Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  The filmed interview took place on the following day:

  p.m. all of them + TV camera crammed into gallery [the tiny study below, where Patrick worked] – questions, verging upon 3d degree – v keen (fortunately) on authenticity [of the historical background to his novels], evidence of which I have in abundance … parted on good terms but at a time when they could not be offered a drink, which was a pity. Good fellows in their way, probably good craftsmen, but heavy and unread. It was extremely wearisome.

  Thus the interview proved harmless enough. Nevertheless Patrick (rightly, as it turned out) remained apprehensive of being in some way besmirched by the programme. Unfortunately, he momentarily forwent his prior determination not to admit to any autobiographical element in his novels, when at one point he acknowledged that an aspect of Jack Aubrey originated in a brother who had died in the War. In 1927 Patrick’s elder brother Mike had emigrated to Australia, when Patrick was eleven. His exciting letters home, describing thrilling adventures and the colourful wildlife of the outback, stirred the lonely boy’s enthusiastic imagination and served to inspire some of his early books. After war broke out, Mike joined the Royal Australian Air Force. Eventually his squadron was posted to Britain, where he resumed contact with his family. He visited Patrick and my mother at their house in Chelsea, when Patrick’s youthful admiration was confirmed by the dashing figure of his genial giant of a brother. Tragically, Mike was shot down during a bombing raid over Germany on 4 May 1943. All this Patrick recounted freely to the interviewer. Unfortunately, after half a century’s residence in France, Patrick was unaware of the degree of sensationalism and trivialization that had already begun to characterize much (although certainly not all) that was produced by the BBC.

  For the present, however, all other concerns were subsumed beneath the tragedy which had now become imminent. My mother’s fragile health declined swiftly. On 18 February she was taken to hospital in Perpignan, but her sadly debilitated constitution proved unable to survive further repeated probing. After three weeks of successive operations, the long-dreaded event arrived on 9 March 1998:

  At noon a nurse called to say that M did not seem to be doing well – Dr J would like to see me. She was in fact dead. They had disconnected the ventilating machine, & she died. Dr J saw me down by the theatre – humane, considerate, sad … there was one point (after Dr J I suppose) when I saw her ‘laid out’ quite beautiful & well.

  On returning home Patrick telephoned me with the desolating news, and in a dazed state fulfilled a dinner engagement in Banyuls with good friends whom ‘I did not like to refuse’. Afterwards, back in the empty house, he noted wanly: ‘A very strange lost state indeed.’

  Two days later I travelled to Collioure with Natasha for the funeral. The service was held in the church by the harbour, attended by a gathering of warm-hearted friends among the inhabitants, many of whom had known my mother and Patrick since their arrival here half a century before. Following the service, we accompanied Patrick and our mother to the new cemetery above the town, where they had acquired their plot. It was a clear, cold day.

  Patrick was understandably distrait, and as I recall we spoke little about his bereavement, which pained him too deeply for discussion. After all, they had remained passionately in love since first they came together in 1939, throughout which time they had never been apart for more than the occasional week or two. Only to his diary did Patrick confide the extent of his misery and loss. Three days after our departure, he noted: ‘Just now I looked at the front of this book – the photographed portrait [by Willy Mucha] – such a jet of love.’

  Next day he found himself adjusting to partial acceptance of his bereaved state: ‘At some time in the morning I think, I found (as an evident fact) that I did not believe in M’s absence. This did not mean a presence: but the awful loneliness went quite away – it is extremely difficult to express: yet the contradiction is only apparent.’

  At times it seemed that she had not really died at all, but remained protectively by his side. Preparing to leave their impossibly lonely house for London, he discovered characteristically that he had lost his passport. He hunted high and low to no avail, until he finally happened on it. ‘In the end, the v end, I tried (why?) our coffee-pot, & there the dear, dear soul had put everything – I like to think she had moved my mind.’

  Although Patrick’s introspective character made it hard for him to discuss his loss with others, however close, he obtained much solace (more, perhaps, than they appreciated) from letters arriving from kindly sympathizers. Thus, to me he wrote:

  Yesterday I had a dear little letter from Anastasia, dated 16 February, and another came today, dated the twenty-sixth, from which I understood that you had told her about her grandmother – a letter that did great credit to her heart and her power of expression. I was deeply moved.

  Looking again I find that I had my dates confused: but in any case that was the sequence, and this evening I shall try telephoning her again – she is a dear child.

  That my mother’s growing frailty had for some considerable time prepared Patrick for the eventual tragedy did little to palliate the loss when it occurred. Many of his readers will have guessed that Stephen Maturin’s beautiful wife Diana Villiers was in considerable part a reflection of Patrick’s own Mary. Since his current novel in the Aubrey–Maturin series, The Hundred Days, was published in the autumn of 1998, it might naturally be assumed that Diana’s death in the story followed on that of my mother.[fn5] In reality, the fictional conception had long anticipated the real-life event. As early as Christmas 1993 Patrick noted in passing: ‘DV to drive 4-in-hand over a bridge.’ However, Diana escaped her fate for another three books, and it was not until 5 June 1996 that Patrick queried: ‘Is my killing of DV. (unaccompanied by lover) too offhand & done-on-purpose.’ Two days later, he acknowledged that ‘my disposal of DV does seem pretty crude’.

  It can hardly be coincidental that my mother’s fictional persona was made to die in a traffic accident – a fate my mother had narrowly escaped on innumerable occasions.

  Many readers are likely to have found the account oddly cursory – even strangely unfeeling. Diana’s fatal accident is not described, but merely alluded to at the outset of the tale in a placid conversation between two half-pay lieutenants. Indeed, his first draft did not even make it clear that she had died. In a handwritten memorandum lying before me, Patrick notes: ‘In proof I must make sure that DV was killed. Ch I – implication is not enough.’

  Towards the end of that year, ‘I showed M the beginning of XIX (about ½ ch I): she was kind of course – said it was dreadfully sad but made no comment on DV’s disappearance.’ Clearly, she recognized the implication, but accepted what Patrick wrote as driven by a reality of its own.

  In dramatic terms, it is hard not to believe that the death of so striking and sympathetic a character, whose adventurous career readers had pursued since Jack Aubrey first clapped eyes on her when out hunting in Post Captain, might have been treated with considerably more drama and pathos. However, so real was Mary’s alter ego Diana to Patrick, that I believe he could not bring himself to dwell on so distressing an event. When Stephen himself is depicted as reflecting on his loss, the reader might be excused for not recognizing its subject in the terse allusion: ‘Stephen … gradually sank deeper and deeper into his own reflections, all necessarily of a kind as painful as could well be imagined.’ Later, when the dead Diana is momentarily brought expressly to his mind, her name is again not mentioned, and we learn no more than that: ‘he felt the familiar chill grip him, the sort of frigid indifference to virtually everything …’

  One senses that the death of Diana (which, after all, need not have occurred at all) was introduced for a purgative purpose, and that Patrick found it impossible to face fully even an imaginary death of my mother. But face it he now had to, however briefly and obliquely. So closely was his fictional Diana bound up with his recently living Mary, that it was not long before he could forget w
hose death had come first. ‘I think I had killed DV long before I was a widower, but I should need to check in diaries.’

  Throughout his life Patrick had suffered from occasional spasms of timor mortis, which inevitably intensified now that he was a widower eighty-four years old. Intriguingly, in chapter 6 of The Hundred Days he makes Daniel, master’s mate on board the Surprise, reminisce affectionately about what is clearly the old building of Lewes Grammar School, which Patrick had attended from the ages of nine to twelve. The autobiographical detail continues, with Daniel’s premature withdrawal from the school owing to his father’s indigence, together with the consolation the boy finds in books – some of those named being from Patrick’s own pre-war collection. It seems likely that this belated nostalgia reflected increasing consciousness that his earthly existence was remorselessly approaching dissolution.

  From the moment of my mother’s death, Patrick sought to dispel his distress by shifting restlessly between Collioure, London and Dublin. Immediately following her death, he came to stay at our home for a few days, where he was particularly charming to the children. Despite his innate wariness of young people, he had latterly come to take an increasingly paternal interest in his grandchildren, as he regarded them.[fn6] Now he joined them in playing ping-pong (with remarkable skill), chatted about their lives and hopes, and charmed them with his ever-youthful exuberance. He accompanied Georgina and me on a visit to nearby Oxford, together with our son Dmitri, whose fees he was generously paying, where we visited Worcester College. There he conferred with Dmitri’s tutor, Dr Harry Pitt, and presented the College library with a magnificent sixteenth-century edition of Montaigne. Afterwards he expressed disappointment at what he took for Dr Pitt’s lack of enthusiasm for the gift – which I confess led me secretly to wish he had only bestowed it on a more appreciative recipient! Patrick’s warm concern for Dmitri’s progress surely aroused memories of his own burning desire to study at Oxford – an ambition frustrated by his father’s parsimonious failure to provide him with any adequate educational opportunity.[fn7]

  Clearly Patrick had come to acknowledge that some children could, after all, be delightful. Significantly, it is at the conclusion of The Hundred Days that he makes Stephen Maturin display affection for two pleasing children, whom he rescues from slavery in Algiers.

  As Patrick parted from us at the entrance to Worcester, we watched him disappear on foot for Oxford railway station, a lonely figure in a well-worn mackintosh clutching a bag of his travelling possessions. As ever, he made little use of his now considerable wealth to indulge in small luxuries like taxis.

  While he remained distraught under the weight of his loss, the BBC continued preparations for its documentary broadcast. After his stay with us, Patrick moved on to Dublin for a week. There he accepted a request for a further interview. Although not Irish, like many others (including me, following five unforgettable years at TCD) he had become deeply enamoured of the country, on occasion it may be to the extent of half believing himself an Irishman.[fn8] It was in Dublin in 1937 that he had completed his early novel Hussein. Now he enjoyed ‘a walk right round the [Stephen’s] Green looking for my bench’, possibly where he had penned the book’s conclusion. Next day, ‘I walked about, rediscovering a little of my youth but not v much, legs being not what they were 60 years ago.’

  It was during this visit that he experienced a typically quaint mishap. Staying at the Shelbourne Hotel:

  About midnight I, putting my breakfast-list on the outer door, locked myself out with no clothes on at all – tried a descent in main lift, meaning to call porter through a crack – met by [?]. Up again to the service-lift – rang the alarm – in no time a man came up, gave me a coat, fetched a key, & let me in – no fuss.

  Ever restless, Patrick abruptly upped sticks and flew back to Collioure: ‘Home … A degree of sadness that I had not expected, & some refinements upon it.’ Next day, driving up to visit his vineyard at Manay:

  … passing the cemetery I said. ‘Why. It’s the cemetery’, adding in commonplace, almost facetious tone ‘where we shall all end’. Then realizing what I had said, I was v deeply saddened: & reflecting on my not going to see the grave, bow over it, pray over it, or whatever. I drew what comfort I could from the reflection that it was wrong to sentimentalize, to make a fetish of a body. It was not then, but I think at home that I had a strong, infinitely comforting sense of presence.

  In May the BBC crew returned to Collioure. The eager interviewer, who by now (under instruction?) evinced desperate concern to extract details of Patrick’s private life, encountered a stone wall at every approach. When at one point he enquired in some exasperation how long Patrick had lived in his house, the indignant author riposted: ‘I’m not going to answer that: the next thing you’ll want to know is how much I paid for it!’ Afterwards he feared the discussion had not gone as well as might be wished. He felt old and tired, and could no longer seek my mother’s advice. ‘Not a v good day … A good deal of pain, little sleep.’

  Meanwhile a disturbing report reached him from Christopher Dowling at the Imperial War Museum. A colleague had informed him that the BBC was employing a researcher to uncover evidence of Patrick’s wartime service with British Intelligence. He responded with some alarm that: ‘They were tedious here [at Collioure], but I had no idea that they could possibly dig down into my Intelligence background. I do hope that your colleague was impenetrably discreet.’ He himself had volunteered nothing on the topic, being bound by his oath under the Official Secrets Act.

  Patrick continued to be assailed by increasing bouts of physical debility, poignant grief at the loss of my mother, disturbing dreams, and recurring consciousness of mortality: ‘A night of asthmatic coughing – remedies no good – & it occurred to me that I might die. Today I began letter to Nikolai for Hélène [Camps] to send if I do … Strange weakness today – legs – & stupidity. Should I write my post-mortem letter to Nikolai.’

  The letter, which he in due course conveyed to me by hand, contained among other requests ‘when you come down destroy my diaries (if I have not already done it) and any private, intimate correspondence’.[fn9]

  This I fully intended to do, and was only prevented by two wholly unexpected circumstances arising immediately after Patrick’s death. In the first place, I discovered to my surprise and dismay that the diaries had vanished from our house at Collioure. Not long afterwards it transpired that it was about the very time that he handed me his letter that Patrick reluctantly acceded to a literary agent’s urgent request to place his diaries temporarily in her keeping, with a view to possible publication of extracts. Having retained them until the distracted Patrick was dead, she then failed to return them to our home at Collioure where they belonged (the house and all its contents having been bequeathed to my sister and myself). In this way I was prevented from destroying them, had I wished to do so.

  Whether I would in fact have fulfilled his earlier injunction is hard to say,[fn10] since swiftly following this setback there occurred the publication of Dean King’s unexpectedly hostile biography, which in turn provoked much equally ill-informed British press criticism of Patrick’s personal character. I now found myself placed in a wholly unanticipated quandary. Should I implement Patrick’s seemingly unequivocal request, or had this development radically altered the situation? Clearly, it had: his diaries having unexpectedly been abstracted, their destruction now lay beyond my power. More importantly, at least with hindsight, fulfilment of Patrick’s instruction would leave his reputation unjustly besmirched by King’s book to a degree that neither he nor I could have anticipated. In addition, I had to consider the significance of Patrick’s failure to destroy such scattered records as lay to hand where he worked.[fn11]

  Finally, there was the matter of the substantial archive of correspondence and other manuscript materials relating to him and my mother which I had accumulated during the long years of our close relationship. Possibly through inadvertence, Patrick never made any allus
ion to such personal records.

  After much reflection, it seemed to me all but certain that Patrick would have changed his mind when faced with fresh and unpredictable circumstances – just as he had done a year before his death, when he discussed with me the question of his granting Dean King’s request for an interview. He had been prepared to take my advice then, being diverted only by learning of King’s unfortunate publication of an adverse piece in the press. Further to this, it struck me that I, both as a professional writer and as the only living person to have known Patrick intimately for so many long and eventful years, found myself unexpectedly placed in a situation where I felt duty bound to protect his reputation from what swiftly became widely accepted slanders, whose effective refutation rested on the substantial range of documents in my possession. Moreover, many of these papers were of a character that I was uniquely placed to explain. The diaries in particular are replete with allusions to people whom in most cases I am the only person left in a position to identify. But all this is to anticipate matters.

  At the beginning of 1998 Patrick’s literary fame had gained an enduring apogee. His novels were devoured by enthusiastic readers the world over, receiving consistently glowing reviews. In 1937 he had been gratified to receive a £50 advance for his novel Hussein. Sixty years later, he noted that: ‘I was discreditably excited by accounts, which say we have 2 million +.’ A week later his literary agent ‘telephoned – she has bumped … [Norton] up to $800k + better terms of payment’, and shortly afterwards recorded ‘huge US contract for [volumes] XIX & XX ($1,600,000 in all, I think)’.

  His early ambition had been achieved beyond any conceivable anticipation. In material terms he could indulge himself as he chose, contemplating leasing a flat in the Albany (where Lord Byron had once resided), and idiosyncratically buying himself a golden cup. The satisfaction was real … and yet had come too late. The companion of his life and literary endeavour was dead, his health was perceptibly declining, and death itself beckoned. But worse was yet to come. His own mother’s premature death had not only deprived him of maternal protection in his infancy, but assisted in transforming his giant father into a frequently grim tyrant. A lasting damaging effect of his deprived childhood was a deep-rooted apprehension of what he feared to be the malicious character of many of his fellow humans.