Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The sight of the Institute, severe behind its quiet shrubbery, did something to subdue him. It suggested having to be serious, it hinted at confrontation. Lena’s mood was not easy to assess, either, as she greeted him in the hall. The air was cool and withdrawn, faintly scented with beeswax polish and what seemed to him burnt jam. Their footsteps on the marble staircase echoed grittily in the afternoon hush. On the half-landing Schiller’s bust stood outlined against the creepers at the window whose leaves, on this shadowed side of the house, were still hung with drops of sparkling rainwater from the midday storm.

  ‘It hasn’t been long enough,’ said Lena in her office. ‘Such a ridiculously short time. I don’t just mean too short for you to do justice to Manaos or whatever. I mean it’s too short for us to have overcome our awkwardness. Forty years are impossible to undo in five days.’

  ‘I don’t know that “undo” is a happy choice of phrase. Presumably neither of us would wish to undo the bulk of our lives. One doesn’t willingly unravel oneself.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said unhappily, ‘of course not. I only meant …’ After a pause she asked, ‘What will you do now, Edward?’

  ‘Eh? Why, go home. Oh, I see. In the future? What will I do? I don’t know. What will you do? What will anyone do? Grow a bit older, maybe, and then die. Such at least are my plans.’

  ‘You’re infuriating, my dear Edward, but since it’s exactly the infuriation you’ve always been able to arouse I find myself fond of it. I meant – and I shan’t apologise for presuming things I can’t know – I believe I detect in your whole manner and everything you’ve said since your arrival that you no longer have much faith in your future creativity as a composer. I don’t know if I should commiserate with you or whether after a lifetime such a respite comes gratefully?’

  But he remained silent, staring at the tips of his pipeclayed tropical shoes with the faint puzzlement of a child still uncertain whether it’s being encouraged or scolded. Finally when the silence had extended itself in all directions he said, ‘Whatever you may think, I shan’t miss it. It’s a hard and anxious business confronting blank paper all one’s life. But I still work, Lena; I don’t think you realise how much I work. I’m always travelling around England, conducting here, conducting there. I’ve made a lot of recordings too, you know.’

  ‘I know that, Edward. We have most if not all of them in the Library here. I think … I think all I wanted to say was what an exciting phase in your life you’ve reached and how very glad I am for you. Truly I am.’

  ‘Exciting? Travelling in cold trains to underheated halls to conduct my wretched music for diminishing and ever more elderly audiences? Exciting, reading sniffy reviews of such events – when they’re reviewed at all – by hack journalists only too eager to write me off as out of fashion, faintly embarrassing, downright vulgar? I suppose you could say it was excitement of a sort, but then you could say that about an attack of apoplexy.’

  ‘I didn’t make myself clear. Dear Edward, that side of things comes to all artists who have the misfortune to live long enough to see themselves become unfashionable. It must be infinitely horrid and depressing, not least because it’s fickle and unjust. No, when I said exciting I specifically meant the marvellous future which the gramophone holds out to people like yourself. I should think in your case it’s the perfect invention. You like clever machines and it offers you the prospect of a kind of immortality no major composer has ever had. So far as I know you’re the first to have conducted his own work for the gramophone, certainly to have conducted so much of it.’

  ‘H’m. Probably because most aren’t up to much as conductors of their own music.’

  ‘Of course. But you can do what no other composer has yet done. You can leave a legacy of performances which will show for ever your special talent.’

  ‘And what is my special talent?’

  ‘I’d say it was for giving interpretations of your music which are always convincing yet no two of which are ever the same.’

  For the first time he smiled. ‘Well, bless you for that, Lena. I always used to say I wanted my stuff to go elastically and mystically and I’m afraid I haven’t much faith in modern conductors. They haven’t the heart for that sort of thing, most of ’em. Mystically doesn’t mean religiosely’ – he drew the word out with an exaggeration which heaped contempt on sententiousness of all kinds – ‘it means an awareness that the music is only half expressed by the actual notes. Of course. And as for elastically, well, it should go with a brisk snap and never rigidly. A thousand fluctuations in tempo but much too delicate to write a full-blown tempo rubato into the score. And obviously those fluctuations will depend on one’s mood at the time of the performance, they’ll change from day to day. That’s the mistake they keep making, in my view, these modern conductors. They’re so keen to make a name for themselves by producing their own definitive versions of great works – X’s Ninth, Y’s Parsifal, Z’s Brahms’ One – they simply turn out beautifully-crafted fossils. Whereas I know one must re-live a piece of music each time one plays it and in consequence no two performances can ever be identical and still less definitive. Nor should they be. The idea’s cretinous.’

  ‘Then that, Edward, must quite simply be your work from now on, to leave as much – no, all of your music – in different versions. That way there will never be any doubt, no matter which way the weathercock of fashion swings. Anyone will be able to hear that your music is still alive, still beating. It’ll be an immense task for you and it’s highly creative, only maybe a slightly different form of creativity. I can’t tell you how I long to hear your records. They will arrive here packed in sawdust and I shall take them out of the crate and blow the shavings off them and put them on the gramophone in there. And then I shall have you to the life with me in the room.’

  ‘Ah, Lena, you’re trying to encourage an old man,’ he said, not displeased. ‘I admit I’d had some such project at the back of my mind simply because I’m so despondent about the future of my music. At least after I’ve gone there will exist reminders of what it could sound like. I can sometimes foresee only too clearly how my stuff will be treated in future. By the time they can bring themselves to play me at all they’re going to linger over it, damn them. They’ll make it wallow in horrid nostalgia because they won’t be able to think how else to play it. They’ll wring out every last drop of purple, just see if they don’t.’

  ‘Of course I hope you’re quite wrong but it’s all the more reason for making your records now.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Something permanent.’

  She heard herself saying ‘Well, as permanent as anything ever is’ quite sharply, as if impatient with herself for having played yet again into the willing hands of his hubris. ‘One no longer has quite the same unshaken faith in the durability of such things – neither masterworks nor the civilisations which gave them birth. You find yourself despondent about the survival of your music whereas sometimes I see only a vision of a more general dust. After all, even Beethoven’ (how impetuously the comparison came to her mind!) ‘even Beethoven himself wrote in sand and on the same beach as the rest of us, only rather higher up so his marks may remain a while longer than the rest. But one day I believe will come a freak tide and sweep the entire beach clean: Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Goethe, even Schiller and Edward Elgar. Everybody. Just a smooth sheet of sand blotting in the sun like a mirror going opaque. Time for a fresh batch of scribbles. Or for none.’

  ‘You take a bleak view of the future I must say,’ said Edward, clearly disturbed by her unexpected usurpation of his usual role.

  ‘Do I? I don’t think so. Civilisations have been coming and going now for a great many thousand years and no doubt they all had their Edward Elgars. Things move on: it’s in their nature. Not that they’re going anywhere. Just the universal wheels turning, and as they grind so the dust falls out. You and me.’ She was speaking now with a subdued passion and not without a trace of triumph as well.


  ‘According to you, hardly worth bothering to make a mark in the sand at all.’

  ‘I think wisdom may consist in being able to say that without the least tone of injured self-esteem. I’ve never myself quite learned that trick. I suspect the proper aspiration would be to cross the beach without leaving a single footprint.’

  It was the solidity of the room and the things in it one noticed, he was thinking, to say nothing of the house itself. Scattered about this building were more than a ton of Bösendorfer piano, tens of tons of books and records. The plaster busts of Beethoven and Bach, the bronze Schiller on its plinth, the buckram volumes of music, the marble clocks, the dense tropical hardwood which sheathed and enclosed as with armour – a veritable mountain of stuff implying a continuity more enduring than any single one of its elements. The whole was a fully-equipped compendium, an outpost of European culture. Remote maybe, and dwarfed by the surrounding continental expanse; but like an amoeba caught in a drying puddle it could survive almost indefinitely in a cystic state, containing within its hardened cell walls the essential nucleus, the fragment of the original seed which would swell and crack and propagate anew when the climate changed and water returned.

  ‘I think Beethoven’s bit of beach will survive as long as there are ears.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ she said. ‘Ears change. No-one now can read Shakespeare without explanatory notes; one day he will be accessible only to scholars with dictionaries.’ A moted shaft of sunlight, thin as a pencil, somehow found its way through the leaves and a shutter chinked by termites to fall onto her lined cheek like a death-ray. ‘I don’t share your confidence, Edward, I only wish I did. I’m too conscious always of time and of what lies out there.’ She lifted a hand wanly towards one shoulder without moving her face. It pointed to an entire compass of directions.

  ‘Savages? The human hinterland? What do they care about Beethoven, you mean?’

  ‘The war changed everything, didn’t it?’ she said. ‘We came quite close to wiping out our own civilisation. Really quite close. Then where would the ears have been? There’s something exhausted about us, had you noticed? Nobody who’s energetic ever commits suicide. And what they have’ – again her hand raised itself – ‘is energy.’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed, they haven’t. They’re either standing stark naked on the river bank with their mouths open or they’re asleep in hammocks. I’m not saying I blame them, only that the casual observer searches in vain for signs of anything other than terminal lethargy.’

  ‘That is energy. While we’re frantically working to exterminate ourselves they’re pleasurably occupied in multiplying. History is very much on their side. And so are numbers, believe me.’ A third time her veined hand indicated more than the window over her shoulder. ‘I’m not talking just of Brazil, naturally. Mercifully we shall neither of us live to see it but I can envisage a time when we have cancelled ourselves out and they with all their numbers and natural resources will simply come and cart away the entire beach in order to build concrete cities for themselves. Then it’ll be their turn to come and search the jungles covering London and Berlin for our lost temples and speculate about our priesthoods and our tyrannous élites. And they won’t be – what is it you like to call such people? Yahoos? Of course, Jonathan Swift. No, they won’t be yahoos. They’ll simply be the next civilisation. And there’ll be others treading on their heels. It’s no cause for despondency, after all. No-one loses more than anyone else. Or gains. If we’re despondent we have only ourselves to blame for inventing hopes and pretending we haven’t got eyes. London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, New York … They’re all Babylon.’

  It was profoundly irritating, he later thought on his way back to the wharf, to be lectured on transience at the age of sixty-six by a person not significantly younger and then to be told that any annoyance it might cause is merely due to a lack of the wisdom which accepts. Presumably if one had been cut off for the last quarter-century in the middle of primaeval rainforest one’s mind would have become a little rusty and peevish, but all the same he did think with a bit of effort on her part …

  ‘But of course dearest Edward,’ she said before he left, ‘when all’s said and done I’m dreadfully envious of you. It’s foolish, isn’t it? Especially after all I’ve been saying. The fact is, no matter what may happen when we’re dead we are at this moment alive and you have left a deep mark on the beach. You’ve made such beautiful scribbles. You’ve had a voice, and practically no-one else has one. How lovely to have had a voice. I can’t be more myself than I am and yet I’m merely lost in the inarticulate crowd. But practically any single bar of your music is utterly you and nobody else in this universe. Ah, damn you, Edward my dear, dear man. Damn you.’

  Hours later and she was still weighed with remorse for having been able to spare him her previous night’s inward tirade only by replacing it with gratuitous meanness. Now and then a peppery self-justification lightened her mood, telling her that news about the fleetingness of human affairs was fairly stale and enjoyed widespread acknowledgement. But this was soon supplanted by a return of shame and regret that, after all the years, she had been able to find only tones of upset and tokens of injury with which to greet the man she most envied and admired. And loved, of course, whatever that meant. Maybe after all it had to entail not becoming abject, not allowing the other all the spoils. How stupid it was, though, two old people heading for their respective graves unable for so many reasons simply to embrace, to bid each other an uncomplicated farewell.

  But such reflections came too late now. Tomorrow he would go and she would never see him again. From her pavilion she might glimpse the Hildebrand’s smoke dissipating in the morning sky, for she didn’t think she had the courage to go down to the port and wave. And in a couple of months’ time when she heard again that melancholy C echo over the town among the vultures and know the ship had returned her hand would tremble slightly as she took the passenger list from Raymundo and scanned it eagerly for the name which would not be there, not ever be there.

  She wrote a strange sad note and despite the lateness of the hour took it down to the port herself, handing it in at the gates for immediate delivery to the ship. Steward Pyce brought Edward the envelope with his morning tea at six-thirty but he on seeing it laid it aside unopened for when he felt a little stronger (as he put it to himself ) and then, in the general excitement of departure, forgot about it.

  For in the hour which preceded the Hildebrand’s sailing the despedidas were in full swing and the decks and gangways crowded with people who, regardless of their nationality, all seemed imbued with the spirit of Brazilian leavetaking. Young English clerks returning home on furlough, several wasted by past fevers, came on board accompanied by girls whose tropical dewiness was in as much contrast as the brown of their skins. Fans jigged violently, straw and linen hats flapped, for the heat which already bore the urubus so effortlessly up above the town bore equally down upon the revelries of farewell. Edward, watching it all from his usual eyrie of Captain Maddrell’s private piece of deck, spotted Molly and Fortescue coming up the gangway. Knowing quite well they could only have come to say good-bye to him he groaned at having to leave his undisturbed vantage point and contend with heat and people.

  ‘You surely haven’t come all this way just to see an old buffer off ?’ he greeted them. ‘I think that’s very noble of you.’

  ‘We couldn’t possibly have let you vanish without another word,’ said Molly. ‘I had to say how grateful I was for your company on the way over. You were a great help and encouragement and I shan’t forget it.’

  ‘I was? Well, young lady, I’m very pleased if so. I may equally say you both cheered me up. I’m now somewhat dreading the return voyage, to tell the truth. I feel I haven’t the energy to make new friends and it’ll be rather a gloomy passage. But never mind, I can think of you in the sunlight of Manaos,’ and he waved a hand at the light which streamed at all angles upon the ship.

 
‘I’m off to Iquitos the day after tomorrow,’ Molly said. ‘I don’t know if I shall ever get there; I may see something too interesting on the way. But I’m definitely moving on.’

  ‘Ah. You will paint well, won’t you? Don’t do it too much from the life.’

  ‘Not too much from the life?’ She was laughing.

  ‘You must watch and watch to get the details but you must work from the imagination. I commend to you the words of William Morris: “No man can draw armour properly unless he can draw a knight with his feet on the hob, toasting a herring on the point of his sword.” There, that’s enough advice.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Good luck to you both in your intrepid pursuits.’