Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Edward was introduced to a dozen people whose names more or less passed through his mind leaving few traces. Some of them seemed to fall so readily into ‘types’ that he felt excused the laborious gallantry of trying to remember what they were actually called. There was one of those mysterious knights of commerce whose very nationality was vague – Sir Somebody Pereira – port wine, most likely, or rubber. Or even slaves, who could tell? Two spinsters going back to some benighted mission in the depths of nowhere, all shiny knuckles and good works. A young man, practically a boy – Peter? Patrick? – going to take up his first post as a clerk in Alfred Booth & Co.’s offices in Manaos. A young woman in her twenties, rather modern, a Miss Air, self-described ominously as ‘an artist’. There was even an explorer or botanist named – incredibly – Fortescue, with a red face and vague moustache: the sort of features which become visible only when surmounted by a pith helmet.

  They all chattered as they ate, more, it struck him, out of excitement at the impending voyage than from a real desire to make acquaintance. Towards him they maintained that exaggerated respect which he had long since come to recognise and often to connive at. The food was good; he ate it largely in silence and listened to their conversation. But towards the end of the meal his reserve was overcome – maybe by the wine or even by the others’ high spirits – enough to remark:

  ‘I’d take a small bet that this company will be a good deal quieter by the same time tomorrow. Rather less numerous, too.’

  ‘I imagine, Sir Edward, that you speak figuratively?’ said one of the spinsters. ‘I hardly think betting on the way Providence sees fit to dispose the weather …?’

  ‘Will anyone here offer me odds?’

  ‘Well really, Sir Edward …’

  ‘You think it’ll be rough then, sir?’ asked the Booth’s boy. His evident apprehensiveness seemed to be shared by a majority of those at the table.

  ‘My steward certainly thinks so.’

  ‘Ah, one of those old sea-dogs, is he?’ asked the explorer sceptically.

  ‘More of a puppy, I should say, in every sense. But he claims friendship with the Marconi man in whom nowadays all wisdom is vested. Even old sea-dogs have given up lifting their muzzles to the sky. They shove up aerials instead.’

  ‘It’s quite miraculous and mysterious,’ said the other spinster, giving him a sharp look he could not interpret.

  From somewhere overhead came a melancholy C, loud enough to thrill the panelling and the table and the deck beneath their feet.

  ‘Maybe we’re off at last?’

  But the glimpses of lamplit quay beyond the portholes remained unchanging. However, several guests took this as the moment to leave the table. As Edward himself stood up the first spinster made a nervous leaning gesture with her chest which implied that the eight or so feet of air between them was a momentarily intimate space.

  ‘Despite our little contretemps I really must tell you, Sir Edward, how immensely honoured we are to have you with us.’

  He muttered something. ‘Muh, ah, very kind.’

  ‘But I should explain that it’s a particular honour for me. You see, I sang in the chorus at the first performance of your wonderful Apostles in Birmingham.’

  ‘I am sorry, madam, that you should have thus wasted the precious hours of your youth.’

  ‘Wasted? Sir Edward! It was the greatest possible privilege. It was probably the single most memorable event of my life. For all that it was so long ago I remember it vividly. The year was nineteen hundred and three.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder. But I believe the only thing worth remembering about that year was Rock Sand winning the Derby and the Two Thousand Guineas and the St Leger. Two to five on. Not much chance for a killing with a horse like that. Now if you will excuse me?’

  ‘Pig,’ he said to himself as he strode off down the passage to his cabin. ‘Pig-pig-pig.’ But then, as if to convince himself that his rebuff had been justified, ‘She’s ghastly. Is there no end to these dried-up creatures who hover around choral societies like vultures? I expect her friend sings drawing-room ballads in K sharp. Cursed pair of sirens.’

  ‘Pig.’

  He let himself into his cabin. His trunk had arrived and seemed to take up most of the bedroom floor. Its new lacquer glittered malevolently. Coffin, strongbox …; certainly it had the air of buried things about it, either of things decayed or of things concealed. Because he had not wanted valeting by a stranger he had not given Pyce the key. He now laid out his own night things, uncovering in the depths of the trunk several polished mahogany boxes with rounded edges, brass carrying handles and keyholes. The lid of each was inlaid with a rectangular ivory wafer where a name could be imprinted; they were all blank.

  He read for a while in his dressing-gown, wishing to take refuge from that part of his brain which was vibrating with events, his day’s travelling, the new surroundings. Beneath these lay the deeper upset of a life made suddenly rootless and aimless. His present existence seemed encompassed by the dingy walls of clubs and flats despite his recent move from Hampstead back to Worcestershire. Now that Alice was gone the London place had outlived its purpose. In relief he had returned to the county of his birth where he could finally turn his back on that endless metropolitan coming-and-going which had made Severn House so difficult to work in. Visitors, dinners, receptions, theatre-parties; telephone, telephone, telephone. Lady Elgar had revelled in it. Only he had known that each time the footman opened the front door another bar remained unwritten and another few pence unearned to pay that footman’s wages. Footmen. Dear God, he was a composer. Why did he have to live like a character in Earnest where young moneyed swells could mess about at the piano while the butler brought in cucumber sandwiches? Damn them all, he thought, without trying to identify ‘them’ or, for that matter, having to decide whether he himself were included. A little hummock of bitterness heaped itself momentarily, lurched him and rolled on even as the other, the reading part of his brain, resisted its interfering with the kind of serene melancholy he hoped might permit sleep.

  Why had he brought Tennyson to read, of all people? Griefs, longings, loves, ships, boxes, death. The rumble of wheels above the dreamless head. He closed the volume and went into the bedroom. As he did so the carpet transmitted another C to his slipper-soles which was then taken up muffledly by the air within the panelled box of his cabin. This time although the sound died away the carpet remained trembling. When finally he laid his head on his pillow he could hear distant machinery and marvelled at the smooth tumblings of steel, the tons of hot castings and whirling axles on which his life would depend for the next month or two. For a moment he was conscious of savage pressures in boilers studded with bolts.

  ‘Calm sea. Prosperous voyage. Codswallop.’ On the brink of sleep more jumbled phrases came to him: ‘The watcher on the column’ and ‘autumnal man’. It was what came of leafing through Tennyson before going to bed.

  He awoke once during the night, his eyes opening onto a dim circle of light. His first thought was of a hospital or nursing room, one of those places of disquiet and transience whose doors have round observation panes let into them through which white-capped heads were visible from time to time like a muster of ghosts waiting to be joined. Another operation? The pitching of the room still further bemused him. Just before a doleful calm panic set in he remembered where he was and consciously stopped his pyjama’ed arm before it could reach to switch on the bedside lamp. He was on his way to Brazil. Brazil? He must be mad. Therefore the circle of light was the curtained porthole giving onto the shelter deck. The Hildebrand’s plates quivered to waves and machinery. For a moment the motion was disagreeably like his recurrent attacks of Ménière’s disease which had so debilitated him during the war; but once he knew the movement was real and not a trick of the inner ear he began to enjoy it. It was surely rougher now than it had been on any of those crossings he had made to the Continent – rougher, come to that, than on his transatlantic trips to New Yo
rk in the Mauretania. After a particularly violent lurch which made the toothglass in the bathroom rattle in its retaining ring he thought it might even be rougher than it had been for the Mediterranean cruise with the Royal Navy in 1905.

  For a while he debated getting up but gradually an inertia stole over him which was more like abandonment. Why worry? Things had run their course. If by some wilful alchemy his emptied life now consisted of being in a plunging steel box heading towards a dark continent he had never wished to see, why not? As soon do that as continue desolately shifting between the unsettled poles of Kempsey – still all packing cases which he now feared to unpack – and the London clubs where he lived out of suitcases. What drearier rut for an artist than that which led between servile slipper-dom in the shires and the billiard rooms, smoke rooms and theatre crush-bars of the city? The shunting back and forth, the search for a quiet place where the departing Muse might once again be persuaded to settle: such very restlessness guaranteed it never would. Perhaps, then, in Brazil. Perhaps what had deserted him in fading England was now waiting among the energetic canopies of vast forests, its jewelled wings folded. It seemed unlikely; but then everything did.

  It is the moment between dusk and dark when the forest stops breathing in and prepares for its night-long exhalation. With the vanishing of sunset’s colour the water slides around the river bend like liquid slate, its surface scrawled faintly with poolings and involutions. The first fireflies blink over the mud among the rot and tangle at the jungle’s edge. At the last moment of visibility a shadow comes and goes on the water although the air above seems to hold nothing more substantial than moths and midges – certainly nothing which could draw beneath it the outline of jagged wings. This slow flap as of membranes supporting a most ancient thing crabs its way upstream at an angle and is lost almost as soon as the eye thinks to have seen its shadow. A strange cry comes from invisible mid-river and at once a thousand frogs burst into steady unison.

  Anybody who has felt nightfall’s breeze off the river expire beneath damp heat rolling out of the jungle may also sense behind the rising whoops and screams and chitterings the combined tension of ciliary muscles as unnumbered pairs of eyes adjust their lenses to the dark on all sides. Only man becomes more blind. Yet there is a man here at this moment, watching this scene. It would be better to say he surveys it, for he is not standing on the shore but high above it. There is a small clearing from which the branchless trunk of a dead tree soars straight up. Its base is swathed in moss; above this the shaft rises, glimmering where bark has peeled in scrolls. At the top is a makeshift platform of branches lashed roughly together in a roc’s nest and on this he stands.

  There is about this figure a great attentiveness. The very fact of its watching changes the scene in some way. In every direction for a thousand miles night hides the unrecorded, the inchoate. But this tiny patch of Brazil is different: it is being observed and experienced. It is even being loved. For the smells and sounds of the forest, as they rise from below and reach across from the adjacent jungle canopy, are fond to him. Even the stinging insects which cluster about exposed skin are familiar, a necessary part of the mysterious cycle in motion about his axle-tree. Years of this rigorous pursuit have sharpened his night vision and he easily identifies various animals which pass the foot of his tree. In fact there is a lamp in this eyrie but so content with the darkness is he that tonight, as often, he has delayed lighting it. Once he does so his night vision will be destroyed for the rest of his vigil and it is a faculty he is loth to lose. Meanwhile the sky flickers soundlessly to distant lightning. Sometimes he smiles when it crosses his mind to wonder what people would think if they could see him standing up here in the dark being eaten by insects. Those who didn’t know might suppose him mad – the victim, maybe, of some self-imposed penance. And those who did – well, they too might find something extreme in a mode of behaviour which so courted discomfort and even danger.

  There is a sudden breath of air across one cheek. He is tremblingly alert but does not move his head. His ears strain for the sound of something he can sense approaching, for whose arrival he yearns. A heavy body moves through the undergrowth below, but it is not that. A night bird crossing the river cries chakk-chakk, chakk-chakk, in a crescendo as it passes overhead. Following the sound with his eyes the watcher glimpses a blunt head crossing a starfield. It is not that, either; its diminishing cry is swallowed up. But in this limp tropic air there is a new tautness. Out there is some creature for which he has affinity. His sensibility has honed itself and is seldom wrong. Again the breath of air although the night is still. He imagines a light furry weight settle on the back of one hand or on his neck. Despite himself his skin crawls. He feels for the lamp and strikes a match.

  The flare of light alarms certain creatures. There is the sound of wingbeats as a dazzled bird rushes for darkness. From the foot of the tree comes a startled snapping of twigs. But other things home in on the light and circle it in ecstasy. Beetles batter the platform with a crack of shards, carom off the lamp glass. The watcher is being spun into a whirling cocoon of insects. He catches the sparks of eyes, flashes of plumage. They are a wonder to him, the extravagant colours, the tigerish markings. It is this prodigality he chiefly loves: this profusion of colour and design intended for neither the light of day nor the eyes of man. The revelation of this concealed world has made the days less pre-eminent, less shallow.

  And then he feels again the close breeze at one cheek and this time makes out a darting at the light’s edge. Finally it comes completely out of the darkness to him: a moth the size of a pipistrelle clad in soft gold down. It settles on his shirt-front and he gazes down at it expectantly and with wonder. He notes the rapid tremble of its forewings, a stiff blur as it crawls an inch or two closer to his throat. Presently it stops and relaxes and he can see its hindwings are patterned like watered silk. Delicately its anus deposits an amber drop of liquid on his shirt. He stares into its eyes and thinks of his own hundred faces in those tiny gold seeds. The antennae are thick as beige feathers; the moth holds them high like the horns of an oryx making it look both quizzical and fierce. Slowly its abdomen pulses.

  Seen from out on the river the light at the top of the tree is bright but scarcely illumines anything. It is there, high up in the air, for itself, on its stalk like a single dandelion opening short yellow petals. If a boat were to pass in midstream it would appear a lone bloom indeed, maybe the only light in an entire dark continent. Because it is unique it is a focus, a centre of activity, a contemplative node. To be carried past it out there on the dark current would be to have one’s attention monopolised, for as long as it remained visible, by nothing more complex than a light up a tree. But as the boat rounded the bend and a swathe of forest extinguished it the mind would be unable to let go the image it retained. From now on the journey would be different, the night itself changed by the fact of having seen this: a lone figure standing on its high wooden tower in the middle of Brazil, motionless and waiting in the mothy air.

  The next morning Steward Pyce almost concealed his disappointment on finding Cabin no. 2’s occupant positively chipper. Looking for all the world like a displaced squire Edward was striding about the shelter deck saying happily fatuous things under his breath as the ship lurched and fell. Through the tightly-dogged portholes were visible steep wastes of green-grey water marbled with the scud of broken foam. The Hildebrand bounced and slammed, its twin screws vibrating as their tips gashed the surface and then quietening as they were thrust back beneath a deep tonnage of water.

  ‘By golly, that was a corker! ’Morning, Pyce. Any chance of breakfast yet?’

  ‘Every chance, I should say, sir. There’ll be quite a lot of it to spare this morning.’

  ‘Coughing in their stables, are they? So much for the Jolly Jack Tar supposed to be lurking within every Englishman. I think I win my bet.’

  ‘I’m afraid they are not all blessed with sea-legs like yours, Sir Edward. And the Marconi man says
it will probably get worse. There’s been a transmission from an American vessel out in the Atlantic to the west of us and they’re taking it green quite badly. We’ve not even been able to put the pilot off at Holyhead like we usually do. He’s still aboard and looks like being so for some time yet. The Captain says he’s not keen on dropping him at Le Havre: wants to keep well clear of Biscay and I’m glad to hear it.’

  Edward made an agreeably rolling progress to the restaurant where his spirits were still further lifted by the vista of empty tables. Only a few of them had been laid, their cloths dampened with water. At these a handful of breakfasters was sitting. As he passed they greeted each other with convivial nods in mutual recognition of their superiority to the landlubbers still groaning weakly in their bunks below. At his own table he found Captain Maddrell himself and Miss Air the ‘artist’. His estimate of her went up.