Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll think me a complete idiot, Pyce,’ Edward began, offering the bent wire. ‘I was fiddling with that can when it somehow unhitched itself and fell overboard. I wonder if I could trouble you for something a little stouter? A bucket perhaps?’

  As he went to fetch one the Steward pondered this inept little falsehood and pondered still more the outcome of an attempt to lower a heavy galvanised iron bucket into the whizzing sea. ‘Probably pull his stupid arms off,’ Pyce told the stores man with satisfaction.

  ‘Lose a perfectly good bucket in any case. Give him this one, look, it’s patched. Hanged if I’m turning over a new one.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll do it for him. Better have some proper rope while you’re at it.’

  Up in the sunlight he approached Edward blithely, swinging the bucket.

  ‘Now then, sir, you want some sea-water.’

  ‘Oh, Pyce. Er, well, while you’re here with a bucket I wouldn’t mind some of that as well.’ And his distinguished passenger shot him a hot unreadable glance from his deep-set eyes. ‘But not here.’

  ‘No sir, it’ll be easier if we do it from the stern.’

  ‘Afraid not. No, I want it from up front.’

  ‘You want water from the bows rather than from the stern?’ This isn’t eccentric, he thought, it’s stark staring. ‘I think you’ll find it’s pretty much the same water, sir. Sea up front and sea behind.’

  ‘That’s maybe what it looks like to you, Pyce, but I can assure you it isn’t at all the same to my instruments.’

  ‘No sir?’ The man was going to give his trombones a drink, that was the only possible thing. Pyce wondered whether he should see the MO – informally, of course, just to find out if there was any chance of this man going right off his chump. There had been that American last year who had tried to walk on the water. You just couldn’t tell. It usually wasn’t the noisy ones at all; it was the quiet, well-mannered, purposeful sort you had to watch.

  ‘Well, sir, if it’s from the bows you’d better let me get it for you. It’s a tidy drop to the water up there and that bucket’s going to weigh a bit when it’s full.’

  Together they made their way forrard past the bridge to the very bows where the deck narrowed to a cramped clutter of ironwork – windlasses, chain lockers, a small derrick – and the stem plunged vertically to cleave the water far below like a sharp grey headland.

  ‘You shouldn’t really be here, sir,’ said Pyce as he let the bucket fall to the water trailing an impeccably-judged length of slack, then extricating it with an expert flick the moment it had begun to fill. It had taken a fraction of a second. Soon the bucketful of Atlantic came up over the rail, the water still revolving as the last effervescence cleared. ‘There you are.’

  From an inside pocket Edward produced a silver hip-flask which he unstoppered and plunged into the bucket. When it was full he corked it.

  ‘Very much obliged, Pyce. You can throw the rest away now; I have what I need.’

  From his vantage point on the bridge Captain Maddrell had been watching with puzzlement.

  ‘That steward, Pyce, what the hell does he think he’s up to?’ he said, presumably to Mr Mushet who was slouched in his customary corner nearby.

  ‘Is that the musician fellow he’s got with him?’

  ‘You know damn well it is. Pyce should never have taken a passenger up there. I don’t care if it’s the Prince of Wales, he’s not being given the unrestricted freedom of my ship. Company regs are quite definite on the point. If some passenger takes a header into the briny from the bows we won’t have a leg to stand on in court. Look good in the Echo, wouldn’t it? “Booths Murder Nation’s Composer”.’

  Allowing a discretionary ten minutes to elapse before sending for him the Captain had Pyce uneasily climbing the bridge stairs. This was emphatically not the steward’s territory; he normally had nothing to do with the ship’s officers, being answerable to the Chief Steward. Once on the bridge he stood to attention, conscious of how out of place his white mess-jacket looked amid the blue serge and knitted pullovers of professional mariners.

  ‘At ease, Pyce. You again, eh? I want an explanation.’

  ‘Sir, Sir Edward insisted, sir.’

  ‘Did he, by Jove. And if he’d insisted on taking all his clothes off and climbing the ruddy mast you’d have given him a leg-up, is that it?’

  ‘Sir, of course not, sir. But he’s my passenger sir …’

  ‘Blast your passengers. What in God’s name gets into you? That American fellow. Scandalous. Right, you know Ship’s Regs.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Clear breach. I’ll get Chief to dock your wages. Now get off my bridge. If it happens again I may bring back the old naval tradition of keel-hauling. D’ye know what keel-hauling is?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Not very nice is what it is, Steward. Not very nice at all. Go.’

  But much to his own surprise Pyce stood his ground.

  ‘It’s about my passenger, sir.’

  Captain Maddrell, who had already turned away, inflated his face in a fine imitation of disciplinary rage.

  ‘Are you deaf, Pyce?’

  ‘No sir. But Mr Elgar, that is Sir Edward …’

  ‘Good God man, who’s Master of this vessel?’

  ‘You are sir.’

  ‘Then d’ye think a captain wishes to hear a steward’s impertinent complaints about a passenger? Don’t you think he might have better things to do, like getting us all to Madeira in one piece?’

  ‘Sir. But I think he’s mad.’

  ‘Probably the only thing you two have in common, then.’ Over by the window the pilot gave an acidic snort. ‘Whatever it is I don’t wish to hear it. For the last time, get out.’

  All right Kaiser Maddrell, thought Pyce as he gave an unnautical salute and left the bridge, I’ve done my bit. If the old idiot starts prowling your ship gibbering and waving knives at people I’ll be the first to go and put my feet up with Hempson in the galley.

  The Hildebrand ploughed on another mile or two before Captain Maddrell spoke aloud. ‘What d’ye think that damnfool steward meant, “mad”? Did Sir Edward strike anyone else on this bridge as mad?’

  Long familiarity with their captain enabled the others to recognise this as rhetoric and nobody spoke. But their unexpressed replies hung on the air: ‘No madder than most civilians.’ ‘Aren’t all passengers?’ ‘What does it matter?’ The Captain alone answered his own question with the sophisticated thought that to a man like Steward Pyce anyone of a higher social order and an artistic bent probably did strike him as an alien being.

  Inside Cabin no. 2 Edward was happily opening the polished mahogany boxes he had brought. He would have unpacked them the first night but fearful for their safety in the ship’s violent movement had left them among the shirts and suits and underwear which largely filled the massive cabin trunk. Now at last he had them ranged on the writing table. From the porthole above it a brilliant stream of light, bounced first off the sea and then reflected from the white-painted shelter deck outside, fell onto the wooden surfaces. The grain shone, the ivory nameplates gleamed, the brass sparkled. Some quality of the light in these reflections, some persistent afterglow from a lifetime’s forgotten summers filled him with quiet exuberance. Unlocking the tallest case he drew off the cover of a microscope, a handsome brass instrument with a choice of three objective lenses. Peering down it to assure himself that it was none the worse for its rough passage he flexed and swivelled the concave mirror underneath to gather the light into a single disc of glare. Satisfied, he opened a second case, a nest of glass slides each fitting into its grooves. He lifted out one or two and held them up. None was cracked. Light winked off their polished edges, made momentary jewels of the stains, the rubies and topazes and amethysts set at their centres. The last of the cases yielded a compact field kit: small bottles of dyes and reagents, various tweezers, spare slides and cover-slides, tiny gummed paper labels, mapping
pen and a thimble-bottle of indian ink.

  About all this equipment there hung a subtle air of professionalism, for although it was beautifully maintained clearly none of it was new. Various blots and spillages inside the compartments hinted at long use while inside the lid of each box was an old paper label inscribed ‘Ruthven Jevons MD, Bombay’. Edward had not liked to remove these labels: it had seemed presumptuous for a mere hobbyist. Besides, he always had in the back of his mind to track down this doctor, discover when – and if – he had died, and how such personal things should have found their way into the anonymous mart of the saleroom.

  It did not cross his mind that the unknown doctor might, like himself, finally have tired of his life’s work and have willingly swapped the tools of his trade for some congenial new pursuit. It was thus, shortly after moving into Severn House, he had impulsively but without regret sold his Gagliano violin and bought a billiard table with the proceeds. Golly how cross Alice had been … And now over the last eighteen months an obsession with microscopy had grown so it almost displaced – or perhaps was complementing – a lifetime’s varied hobbies. Woe to artists with a scientific bent! he might once have said, thinking of fatal distraction and of Saint-Saëns, among other things a competent enough astronomer to have had a telescope built to his own specifications. Woe to artists whose talent is seen as subtracting from their genius! For Edward there never had been a time when bouts of intense creative work had not alternated with a lassitude full of loathing for music. At such periods the hedging-and-ditching, the chemistry experiments, the bicycling, the barrel-making, the kite-flying, the motoring had seemed like remissions from a long and nagging illness, stretches of normality when an ordinary life became possible once more. Yet always it had returned like a malign influence, the half-hated half-loved imperative, as if with its monstrous egoism it was making the claim that beneath the guise of seriousness the little crazes merely concealed the one part of him which was truly serious and which consumed him.

  With nothing but pleasure he now tipped the contents of his hip-flask into a carefully-rinsed toothglass and with an eye dropper took a sample of the sea-water. For half an hour he bent over his microscope, bathed in sunlight, occasionally grunting. ‘Oh look!’ he would murmur. ‘Oh how perfect!’ Far beneath him the engines prowled peacefully in their confines, the ship hummed along so steadily it might have been on wheels. Shadows fleeted past the porthole as the last passengers hatched out and fluttered to the upper regions trailing fragments of conversation.

  ‘“… well, not at any rate with that dress,” I told her …’

  ‘Betty’s taste …!’

  ‘… buy some more in Funchal …’

  Sometimes the grey-haired man at the table prepared a slide, light flashing off silver tweezers as he delicately settled a tiny wafer of glass to cover the bead of moisture containing the specimen. Finally he sat back and rubbed his eyes before going to the cabin trunk and rootling in it like a schoolboy with a fine disregard for crushed shirt-fronts. He came up with two books, one of them obviously new: Minchin’s Introduction to the Study of the Protozoa. The other was Murray and Hjort’s The Depths of the Ocean. Back at the table he spent the next hour leafing through their pages, often peering down the microscope to verify his identifications.

  When the bugle went for luncheon Edward was much restored and went with every expectation that he would see Molly Air and be able to apologise to her. But she was not there; her empty place mocked him. For the first time the restaurant was reasonably full. As he left he was conscious as always of people’s eyes upon him and of brief lapses of conversation at the tables he passed. The mere awareness stiffened his back and bristled his moustache. Nosy blighters. He marched out, but wearily. Returning to the cabin he wrote a note on ship’s stationery:

  Dear Miss Air,

  I missed you at luncheon when I had hoped to apologise for what must have seemed like brusqueness earlier this morning. I had no call to vent spleen on an innocent fellow-passenger. Might you reassure a lonely old composer by permitting him to make amends?

  Yrs,

  Edward Elgar

  He rang the service bell but no Pyce came. Instead a cabin boy stuck his cropped head around the door.

  ‘Would you kindly take this to Miss Air? I’m afraid I don’t know her cabin number.’

  ‘Miss Hare, sir?’

  ‘Not Hare, Air.’

  ‘Miss ’are, sir. Right away.’

  Edward gravely pressed a sixpence upon the child who disappeared and could be heard whistling his way along the deck outside. He allowed himself a pleasurable smile then once more seated himself at the table intending to continue with the microscope but falling instead into a light doze from which he awoke disgruntled. In a mood of mid-afternoon melancholy the sudden thought of going up above and parading in a boater, an old widower amid couples playing deck-quoits or flirting, was horrid. He reminded himself that there were plenty of single people, Molly herself included, to say nothing of the missionary spinsters. This thought made things no better, however. He wondered what to do. He missed the ticker-tape machines with their news from Epsom and Sandown, Thirsk and Doncaster. He missed The Times and the theatre reviews. He missed his dogs.

  As he had gone about his rounds through darkened cabins full of reek Dr Ashe could think of nothing but the disaster which had come upon him. In all twenty years of Army life – in the sundry wanderings, postings and finally decimations of his regiment – he had never felt so lost and adrift. It was the sounds he missed as much as anything, those familiar sounds by which his inner clock was set: the scrunch of boots outside the window, the distant wails of command, the brick yards echoing to horses in their harness. And above all the bugles, hailing the sun and bidding it farewell, accompanying the flag up and down its pole, exhorting, alerting, summoning, inspiring. In this tin can amid the waves, by contrast, the only bugle call was a single note, a mockery blown by some hopeless matelot with brilliantine to invite the already overfed to yet further meals.

  What had he to do with these people? True, many of them had as yet eaten very little but one could tell from the spineless way they lolled in their bunks and moaned that they were rotted with self-indulgence. It was impossible to keep the company of vermin who refused to take responsibility for themselves. At least there was comfort in knowing he had taken his own responsibility for that affair at Aldershot. Resigning his commission after so much honourable service had earned him the baffled sympathy of fellow-officers who, if they couldn’t have been expected to deduce the real cause, had accepted the evasion of ‘personal considerations’, that stock explanation which might conceal a thousand different urgencies. Since then he had received a letter which led him to believe no further enquiry would be pursued. The military had a sixth sense where taint was concerned and his own regiment was no exception. Unruffled waters would be allowed to close seamlessly over the place where his respected head had last dropped from sight. From the Army’s point of view he no longer existed.

  Returning to his quarters he locked the door and poured himself a tumbler of whisky. For half an hour he sat unrelaxed at his empty table, drinking steadily and finishing the best part of half the bottle. Then he got to his feet and stripped to the waist, letting his shirt hang by its tails from the waistband of his trousers. He took out a small canvas roll of surgical instruments, the field kit he had carried in France, and selecting a scalpel clipped in a fresh blade. Then he stood in front of the mirror and examined himself minutely, angling up the lamp on the table beside him so as to bathe his upper body with light. Deep shadows were thrown in the hollows of his torso which had the flayed look of a mediaeval saint whose life was not separable from punishment. With the blade he drew a deep five-inch line high up across the left side of his chest and without pausing another in exact parallel half an inch above it. He repeated these pairs of cuts twice, moving upwards so that his work was not obscured by the blood which welled from the incisions and streamed freely do
wn his ribs. He studied the cuts in the mirror before, apparently satisfied, pouring himself another glass of whisky which he drank off in three gulps. Then he turned back to the mirror and carefully began etching a series of vertical cuts between the parallel lines like irregularly-spaced sleepers on a railway track. It took him a minute and more and his face in the lamplight betrayed nothing as he worked. By the time he had finished his dangling shirt was spotted with blood and the waistband on his left side sopped in it.

  Laying down the scalpel Dr Ashe once more dispassionately examined his chest with its fresh grid of hatch-marks and the crimson sheen which drenched his white skin with shimmering and mesmeric beauty. In the brilliance of the electric light the colour was rich and vibrant as the juice which embodied it sank slowly downwards from the wounds. The doctor took a handful of lint, soaked it in surgical spirit and pressed it to his chest. Only then did an expression cross his face momentarily, a quick grimace, a spasm nearly of disgust. He pressed the pad still tighter then suddenly took it away. In the instant before blood sprang back to blur the pattern the filling red strokes on his skin formed the outline of the ribbons he had worn, the medals he had won: MC, DSC, the many campaign awards, the insignia of his service.

  He took a fresh pad, sprinkled it this time with iodine and taped it across the wounds. Gasping almost inaudibly as he moved he cleaned up his body, put on a fresh shirt, changed his trousers, adjusted his tie in the mirror. He lit a cigarette with fingers which scarcely shook, finished both it and another tumbler of whisky, unlocked the door and went out on his rounds.

  IV

  Day started badly, terse with Air girl. Of course I’ve apologised but don’t know why I shd. Then visit to engine room where the Chief Engineer’s named Stanford! Can’t seem to shake ’em off even in mid-Atlantic. Stainer & Mackenzie will be lurking somewhere, office-boys in Manaos probably. Engines huge, the heat & din expunged me – exhilarating in its way.