Read Online The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding - Free Book Online

lips a little apart exhaling a ribbon of condensed breath, her hair fallen from its cap half down her back
as she bends her neck. Tentative as if she too might vanish, he reaches out to touch her hair, to pull his fingers through
it to loosen it further, to move his hand on and let it rest in the warm hollow of her back. Her two hands have till then
been placed soft and flat upon her swollen belly but she moves one now and takes in it the hand that he has free, and without
a word pulls it to her belly, beside her own, so that he too through the pads of his fingers and palm can feel the movement
of the baby within. The lights flare again, tongues of flame that writhe and lick the heights of the sky, then melt away,
and in the moonlight she is no longer there.
    That first time he came back from the sea after they were married he had ached for her. He had thought of little but her all
the days since they had first sighted land. Yet when they approached the Sound a moist autumnal wind had blown up against
them, so that the ship had to tack tediously between one low grey shore and another, laying off a whole day and a night before
Elsinore, and he had looked out and imagined her expecting their arrival, waiting even at the quayside with the water black
and empty before her. When at last they did come to port, he was one of the first ashore, jumping on to the quay before the
boat was tied like a man more her age than his, walking as if he was driven through the crowds of men and women; such a clamour,
such a wild explosion of life after six months in the Greenland seas, as if the world had burst into flying shards of figures
and costumes, of wheels and cries and animals and heads and eyes and mouths, and he had looked into every young or half-young
female face he passed for her face, wondering if he might see it, if she might by some chance have known and come for him,
and yet as one woman's features blurred into another's he for a moment panicked and lost the memory of her, and feared that
if she were indeed suddenly before him he would not know her.
    She was at home. Hans was deep in talk with a customer so he brushed past with the briefest of greetings, down the steps and
past the birdcage, into the storeroom with its brown smell of leather, and through into the light of the kitchen. She was
there, standing at the table with the light flooding in from the open door behind her. Recognised, there was no trouble about
that: no difficulty in knowing her hair, golden where the light caught it, her happy smile, her raised hands that were white
with flour, all so familiar; but different too, a woman whose full breasts and curve of belly betrayed her as she came away
from the table to greet him, in silhouette before the brightness of the yard beyond the door.
    'Don't you know me, Thomas?' She came right up to him where he had stopped, still within the storeroom entrance, and looked
into his face but it did not answer her in the way that she expected.
    'Is there something wrong, Thomas? Has something terrible occurred? With the ship, on the voyage? I have been so afraid for
you all these months.'
    And then he saw the tears that were flooding to her eyes as if they had waited there primed for all of that time. He felt
a rush of sorrow then and pulled her to him, touched and smelled her familiar skin, her hair, her flouriness: a sweet clean
smell. No, there's nothing wrong my love, all went well, the voyage was a good one and we made much profit. And he crushed
her to him and kissed her deep, held tight to him all the life in her, and yet below the kiss lay a strangeness. It was too
soon for him, too sudden, this new knowledge of her. There was something mechanical in the action, as if he watched himself
embracing his wife, a sailor returning home doing what a sailor does, a sailor kissing the wife who is soon to bear his child,
two figures performing as themselves and yet they were not yet themselves but only