Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘It would make a splendid club, you know,’ he said as he surveyed the shelves of books and the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. ‘If you allowed smoking and had some decent sporting prints on the wall.’

  But she was not to be provoked. She went serenely over to a group of shelves and said ‘There!’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘No, Edward, but you must look at them. You don’t know what is here.’

  He went forward and scanned the shelves in silence which he suddenly broke with small exclamations. ‘Good Lord!’ ‘I say!’ ‘That old thing!’ ‘Well, really,’ ‘Well really,’ he said again, ‘you have been to a lot of trouble. Or somebody has. Time must hang heavy out here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ But she already knew she had made a mistake and that in all probability there would be no way of undoing it.

  ‘I mean imagine the waste of energy. All this time you’ve been collecting me.’

  He had never before seen such a gathering-together of his works and of things concerning his works, his life. Or rather, he had; and he had supposed Alice to be the only person in the world thus to have filed away everything. He had hated it but was never able to dissuade her. It smacked to him of hagiology. There was something infinitely distasteful about the thought of anyone dogging his footsteps with a pan and brush, as it were, gathering up with eager impartiality a symphony, a grocery bill, a yellowed review, a letter, his nailclippings. He was diminished by it even as he felt she had demeaned herself. Had she not written poetry? Evidently the man of flesh had not been enough. Why had he never been allowed to get away with merely (merely!) being a composer? But no, it had also been his daily duty to connive at the creation of his own legend, at the erection of some ridiculous monument to himself constructed from torn scraps of paper, a broken favourite pen, interviews he wished he’d never given: a jumble of the ephemeral and the lasting which mocked both. He’d never understood it even as he grudgingly recognised it as one more of the terms she created for disciplining his moody and vagrant Muse. Thus had she tried to temper his dartings between apathy and excitement, between months of inertia and burstings of energy, and on days of precious sunshine had kept him in his study. Edward the intermittently industrious had been swept up in the Elgar industry and was carried along helplessly by it to meet head-on the incoming bills as they poured across his desk.

  ‘It’s damned cheek!’ he heard himself say, his voice all but lost in the spacious library. Then louder, ‘You had no right, Lena.’

  Surprising herself, she remained calm. She had never dreamed he might one day see what she had so painstakingly assembled but now that he had she felt not the slightest cause for shame. ‘I had a perfect right, Edward. I have merely been doing what any decent librarian would do – and, I’m sure, has been doing across Europe and America and everywhere else.’

  ‘There’s no privacy, none.’

  She realised belatedly that he was not really addressing her at all, that the vehemence in his words was left over from another time and another place. ‘You’ll find nothing private here I assure you, Edward. Nothing. All that is here is public property and has been printed and issued. There are no letters, no personal things. I’m sorry if our collection gives offence but you’re a famous composer and your music is now public property. That is the price of fame.’

  Somehow her words quietened his alarm. With the unfamiliar cries of brilliant birds which rolled and twirled in the vines outside the window he felt an unexpected drifting-in of an earlier mood which had reminded him both reassuringly and gloomily that something essential remained untouched, unassuaged, unexpressed by an entire lifetime’s work. He looked again at the shelves of material: a corpus, a cadaver. What had this fossil past to do with him? Whom did these Jurassic strata concern?

  ‘Well, it’s silly to quarrel over such nonsense. I suppose I should be congratulating you, Lena. As a librarian you’ve evidently spared no pains. There’s stuff here I’d long forgotten about.’ And as if to make amends he drew out a part-song and glanced through it. ‘My God, what utter rot! I’ve vague memories of having sweated blood to finish this and I don’t believe it made me a penny piece. But that goes for pretty much everything else you’ve got here.’

  He put it back but not before she had glimpsed the attribution of the text. She was perfectly certain he had not been describing his wife’s poetry. How that woman posed a challenge to the conscientious Elgarian! An apparent spinster of forty had swept a struggling, unknown composer of nearly thirty-two to the altar of the Brompton Oratory. Or was it the other way about? She, finally, was the greatest enigma of them all. Lena could sense her puzzling ghost even here, standing at the shoulder of this peculiar man. Was it through her or despite her that he appeared to remain so identifiably the youth she remembered from Leipzig and Worcester days?

  ‘What a strange place,’ he was saying. He had moved to a window and was looking out. ‘All the way up the Amazon to find what I most wanted to leave behind.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not your fault, Lena. Just circumstances. Fate. The business of Fate is mockery rather than tragedy, and I feel mocked. Let’s talk about old times, we’ll be on safer ground. Or maybe not … Do you think I should come to your moth-man’s lecture?’

  ‘Of course, unless you have something better to do. He’s very entertaining. He liked you, you know; he really meant for us to have dinner together afterwards. Are you free?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I must be. Anyway I like the idea. Perhaps he can chill my blood.’

  ‘Then we shall dine the day after tomorrow. Forgive me, Edward, if I … That young lady you were with this morning. Should I invite her too?’

  ‘She’s merely a fellow-passenger. She gets off here so I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing much more of her. She’s an artist. Name of Molly Air.’

  ‘An artist? Oh, I should meet her.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she’s very famous at present, she’s just starting. But she’s interesting and estimable and undoubtedly serious. She’s come to paint the Amazon.’

  ‘Unusual. And she’s single too? You shall introduce us, Edward. I insist.’

  ‘I do admire you, you know, maintaining your cultural outpost.’

  ‘Do you? Well, I too am serious. You and I have both felt the world shudder. At all costs civilisation must be handed on.’

  ‘Must it? If you remember, it was that civilisation which caused the shudder in the first place. It was kings and kaisers who fought the war, not Brazilian Indians. I couldn’t believe it was happening. It made everything horrible beyond belief. I loved Germany and the Germans yet practically overnight one had to treat them as an enemy. Incredible. It was the Germans who’d been my greatest friends and champions. They recognised Gerontius when the English were still turning up their noses at it. How could I suddenly repudiate Hans Richter and Richard Strauss or publicly despise the country of Brahms, Wagner, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach … my God, the list is endless.’

  ‘Of course, Edward. That’s what wars do. They are wholly insane.’

  ‘Half my close friends were German or of German and Jewish descent. Frank Schuster, August Jaeger, Alfred Rodewald, Henry Ettling. Brodsky at Manchester. Fred Kalisch the critic. Friends of Brahms and Strauss and Tschaikowsky and Fauré … Is an artist to shut himself away like some sort of national hermit? To this day I believe it counted against me. After the general braying about how I was supposed to epitomise England – whatever that meant – there were some filthy little innuendoes about my keeping the company of Huns. You must excuse me, Lena, but you’ve no idea the beastliness of some of our press. There is in England a disgusting fake patriot they’ve just jailed for fraud called Bottomley who ran a rag called John Bull … Oh Lena, you’ve no idea. That war killed everything.’

  ‘You suppose I don’t know? It killed my son, Edward. Your reputation has survived. And do you imagine we too didn’t have a popular press of our own just as full of hate a
nd lies? Even out here the … the mud and the stink of it came. So what now can we do but try and repair this civilisation so such things cannot be again? Do you think I didn’t come under criticism even out here in the middle of the jungle? That in our echt deutsches Schiller-Institut I was keeping so much music of Edward Elgar, British nationalist composer? I was telling people “Listen – only listen: he has great things to say even to us Germans who already have so many famous voices.” And if that was true in September was it suddenly to become a lie in October? No. Nobody comes with honour from such things.’

  She had spoken with such a crescendo of passion he was shaken out of his own mesmerism, perhaps not by the sting of her reminder but by her accent’s decay and incoherence. Harsh words between old people in a quiet library, not directed at each other’s head but hanging above like an evil smoke. It was enough to remind him of a characteristic which he had shed from the bland image he retained of her memory: that she had always been as forceful as he. And for the first time he could clearly recall her attraction, a pungency of temperament when her age and sex had most presumed demureness and self-effacement. This sudden reminder of how she had been in the streets of Leipzig and on the hills near Worcester bumped up against the next forty years which he had lived – it now felt – within a penumbra of correct behaviour and then the long shadow of habit.

  ‘Well, we’re not at war still.’

  ‘We? Us, you mean? Oh Edward, I’m … I must apologise. It’s so difficult. So much time has gone by and yet … I have to remember I’m talking to a man whose biography is on these shelves. I last remember you as a boy, a young man, and now … a biography.’

  ‘And I’m not even dead, you mean.’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not that. But all those facts: your life, our friendship – why not be truthful and call it our romance? – all of it doesn’t really count, not against what you’ve done.’

  For it was strange, she thought, how easily when talking to certain artists or reading their biographies one forgot the greatness of their art. One might read about Schumann, for instance, and his life at once degenerated into a pathetic domestic tally of hypochondria and misery. ‘Towards March,’ one might read, ‘these depressions and aural disturbances intensified to the point where Robert was consulting Dr Carus almost daily leaving little time or energy to spare for composition. Nevertheless he managed to fulfil his commission on time and the Gewandhaus Orchestra began rehearsals. But almost at once it became apparent that Clara was pregnant again with their sixth child and simultaneously his old alarming symptoms began to re-appear …’ For a time we’d been thinking, yes, the usual human problems; we’d even begun to feel slightly superior since our own were not as a rule so doom-laden. But then we suddenly returned to our senses: that ‘commission’ was the Manfred Overture – or the piano concerto or whatever – one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century music. The saga of an artist’s life was on the whole an irrelevance and the public’s voyeuristic interest in the circumstances of creativity so easily and vulgarly overshadowed the creations themselves.

  In the silence he watched from the window the clouds in the huge Amazonian sky which seemed to cast never a shadow into the garden below. Two urubus were just visible in the alley which ran beneath one wall of the grounds. Ugly, verminous-looking creatures like turkeys with mange, they were tearing at a dark lump of something, bouncing and sidling before the approach of a gaunt dog. There ought to be some way out, was the idea which filled his mind. There ought to be some way of shucking off this longing for ancient times and grieving for the present and expecting from the future at least an unspecific truce. It was no longer clear where one lived nor from what one drew sustenance.

  ‘What a strange place,’ he only said once more.

  ‘It is and it isn’t. If you look at everything like the travellers’ guides do then it’s nothing but contrasts: the modern port, the aboriginal huts; the Opera House, the open sewers; the trams, the bony horses; the newspapers, the illiteracy … That’s how they go on. But the more one sees of Brazil and countries like it the less strange such things seem, the more ordinary. I don’t understand why everybody thinks Progress must be instant and uniform. Anyone can see differences, they don’t have to make them significant by calling them contrasts. Did not Ruskin look at your Industrial Revolution and complain that the railways had filled every green valley with belching smoke? Yes, I’m sure it was Ruskin.’

  ‘My dear Lena, I didn’t mean … When I said “strange” I was thinking of rather a different thing. But it doesn’t matter. Is there anything particular I should do or see while I’m here?’

  ‘There are trips. You might go to the Tarumã Falls but they’re really only worth seeing in June and July after the rainy season. It’s quite dramatic – not the Falls themselves, they’re ordinary – but when the Amazon floods the water here rises forty feet and the Tarumã Forest is drowned. One must go by rowboat through alleys between the tops of the trees … What else? You could see the giant lilies at Solimões: I believe they’re called Victoria Regina lilies so you might feel a patriotic urge to visit them? No? Then there’s bathing in Chapéo Virado at Mosqueira.’

  ‘I don’t know. None of those sounds …’

  ‘Or we have here in Manaos, believe it or not, a museum of coins which is the world’s fifth largest.’

  ‘Only the coins in my pocket have ever held any interest for me.’

  ‘Or you could stay here and talk to me.’

  But within half an hour he had taken himself off to the Hildebrand where he made a mistaken attempt at a Journal entry. He soon crossed out the three lines he had written and rang the bell for Pyce. It was high time for something sensible and down-to-earth: time for a closer look at the river-water in which the ship floated.

  The Hildebrand meanwhile had taken on the aspect of a hotel. Of the passengers who had not already disembarked most were away all day on various trips and diversions; and of those some had even engaged a room ashore for a few days. Molly Air was still living aboard in a lingering fashion, and Edward presumed she had come to an arrangement with the Purser, retaining her cabin for a per diem consideration until her berth was needed. He half wished she would suddenly vanish. He didn’t want to witness any erosion of her determination, nor the process by which the clarity of plans laid in the subdued light of England began to cast ominous shadows under a tropical glare. In such ways did simple grand designs for a life fetch up against the world’s small hard edges. He had no doubt her need to make economies was pressing; he was also sure that her determination to push on to Iquitos had been made shakier and more fateful by the unforeseen Fortescue and his presence in Manaos. Now and again a low mooing could be heard from behind the town. This would rise to a distant bellow and then fall abruptly to a moan before stopping altogether. Molly, who happened to be on deck with Edward during one of these moments of animal agony said proudly, ‘That’s Forty.’

  ‘I wondered what it was. Is he testing his machines?’

  ‘Only their engines. Tomorrow they’ll fly them. Why don’t you come and watch?’

  So next morning they took a tram to the outskirts and walked down a dirt road to where, across a cleared expanse of ground, a distant white pole stood with a wind-sock on it. The road was potted with the half-evaporated puddles of yesterday’s rains. From the mud at their edges thick clusters of white butterflies rose in clouds around the walkers as they passed.

  ‘It’s not like this in Worcestershire,’ said Edward good-humouredly, dashing butterflies from his face and endeavouring to sweep a forward path with his cane. But they were distracted from the insects by a sudden howling and in the distance a bright yellow biplane took off, banked steeply and made a circuit of the field, coming back low along the road over their heads.

  ‘Oh I say!’ Edward had his face to the sky, the single hind wing of a butterfly stuck unnoticed to the sweat on his temple beneath the panama hat.

  ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ shri
eked Molly into the din as the machine passed over them trailing a cool draught which smelt of burnt castor oil. The wings waggled briefly in salutation before the aircraft landed and jolted to a stop two hundred yards off. It remained stationary for a moment, the propeller ticking over and flashing in the sun before it revved abruptly and cantered once more into the air. This time the pilot put his machine through some more strenuous paces and Molly and Edward had long since reached the modest club house when it taxied up. The engine stopped, the racket died and Fortescue jumped down, his face dark with burnt oil except for the outline of the goggles he swung in one hand. His hair was blown flat.

  ‘Hullo old girl,’ he said, ‘Sir Edward. Come to watch the fun?’ He was wearing a battered leather flying jacket done up to the neck with a lump at its chest. As he spoke he opened it, allowing his binoculars to swing loose.

  ‘What’s the view like from up there?’ asked Edward.

  ‘Grandish. One can see the occasional tree. But I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, I’m afraid. At this stage we’re just testing to see if the crates have been put together with all the bits in the right order. Up to now we haven’t had much time for sight-seeing though we’ve definitely noticed the odd hazard peculiar to these parts. The Rio Negro’s the most deceptive piece of water I’ve ever flown over. From up there it’s like a sheet of black glass. Impossible to judge your height unless there’s a boat below leaving a decent wake. Otherwise it’d be all too easy to fly straight in. There’re these damned vultures into the bargain.’

  ‘What happens if you fly into one?’ asked Molly, looking hard at the plane behind him.

  ‘Depends where it hits and when. If it smashed your prop just after take-off it would be a bit tricky. I did hit a swan once, up over Cambrai. It was pretty messy. Some of it stuck in the radiator but most ended up in the cockpit with me and my observer.’

  On the hard-standing beside the club house an engine started and a second biplane – this one painted light blue – taxied a few yards before opening up to full throttle and taking off. A low storm of dust and pebbles swept back towards the onlookers.