxication of the last several days. Now came a day—it was a Sunday—when she heard, in the early evening, just as twilight descended, and the murmur from the taproom below grew loud, and the first songs were sung to the first scrapings of the fiddle—a sudden shout from his room.
    She looked up from her stitching. Muffled curses through the door now; he was in pain. This she had been dreading: that while he was in this gin-sodden condition he should suffer an attack of those torments of the spine which at intervals felled him and left him in a state of wrecked exhaustion. With gin in him, what then would happen when the pain came? Would it drive him into a frenzy, into mania proper; and what was he capable of then?
    She put aside her work and crossed the room to her father’s door, and without knocking she went in. There had indeed been a sudden increase in his drinking, and it had been accompanied, so it appeared, by a furious bout of writing. Sheets of paper were scatteredall over the table, every sheet covered with his distinctive flowing hand, and not a few stained with spilt gin. There were papers on the floor, and no attempt had been made to gather or collate them, as though the act of writing was what mattered here rather than the verse generated, if verse it was; as though he were attempting to expel the demon through the medium of ink, and the more furiously he wrote the more gin he must drink to sustain the flow.
    But he had been brought to an abrupt stop. He stood swaying over the table, staring at his thumb, from which blood was gouting onto his papers, staring at it with his lips pulled back from his teeth and his eyes wide with horror. He was obstructed even in his attempt to empty his poor teeming brain of its frenzy! Quills he had worn down and thrown aside were scattered on the floor, along with the shavings from repeated sharpenings of their nibs; and now in his sharpening he had sliced open his thumb. Blood spouted everywhere, onto his shirt, onto the table, and onto the sheets of writing, where it mingled with the fresh ink, creating blots and rivers of red and black.
    Martha ran to him with a cry of alarm, pushed him back down in his chair, seized tight his thumb and held it aloft. Harry sat