‘Oh, I don’t know,’ came with a deprecating laugh from the dark. ‘Anything you like. I hadn’t got that far.’
‘You mean … you mean you were making it up?’ Edward sounded aggrieved.
‘I was under the impression you wanted a mysterious tale for the dinner table. I’m sorry if it fell short of expectation.’
‘It was absolutely gripping as far as it went. Do you mean all that business about disguising his name and everything … ? Lena! Had you or hadn’t you heard it before? Was it true?’
‘Oh, perfectly.’
‘Put it this way, sir,’ said the Reverend Moss. ‘Let’s say yes, there once was a man haunted by his past and yes, I did perform an exorcism in Santarém. The person concerned, Major Blackham if you like, was convinced of a horrible incubus and was certain it was useless to get on the first ship back to England to escape his curse. He knew he would only carry it with him. It couldn’t be outrun; it had to be induced to leave him by one means or another.’
‘Well, and did you induce it?’
‘I most truly believe so. Something … happened during the exorcism which, since it involves sacred matters, I’m not in a position to divulge. Such rites, involving as they do the innermost matters of a man’s soul, are not to be used as fodder for anecdotes. However, yes, I’m convinced that whatever it was – the Squatter – left Major Blackham’s shoulders and returned whence it had been summoned. I can tell you seriously, sir, that I don’t believe it’s ever to be found here in Brazil rather than anywhere else in the universe. Whatever home it has is nowhere as friendly as an earthly jungle; no.’
‘And the Major? What became of him?’
‘He returned to England in due course, I’d guess what novelists call a changed man.’
‘Under a changed name, it seems.’
‘Exactly. To be truthful I’ve quite lost touch and am not sorry to have done so. There was something contaminating about – but here we are.’ They had reached the wharf. Before them lay the Hildebrand, her elegant hull pierced with lit portholes. ‘Well, Sir Edward, may I ask if your kind offer still stands for tomorrow? I would understand if you felt you’d already had rather too detailed a look at the local lepidoptera.’
‘Absolutely not. Come tomorrow morning as convenient. The earlier the better. I don’t suppose, Lena, you’d be free later in the day?’ The bulk of the ship which blocked off the view of the river, glittering with lights and evidently alive as it was, spoke of imminent endings.
‘Of course, Edward. How can you ask? Do important things happen every day in Manaos?’
From the top of the gangway he watched them drive away. Far above the bellows hood of their caleça the vast notice in glimmering capitals sang out over the ship, across the river, across Brazil itself: ‘PUSSELS CRONIFER GmbH’. Only when he had actually got into bed did a thought which had been gradually forming suddenly articulate itself with shocking distinctness. Had Lena’s late husband been one of those mercantile barons of inconceivable wealth whose marble palace was built on the proceeds of brutality and slave labour? A veritable Marchcroft Manor of Amazonas? Impossible to imagine somebody of Lena’s fineness of soul condoning either the vulgar or the atrocious. Yet what darkness did these primitive jungles exhale which might not in time infiltrate a man’s best nature? There again, sterling fellows like Miles Moss appeared quite uninfiltrated. And so one would hope (thought Edward to himself as he dozed off ); son of the vicar of Windermere, native of Birkenhead, ex-member of the Leeds Clergy School … Assuredly the down-to-earth quality of that background was proof against all manifestations of sinister waywardness … He slept.
But that night the lights of the Villa Mirabelle shone for many hours, casting their rectangles onto the dew-laden grass outside and bringing insects thudding and rustling at the mesh screens which guarded the open doors and windows. Lena played to herself as she still did sometimes, more frequently of late since her husband’s death. The sounds of the Viennese classics flew out past the reflecting eyes and quivering wings, drifted down to the pavilion in its spinney of jacaranda and reached in faint tones the slipping waters of the Rio Negro. The music spoke to her not of any past, not even of her own; it was simply something immutable, something which had always been there, which had sustained and would sustain her passage through the world. She no more thought of student days and her dazzled aspirations at the Conservatoire – not even with Edward’s presence in town to evoke that precise period – than she remembered learning to walk. She played to calm an immense and present anger whose very incoherence was a source of distress to her. In consequence she did not play very well, having only half a mind for the music. Her eyes read the notes or her fingers remembered them. Had she been knitting she would not have dropped a stitch; but between the patterns formed by her hands and the raging conversations in her head would have been no connection.
No apparent connection, certainly. Except that as she played on, the music’s orderliness gradually gave shape to her rage and bit by bit this fury, which seemed squatted on by the accumulated weight of forty years’ rumination, at last moulded itself into simple outrage at the unfairness of his victory – or better, of his victoriousness. How dare a man enjoy worldly success yet court sympathy by pretending to have failed, all the while basking in the implied virtue of self-deprecation? It was too much; no, it was downright gross. It was difficult to give anybody their correct measure of public recognition while keeping back enough affection still to be privately touched by them, and Edward expected – demanded – that this difficulty be overcome. For he was above all one of those men who simultaneously yearn for praise and despise it, whose desire for approval is implacable even as they reserve the right to belittle their admirers’ qualifications to bestow it. As Lena’s fingers played to an audience of moths she furiously addressed a figure, an Edward who looked neither quite like the young man she had known nor the elderly gentleman with whom she had just dined.
‘You’re a baby, Edward, you always were. A brilliant baby, a genius baby; but a baby in your clamour for attention, attention, attention. And you always got it, too, although it suits you now to pretend otherwise. All your venom about no-one ever taking any interest in your music, that bitterness with which you allege that had you had the least encouragement you could have composed Caractacus ten years earlier: it’s all the invention of a baby.
‘How do I know about that? Well, dear Edward, not only did I once know you rather well and see you on your home ground but I have spies in Europe who have always kept me informed. There! Be shocked if you will. Talk about traitors within your own camp and the rest of that silly rhetoric. You’ll never know who they were, who they are. Some of your favourite Germans, I’m afraid. But it’s further evidence that right from your cradle you had people interested in everything you said or wrote or did, from your mother onwards. Far from letting your music emerge unsuspected from behind a garret door to make its way painfully in an indifferent world, you made very sure that everybody was privy to each step in its creation.
‘It’s not very gallant to say I lie … Then I shall simply be more gallant and say you’ve conveniently forgotten how you collared anyone who would listen and make them stand beside the piano to hear your latest big tune or your musical impressions of a bulldog swimming as you fumbled your way towards a complete work. Especially women, Edward, if you’ll remember; especially women. You always did have a string of admiring females in tow, didn’t you? Beginning of course with your mother and ending … and not quite ending with your wife. They were vouchsafed glimpses of your creations in exchange for adulation which you accepted serenely or with temper tantrums according to your mood. The point is that no-one minded. On the contrary they felt privileged, flattered, overwhelmed, just as they were by your long walks which might turn out jaunty and funny or morose and confessional, full of your dreams for the future – as if we didn’t also have one or two dreams of our own.
‘So what emerged from all this? Wha
t but that classic myth of the romantic artist – the lonely dreamer of the reedbeds taking dictation from the wind, young Ted Elgar up from Worcester whose genius was for ever being snubbed and thwarted by some upper-crust musical establishment in Cambridge and London? But it remains a myth, Edward. Oh, there was probably enough truth in it to make it worthwhile embroidering a little; but you embroidered a lot. Publicly, too. Remember that interview you gave in Strand Magazine back in 1904? Certainly – I have a copy here in our remarkable library. You claimed to have written wind quintets as a youth during the morning services in St George’s at which you played the organ, and then to have performed them later the same day at the Leicesters’. Entire wind quintets, Edward, thrown off during the sermon? We might have believed it of Mozart, but not of young Ted Elgar the famous slow starter who for a good few years hardly finished a single piece of substance he started. Of course I’m not saying those weren’t years of great musical fertility, that you weren’t sketching ideas which later became most if not all of your major works. What I am saying is that put that way it didn’t sound quite portentous enough for you, not quite enough like Florestan and … and Eusebius triumphing over the Philistines. No. So you went beyond embellishment. You invented a myth for yourself in which you, at least, believed fervently. But I’m afraid those of us back then who saw at first hand your uncertainty, your nervous prostrations, your tyrannical slightedness, your mysterious illnesses – we were under no illusions.
‘But the one thing which of course made it all possible for us was that you so clearly had genius in you. I’d never met it before in its raw state and nor have I since, but it was as unmistakable as it was unfocussed. Contrary to what you prefer to believe even people who disliked your music could perceive it, which was not guaranteed to make them like you any better. For those of us who loved you it was precisely what saved the whole thing because it gave us the stamina to see how funny and affectionate you were underneath the touchiness.
‘Why do I speak like this? Perhaps because I’ve watched – all right, spied on, then – your life from afar for so many years I’ve earned the right to intimacy. Perhaps because I’m shocked to see you so dreadfully unhappy at a time when you might be sad but tranquil, even contented. You don’t at all like the person you’ve become, this person you’ve created for yourself, because in your heart you know he never existed. There once was a deeply sensitive, intelligent child, an artist to his fingertips, and he was a dreamer of dreams. But it took him many years to find his proper voice, which he found neither earlier nor later than he should have done. Unfortunately he never could accept that simple fact because it conflicted with the desire of the baby in him to have from the very first the adulation due a genius. So he largely invented the enmities, the machinations, the cabals, misunderstandings, snobberies and the rest as a palatable way of explaining to himself why the symphonies weren’t pouring from his pen as they had from Haydn’s and Mozart’s at a far younger age and faced as they were with even worse penury and social ignominy.
‘But … no, I’m afraid I’ve not finished yet. There’s another aspect to your unhappiness, one connected with us poor women in your life and especially with Alice … Of course I dare speak about her – don’t be pompous. Lady Elgar is as much public property as Sir Edward. For genius or not, you actually needed us and especially her in order to function as a composer. Oh, not for our hugs and kisses; not for tremulous encounters in summer-houses while the sounds of croquet drifted through the shrubbery from distant lawns. It was for something far less romantic, more basic than that, more … babyish, I suppose. Dear Edward – it was because of that I resolved not to see you again. Quite simply, I didn’t want to become your mother. But Alice – well, Time’s wingèd chariot was bearing down behind her in a way which made it all the more possible and right. She was exactly what you needed: an older woman who believed utterly in you. To make doubly sure, she had good reasons of her own for wanting your success: she badly needed to be able to cock a snook at all her horrid snobbish relatives for marrying beneath her – as they saw it. And your success is what she got. She made you work when you didn’t want to and she praised practically every note you wrote. She ruled your life and she ruled your bar-lines. Suddenly it all came right. Triumph. Enigma, Gerontius, The Apostles, The Kingdom …
‘Ah, but we’re still conniving at your myth, aren’t we? Our version suggests that Alice stepped into your life, took over the running of it and almost at once your now unfettered genius was free to take off. But it still wasn’t ready, was it? Nearly ten years went by before Enigma. Ten more years finding your way until you yourself were over forty, working through your Froissart overture and all those oratorios. What were they, now? The Black Knight and Lux Christi and King Olaf and The Banner of St George and Caractacus – heavens, one might say one detected a curious obsession with chivalry and its silly lance. Can it be the pure-hearted young Edward riding valiantly out girt about with the armour of a good woman’s love to do battle with the Philistines and in quest of a knighthood?
‘A cheap gibe, you say. Oh well, perhaps. But you did defeat the Philistines and you did get your knighthood and much else besides. However, there was a catch to it all; one which even now contributes to your unhappiness. You began to wonder how strong your genius was if you had to rely so heavily on your wife to enable it to function. Hence that nasty vice between whose jaws you were caught. You needed Alice with a need beyond mere love but at the same time you resented her for it. You demanded her approval but that uncritical adulation of hers was infuriating. Convincing or not, though, you had to have it.
‘And now she’s gone and I’m bitterly sorry for you, Edward, because I know you and your genius and I know you’ll have lost faith. In your heart you’re convinced your Muse died with her and that willy-nilly your creative life is over … And you’re left with what most human beings would dearly, dearly love: not one but several works which will ensure the immortality of your name and which will give pleasure and be discussed long after you and I are dust. But that still isn’t enough for the baby Edward, is it? Not content with being Elgar you still want to be Beethoven. Why? I truly can’t imagine. I don’t understand it. Ah, now you’re looking resentful as well as furious. You’re going to say that with the fickleness of taste I could never be quite sure you may not be Beethoven in two hundred years’ time. But you know you won’t be. Brutal truth? Your range is too narrow, your output too small. Your famous heart is maybe too much with you – indeed, I’ve never known anyone, Edward, who so carried about with them their autobiography. And while you may have changed the musical history of England you haven’t touched that of Europe. It’s Stravinsky now, and Schoenberg and Webern. A sad irony, that. By sheer historical misfortune you led the renaissance of English music from the tail end of a European style.
‘You know all this, of course; but not content with an astonishing achievement you’re eaten up with resentment that it was not still greater. So now you renounce your own works and music itself. It’s all horses and theatres and impresarios in bars. It’s flying machines and microscopes and chummy diversions. The crusading knight has at last gone over to the Philistines. The child denied the sweetshop declares his loathing of sweets. Oh Edward … My God, it’s so unfair of you. And the unfairest thing of all is I suspect I know what you’re thinking after this impassioned outburst of mine – some knowing masculine vulgarism about forty years’ pent-up unrequited love. Well, that isn’t it either. I’ve had far too interesting and amused a life of my own – a family life at that – to have carried on such a proxy affair for even a tenth of that time. No, I think you can’t recognise the nature of the upset you induce in people when you pretend to belittle the whole of music as if you owned it and your achievement as if you hadn’t earned it. You think they take offence at your tone or are worried about having provoked a famous man.
‘But do you know what I think of as I hear you maintain your name will perish even as you know perfectly we
ll that it won’t? I think of my own Eusebius and all those like him who had no time to do anything and are already handfuls of earth. I think of my son who was so pretty and lively and sulky and who too liked long walks to the villages in the jungle round here and days drifting about the river. I think of my boy who frisked in the sun for nineteen short years and whose bodily remains are now lying beneath some hideous mass gravestone carved with sententious quotations about his unnamed name living for ever. That, Edward, is what I think when I hear an old man’s self-pity which is merely an overweening egoism in disguise.’
The piano had long ago fallen silent. Insects still clung and battered themselves on the meshes at door-and window-frame but now no sound passed out beyond them except a woman’s soft crying. The red and silver beads of their eyes saw a thousand reticulated versions of the room with a thousand identical tiny figures sitting at pianos with hands pressed to faces. On chitinous legs for hours they clung and stared, bouncing slightly; and at their backs was the tumultuous silence of all Brazil.
Later still she watched from her bedroom window as the night grew pale and that invisible current of dawn flowed across the earth which makes sleepless hours retreat into the shadow of their own unreality. And as she looked it took shape, the mountain, its foothills rising from misty jungle and ascending through opalescent regions to where the tip burst and sparkled and flew its freezing banner. It grew in her, unchanged, untouched by rhetoric and argument and imprecation, the whole immovable vaporous pile of it until for the first time she imagined it crumbling, dispassionately viewed the inward collapse, the slipping to ruin of the entire bulk. It shocked her, exhilarated her, shocked her once again.
‘Ah Edward, Edward,’ she said. ‘Damn you.’
Miles Moss arrived punctually aboard the Hildebrand and spent most of the morning below, he and Edward dabbling happily with slides and stains. Later both men went ashore together and lunched at the Club before taking leave of each other with regret. The priest returned to convince Captain Maddrell that a memorial service for the vanished doctor would on second thoughts be neither appropriate nor well attended while Edward made his way to the Schiller Institute. It was, he realised with some surprise, his last day in Manaos. Tomorrow morning at seven – or so Steward Pyce claimed – the Hildebrand would begin the return journey to Liverpool. He was somewhat unclear as to how he had filled the last five days but the time had gone quite pleasantly and he had met one or two capital fellows – the Rev. Moth (for such he had privately re-named the man) most assuredly being one of them. A knowledgeable chap who had turned out to be no mean microscopist himself, hardly the typical priest, not at all earnest or dowdy or sidling. Edward thought that Brazil certainly had a way of showing people in an unexpected light; practically no-one he had so far met on this trip had been quite what one might have supposed. He did not extend this line of thought to the point where it would make the prospect of a winter-bound England loom dull and forbidding. His mind was that of a man for whom the mere excitement of the journey home eclipses his knowledge of what arrival will mean.
Gerontius Page 32
