Subsequently my wife Georgina and I came to know Annemarie Victory well, when we joined Sea Cloud in successive years on Mediterranean cruises, where I delivered lectures to admirers of Patrick’s life and work. She told us of her emotion when she accompanied him at his final disembarkation. Tears were coursing down his face, as he recognized the taxi-driver bringing him home as the one who had taken my mother on her final journey to hospital.
Returning to Patrick’s activities in 1999, in August he reported to Richard Scott Simon: ‘I have lived alone, keeping a sharp eye on bread, milk and butter I have not indeed abandoned writing, but my filing has assumed that neolithic form of putting every day’s post on the nearest flat surface. In some cases the depth is now quite surprising.’
He went on to express gratitude for:
your very very kind letter about my British Library juvenilia … The little books themselves are charming objects, and that dear man Arthur Cunningham took endless pains with their appearance. They were pretty well received, but in spite of your praises and William Waldegrave’s I have, as yet, barely looked on them, for fear of being made to cringe.
The books in question were the British Library’s handsome reprint (by arrangement with HarperCollins, who paid Patrick £50,000 advance) of his youthful tales Caesar and Hussein, issued in a single slipcase. The original titles had been published under the names of Patrick Russ and R.P. Russ respectively. For some time Patrick had resisted their republication for this reason,[fn2] but now that his change of name had become public knowledge there was no longer sufficient justification for concealing their existence – although the author’s name now appeared as Patrick O’Brian.
HMS Victory, 30 September 1999[fn3]
Towards the end of September Patrick flew to England to attend the annual dinner aboard HMS Victory at Portsmouth, to which he had been invited by the Second Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Brigstocke. The company was as ever small and select, many of the guests being accompanied by their wives. Patrick felt a sharp twinge of regret as he recalled that, had he been able to accept the invitation Sir John sent him in the previous year, my mother would have accompanied him.
On this occasion he was the guest of honour, and had been invited to provide a short address. As ever, this filled him with apprehension, and in London he sought Richard Ollard’s advice as to whether on such an occasion notes were likely to prove advantageous. Richard’s sage counsel was to compile them, if only as a source of confidence or reserve aid should he become momentarily stuck.
Patrick’s scribbled note, covering a single side of A4 paper, makes for intriguing reading, representing as it does his final autobiographical résumé. After explaining that he ‘began life as a child but a sickly child’, who experienced ‘little or no school but reading’, he ventured onto a controversial aspect of his career. Cryptically he continued: ‘& then sea Phantome II first sailing Westminster?’
The allusion is to the magnificent barque Belem, which he had seen in the harbour at Port-Vendres eight years earlier. It had indeed belonged to the Duke of Westminster, who sold it in 1922 to Sir Arthur Guinness. Guinness renamed it Fantôme II, a detail not recorded by Patrick when, years before, he jotted down notes on the Belem (the name to which it had reverted some twenty years earlier), on the occasion of her visit to Port-Vendres. It was this yacht that Patrick claimed to have crewed by invitation of his ‘particular friend’, a young Irishman named Edward Taaffe, who bore a familial or other close connection to the owner.
There appear to be three alternative explanations of the account Patrick gave his fellow-diners aboard the Victory:
His claimed voyage or voyages aboard Fantôme II represent pure invention, inspired by the splendid sight of the vessel under sail rounding Cap Creus in 1991.
He mistakenly believed that the voyage had occurred, having become persuaded of its truth over time.
He had indeed engaged in such a cruise or cruises more than half a century earlier, memories of which influenced his subsequent literary inspiration.
I do not believe that in the present sparse state of evidence it is possible to be certain which of these alternatives is correct. My own inclination, for reasons set out in my Appendix C, is with some reservation to accept that the last may after all be true.[fn4] Frustratingly, I have been unable to discover anything about Edward Taaffe, beyond the fact that he and his wife Kathy undoubtedly existed as Patrick’s close friends in the 1930s. This is a pity, as clearly confirmation could well lie there.
Be all this as it may, Patrick’s speech was warmly received, for which he afterwards thanked Richard Ollard, saying he felt it had gone down well in consequence of his advice.
Earlier in the month Patrick had written to the Provost of Trinity to alert him that our daughter Xenia would shortly be arriving to begin her studies at the College. The Provost’s secretary responded, reassuring him that ‘I hope she will make contact and if not I will make some discreet enquiries and make sure she is finding her feet – I hope she will be able to take the rough and tumble of TCD as it is today – quite different from when her Father was a student!’
Concerned by the friendly warning, Patrick flew to Dublin for a few days at the beginning of October to ensure Xenia was safely settled in.
That done, he returned again to Collioure, where he stayed for a month working on the manuscript of his as yet untitled ‘XXI’ in the Aubrey–Maturin series. He was finding the work increasingly arduous, explaining to Edwin Moore at Collins that: ‘For some time I have been somewhat indifferent, and what I facetiously call my memory has been worse by far.’ A month later he responded to an invitation from the Constable, Field-Marshal Lord Inge, to dine at the Tower of London, with the lament that ‘at the moment I am sadly perturbed by a difficult chapter and I can hardly see beyond the boundaries of an overcrowded desk’. On 9 November he agreed to sit for the moulding of a plaster bust by his old friend Rirette de Bordas. Her husband Pierre’s photograph of the occasion is the last to be taken of Patrick in his beloved Correch d’en Baus – that dear cosy home which I would say was, second only to my mother, the great mainstay of his work and inspiration.
The last photo of Patrick in Correch d’en Baus
When in January I entered his deserted study, I found on his desk a copy of Horace, in which he had marked this passage: ‘The years, as they pass, plunder us of all joys, one by one. They have stripped me of mirth, love, feasting, play; they are striving to wrest from me my poems. What would you have me do?’[fn5]
Immediately after this final visit, he flew at his US publishers’ request to New York to publicize the newly published Blue at the Mizzen. There on 15 November he was interviewed by his genial admirer Walter Cronkite before an enthusiastic audience at the New York Public Library. Although he appeared his usual self at the gathering, he felt his strength waning fast and was obliged to cut his visit short.
After a brief stay in London, Patrick returned to Dublin for the last time. Exhausted by the hectic succession of flights between New York, London and Dublin, he was in a sorry state of mind. As the century drew towards its close he noted: ‘TCD again: 26·XI·99 and I am sadly at a loss …’ His Dublin acquaintance Helen Lucy Burke told me that Patrick returned much disturbed by what he described as excessive pressure from his literary agency to fulfil the stressful engagement.
In his Trinity rooms, Patrick resumed work on what was to be his final, incomplete and untitled novel. In it (as he told me), Jack Aubrey was to cross the Atlantic from South America, pay a visit to Napoleon on St Helena, and undergo adventures in the jungles of West Africa. The last part of the work would have drawn much on the intrepid late Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. At the close of 1998, Patrick recorded: ‘I finished, with great applause, Mary Kingsley’s Travels in W Africa – a jewel of a woman.’[3] Work on the text of the novel began in May 1999, but despite much preparatory labour only three chapters had been completed in preliminary form by the time of Patric
k’s death.
A scrap of paper he left behind suggests that he envisaged eventual happy endings for his two friends:
final (?) solution: SM marries Christine her brother having died & they live in the house near Woolcombe.
At some point soon JA may say ‘I had so looked forward to peace [modest wealth, country delights, greenery, fishing, hunting (his own pack even).
That Jack’s leisure is not entirely to be reduced to such innocent bucolic pursuits is suggested by a cryptic admonition – surely uttered by the cautionary Stephen: ‘a snowy bosom shd be contemplated with an equally untroubled even frigid eye.’
Returned to Dublin, Patrick first stayed in his Trinity rooms, where he was much cheered by the presence of our youngest daughter Xenia, now enrolled at the University. She remembers wandering with him arm in arm through the streets of Dublin, where he laughed and joked, even skipping on occasion, and occasionally pausing to point out the scene of some incident from his stay in the city in 1937. Now he planned to settle there, and entered into negotiations for purchase of a flat, the principal stipulation being that it should have a room suitable for his granddaughter. I suspect that Xenia’s departure for the Christmas vacation contributed towards reviving Patrick’s loneliness and confusion, exacerbated as it was by the importunate pressure that persuaded him to undertake his stressful visit to New York.
Immediately on the term’s ending, Patrick moved to the Westbury Hotel in Grafton Street. Sadly, annotations in the manuscript of his novel show that he was becoming more than ordinarily confused, even a touch paranoid. His apprehension, expressed to me during my stay in his College rooms, that Trinity no longer wanted him, began to pervade his thoughts. This delusion appeared confirmed when the Provost’s secretary, Daphne Gill, arranged the move. In reality, it was far from the case: both Provost Thomas Mitchell and Daphne Gill were very fond of their at times cranky but generally fascinating guest. The truth was entirely mundane: the Michaelmas term had ended, and the College servant (‘skip’) would no longer be available to care for his rooms.
For the remainder of the month Patrick toiled fitfully at his work, by this time more, I suspect, as refuge and consolation than inspiration. As December drew towards its close, he lamented: ‘I am absurdly sleepy’, while his book ‘creeps on with petty pace’. Cruel old age and deep loneliness in the absence of my mother, and now that of his granddaughter Xenia, combined to enhance that latent paranoia which had bedevilled much of his existence. On what was probably the last day of his life, at the advent of the new millennium, he wrote sadly:
No: there is quite a lot of III – LdL’s [Lord Leyton’s] dinner or part of it – missing It is not in the MS binder: but I remember now that there was a table-plan in the lower L[eft] marge Alas, I cannot find it: lost pages, two lost MS chapters are the almost daily bane of my life: could there be a malignant hand?
On the evening of 2 January 2000 the telephone rang at our home in Berkshire. It was Helen Lucy Burke, the Irish journalist whom Patrick had befriended, who broke the news of his death. Seemingly bright and cheerful as ever, he was about to go out to dinner with a longstanding family friend, Youg Azzopard-Vinour, who owned a flat in Collioure overlooking the church and plage St Vincent. Patrick arose from his armchair, took three or four steps across the carpet towards the door, and suddenly collapsed unconscious on the floor. He was rushed to St James’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
At his prior request, his death was kept secret, while formal preparations were made for the transport of his body to Collioure. Georgina and I travelled by train with our four children to Collioure, where we were joined by Natasha and her two sons Michael and Robert. Patrick had wished no one else to be present, save his friends among the inhabitants of Collioure, who crowded the church by the harbour. The service was quiet and moving, after which we all followed the cortège in cars up the hill, to the cemetery where Patrick was laid to rest beside our mother. They were together again, as they had been since that memorable summer of 1939.
On 27 April a memorial service was held at Greenwich Hospital, scene of Patrick’s triumphal banquet in 1996. Georgina and I were present with our children, as were also Natasha and her sons. Lessons were read by Anastasia and Patrick’s nephew Stephen Russ.[fn6] Charles Dibdin’s lovely ‘Tom Bowling’ was sung by a solo tenor. Tributes were delivered by Lord Waldegrave (as he had become), Admiral Sir Michael Layard, Richard Ollard, and me.
I was moved to see that Richard Ollard was close to tears when delivering his encomium. He could be a stern critic of Patrick and his writing when occasion required, but proved a perceptive judge of his strange and at times unfathomable character. I feel it fitting to close with something of what I recorded of his subsequent estimate of Patrick’s character, which I noted down after the latter’s death:
Richard’s underlying feeling towards Patrick was warm. He regarded him as fundamentally a kind, affectionate creature, but all kinds of laciniations formed. He constantly saw slights where they did not exist, which spoiled the flow of geniality. He was unusual in a man of letters in including no other authors amongst his friends – except conceivably Simone de Beauvoir. He was always extremely kind to Richard about his work, and consistently a generous reviewer. There was never anything laboured about Patrick’s writing. Though he found William Golding’s last book laboured in parts, he still reviewed it kindly. He was not jealous of other writers – not even C.S. Forester …
Richard last saw Patrick when dining in Brooks’s about three months before his death. They dined à deux, when P. conveyed no hint of ill health. However Richard had latterly noticed a certain falling-off and loss of grip both in his writing and physical state. Patrick once said with feeling that he was only tolerably happy when writing: everything else was but dust and ashes.
Only the last sentence requires serious modification. It is unquestionable that he would have placed my mother at the forefront of his armoury of happiness. Again, only those fully intimate with him could appreciate the extent of his passionate commitment to their house and garden in Collioure – to say nothing of mountain walking, ornithology, astronomy, English, Irish and French literature, classical music (before Debussy!), and regular interchanges with a handful of intimate friends living locally. This fruitful existence was preserved almost entirely separate from that of the literary world – one which he in any case largely eschewed. As I have said, after my mother’s death, writing provided only intermittent compensation from that irreparable loss. But now they are together again, safe where the arrows of posthumous envy cannot touch them.
Envoi
At the end of 1952 Patrick constructed this model of the casot they built three years later, which formed the core of the house where they lived for the remainder of their lives. After his death I found the little tin box reposing within, which proved to contain a tiny piece of paper with this message to his Mary:
Appendix A
Collioure: History and Landscape
There is no sky more blue in France than in Collioure.
Henri Matisse
As Collioure played so influential a role throughout the latter half-century of my parents’ lives, it is helpful to know something of its history, as ancient as it is colourful. Patrick in the early years of his residence there spoke to me of his intention to write a history of the town, a project for which in the event he never found time. Its early inhabitants may have watched Hannibal’s army, when in 218BC he passed northward with his elephants on his march to the Alps and Italy, since he is recorded to have encamped at nearby Elne.[fn1] In Roman times Collioure was known as Caucholiberi, but the earliest recorded historical event in its history was its siege and capture by the Visigothic king Wamba in 673.[1] In the early Middle Ages, it was ruled for two centuries by the independent Counts of Roussillon, until in 1172 it came to be absorbed into the kingdom of Aragon. When Aragon was united with Castile after the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, Collioure became part of the king
dom of Spain, until in 1642 it was besieged and captured for King Louis XIII of France.[2] The transfer of the province of Roussillon to French rule was confirmed at the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, when Collioure became permanently French. However, the inhabitants of the Roussillon continued proudly Catalan in speech and loyalty until very recent times.
It was a source of pleasure to Patrick that one of the royal commanders in the siege of 1642 was the original of Dumas’s d’Artagnan. This is recalled in the novel, when the musketeers are depicted at the siege of La Rochelle as drinking the wine of Collioure. It was this detail that swayed my mother’s father, Howard Wicksteed, into acceptance of their move. Like many Englishmen of his day, he regarded the volatile French with deep suspicion. However, as a lifelong devotee of The Three Musketeers, he was grudgingly persuaded to accept Collioure as a desirable asylum.
The town’s chief claim to fame lies, however, in its outstanding beauty. In the autumn of 1904 Henri Matisse arrived for the first of several prolonged stays in Collioure, where he was joined by his friend André Derain.[3] Their paintings have made the town famous throughout the world, and the picturesque church on the rocks by the harbour, with its imposing clocktower, has been reproduced on countless postcards, travel posters and paintings – regrettably few of the latter approaching the standards set by Matisse and Derain. Baedeker in 1914 described the town as ‘picturesquely situated’, and for some years before that tourists, principally from England and Germany, had begun visiting.
The most impressive view of Collioure is that from the little lighthouse at the end of the pier, which affords the visitor a broad perspective of the whole town, with its rugged mountainous backdrop. (It is fortunately possible to avoid looking at the exceptionally hideous rash of housing to the south that disfigures the rocky promontory beyond the Port d’Avall.)[fn2] The most striking object is the great castle, whose towering frontage dominates the little harbour. Although of medieval origin, contrary to popular opinion it never had anything to do with the Templars, who merely owned a building nearby which was demolished centuries ago. Although occasionally occupied by the Counts of Roussillon and their successors the Kings of Aragon, the castle’s primary purpose was to protect communications between the south and the frontier with France, which then lay to the north of Perpignan, beyond the great castle of Salses.
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