Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Mm. What price Sir Edward Elgar, though?’

  ‘Under no circumstances.’ The voice came from the darkness in a firm tone as if its owner had come up on one elbow to make the point.

  ‘Dearest, just think … Position, wealth, and I’m sure I remember hearing his wife died recently.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Well it seems a pity. Rather a waste, I mean. He has the eye, did you notice? And don’t come all over virtuous, it’s such a bore. A touch hypocritical, too.’

  ‘I suppose he has, yes. Yes, of course I noticed if you insist.’

  ‘Oh I do insist. I also reserve the right to imagine you becoming more predatory as the voyage wears on. Anyway, I thought we’d long since agreed that anyone with the eye was fair game.’

  From either bed there came the sounds of two old friends from whom little was hidden quietly enjoying a joke.

  ‘I forbid you to have designs on the Master of the King’s Musick.’

  More laughter. All around them in the starlight the wavetops wrung their hands unseen and fled continuously astern.

  Oblivious of how his presence was already beginning to affect the plans of at least two people aboard, Edward was at that moment returning to his cabin after a bluff evening with new acquaintances. Still restless with smoke and chatter he postponed sleep for a while and instead settled down at the desk with his Journal.

  III

  Maddrell was complimentary on my helmsmanship in a gruff sort of way. Told him it wasn’t unlike conducting & nor is it. As a beginner one had the same feeling of being run away with and then of immense power & one’s least act will cause everything to skid off or sing. Maybe I should have been Captain Maddrell although it’s by no means certain what sort of a composer he might have made. Probably rather good: well-made light music which everybody likes to hum and which earns.

  Well I could do that too, and did it, except that I never wanted to have to. If only I could have made a halfway decent living out of ‘serious’ stuff I would probably have dabbled quite pleasurably in the odd ‘popular’ piece – & why not? it’s perfectly respectable to be a tunesmith. That time hearing someone whistle the viola tune from Alassio in the street – who it was or where they heard it lawd nose but oh! the pleasure. It’s the greatest compliment a composer can be paid (but compliments don’t buy groceries) and I thought yes, I took the tune down so that other people could hear it too. I would certainly much rather have done salon pieces which people could whistle than all those glees and part-songs for beastly little choral clubs to massacre earnestly. One of those odious commissions (for a pittance, naturally) actually paralysed me with hatred. My hand would not move across the page. It took five days to write a line, such bosh, nobody would have wanted to whistle it & we ate bread that week but precious little else.

  I did once tell somebody (pompous ass that I am) that I was folksong, mainly a retort called forth by their endlessly trying to get me to say what I thought about the ‘new music’ (esp. V. Williams) and all that Cecil Sharpery. Perhaps it wasn’t so far off the truth. If ancient folksongs were the distillates of a culture & its language then it wd. be surprising if I who knew the sound of the wind on the Malvern Hills quite as well as Piers Plowman had not occasionally captured something of the essential melody which lies beyond mere tune. And anyway if folksongs are songs the folk sing then ‘Land of Hope & Glory’ – curse every one of its bars – surely qualifies. Not something I ever want to hear again, not even whistled in the street. How I’ve come to detest the thing! You can’t joke with the public: they know nothing but what they do know is always enough to hang you. All my music has now shrunk to that single tune, quite undeserved what’s more since it wasn’t my idea to put words to it but the King’s. They don’t fit – of course poor Jaeger was right about that drop to E – whatever words had been shoehorned into it wd. have sounded vulgar. But dear old Nim didn’t have the full weight of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha bearing down on him, only consumption, and that makes a man unafraid of kings. Mind you I don’t regret the original tune as it was in P & C – it knocked ’em for six as I knew it would – but I never intended a thing which came to me one morning while I was probably sawing wood or something (the rhythm?) should become a perennial excuse for a national bellow.

  Well, it was the box office & I played to it & God knows I needed to. One surely can hardly blame penurious artists for trying to make a bit of chink, even a living when they can tho’ in the long run it never pays because you get labelled by the public’s taste, fickle & ignorant as it is. Nobody now gives much of a damn for any of my music, only a remaining handful of dear ones who remember the great times; now we’re fellow-dinosaurs who haven’t yet crept decently down into our coal-seam and joined the fossils of a forgotten age. But I do live and breathe, I lash my tail & still can bite & take pleasure in doing so. The single exception to the fate of everything I’ve written seems to be ‘Land of Hope’, belted out with bombast & that has anyway become national property – it’s no longer by me, just another of those purple tunes like ‘Rool, Britanyah’ and ‘Gawd Save’ which make the public climb onto its hind legs and yell with a tear in its eye (two tears if there’s a pint in its stomach). Oh, foolish! spending a lifetime despising the British public’s musical taste & I realise now my scorn was misdirected. It was really self-loathing for bothering with such things anyway. One is an artist & there’s an end to it. No use trying to suck up to posterity – posterity’s inscrutable & doesn’t pay last month’s gas bill. When dreamers of dreams get turned into national figures you can be damned sure their dreams are misunderstood. Poor old Kipling, now – a case in point. He complains he’s so well known by a famous line here and there but never by the next line which undoes it & still less by all those hundreds of poems which lie unread in the Collected Works. Alas it’s the same for me & probably for all of us. The people who are known by whole pages at a time are either a hundred years dead or Arthur Sullivan which amounts to the same thing. I know some of my things are alive and will last but it won’t be me who reaps the least benefit from them – nor ever did – just a lot of conceited asses not yet even born, conductors & fiddlers & bawlers who are more thought of than the composers without whose music they would be nobodies. Or coxswains.

  Later

  We’ve all lost our faith, those of our generation – Hardy, Kipling, Conrad – we all went through the motions of producing stuff as if everything were all right, or at least still possible – as if that eye in the sky were still looking down with compassion. But it isn’t; & since that filthy war we all know it never was – such scenes of carnage it wd. have to have witnessed unblinking – & now we’ve all woken up to the fact that it’s dead. It’s all as dead as the machinery roaring everywhere (soon no more horses, no more hooves clopping through the streets, no more friendly smells of fresh sweat & honest dung). I’m like a man who as a child once heard a marvellous bird sing in a miraculous tree & has spent a lifetime trying to take down its song – only to discover too late that it was only a cuckoo clock, springs & pulleys & cogs.

  What a fool!

  Later that night the Hildebrand, relieved of the sensation of butting into banks of solid felt, flew easily with its complement of sleeping lives high above an unseen terrain of mountains, crevasses and plains of silt. Among these suspended sleepers none at that moment knew where he was nor where he was bound, and there was at least one who even on waking might not have wished to settle on any particular landscape the reposeless slow whirling of his unease.

  When dawn broke on the port side a grey track of smoothly undulant water led from the ship to a cream-and-gold focal point on the horizon. By the time the sun had risen in a sky which had in it only a few remaining tatters of cloud the water was gentle. It had also taken on shades of transparent indigo and blue which mark warmer latitudes and on which suds sit blindingly white for as long as it takes a ship’s hull to pass. Gradually passengers began emerging on deck, pale and rubber
y and uncertain in their dress, to blink at the ocean. Taking heart at the sight they all disappeared again and up from below, like the scent of fresh toast, there drifted the subdued clatter of crockery and silverware as the first solid nourishment for nearly six days displaced the nightmare memories of beef tea and water biscuits. It was a breakfasting ship whose decks Edward strolled with Molly.

  ‘I know it’s customary to observe that we all become different people when we travel,’ she said, ‘but I really do feel reborn. No doubt I shouldn’t say so to a celebrated patriot but now we’ve left that storm behind I really think we’re at last out of the clutches of England. I’m afraid for me the country has a malign aura of gloom which extends far beyond its coastline, like territorial waters or something. Now you’re shocked, I bet.’

  ‘Only by the news that I’m a celebrated patriot. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Surely you’re joking, Sir Edward? Knighted for services, friend of Royalty, composer of national songs?’

  ‘I suppose I love my country – the few remaining bits which haven’t yet been ruined by concrete and asphalt and other industrial eyesores, that is. And maybe I love my countrymen – some of ’em. But as an artist yourself you should know that artists don’t have countries in the way other people do. If they’re as unlucky as I’ve been then bits of their work – invariably not the best bits, either – get taken up and people go around saying how exactly they fit the national mood. All of a sudden an ordinary Worcestershire countryman, which is what I am, finds himself touted as the embodiment of John Bull. It’s not a role I relish.’

  ‘Oh … But I thought, well, Master of the King’s …’

  The ferocity with which he cut her off made her stare straight out over the rail like a ticked-off child who dare not look at its accuser.

  ‘For the last time, I am not the Master of the King’s Musick. That post is currently held by Sir Walter Parratt and has been since the eighteen-nineties. I am no longer the master even of my own music, let alone the King’s.’

  The sheer pain of this last sentence, spoken as he turned abruptly away to stare at the black funnel uttering its racing black coils, silenced her instinctive protest that this was positively the first she’d ever heard of it.

  ‘I’m extremely sorry if I offended you.’ She did not say this especially meekly but more with the dispassion which comes from being accustomed to ordinary bad behaviour. That was what one had to say; it was thus one sued for peace.

  ‘Offended? I’m not offended. I’m just bored beyond bearing that wherever I go people feel they’ve got to talk about music, music, music. Damn all music! Why ruin a perfectly beautiful morning with this incessant gabble about music?’

  The injustice of this fresh outburst, instead of silencing her as it had silenced so many, actually stung Molly to say an unthinkable thing. Not knowing nor even caring whether this man beside her embodied the State or an Art or was merely some kind of distinguished-looking puppet she said:

  ‘That is probably the most childish thing I ever heard a grown man say. We were talking about patriotism; it was you who suddenly began a tirade about music. Five years ago I was watching horribly wounded men die – boys, most of them, children even – and not one of them behaved in such a nursery fashion. You’ve evidently lived a very indulged life, Sir Edward.’

  She walked away up the deck and vanished down a companionway. He was left staring at the impassive slide of water, the speed of whose hissing lacework of foam reminded him of how fast he was being carried ever further from the known, or at least the familiar. What on earth was he doing here? He’d never wanted to come on this stupid trip. Who had taken this mad decision for him? Who had recommended this very shipping line? Sybil, damn her. And the thought came and went too fast to be put into words, like a sick chord, ‘How dare Alice leave me like this?’ while that same fleeting sound also encompassed her chiding ‘South America? Oh Edu, I hardly think …’ He had a sudden glimpse of the frightening and empty waywardness to which a life was subject once ordinary domestic restraints had dissolved. What was to prevent …? And the answer always came, Nothing. Nothing might prevent anything. And the dazzling wound in the water was forced open beneath his eyes to close raggedly somewhere under the Red Ensign at the stern, the scar of the ship’s wake stretching back and back to the vacant line of sky and water.

  Whatever crossness or self-pity might have swallowed him for the rest of the day was staved off by the appearance at his elbow of Steward Pyce in a white mess-jacket.

  ‘I have a message for you, Sir Edward. Chief Engineer Stanford presents his compliments and would be happy to see you at your convenience in the engine room.’

  Edward continued to stare downwards. ‘Stanford? Is that really his name?’

  ‘Chief Engineer Stanford, sir. Yes sir.’

  ‘Dear God. I suppose there isn’t a cabin boy named Delibes, is there? Or a grease-monkey called Dvořák aboard? No Saint-Saëns in the stokehold?’

  ‘No sir.’ Pyce was perplexed. ‘No foreigners aboard. Not as crewmen, leastways. And certainly no Germans. I can’t see any of the lads wanting to share a berth with a Hun.’ Then, evidently wondering whether he might not have been a little outspoken (Elgar, now, that didn’t sound particularly English, did it?) he added a conciliatory ‘Bygones be bygones, sir, of course. Water under the bridge. Live and let …’

  ‘Show me.’

  As Pyce led the way below Edward said ‘I wonder if you would be so good as to get me a couple of things?’

  ‘Of course, sir. All part of the …’

  ‘I need a small bucket – well, perhaps a large tin with a stout handle and some light cord. Say about thirty feet. Can you do that?’

  ‘Stout cord, sir. Light bucket. Can do, sir. Any particular …?’

  ‘Just those, thank you Pyce. When I say bucket maybe that would be a bit large. More of a can with a handle. Hold about a quart, shall we say?’ And as they both stooped to enter the first of a series of round-cornered metal doors set rather high in the wall Pyce caught the words ‘my instruments’. It’s his bloody trombones, the Steward thought. What on earth can he be up to? He tried to imagine any activity – regardless of plausibility – which could possibly involve such equipment. He gave up as he ushered his passenger through a last hatchway, grasping the lintel with an extended hand so the distinguished grey head might bang itself on nothing harder than his knuckles.

  Edward passed into a racketing cavern where sound and smell merged into one another and became the single effluvium of power. The noise itself was a sustained low howl and monstrous panting as though the Hildebrand’s metal flanks heaved with her efforts to drive through the ocean. An hour later he returned to the upper air deafer and with the uncertain tread of an invalid. Once in the bright breeze he was again conscious of the onward rushing of the ship, a feeling now informed by images of the implacable force of great engines. Never mind, he thought, only for a few weeks. But as the memory of that appalling breakfast-time conversation with Molly Air re-surfaced a familiar swell of despair rose up from beneath and then receded, leaving him beached on the exposed deck like a castaway. ‘We could none of us have foreseen how stranded we should become,’ he thought, and, ‘We do not belong here.’

  Yet once again his desolation was broken into by the sudden appearance of Steward Pyce. This time the man carried a coil of light cord and a small metal drum which had been roughly pierced at the rim and fitted with a wire handle.

  ‘Were these what you had in mind, sir?’ After some thought and a speculative conversation with Hempson he had decided that this was part of the equipment for a new game his passenger had devised, something like deck-quoits but involving throwing things into a tin rather than over a peg. The string was probably to enable a player to twitch the tin at a distance to spoil his opponent’s aim. He had not yet decided on what these people would be throwing into the tin – coins, probably, even bloody sovereigns, seeing the money some of them could afford to le
ave lying around on their dressing-tables. Well, you had to be idle rich to come on a jaunt like this in the first place, didn’t you? Upwards of forty-eight quid was what the round trip cost a First Class passenger. Forty-eight quid.

  ‘Just the thing,’ his own passenger was saying, looking pleased for the first time. Gloomy sort of cove, Pyce reflected. You’d hardly have thought an old jam tin from the galley would cheer him up like that. ‘Is this thing clean?’

  ‘Clean, sir?’ What was this? ‘Oh yes sir. Cook gave it a good washing out.’

  ‘Well, very good then. That’ll be all.’

  From the way in which he put tin and cord at his feet the man was not going to be more forthcoming. A little disappointed Pyce withdrew but only to the ample cover of an engine room duct whose mouth perpetually gulped the cool wind of their passage. He fiddled idly with the latch mechanism controlling the angle to which the duct could be swivelled so that any passenger on deck might suppose him properly occupied, while every now and then covertly watching the distant figure at the rail. Suddenly it stooped in the stiff manner of the portly and tied one end of the cord to the handle of the tin. Then Sir Edward gave a swift glance about him and, evidently reassured that he was not watched, began to lower the tin over the ship’s side. There was a pause during which his grey hair was twitched by the breeze then a sharp ‘God damn it!’ reached the Steward’s ear. Sir Edward could be seen hauling in the cord hand over hand very fast. On the end was nothing but a piece of bent wire.

  Pyce, who from the moment his passenger had begun lowering the tin had known what would happen, smiled to himself. ‘Silly beggar,’ he thought. ‘What did he imagine at fourteen knots?’ He moved off to another part of the deck but not so far away that Sir Edward would not be able to spot him almost immediately. He was not at all surprised by the man’s appearance at his side within minutes.