The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding Page A

out was like walking on uneven bubbled glass, and horses slithered and people fell
and broke their limbs. It became worse as the weeks passed, with every further melt or snow fall or new freezing, and down
every alley the tipped water from household pots made hazards or thin-iced traps. You of course stayed inside most of that
time. You wore that red jacket that you loved, with only the top buttons fastened now as you were so big, and a dark shawl
over it sometimes and a heavy dark woollen skirt. You sat in a pool of warmth with your swollen ankles up upon a stool and
stitched or made tidy pieces of lace. I remember that I thought your stillness very beautiful, the huge wrapped calm of you.
Even so there were times when you shivered and looked pinched and you complained of chilblains in your fingers that made it
hard to handle the little wooden bobbins.'
    He speaks to her in his mind, not breaking the silence. He would not dare to, as if he knows that the brashness of his voice
would drive her out. He is aware of her unreality even as the words rise within him.
    'I think that I had never lived in such a way before. Not since I was a child in a home I never told you of, in a village
two days' walk from the sea, and when I was young I did not see it thus. I was impatient then to be away and my father sent
me at the age of twelve to learn the sea from a cousin, his mother's sister's son, in the major port along that stretch of
coast. It was where in a sense my life, my life as myself, my life as I could tell the story of it, began. Not in the village,
not as the small child I was. I have little memory of him, only a picture of a sober boy who had a mother who was gentle and
carried about with her ever smaller children than himself, until one day she died and was not there, and left him with his
father and five brothers. I do not think I could tell you more about that early time.'
    He is surprised at himself. He begins to be carried away on his words. In this solitude he has begun to look within himself
and into his past in a way that he has never done before. He has always been a silent, contained man, but not a thinker. He
has lived a life of action surrounded by other men and he has vested his interest in material things. That has been his philosophy:
to act, to work, to understand the mechanics of what he does. Not to indulge in pictures and dreams and chameleon memories.
Now he feels almost a guilt at what she has tempted him to do, as if it is a sin.
    He opens his eyes. He has had them closed to let the pictures run through his head. He wills himself to rise. As though if
he did, if he acted like a man beginning an ordinary day, the sun itself would rise, the world melt and come to life outside,
the stream run again across the beach, the sea begin to swell and move. But for now his will lies frozen. He seems to have
the strength only to turn on to his back and look up to the rough wooden ceiling. He feels his stillness on him like a weight,
like the furs holding him down. Something in the fire hisses and draws his attention, and though he does not look he pictures
her there seated beside it, seated upright in the chair gently making lace. It has not occurred to him before but perhaps,
now he thinks of it, she is a little like his mother.
    'It was so very different, that winter when I was with you and the Sound froze over. The type of cold so very different my
love from here. Here cold is wholly another sensation.'
    His thoughts turn, repeat. What is he doing, talking to someone who is not there? He is tired. He huddles in the furs on his
cot. It is not the cold that he fears most now but the inertia of his existence. It may be that the inertia itself is a product
of the cold and the incessant dark and of his poor rations, but it is that which he feels crushing his soul: inactivity, enervation,
indolence. He lives in constant fatigue, he drifts between waking and sleeping, his brain turning without