Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  This was delivered so precisely in the expected dreary monotone of one who imparts guide-book information that it was a moment or two before anyone could find no reason not to laugh.

  ‘By Jove, Molly,’ said Edward, wiping his eyes. ‘I do believe you’ve been japed. And by a master-japist, too.’

  Molly Air had gone a slight red at this unimagined reversal of casting. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I deserved that.’

  ‘“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”’

  ‘I hardly think that, Sir Edward,’ said the tall lady. ‘Merely someone else who tries to relieve life’s awful expectedness with a little flexing of the imagination. You’ve no idea how dreary our two lives are shortly going to be.’ She indicated her companion. ‘Mrs Hammond and I do our best to keep ourselves amused, but in the interior of Ceará or Piauí that’s often impossible for whole weeks at a stretch.’

  If Edward was surprised by the ‘Mrs’ he gave no sign. ‘I suppose life in the Missions can’t always be as, well, fulfilling as the rest of us imagine.’ Then he added, as if invoking some kind of authority, ‘My own sister Dot’s a nun. In fact she’s a Mother Superior.’

  ‘I think you’re under some misapprehension, Sir Edward,’ said Mrs Hammond. ‘Dora and I are rejoining our husbands in Pará. We’re just business wives, you know. Part of the little British community there, except that sometimes we go with the men on their trips to the interior. We’ve no connection with any mission. To be frank, we’re neither of us very religious at all.’

  ‘In that case I beg both your pardons.’

  ‘I’m afraid, Kate, that Sir Edward looked at us, saw two dowdy creatures and drew the obvious conclusion.’

  ‘Scarcely helped, Dora, by your choral reminiscences of yesteryear.’

  ‘Nor by your pretence of being shocked by betting.’

  These two mischievous women at once managed to produce, as if by magic of their candour, an intimacy among the others which had that quality of appearing inevitable only now it had happened. On the way down to the ‘Esplanade’ Dora Bellamy said:

  ‘I’m a prankster, Sir Edward, but not a liar. I promise you I shan’t mention it again but what I said our first evening about being deeply affected by singing in The Apostles was utterly the truth. There. Now we should have some lime-juice or chocolate or something.’

  How jocular were Britons abroad, thought Edward. Maybe it was a relief from the formalities of home or perhaps just the seeping-through of a genial contempt for the rest of the world spreading from a damaged heart, as a stain on the outside of luggage betrays an object broken within. But at the same time he knew he was being made up to by all three women and was very far from disliking it. Avoiding the bleak expanse of the chalet’s terrace they went round to the garden at the back where he sat quietly at a metal table while the brilliant November sunshine fell through trellised vines patchily onto his grey hair and linen jacket. Like a cat on a newspaper he basked; but the restaurateur’s wife, supervising the refreshments and covertly noting the distinction of her party’s oldest member, noticed also the alertness in the way he sat which only partly concealed a remoteness in the gaze he sent at his neighbours’ faces, at the calves of the serving-girl, at the sky between the leaves.

  ‘Well, Sir Edward, are you ready for an experience?’ Molly asked him.

  ‘I’m always that.’ He set down his cup.

  ‘Good.’ She led the way down through a gap in some oleanders towards the square. They found themselves at the end of a cobbled roadway much stained with grease. The thin soles of their shoes made tacky noises as they crossed it. To one side was drawn up a line of curious vehicles. They were wicker sleds of lighter design than their counterparts down in Funchal, clearly not drawn by bullocks. Nearby loitered a group of swarthy youths wearing some sort of national costume. Their thighs bulged and their bare arms were sinewy.

  ‘Heavens,’ said Edward faintly. ‘D’you not think the railway?’

  ‘On no account. You wanted an experience: this is one.’

  The wicker creaked as they settled themselves.

  ‘Do you mean we’re going to toboggan down to the town?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Behind them once again sat Mrs Hammond and Mrs Bellamy.

  ‘I say, I’m not faint-hearted, but, you know, stopping … ? Might we not shoot off the mountain?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Sir Edward, they’ve thought of that. Nobody’s in business to kill their own customers.’

  ‘Sweeney Todd?’

  ‘Nonetheless, this is a much-used form of public transport. You’ll enjoy it.’

  A pair of buttocks appeared at Edward’s ear, sheathed in crimson cloth. A spasm ran beneath, the material bulged in implausible lumps and they were off. It soon became apparent – to everyone’s unexpected relief – that this was not to be a nightmare career down a piste but an ungainly slither down a cobbled road at a stiff jogging pace. Once it was clear that the two young men who ran on either side were not going to let go the ropes they held and with which they steered the sled around the sharp bends the passengers relaxed and enjoyed their unusual descent. The cobbles were not too uneven and slick with repeated oilings. Now and again one of the youths reached inside for a can and, still jogging, poured a stream of oil over the upturned snout of the nearest metal runner which curved away beneath the sled. For a while the scrunching and grinding lessened.

  Soon they had left solemn stretches of pines behind and had entered the lands where villas appeared momentarily behind wrought-iron gates and whitewashed walls. Sometimes they shot through a tiny tunnel as the roadway curved beneath the funicular track and for a moment the dank hole roared with the screech of iron, the slapping of feet and panting of the men. Then sunlight blazed again and the sound fell away on either side into the patches of tobacco roots and bleached maize stalks. Towards the end of the journey the Caminho became more populous with trudging peasants, water-carriers and the occasional ox. As they approached them the runners would yell.

  ‘I like the way he shouts at ’em to go faster,’ said Edward. The excitement of their hectic descent was in his voice as he half turned to include those behind.

  ‘Do you know Portuguese, Sir Edward?’ Kate asked him.

  ‘Nary a word.’

  ‘Well, “Afasta!” actually means “Get out of the way!”’

  ‘All the same they’re doing it quite quickly.’

  The first roofs of the town swam up and the road tipped sharply into a last steep descent. At the same instant both men jumped onto the sled’s runners as if to add their lot to a final suicidal rush. But perversely their additional weight merely slowed the thing and brought it to a perfect halt by a ticket collector wearing a crimson head-scarf. The experience was over.

  ‘Surely the most preposterous mode of transport ever invented,’ observed Edward as he climbed stiffly out. ‘Tobogganing on cobbles: talk about crude. Your Bishop Whatsit has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘Poor Teofilo,’ said Molly. ‘He was a troubled man. I fear his name will not outlive our visit.’

  ‘How do you mean? He’s in that guide book of Mrs Bellamy’s.’

  But Dora simply handed him the battered red book. It was a copy from the ship’s library of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

  ‘Now do you see to what extremities of games intelligent people like ourselves are reduced?’ said Kate.

  Fortescue’s sled had now arrived. ‘I made that about four miles in twenty minutes,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I was just beginning to miss the twentieth century.’

  ‘That’s something I can’t imagine,’ Edward told him. ‘I often wish I had missed it. In a funny way I think I probably have after all.’

  This feeling intensified during the early luncheon they took together in a restaurant overlooking the harbour. Several hundred yards away the Hildebrand lay reassuringly at anchor, the thinnest wisp of smoke drifting from her funnel. She was due to sail at two-thirty so nobody needed divide their attention be
tween the dishes of seafood and the clock on the wall. The mood of the table was animated. They told stories, as travellers usually do: of other times, other little adventures, other company. But even as he spoke Edward could hear the drone of some imaginary biographer describing the scene as recalled later by one of the others. ‘Sir Edward, no mean raconteur himself, drew on memories of a long and varied life to the great amusement of everyone present.’ What were these stories of his, many times told, if not fables of a distant self, a self who had lived forty-three years in a different century? He was nearly twice the age of anybody else at table. The things he remembered best had happened years before they were born and if dragged up into the light of present day – weighted with a little over-explanation and set adrift in this treacherous company – might they not sink down again contaminated with incomprehension? Better keep silence. The conversation turned to fairies as Fortescue, evidently neither ill-read nor unreflective for a man of action, leafed through The Lost World and remarked that he’d always found it odd that a ‘scientific’ author of Conan Doyle’s character, a doctor, a man of acutely forensic imagination, should in his later years have developed a passion for photographs of fairies.

  ‘As far as I know he’s convinced the camera sees things the eye can’t,’ said Edward. ‘If X-rays can do that – or a microscope, come to that – why might not a camera?’

  ‘There was a witch who came through Pará last year claiming the same thing, do you remember, Kate?’ asked Dora. ‘That blackamoor with the French name, Madame Veyrou, Voisy, something like that.’

  ‘Oh her. She claimed to be an ectoplasmist. One took a photograph of her in a trance and when it was developed the plate showed all this white stuff coming out of her mouth. It looked like butter-muslin to me.’

  ‘Of course it was a trick; but it was quite well done for a fake medium. Still, she did cure some child’s sickness in a séance.’

  ‘The Aylings’ little boy? She didn’t have to fake a thing, the child did it for her. It was no more sick than we are.’

  ‘However,’ continued Edward, ‘I won’t allow that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a cheap fraud. I’ve met him and he’s as straight a man as ever there was. So how do you explain the fairies in the photographs?’

  ‘Have you seen the pictures, sir?’ asked Fortescue.

  ‘Well, not the actual photographs, maybe. Copies. But in some reputable source – a magazine or something.’

  ‘One thing always strikes me about those sorts of photographs,’ said Molly, ‘as also about the ghosts people claim they’ve seen. Why is it they always look as they’re expected to look? Conan Doyle’s fairies, for instance. I’ve seen pictures of them too and they’re all wearing Kate Greenaway costumes. Why? Are there fashions in the fairy world? Why weren’t they all in miniature suits of armour, or woad? Or stark naked but for a moleskin cache-sexe? I think it’s significant that Edwardian photographs of Edwardian gardens should show fairies wearing idealised Edwardian children’s costumes.’

  They were drinking a light Portuguese red wine of the kind which makes the English think of sunny holidays abroad but which is not strong enough to remind them of mid-afternoon headaches and lassitudes of Calvinist guilt. It was just the sort of speculative conversation Edward had once delighted in and for an instant an unstoppable sense of good times past welled up and flowed over him so that he half expected to see old faces, his little daughter still impatient to leave the table and climb back on Gaetano the mule, the sunlight outside to be Italian. But there were only the faces of four near-strangers, his fellow-countrymen abroad. A weary passion came to him that postwar scepticism should not have everything its own way.

  ‘I have a theory,’ he heard his own voice saying with pompous defiance, ‘that the human imagination is far more powerful than is convenient to admit. I believe that in certain circumstances the mind of the photographer might well impress its imagery onto the collodion surface of a film. We may not yet have any scientific way of proving how this happens, nor indeed that it does. But it seems to me a much more rational approach than assuming automatically that men like Doyle must either be deluded or lying in their teeth. Besides, nobody need be surprised when the images he captures conform to the imagination of the times.’

  This was so clearly, even fiercely, delivered the others were evidently impressed.

  ‘Now that’s an interesting theory,’ said Fortescue. Strangely, he had not taken off his binoculars when he sat down but had merely tucked his napkin behind their eyepieces. As he ate they stirred slightly behind the fall of white linen. ‘I’ll tell you why. When we were in France I flew for a time with a squadron doing photo recces: photographic reconnaissance, you know. We’d fly behind the enemy’s lines and take pictures from the air of various strategic points and then our experts would try and decipher what they meant. Of course the Germans were doing the same to us so we all had to become more or less tricksters. There’s quite an art in camouflage but there’s an even greater one in hoaxing. For example, if it becomes necessary to advance some troops over open ground while being essential they’re not seen one can tie bushes to their backs and tell them to freeze each time a machine comes over.’

  ‘The Birnam Wood principle,’ said Edward.

  ‘Exactly. That’s camouflage. But supposing you needed to give the enemy the impression you were advancing forces into a certain sector but without deploying the troops which you anyway may not have? You get bushes and dot them about the landscape but after the dawn recce’s gone over you move them all slightly and add a few. Next time the photographs show fake bushes on the move and with a bit of luck they’ll mistake them for troops. That’s hoaxing.’

  ‘Rather ingenious,’ said Kate. ‘I never knew that sort of thing went on.’

  ‘Oh Lord yes. I once helped to build an entire British airfield with a squadron of FE 2b’s out of cardboard and plywood. We had one or two old buses beyond repair and parked them with their engines ticking over for the sake of realism, even some brave souls walking about. We called it Honeypot Squadron. It was a lure, you see.’

  ‘And did it work?’

  ‘Oh, it worked. It brought over a whole circus who’d been giving us hell but this time we had a couple of squadrons waiting in the sun.’ There was now no trace of boyish enthusiasm in Fortescue’s eyes. Absently he used his fork to prise open the mouth of his fish and examine its teeth. ‘It was a carve-up. But anyway, to return to the subject,’ he pushed shut the unresisting mouth, ‘I was merely meaning to say that I can never look at a photograph without wondering what’s been arranged, and why. But even in those unromantic times there were some strange occasions. For instance, a pilot could fly over a dead wood and take pictures which later showed a lot of mounted troops sheltering. Then another pilot would walk in with a picture taken of the same wood at much the same time and show not a man anywhere. That happened once at Bapaume and we never did get to the bottom of it. There was nowhere for all those men to have gone, unobserved, in five minutes. And we took that wood a day later after a lot of unnecessary shelling and there wasn’t even a foxhole in it, let alone a tunnel. So where did those men go? Nobody knows to this day.’

  ‘Maybe they were ghosts,’ said Dora.

  ‘Don’t worry, that was suggested,’ Fortescue said perfectly seriously. ‘A lot of men including quite high-ranking officers managed to convince themselves that they were the ghosts of a squadron of cavalry which had been caught in a gas attack in that wood two years before. It was late on in the war by then and far easier to believe in such things. There was nothing rational left about any of it. So if Sir Edward’s theory is correct perhaps the first pilot, knowing at the back of his mind of the gas attack, somehow projected onto the photographic plate an image of what he imagined might be there, even though he actually saw an empty wood.’

  The effect of this account from a somewhat unexpected source was to throw Kate and Dora onto the defensive.

  ‘You’re in danger of ruining the g
aiety,’ Dora told him with mock severity. ‘Awfully morbid.’

  ‘Just history,’ said Fortescue. ‘Just history.’ And he too looked up as if half expecting to see old faces.

  Edward was evidently much moved. ‘The horses,’ he murmured. ‘The poor ghost horses.’ It came to Molly that the tears which suddenly stood in his eyes were shed for something other, had been almost relieved to find so ready a pretext. For the first time she was touched by him, wondering at the source of an abundant emotion which in its turn had had the power to move others. What else was art if not this contagious sensibility? Equally she felt the incongruousness of this man, once apparently on hearty terms with a dead king and now being wrenched into the company of very ordinary strangers in an unfamiliar world by the mere circumstance of having survived long enough.

  After a moment’s withdrawal Edward rallied, however. Resuming the theme of fairies he told them he had once written some music for an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s Prisoner in Fairyland.

  ‘Not a title which gripped me with enthusiasm,’ he said, ‘given that this was in 1915 at about the time of the events Mr Fortescue was relating, and given that a good many people had sons who were even then prisoners in Germany. The thing was for children, of course, and they re-named it The Starlight Express. Still, Algie Blackwood’s a good sort. I don’t quite know what I expected when I first met him; in my experience writers are often a pretty rum bunch – except for Doyle, of course. I suppose I vaguely thought he might go on rather a lot about wands and toadstools but actually he said “A pint of something would go down nicely” and told me how Black Jester, who won the St Leger in 1914, had been entirely reared on dried milk. Imagine, dried milk by the gallon. They steeped his mash in it. Well, for an author he struck me as being a normal sort of fellow but I fear I made a more eccentric impression on him.’