Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  Television, on the other hand, persisted in presenting insuperable problems. Never dreaming that his might be a faulty set, or that he was remiss in handling it, Patrick was constantly angered by its inadequacy as a medium of communication. Thus, he enjoyed a crime film, despite the fact that ‘little of the sound could I hear’.

  Nor was this the only device with which he waged sporadic war. October found him wrestling with ‘muddled instructions’ for the washing machine. Many of his battles with the perversities of modern technology were recorded in dialogue form on slips of paper, which were soon mislaid. ‘We lose so many things now & waste so much energy angrily looking [for] them’; ‘Late in the day I found Froude under Freud.’

  Another troublesome factor was provided by his tax status, which had by now become an increasingly pressing issue. Patrick confessed to having undergone forty years’ perplexity over the matter. Until quite recently his income had been too small for the issue to matter. In fact, it was not resolved until several years after his death, and then only with difficulty. As I understand it, he paid little on his constantly accruing wealth. It seems that one difficulty lay in the fact that the French tax authorities believed he was paying his due in Britain, while in Britain the Inland Revenue understood that it was owing to the French. My impression is that in consequence he paid neither (at least, not in full), and his estate was not mulcted until some years after his death.

  On 2 July Patrick was delighted to receive ‘a more than civil letter from TCD and formal invitation to dinner. I replied, accepting, but on going up, I saw M returning from the town & coming so painfully up the hill that my heart smote me – could I leave her for 4 days like this?’

  The invitation was to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin, the university where Stephen Maturin gained his degree, and where Patrick and my mother had visited me during my five years of study.

  On Wednesday 9 July Patrick flew to Dublin. Next day he sought in vain his ‘old den’ in Stephen’s Green – presumably a location familiar to him from his visit in 1937. On Wednesday degrees were awarded in the Examination Hall:

  … about 5, presented to Chancellor & made [response amid?] Mild to ecstatic applause. Then the 5 of us in turn, described (v well) by Orator, were also made & given our diplomas – back in procession to the Provost’s house – welcome drink – back to pub – feet up – fetched again to banquet … I sat next to friendly Provost – speeches, all indifferent – food rather poor – hall and silver splendid …

  His diploma described Patrick inter alia as a writer ‘of Irish stock’. Since he had not been asked for personal details, this can only have been an assumption on the part of the University authorities. Sadly, this means that we learn no more of the colourful Gothic romance of his lost inheritance and mysterious conception in Ballinasloe.

  On 12 July he flew home via Barcelona airport. The taxi driver lost his way for an hour en route, when Patrick realized that our younger children Dmitri and Xenia (who had a longstanding arrangement to stay at Collioure) were arriving any moment at Perpignan. Swift driving brought him there just in time to pick up the children, drop their luggage at their hotel in the rue de la Gare, and bring them up to the house.

  I had warned the children of Patrick’s occasional eccentricities when in the company of the young, but in the event he proved hospitality itself. They swam daily, but at the outset poor Xenia was handicapped by stepping on a treacherous oursin, which prevented her playing tennis on the courts which Patrick had booked. He carefully removed the sharp spines with a razor blade, just as he had done to me forty years earlier. The children were lavishly wined and dined each evening at the excellent La Chréa restaurant in the Faubourg and the celebrated fish restaurant La Côte Vermeille in Port-Vendres, and on the 14th witnessed from above the spectacular Bastille Day fireworks around the harbour at Collioure. However, they found their grandmother stooped and old, being more often than not obliged to leave during dinner, or absent herself altogether.

  On the fourth day, leaving the injured Xenia at home, Patrick drove up to the further of the two mountain-top medieval watchtowers visible from their house:

  I drove M[ary] & D[mitri] up to or nearly up to the Massane – far too many people alas, & the air rather thick – but ¾ of the way up M asked if she could be let out at once – the usual emergency, I thought: but no, she preferred to walk down. Having viewed the tower (horrible Germans) we turned. She had gone a long way, but on looking back she stumbled & v nearly fell – D pleased me by his real concern. She was not up to dining at La Chréa, but fortunately young appetites cleared the enormous dish.

  Although I had warned the children (actually, teenagers) to be on their best behaviour, given Patrick’s odd temperament they could not resist a minor sally. When after a prolonged silence Xenia ventured a tentative remark, Patrick threatened to break a water jug over her head ‘should she interrupt again’. Despite this, being greatly tickled by his customary lapses into archaic diction, she had dared Dmitri to introduce one of his favourite terms ‘prodigious’ into the conversation that evening. When the apt moment arrived, Dmitri boldly thanked his grandfather for the ‘prodigious fine dinner’. Patrick accepted the compliment with equanimity, and fortunately the impudent youngsters somehow managed to contain their mirth until they were safely back in the hotel.[fn10]

  Although my mother was undoubtedly in poor health at this time, I cannot help wondering whether she was not also assailed by guilt, regret, sorrow, or a combination of all three. Dmitri and Xenia were after all separated by roughly the same age as me and my sister Natasha, and it could be that she continued racked by memories of the children she had abandoned at so very young an age.

  Long ago, as a fearless teenager, she had galloped bareback along the Appledore strand at low tide, shot rabbits in her father’s fields, and slept alone in the Victorian lighthouse on Lundy. Now everything was fading in a haze of tormentingly sad reflections.

  For Patrick the situation was in many ways different. Although he had done all he could for his son Richard, their estrangement at the latter’s wish had become total. Now, however, he loved his grandchildren, and was happy helping them in different ways. In January 1992 he wrote poignantly in his diary: ‘Letters from g-chn (how I wish they wd not call me Uncle).’

  Whether or not he mentioned this to me I do not recall, but before long they were to his intense pleasure addressing him as ‘Grandpa’.

  For all his occasional quirkiness with young people, he retained much of the humour and charm of his youth, which was greatly appreciated by them. Nevertheless, he too suffered from punishments inflicted by old age. Walking in Perpignan that autumn, a harsh glimpse of fading mortality seized him – accompanied, as ever, by a flash of humour:

  Lord, how tiring city pavements are for an aged rustic … one of those disconcerting views in a shop window showed a stooped old man hobbling painfully, as Taid [half a century before in Cwm Croesor] had done – no ease or swing.

  XVI

  Triumph and Tragedy

  As I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for him that my heart bleeds, – for them both, so singularly fitted as they were to support and cheer one another in an existence which their own innate and cultivated characteristics had made little hospitable to other sources of comfort. This is not to be dwelt on here. But what must be recorded was the extraordinary tranquillity, the serene and sensible resignation, with which at length my parents faced the awful hour. Language cannot utter what they suffered, but there was no rebellion, no repining; in their case even an atheist might admit that the overpowering miracle of grace was mightily efficient.

  Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (London, 1907), pp. 79–80

  As the year 1997 drew to its close, Patrick and my mother continued plagued by ill-health and mental travails. The latter’s worsening condition led to her increasing inability to type Patrick’s manuscripts to a professional standard. Like Leo Tolstoy’s wife Sophia, since the
ir first meeting she had typed every one of his books – often more than once – starting with A Book of Voyages, on which such high hopes had been pinned when with the arrival of peace in 1945 he resumed his literary career. However, Patrick was beginning to find her work increasingly erratic, giving him little choice but to consider an alternative recourse. On 18 September he noted unhappily: ‘My idea of having I-V [of The Hundred Days] typed professionally upsets M, who has typed everything I have written. What to do?’

  A week later, matters were no better: ‘Poor M paid heavily for her activity yesterday & her typing today & spoke much at random, & her strength quite left her at bed-time. How I wish I could think of some way round this immense task of copying a deeply obscure T/S without wounding.’

  Equally, she could not bear the prospect of being no longer his indispensable helpmeet. Even her superlative cookery was becoming a trial: ‘M began making marmalade from the casot tree: she cut everything up, put the pips to soak, weighed the sugar & I fear exhausted herself.’

  This was the orange tree in the courtyard, which produced a gratifying crop each year. The recipe came from my mother’s well-worn copy of Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper, For the Use and Ease of Ladies, Housekeepers, Cooks, &c. (London, 1776) – and delicious it was, too.

  Patrick was not only more and more troubled by concern for my mother’s health, but also by his own occasional mental perturbation. The 4th of November 1997 was to prove my mother’s last birthday. Such occasions had always been marked by an intimate celebration over little culinary treats, but on this one melancholy prevailed:

  A poor sad birthday, I am afraid … vile pâté en croute … & although the ordered cake was pretty good poor M was overcome by nausea quite easily – to some degree perhaps worry about grand-daughters. Alexandra in black NY doing a stage [internship] with Bantam [my publisher], Anastasia to go to Moscow apparently alone in the new year … Still, she [Mary] did eat a little something (egg) in the evening & I think she slept.

  By a cruel irony of fate, just as Patrick’s literary career attained ever greater success, his pleasure in his achievement began at times to diminish correspondingly. As I recorded Richard Ollard’s telling me after Patrick’s death:

  Effectively Patrick only came alive when writing. In material terms he was content with modest circumstances. After his success and huge influx of money he commented once to Stuart Proffitt that, though he was now in a position if he chose to take the whole population of Collioure to dine at the best fish restaurant in Port-Vendres, the treat was infinitely less pleasurable than when he and Mummy would take a fortnight planning the dinner as a treat, savouring the anticipation. Now the keen pleasure derived from anticipation was gone.

  On 12 December Patrick attained his eighty-third birthday. He continued hard at work on The Hundred Days, with Stephen Maturin and the ship’s surgeon Jacob en route to visit the Dey of Algiers. Progress was fair, but he found himself more than ever prone to muddle over his notes, wasting time in frustrating pursuit of mislaid references. These and other worries were, however, dwarfed by my mother’s continuing ill-health. An arrangement had been made for their food to be brought up each day from the town, and the customary birthday treat which they had indulged annually since 1940 arrived: ‘Kind Chréa [the restaurant in the Port d’Avall] brought up not only the salmon, chicken & apple tart that I had ordered, but also a civet de chevreuil & a tarte Tatin, remembering the day.’

  However, it proved of scant avail, as my mother’s body was failing and her mind wandering. ‘Poor M had her iron injection this morning & it made her feel v, v poorly indeed; & curiously enough much deafer.’

  Apart from the overriding worry of my mother’s declining health, they were increasingly troubled by the inconsiderate purchasers of the site on the southern side of their house. The builders’ labours were unavoidably cacophonous, and it became clear that, even after work ceased, their new neighbours were likely to pose an intrusion on their cherished privacy. I recall an anguished telephone call, in which my mother declared that they would have to leave their beloved home. The developers had taken advantage of a French law permitting building directly onto the structure of a neighbour’s house. The tragedy was that Patrick had for some time become sufficiently wealthy to be in a position to pay any asking price for the land, but for some reason which was never made clear to me the sale had been kept secret.

  Deeply pained by the prospect of being overlooked in their beloved garden, Patrick arranged for a high green plastic screen to be erected from top to bottom of their common boundary. Owing to the closely planted trees which now grew on their former vine terraces, this provided considerable protection, while being entirely unobtrusive.

  However, this could not prevent the neighbours, should they choose, from peering down from their terrace into my parents’ snug enclosed garden below, beside their little orchid-house. He decided his only recourse was to plant a fully grown magnolia tree at a strategic point. There being no means for it to be brought into the garden from the narrow riverbed lane below the house (the sole available point of access to the garden), he hired a helicopter to deposit the tree from the sky into a rocky cavity prepared for its reception:

  About 9 the helicopter appeared: it circled, viewed the hole & returned to the place on the side of the road where the magnolia (unknown to us) had been laid, picked it up & delivered it (densely enveloped) in great style, & … mates guided it in the hole, almost upright & at just the perfect depth. They straightened & unwrapped it before lunch, & afterwards they came back & fixed 3 guys. It was wonderfully unharmed, & although its tapered form does not always give all the protection I had hoped for, a year or so may deal with that.

  In the event, the poor tree lasted only a few years before it died. Fortunately, its demise occurred after Patrick’s death, when it was left for me to arrange its removal.

  With the opening of 1998 grim premonitions of mortality redoubled. On 4 January, Patrick noted: ‘We were both strangely exhausted today – even my walk up to the General’s[fn1] was a toil.’ On the other hand, mingled excitement and apprehension in the household arose from the imminent arrival of a television crew. For some time exchanges had been passing between the BBC on the one hand, and Patrick and his literary agent on the other, with regard to a planned extensive interview. Naturally shy and reclusive, Patrick was ever reluctant to raise his head above the parapet.

  Two months earlier he confessed in his diary to general feelings of ‘Ill-temper, general gloom &, by night, remorse of conscience reaching back nearly 70 years’. Such a calculation being generally pretty accurate with Patrick, it is possible that the remorse included his childhood antagonism towards his frightening father. As readers of the first volume of this biography will be aware, the resentment appears largely justified, his father Charles Russ having been for the most part as oppressive as he was neglectful towards his small and timid son. Indeed, it was almost certainly his troubled formative years that made Patrick the shy and introspective character he continued to be for the rest of his life.

  There can be little doubt that there was one issue that particularly troubled Patrick’s conscience. This was his desertion of his first wife Elizabeth for my mother during the War. However, while this was unquestionably reprehensible, he was scarcely the only person to have been divorced: above all, during that troubled era when hundreds of thousands of married couples underwent prolonged enforced separation.[fn2] The gravest aspect of this rupture was his leaving Elizabeth with their two small children, the second of whom (Jane) was cruelly afflicted by spina bifida, of which she died in 1942 at the age of three. Although it was probably this that haunted Patrick the most, it is untrue that he abandoned the poor little girl in the callous manner alleged by hostile critics. In reality, he effectively maintained marital relations until Jane’s sufferings were concluded by her death.[fn3]

  Sadly, it would not be long before events found ill-informed – in some cases it i
s hard not to believe, gratuitously malicious – misinterpretations of the issue being levelled at Patrick on both counts. It is ironical that what might have appeared irrational fears were in his case to become realized to an extent that even his acutely sensitive nature could scarcely have anticipated.

  With regard to the proposed BBC television interview, which had been under discussion for some time, Patrick’s instinctive reaction was to decline. However, he was under strong pressure to comply. In the first place, his publishers and literary agent were naturally eager to grasp the opportunity to publicize him and his work. Still more potent an influence was exerted by my mother. Patrick had conducted a couple of lengthy interviews on French television, which proved highly successful. My mother had been delighted by his performance, and added her voice to those anxious to see him similarly brought before English viewers. Reluctantly, he agreed. Unfortunately, living as he did in France, he continued largely unaware of major cultural divides between the two countries. Whereas his French interviewers had proved polite, literate, and above all almost exclusively concerned with Patrick’s literary work and inspiration, their British counterparts not infrequently tended towards titillating gossip and personality ‘exposures’.

  The interviewer flew in on 7 January – Patrick having confusedly driven on the previous day to Perpignan to meet the wrong aeroplane – when they conferred over a ‘huge lunch’ in his favourite restaurant at Port-Vendres. That evening he noted of the interviewer that ‘his ideas on writing are primitive but he is quite agreeable’. Next morning he patiently underwent the tedium of a preliminary interview, and was photographed on a rock by the harbour with the castle in the background. A persistent factor in the interview was a succession of covertly probing questions about Patrick’s private life. ‘All rather long & wearisome, & the interviewer would insist on biographical material in my novels – would have none of it.’[fn4]