Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  So of course he sat in vain the following morning on his borrowed patch of deck, notebook and pencil to hand. The same blinding scud raced past; the same harmonics from the engines hummed in every bolt and plate of the Hildebrand, quivered up through his thin leather soles. But today the constant rush of water spoke of impatience, of a hurry to arrive, while the subliminal tones of machinery sang of a cheerless age carrying him off beyond anywhere he wanted to be. Neither did reading his sketch help recreate the mood which had conceived it. It was bleak, certainly; but was it really anything he hadn’t already said years ago in one form or another? Parts of the biography of a character who kept on cropping up disguised variously as a man with friends to depict, a dying ancient, a soul on a passionate pilgrimage, a dreamer of dreams. A mysterious figure on a pillar would slip easily enough into that canon. It was true that a tone of stark nihilism would be new if it remained untempered by melancholy, but it was not clear to him how he could sustain that for very long. He was a man to whose eyes the tears sprang naturally; nobody that placable and moody could keep up indefinitely an unblinking desolation. Sooner or later a heart would have to beat. And besides, if nihilism and desolation were to be his new bailiwick there was no ignoring how the battlefields of Europe, still treeless and littered with shards of bone, had usurped that space with a directness far more terrible than anything he could hope to achieve.

  Meanwhile the unspeaking sea rushed away sternwards. What solace was imaginable for this lack of purpose? The frisky heart still beat, the soul had died. Lose yourself, he said silently as he stood up and tucked away his propelling-pencil. Theatres, dogs, clubs, motor-tours round old haunts, races. There’s plenty to do: lose yourself. Look at these blank horizons concealing even blanker continents. Are you not already lost?

  But when he thought nobody was looking he laid an ear to the after-mast and heard the voice of the wind exactly as it sounded in the telegraph poles in the lanes around Kempsey. Their voice was constant, neither rising nor falling with the gusts which shook the grasses at their foot, coming from close at hand and infinitely far away. The mast, too, ignored the buffets of tropic air the bows and bridge threw over their shoulders. It spoke instead in the long paragraphs of tradewinds as if the ship itself were tuned to catch the underlying music of this sphere. On the way back to his cabin he thought of another story which had caught his fancy in that buddhist-book Frank had sent him. Well – not really a story at all, more a snippet of dialogue between the inevitable monk and someone called Unmon. It went as follows:

  Monk: What happens when the leaves are falling, and the trees are bare?

  Unmon: The golden wind, revealed.

  Tommy-rot, of course. Yet in the next-to-nothing this exchange contained there was maybe enough to catch at the mind as it slithered through, and just for that instant one thought one saw the wind … Similarly with masts and telegraph poles, he mused as he let himself into his cabin: for a moment one had the impression of a something, the least and most banal of whose manifestations was mere blowing.

  He was surprised to find Steward Pyce standing by the table in the act of polishing the silver hip-flask with a yellow duster.

  ‘Please excuse me, Sir Edward,’ he said, setting down the flask and pocketing the rag. ‘I’ve just obtained your sample for you and finding you were out I took the liberty of leaving it.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I see. Thank you, Pyce. Where’s it from this time?’

  ‘The bows, sir. As requested.’

  It only then caught Edward’s eye that he had left his microscope out of its case on the writing table where he had been using it for an hour after breakfast. He had not even slipped its cover over it. Well, he thought, that cat’s out of the bag.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a man of science as well, Sir Edward. Pardon my saying.’

  ‘May I not be if I wish?’

  ‘Of course, sir. I only meant, well, a composer of music’s a bit different from, well …’

  ‘Do you know of the Russian composer Borodin?’

  ‘No, Sir Edward, can’t say as I do.’

  ‘He’s an excellent composer who earns his living as a chemist. I believe he’s Professor of Chemistry at St Petersburg and has textbooks to his name which are standard reference works. Just because one’s a composer it doesn’t mean one has to be a dunce at everything else. Nor, for that matter, does it mean that when one’s not actually composing music one has nothing else to do and no other life.’

  The Steward looked astutely at the microscope as though he had only just noticed it. ‘In a manner of speaking, sir, you work with two kinds of instruments, then?’

  ‘Rather wittily put, Pyce. Good afternoon.’

  (‘Bleeding microscopes,’ the Steward said later to Hempson in the Linen Store, ‘who’d ever’ve thought it?’

  ‘Might easily’ve been trombones with this lot,’ said Hempson darkly.

  ‘True enough. But what does a composer on holiday want with a microscope? Up the Amazon? I ask you. And looking at ruddy sea-water. Sometimes I reckon you and me’re the only sane ones aboard this ship, Hemp. That new doctor now, Ashe … To think I tried to tip him the wink about one of my own passengers. Crikey!’)

  In token of the latitude sunset that evening was of a tropical unrestraint. Alone on refulgent tinfoil RMS Hildebrand, the Brindled Marsh, the minor moth, headed for several minutes directly at the settling orange ball as though to be drawn down over the horizon by its dazzle. The ship’s insect passage amid splendours of immensity presented itself as though to an ascending eye which, taking in more and more of the wrinkled metal across which it crawled, lost belief in the very existence of the microscopic beings it contained.

  Yet they were there, and busy. Some steered on the bridge, others laboured deep below in a timeless hot clamour uncaring of setting or rising suns. Some in spotless jackets were arranging wine-glasses upside down on white linen, some were playing musical instruments quietly for people drinking cocktails on the after-deck. Many were dressing for dinner: the outward-bound travellers wishing their lightweight suits did not smell quite so pungently of camphor, the tourists who would be returning self-conscious of the obvious newness of their clothes. Several people were kissing; two waiters were making love in a locked pantry. An aviator past his first youth was talking to a lady painter just quitting hers. An English composer was in animated conversation about a stables in Newmarket with two red-nosed men, one of whom wore the tiny ribbon of a decoration in his lapel. Two middle-aged ladies were finishing a rubber of whist: they had been playing since three o’clock that afternoon. Their male partners had initially done all the laughing and exclaiming while the ladies had throughout played as if against one another alone, with steely affection.

  As it inched its way across the globe this insect – which was due to cross the Equator the next day – shed a trail of sound which streamed behind it and thinned out over its wake. Engines and laughter and the clatter of crockery; exclamations and discreet gasps; saxophones and the hum of a hundred conversations. And in a small room near the Library, the modulations of a lady giving an audience of six her recollections of missionary work in Peru. These sounds leaked from porthole and hatchway, boomed from ventilation ducts, filtered through jalousies and blew off the decks like dust, swirling away past the Red Ensign on the stern and carrying with them the crack of that flag’s material. A small fraction of this audible smoke contained the Captain’s observation to one of his officers on the bridge: ‘Aye, they’re a restless lot this trip. Not the usual “out-and-backers”, Ned,’ referring presumably to the passengers at his own table, only one of whom was booked to return. ‘That Elgar, now. Seems a bit down. Surprised he didn’t fix himself up with a companion before he came, famous chappie like that.’

  ‘A bit of stuff, you mean?’

  ‘Inelegantly put, Ned, but yes. A floozy.’

  ‘Well, he still can, can’t he? There’re enough on board.’ An even tinier fraction of noise was contributed b
y the empty Madeira bottle which rolled from under Dr Ashe’s arm off the edge of his desk and broke on the rim of a stout metal wastepaper bin as his orderly tried to raise him and get him to his bunk.

  And before long the sun had outrun the little moth and left it still crawling across a benighted ocean. But soon enough it put on lights and transformed itself into a glow-worm which twinkled in the middle of nowhere, for as long as nowhere took to pass, leaving behind it in addition to its fume of sound several dozen empty magnums of champagne variously bobbing and sinking amid a scatter of unravelling cigar butts. For an era of horror and attrition was behind and an age of whoopee had dawned. (How the Melodeers twiddled and thumped!) Much later that night the aviator told the lady painter, who was leaning against a davit, that the brilliant white star she was looking at was not Sirius at all but – since it was in Orion – Betelgeuse. The lady painter replied that she was glad to hear it since she happened to know a poem about Betelgeuse, part of which went (and she spoke it softly in the voice which is used for decks of ships at night in the middle of nowhere):

  On Betelgeuse

  the gold leaves hang in golden aisles

  for twice a hundred million miles

  and twice a hundred million years

  they golden hang, and nothing stirs

  on Betelgeuse.

  And the aviator was canny enough to guess that whatever else it was about it was not Betelgeuse. So he refrained from pointing out that Betelgeuse was actually a star believed to be three times hotter than our own sun, an inferno in which were assuredly no leaves, golden or otherwise. Instead he leaned towards the davit and slipped his arm around her waist, saying nothing at all but gently touching his moustache (once, twice) with the other hand.

  Whatever eye it could have been, seeing the little Hildebrand from far enough away to observe it only as a glowing speck whose motion amid all that nothingness was barely apparent, it might have reflected on the oddness of that ship’s monthly passing – now one way and now the other, year after year. Who besides labourers and fortune-hunters (which two categories might well include office-boys and businessmen) was it ferrying between Britain and Brazil? Who were these chatterers with so many changes of clothes who danced and played and drank their way across the ocean and back again, leaving bottles in their wake? For every day portholes opened and glass rained into the sea: wine, gin, brilliantine and ink; Shippam’s paste and Bovril; chlorodyne and scent. Most contained dregs and air. Now and then one with a tight stopper held a safely untraceable obscene message or mock cry for help. For that matter what were the circumstances in which a pair of ladies’ shoes, a clarinet and a hundredweight of Devon butter plopped into the swirling cavitations of the twin bronze screws and vanished for ever? What were these loungers in deck-chairs, these players of deck-quoits and shuffleboard, these readers and flirters thinking to do by coming all this way in order to steam between walls of jungle into the centre of a continent about whose very position on the globe many were quite unsure? ‘Get away from it all,’ was the stock answer people generally give who habitually take as much as they can of it with them. ‘A change of scenery,’ a lost and demoralised old composer had explained to his daughter when she asked what he hoped to find: the change of scenery commonly believed to procure a change of heart, regeneration.

  The shipboard ritual staged at the moment of crossing the Equator and repeated each voyage was both comprehensible and absurd to Edward when he watched it for a short while next morning. It was the first time he himself had ever crossed the Equator, come to that, but he hardly expected to feel very different and neither did he. The freakish pantomime involved Captain Maddrell receiving aboard King Neptune and his Oceanic Court and several passengers – presumably volunteers – were given haircuts and ducked, thereby becoming initiated into something called The Ancient Order of Shellbacks.

  Half of Edward knew what was happening and inwardly applauded this evidence of reassuring British eccentricity. The other half pretended disdainfully not to know, forgetting his own extended fancy-dress role as the pirate Nanty Ewart which he had once played with a friend’s three sons. This fantasy had been sustained for some time and had involved skirmishing with wooden swords in the shrubbery wearing a piratical head-scarf and with curtain-rings in his ears, as well as writing letters to his ‘crew’ away at school in pastiche seventeenth-century English. ‘All harmless enough,’ several onlookers said as they watched the Hildebrand’s Purser in spirit-gummed beard, tattered green robes and a trident. ‘What jolly fun.’ But probably none of them were quite sure why they thought so nor, if dressing up were such a sterling part of the national character, exactly what necessary act was being performed. Afterwards everybody trooped down to luncheon in high communal spirits like participants in a sport whose unwritten rules are never infringed and which no foreigner will ever hope to understand.

  Tomorrow evening Pará. Next day the Amazon. Soon Kate and Dora and several other passengers would step down the gangway onto the lip of a continent and be swallowed up whole. Edward noted the change of atmosphere in the ship as soon as the Equator had been dealt with. Something was ending, something else about to begin. He spent the afternoon, notebook on lap, staring towards the invisible mass of land which on a despairing rainy day he had on impulse made his temporary destination. Why not? he asked the equable ocean across whose surface flying fish skittered from the onrush of the Hildebrand’s hull. Why not keep inventing destinations? Spend whole years in deck-chairs voyaging across one ocean or another to places which have no particular existence beyond their names and varying skylines? The time would fill itself, the clock cease to matter and be replaced by an arcane system of ship’s bells. There would be good eating and drinking and an endless succession of convivial strangers, none of whom – God willing – would know any thing about music. There would be diverting things to do in ports of call: weird conveyances (had he not just tobogganed down a mountain four hundred miles off the coast of Africa?), peculiar foods, extravagant customs …

  And suddenly he realised how horrid the entire notion was; that he didn’t in the least want any of those things, that he wished at this very minute more than anything else to be walking the lanes of Worcestershire or sitting beside the Severn or the Teme. Never mind that it was late November and probably wet and cold. He saw a thousand pictures of his rivers in all weathers and none was unfriendly, none without its pleasurable echo. Even the saddest and most sodden afternoon had its charm, the hat left off to spite the doctor’s orders, hair plastered with rain, coat heavy, dog soaked but everything rinsed through by whatever it was in immemorial weather which dissolved foolishness and brought one always to the essential things of a life. The thoughts, the continuities and all that made a clutch of years look whole, even the smoke from a cottager’s chimney or the wraith of a smouldering bonfire on the other side of a hedge (since wood-smoke was the incense of nostalgia): such things lay as solid as a range of hills behind mist. This was known terrain and had been walked and walked and yet could still surprise with an aspect never glimpsed before, then in sunlight, now in rain. What for this running to the ends of the earth? What had the ends of the earth ever done for him? They were no more mysterious than the planet’s ghost whose sad perpetual strain could be heard by laying an ear to the splintery wood of a telegraph pole. Certainly they could be no less known than the patterns of starlings which arranged themselves across wintry skies over fields and spinneys: boiling clouds of ex-reptiles descending on and then deserting no particular tree, taking with them their single garbled tune.

  More than this, the spinneys and the lanes and the cottages had about them faces and incidents and glimpses of incidents. Somebody’s hands in bright sun twirling as they wound in a kite-string; a muddy hem of skirts ascending before the eyes as someone was handed up into a carriage; a dog rolling down the bank into the River Wye. The echoes of mouths now stuffed with soil; the echo of the strange four-note whistle he had invented to announce at the gate
his arrival home and which had found its way into Enigma; the echoes of an existence. What did the blank and dazzled equatorial ocean know of such sounds? Across which raw continent did another Severn flow? In desperation a life might be abandoned, jettisoned over the rail of a ship as unwanted on the remaining voyage; but it could scarcely be sought elsewhere, still less transplanted. He recalled a visit he and Alice had made to Capri early in 1907 during which they had visited Axel Munthe whose English neighbour had just spent twenty years of his life trying to create a Home Counties garden around his white and shuttered villa. They had sat one afternoon in mild sunshine amid lavender bushes which were the wrong species, being a little too tough and spiky rather than soft and blousy, looking across lawns which ended in blue space. The greenhouse was subtly the wrong shape, the roof being a fraction too steeply pitched. The rockery and sundial were perfect. Since everybody knew they were sitting in Capri there had seemed little point to this painstaking fake but their host glowed. ‘All the pleasures of an English garden without the awful weather,’ he said. (‘All the pleasures of the English vice without the law,’ Edward remarked later, having been introduced to a ‘gardener’s boy’ who was as much an actor as the garden was a set.)