The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny

was white with rage. ‘Never again,’ he muttered in a peculiarly low voice. ‘I’ll never again follow just any asinine instruction from above. I won’t even read that rubbish!’

      They put to sea. The next annoyance already awaited them. Before Dover, Matthew sent the pilot away and relied on sea charts. A few miles farther on, in Dungeness, the ship ran aground on a sandbank. They trimmed the sails and lowered the boats into the water. The current helped. Shortly they got free. But now the Investigator had to go to Portsmouth into dry dock before starting her long voyage. They had to check whether the ship had been damaged below the waterline. Matthew dropped a quiet remark – though distinctly audible to all – about the Admiralty and its charts.

      Mr Colpits, however, was glad. He viewed the sandbank as the one mishap that had been prophesied, and believed that now he wouldn’t perish. Mockridge thought of other things. ‘Portsmouth,’ he mused. ‘I know a lot of girls there.’ The eye geared to distances had already focused firmly on girls. Stanley Kirkeby agreed and declared that this was just what the doctor ordered. His brother Olof was silent. He always judged only after the fact. Every ‘Beastly good!’ presupposed a present test. Also, it wasn’t sure yet whether the crew would even be allowed ashore.

      John Franklin wanted to be like every man. He therefore listened closely when the others talked about women. ‘I like ’em with bigger hips,’ said the gunner. Boatswain Douglas wagged his head: ‘Depends, depends.’ The gardener had a different opinion. Obviously, they all visualised precisely what their recollections offered. John was especially interested in how one went about this practically. He approached Mockridge and put some carefully thought-out questions to him about when and how. Here, too, the answer was mostly ‘Depends,’ but John remained obstinate. ‘Does the man undress the woman first?’ he asked. Mockridge mused for an unusually long time. ‘It gives me pleasure that way,’ he said. ‘But you’re the suitor. Things are done the way you want them.’ The way Mockridge did them was surely the way it was done. John was still concerned about the many buttons. ‘Where things are buttoned, tied and laced, you have to find out for yourself. And don’t forget: pay cruder compliments only to older women. Are you scared?’ John was indeed scared, and for that reason, completely against his instincts, he started to tell how before Copenhagen he had after all … with his bare hands … a soldier. He was immediately ashamed. Mockridge looked at John gently, with his listening eye geared to distance, and turned his sharp, talking eye on the bowl of his pipe. ‘Once you lie with a woman, you’ll be able to forget Copenhagen.’

      On land, John wanted to gaze at all the women, trying to memorise their clothes. But there was so much to see that he almost lost sight of his objective. The city was brimming with scores of sailors; so many young men in one place didn’t exist anywhere else in the world, and he was part of it. He also wore a uniform, and if he just stood there he was one of them. He didn’t know how to dance, though, and there was much dancing.

      He couldn’t see enough of the town hall. It was a narrow building in the middle of the main street, with vehicles crowding around it. Then there was the semaphore tower in the harbour, where many arms were waving to receive and confirm orders from the Admiralty in London. For the first time, John sat in a seamen’s tavern. The innkeeper asked for his order and he read off one of the names written above the bar: Lydia. They all laughed, because that was the name of a ship out of Portsmouth. Those names were inscribed as solemnly as were the drinks.

      Fortified by a Luther and Calvin, he again turned his attention to women. Their dresses varied greatly. Common to them all were the respectable, menacingly protruding bows of their bodices. What standing or running rigging was hidden underneath was not easy to make out. It would all come out upon sampling. Mockridge took him to a house on Keppel Row and said, ‘Mary Rose is all right. You’ll have fun. She’s a sweet fat girl, always gay. When she laughs she wrinkles her nose.’ John waited outside in front of a low building while Mockridge negotiated something inside. The windows of the house were blind or curtained. If one wanted to see anything one had to go in. Then Mockridge appeared and took him indoors.

      John discovered that Mary Rose wasn’t fat. Nor did she wrinkle her nose. She had a bony face: her forehead was high, as though it had been put together from many arched lines. Something about her reminded him of a ship. She was a mano’- war of the female sex. First, she pushed up a window to let in some light: then she examined John carefully. ‘Did you fall into a bush?’ she asked, pointing at his head and hands. ‘That was no bush. I was in the battle of Copenhagen,’ John answered, subdued, and stopped.

      ‘And you have your four shillings?’ John nodded. Since she fell silent, he saw his task clearly before him. ‘I will now undress you,’ he said intrepidly. She looked amused under the multiple arches of her eyelids, eyebrows, skull bones and the little bays where her hair began. ‘That’s what you think,’ she said, smiling. Her gentle mouth could say mocking phrases in a very friendly way. In any case, so far this was nothing to run away from.

      Half an hour later John was still there. ‘I’m interested in everything I don’t know yet,’ he said.

      ‘Why don’t you grab this––do you like it?’

      ‘Yes, but things aren’t functioning right with me,’ John ascertained with some disenchantment.

      ‘That’s not so important. There are enough big guns around here.’

      At that very moment the door opened, and a large, fat man stood there with a questioning face. Obviously he wanted to come in.

      ‘Out with you!’ Mary Rose shouted. The fat man went away.

      ‘That was Jack. He’s a big gun, for example – in feeding himself and in guzzling.’ Mary Rose was in a good humour. ‘Once when his ship had run aground they threw him overboard and the keel came free at once.’ She leaned back and laughed heartily, her eyes closed. John could now view her knee and thigh and imagined how it went on from there. He picked up his trousers from the chair, checked what was up or down. Then he rummaged until he brought out the four shillings. ‘Yes, you’ll have to pay,’ said Mary Rose, ‘or else you’ll think you had no fun at all.’ She took hold of his head. John’s lips felt her eyebrows; he felt the tiny hairs. Gentle and peaceful was this feeling. No need to strain or to plan anything, for it was her hands that moved his head back and forth. ‘You’re a serious lad,’ she said, ‘and that’s a good thing. When you get older you’ll be a gentleman. Let me see you again. It’ll work next time. I know that.’ John rummaged in his pocket once more. ‘Here,’ he began, ‘I’ve got a brass chainlink.’ He gave it to her as a present. She took it and said nothing. When he left, she said in a rough voice: ‘Trip up old Jack when you go out, will you? If he breaks his neck I’ll have the night off.’

      When John got back to the ship, for once both Mockridge’s eyes seemed to focus on him at the same angle. ‘How was it?’ John reflected for a moment, then made a decision and stuck to it. ‘I’m in love,’ he said. ‘Only I was a bit discouraged at first because of the buttons.’ That was no lie, really. For a long time the pleasant scent of her skin lingered in his mind. And he continued to hope that the slowness of women had something to do with his own.

      No damage to the ship below the waterline. Now Matthew also had his pass for the Investigator and, despite the mishaps at Dungeness, the blessing of the naval authorities. Another researcher, Dr Brown, and the long-awaited master sailmaker Thistle had also come on board; the crew was complete. Matthew gave the order to weigh anchor.

      Four days later they came upon the Channel fleet – not a pleasant sight. There they were lying again, those hulks with their high decks crammed to the top with gunpowder and iron, better suited for shooting than for sailing, waiting in ambush for the French.

      ‘Never again,’ John said with relief. They were heading for waters outside Europe where their only concern would be observations and good maps. The beautiful strange world – he would now really have to see it, or he could no longer believe in it. The sea itself had to lift him out of his doldrums. He was no longer a child. When Sherard said once, just as in the old days. ‘I watch like hawk,’