She glanced again towards the notice board on her way back upstairs and could not help visualising a large announcement that Sir Edward Elgar, world-renowned composer of Der Traum des Gerontius and Enigma-Variationen, would be here in person to address the Institute. Remarkable as the Reverend Miles Moss’s work was in its own way her notice of his lecture now seemed a painful reflection of the trivialities which measured out Manaos’s year, to say nothing of her own life. When one encountered the real thing, she told the marble stairs beneath her ascending tread, there was no mistaking it or its way of humbling the common round. And all at once on entering the Library she began to feel afraid. What had she done? And with what appalling temerity? How could she presume a link between herself and this famous man after a gap of forty years? There could be nothing left of that boy with the wet furrows in his quiff and the bony wrists which endearingly had made all his sleeves appear a half-inch too short, as if at twenty-six he were still growing. From that summer onwards their ways had diverged, his on his lonely and distinctive trail up the mountain, hers to marriage with a Lübeck merchant who had a penchant for ‘intellectual’ girls. In that long meantime of a life’s work he had been taken up by royalty, had known and been admired by Richard Strauss, Paderewski, Hans Richter, Fauré, Kreisler, Chaliapin, Siegfried Wagner … the list of fellow-immortals was endless. In that same meantime she had been a wife and a mother, not displeased to shine a bit on evenings when obliged to play hostess for Otto to Brazilian Government officials keen to court Pussels Cronifer GmbH and its influential trade links. Otto’s solidity, as well as his slight resemblance to Bismarck, had implied long-term power more convincing than that of the nouveaux riches rubber barons with their slaves and shenanigans and fountains which sprayed claret. And after dinner the guests were impressed and charmed when their hostess allowed herself to be persuaded to the piano and played with accomplishment and feeling, if to their private taste a little severely.
She suddenly glimpsed herself as exactly that creature she had just now claimed not to be in her letter: an earnest clutcher in a torrid backwater of the cuffs and hems of visiting Parnassians. What more humiliating in its way than that the shelves in the bay between the Library’s two great windows should be devoted entirely to Edward? For years with the help of a network of cultural spies in Europe she had built up a comprehensive collection of books, articles, and cuttings about him. Here were reviews, programmes, gramophone records (on most of which he himself was conducting) and as many editions of each score as she could lay hands on. As she looked at it all in the half-light of the jalousied shutters she could think only that those few feet of shelving represented a distance which could not be measured, and that to pretend otherwise was an impertinence.
By mid-morning she had attended to the various light duties which fell to her. In the present season they mostly concerned arrangements for various Christmas festivities. She then found herself doing something she had almost never done. She wrote a note to the Institute’s Secretary, who generally spent the mornings at home, to the effect that she was suffering an attack of migraine which regrettably would prevent her attending tonight’s recital. Magdalena felt sorry for the Italian pianist, a sweetly pretty girl who had come out with the escort of a female cousin to visit relatives and had consented to put together a programme at short notice. The indisposition of the Institute’s Director would be regretted on all sides but it would in no way affect the concert’s success. Nevertheless she wrote a second note, this one to the girl herself, apologising for her inevitable absence and wishing her luck. Then, handing Raymundo both envelopes, she returned home through the glaring streets, already finding it easy to play the part of a sufferer (for her conscience always exacted the penalty of a touch of the malady she was claiming). If she appeared to be made a little unsteady by the sun, a little carefully enclosed by the shade her parasol cast, and if there was an unaccustomed paleness in her greetings, it was in response to a feeling across the temples which might yet turn into the migraine attack she had never in her life had. By the time she reached the road which gave access to the Villa Mirabelle, Magdalena von Pussels had indeed the makings of a bona fide headache.
The high whitewashed walls and wrought-iron gateway were planted squarely across the end of the road, saying to the visitor exactly what Herr von Pussels had said to the architect: This is one street which goes no further. When he had bought the lot there had been some vague idea that the road – which in those days petered out in a waste of vines and scrub – might eventually curve around so that the slight eminence on which it was built would afford a view over the port area. Herr von Pussels, with the help of an assiduously-purchased majority of the town council, had put a stop to that. The road would indeed continue, but as his private drive. It would not curve around to the left but continue straight ahead through the gates before dipping down to the right. Here, just over the brow of the knoll, the view was away from the town, across the river and out over the endless forest undulating to the violet horizon. There was something decisive in this plan’s exclusion from the panorama of the least sign of human existence unless one considered as such a barely-visible handful of greyish shacks on the far shore and the various craft which drifted like twigs about the river. The villa faced the future, there was no doubt of that. It was not intimidated by the prospect but looked out with confidence across a continent which would in due course be tamed by trade. At the bottom of the knoll the grounds, which were not very extensive, ended at the water’s edge and a small igarapé seeped at right angles into the main stream, marking the other boundary.
Magdalena reached the shelter of her verandah the requisite two minutes before the midday storm, which betokened an inner clock made accurate by years of habit. Tumults of cloud throbbed and piled and prodigious blue voltages made the furniture in the suddenly dark house leap out of its shadows. The jungle, the river, the grounds outside disappeared behind a grey pelt of water. Amid enormous noises she went calmly about the house removing her gloves, examining an envelope on a side table, going upstairs to change. By the time she had done so, her brow cool with eau de cologne, the clouds had been knocked into fragments by their own violence and were hurrying off to re-group over some other horizon, leaving an innocent sky beneath which steam was beginning to rise from paved surfaces.
After her maid had served her a light almôço in the dining room she announced she was not at home to callers and would spend the rest of the day in the pavilion where she would like tea brought later. Taking dark glasses and a volume of Heine Magdalena walked down the now steaming grass to the spinney of jacaranda which concealed the pavilion. This was her favourite spot on the entire premises. Being a little lower than the house its view over the Rio Negro was less dominant, and since it was also further round the edge of the knoll one could, by walking a few steps, just glimpse between the trunks of some carnaúba palms the outermost favelas and hovels of Manaos’s floating docks. It occurred to her that if she tried really hard she might even pick out the varnished masts of the Hildebrand, but she made no attempt to do so from the same impulse which had taken her two safe streets away from the waterfront on her journey home.
She was upset at being upset, puzzled and resentful of herself for being so easily reduced to indecision by a shock. Maybe there was no-one of any age who was not susceptible to the unforeseen arrival on a wharf of a person from the past, but it hardly helped to be reminded of it. In any case Edward was not precisely a person from the past. He filled several shelves in the Library which grew a fraction with nearly every mail packet. However, she had noticed that the new material was steadily becoming slighter and there was of late a tone in the few articles which mentioned him suggesting that as far as England was concerned its national composer was safely dead. The critics, many of whom she recognised as being comparatively young men eager to establish their names, implied that while they conceded he was the dominant figure of the so-called English musical renaissance this had occurred s
o long ago now that he ought to be content with his canon-isation and let serious attention turn to newer music written in the abrasive idiom of the times.
Such articles would make her gesture impatiently, sucking in her breath at each heretical liberty; but this role of champion hid within it an obscure and illicit relief. She could deal with the idea of a master who had earned his acclaim and vanished up the mountain, becoming a surname on the programmes clutched by posterity’s audiences. But the unheralded appearance of the Cello Concerto three years previously – and the arrival of the score in Manaos – had shaken her. It seemed unfair or not quite right that a man so obviously past his prime should suddenly produce an original work of great emotional power which would, without a moment’s hesitation, join the canon of Haydn, Schumann, Dvořák and Tschaikowsky. What was least comforting was that he could achieve this without being part of any tradition; and this was what the music critics themselves most disliked. Unable to assign Edward to any useful category they more and more wrote of him with slight distaste as a maverick. ‘An aloof figure’, ‘A lone but unignorable example’, they said. ‘Neither teacher nor leader nor guide’, they complained, going on to write of a dedicated artist with a self-regarding singleness of aim. Well, she herself could vouch for the self-regard.
The sky above her bower had by now returned to a mid-afternoon normality. The massive parade of clouds drifted on and on full of subtleties of colour and implied stillnesses. On distant undulations of the forest within the range of a watcher’s eyes but still unmarked on any map, their passing shadows moved: prints of nothingness sliding over acres of sun. It was so exactly the eternal view from this pavilion that Magdalena no longer thought in terms of clouds and shadows but of an ever-changing texture. The entire thing stretching from the tips of her shoes to the horizon was a living entity, twitching and shedding and breathing like the hide of a sleeping animal. It never looked the same twice; it always looked identical. Now her mind had been so painfully jarred it easily produced the memory of a similar effect she and Edward had remarked on a walk in the English hills that long-ago August. They had stood at the top of a down, she rather out of breath and trying to pick burrs from her long dress, and watched the clouds drawing their shadows across the mild fields below. That had been gentle, pastoral. It had been a time for quoting poetry – at least, for Edward to quote poetry: something about being meatless and moneyless on Malvern hills which she took to be an elegant way of apologising for having forgotten to buy her luncheon.
And once up on those hills, what had her host wanted to do? He had produced a roll of sticks and cloth, which she had until then supposed to be some kind of collapsible stool brought in case she should feel tired, and assembled it into a large kite. Getting this aloft with its rattling tail of newspaper screws had involved his running round and round in his braces, staring up at the string he held so that he twice stepped on his cap and jacket thrown onto the grass and once nearly knocked her over. It was that afternoon which had marked a turning-point. She told him it was all very well giving himself today the airs and graces of a dazzling future, but it was hardly consistent to expect her to collude while she was forced to witness displays of a complete want of seriousness. He had fallen silent, grumpily like a chastened schoolboy, before insisting that kite-flying was serious, certainly a good deal more serious than Hanon’s bilgey exercises for piano virtuosity.
‘Bilge? What is bilge? How unfair you are, Edward. And do you not have violin exercises so one day you can go back to Adolphe Pollitzer and say, “There. Nothing more you can teach me. I will tomorrow pack my bags and study with Ysaÿe”?’
‘No. I’ve given up all idea of a career as a violinist. And even if I hadn’t I certainly wouldn’t be wasting my time doing boring old exercises on a perfect kite-flying day with a very pretty girl for company.’
‘How unfair you are, Edward.’
‘Oh, can’t you feel it, Lena? Today’s a day on which tunes are made. Exercises aren’t for people with tunes in their heads.’
And such things kept coming back as she stared out, forty years later, across Amazonas until her mestiça maid brought tea on a tray, a glass of guaraná and a Japanese fan. Later that evening she moved restlessly about the villa, going from room to room picking up and putting down again silver-framed photographs of her husband and son. Moths and other insects of the night outside drummed against the mesh screens. She lifted the piano lid, played a C while standing up, put the lid down again.
She dozed fitfully that night, falling into a heavy sleep shortly before dawn. Her maid woke her at the customary early hour, however, enquiring after her headache, and she took a glass of lime-juice over to the windows. There in the fresh light of morning stood the mountain, blotting out a large part of everything. Its upper snows glittered, its pinnacle was pure and uncompromising. It told her nothing she did not already sadly know, but it did so with calm insistence. She was here and it was there and in between lay a gulf into which protests and negotiations and recriminations fell and dissolved. They could never reach the mountain but would fade from inanition and irrelevance even as they were vehemently yelled. The miraculous alp had simply sailed up in the night once more and dropped anchor in her back garden. The rays of light fled in a scatter from its prisms and leaped right round the world. Three toucans with bills like lumps of yellow timber flew out of the jacaranda thicket and, with the sunlight gleaming off their wings, passed through the heart of the mountain and diminished away over the river. Magdalena followed their whirring dots until they merged with the debris in her retinas and lost themselves in Brazil.
Reaching the Institute half an hour earlier than her custom, as one who has made a complete recovery, she found no letter on Booth Line stationery waiting for her. The piano recital had been a great success, she gathered; she expressed pleasure. The Reverend Moss would come round later for a brief word; she said how charmed she would be. Up in her office she sat at the desk and heard the papery whirrings of a moth trapped between a window pane and a blind. The flutterings grew more frenzied as the heat rose and presently, after a few spasms, stopped altogether. Still she sat on. He had never received her letter. He had received her letter but thought it just another piece of importuning by a local dignitary. He had received her letter and found it offensive. He had not guessed her identity. He had guessed her identity and … and was thinking about it. Altogether it took quite a long time before she was able to tell herself to stop behaving like some idiot schoolgirl, snatch up her green parasol with a crawling sensation in her stomach and hurry off down to the wharf.
A spotless cream panama hat moved slowly along a shady avenue, flashing as it left the pools of mango shade and passed through patches of sunlight. At almost the same level beside it progressed a sand-coloured, broad-brimmed floppy hat with a silk band faintly sweat-stained. The faces beneath each – military-moustached and fading English rose – still bore the pallor of a sunless autumn a hemisphere away.
Molly had said: ‘There isn’t a boat leaving for Iquitos inside a week. Until then I’m sure we’ll keep bumping into each other. I suppose now I’m finally here I don’t have to be in a hurry to leave.’
Edward had said: ‘At all events you’d like to see young Fortescue airborne?’
‘And maybe even Sir Edward Elgar safely embarked on his voyage home to where he belongs.’
‘Ah, my dear, I don’t belong anywhere nowadays. According to popular wisdom home is where the heart is and I seem to have mislaid mine.’
‘You may find it again in Manaos,’ she laughed. ‘It seems to be one of those places where hearts inexplicably whizz about. I lost mine here a year and a half ago and I’m not sure I mightn’t be on the verge of doing so again.’
In one pocket of his linen jacket Edward had a sheaf of letters, all unopened. They had been delivered in ones and twos to the Hildebrand throughout the previous day as the news of his presence aboard ran through the English colony, the civic and cultural circles and,
he suspected from the aspect of several of the envelopes, missionary and charity elements as well.
‘Shan’t open any of ’em,’ he had said, and Molly could not be sure whether he were genuinely irritated or secretly pleased by this attention. ‘I came here for a holiday. It’s exactly this sort of thing one wishes to get away from at all costs.’
‘Twenty-four pounds.’
‘Twenty-four? I’m paying twenty-six pounds seventeen and eightpence each way. That’s monstrous. Did you really pay only twenty-four? We ate at the same table and reached Manaos at the same instant … Twenty-four.’
‘You’ve never seen my cabin. It’s not a de luxe Stateroom or whatever yours is called. Besides, I don’t have a private steward.’
‘I’m sure I don’t either. He’s very fly, is Mr Pyce. I believe I share him with half the ship. Once or twice he’s answered my bell admirably disguised as an idiot boy of sixteen … Just look at these. Hounded about the globe. Don’t ever become famous, Molly, it’s the death of everything.’
‘What have you got? “The Britannia Club”, “A Câmera Comércio do Manaos”, “O Pais”, “As Notícias” – those two sound like papers, don’t they?’
And before that day was out two Brazilian reporters had come trotting up the gangway together, scowling at one another and each trying to find Sir Eduardo’s cabin first. He went to ground on the Captain’s patch of private deck, drinking iced guaraná and wondering why, now that he had at last reached this legendary place, he didn’t quite feel up to going straight ashore. It crossed his mind that it would be amusing, having come all this way, never to set foot in Manaos but to remain aboard the Hildebrand for the entire five days of its stay, looking at the town over the rim of an ice-cooled glass. He might even start a fashion. Next year he could go to Samarkand or Timbuctoo and turn back on reaching the outskirts. Thus he would make a late name for himself as an eccentric traveller who had once been an inveterate sight-seer but who now could not abide arrivals.
Gerontius Page 26
