‘It’s what she wants,’ explained Fortescue unnecessarily. ‘She’ll be back, won’t she?’ He glanced sideways with uncertain fondness. ‘Everybody upriver returns to Manaos.’
They said their good-byes in a very English fashion amid the general exuberance. The last Edward saw of them was their heads bobbing down the gangway past oncoming porters crowned with luggage. He watched the increasing frenzy for another half hour, heard a bugle sound for all non-travellers to go ashore. Suddenly a brass band of cockaded Brazilians, which had been forming unnoticed among the comings and goings on the quay below, struck up Land of Hope and Glory. Using a low bollard as a makeshift dais a conductor wearing a band-master’s uniform complete with frogging and white gloves energetically danced at the water’s edge. They played with immense verve, rather accurately for the most part and in the key of F. Edward was taken completely by surprise and experienced a rapid conflict of emotions. First he wished they’d stop, or at least change the tune. Then he wondered why it was in F and whether South American brass were differently pitched. Finally he found himself admiring the utterly un-English rendering of the over-familiar tune. Had he been able to make himself invisible he would have stayed to watch. As it was, though, he caught all eyes on the quay below staring up at him, the raised arms and pointing fingers, and realised this was a deliberate tribute. With a gesture defensive, submissive, vaguely acknowledging, he retreated hurriedly into the day cabin behind him. There he heard the piece through to the end, mopping his face with a handkerchief.
But it was not long before the band had switched to something he didn’t recognise and he judged it safe to reemerge. He was surprised to find it had moved a little further away – no, it was the ship itself now perceptibly opening up a widening ditch of water into which the loops of the bow mooring-ropes splashed before being hauled aboard. A cheer went up from the onlookers on the quay echoed by the passengers lining the rail. A forest of hands waved, pale, dark, bare, gloved. A few streamers criss-crossed the gap, sagging at the ends of their trajectories, to be grasped, held taut, snapped by the Hildebrand’s retreating tonnage. Tears came to his eyes; the business of departures. The ship slid out into the river.
At the last moment he picked out a figure in the shadow of a godown wearing a light dress and carrying a green parasol. Gravely he raised his hand and waved. Maybe the figure lifted a white glove in response, maybe the parasol tipped slightly in farewell; there were too many people, it was too far to tell. The whole scene danced and blurred through brimming lenses. But he went on waving very slowly, regally, a dapper figure alone at its own stretch of rail. A minute later the whole of the town’s frontage was clearly in view, already sliding astern. Across the doors of a massive warehouse, now partially obscured by the boom of an English crane, a sign in blue capitals blazoned out the future, CRONIFER GmbH, it read; ONIFER, FER. Gradually the entire town slipped from sight, the last view Edward had of Manaos being of the glittering dome of the Opera House with above it the specks of vultures turning and turning their ragged vortex.
The Hildebrand was almost in sight of the confluence of the Rio Negro with the Amazon when a noise rising swiftly above that of the engines made Edward look up. A small yellow biplane was diving steeply at them from astern. For one extraordinary timeless instant he thought of an attack, but then the machine pulled up a scant ten feet above the masts and its huge shadow swept the length of the ship.
‘Forty!’ he said aloud, the passing chill replaced by exhilaration. The plane pulled vertically up, fell over on its back and swooped down towards them once more. This time it flattened out astern and wheels skimming the surface of the water overhauled them, waggling its wings in salutation. He caught a glimpse of a figure in the cockpit, face masked by goggles, unhelmeted hair blown straight back, a hand raised. Excitedly he waved back and thought he saw the face turn towards him, maybe imagined a wide grin. Then the machine was past and climbing again. From then on until the ship had reached the twin lighthouses the yellow biplane performed aerobatics in the tropical sky for an audience of eagerly upturned faces. It finally turned away with a farewell wave of its wings and a dark burp of exhaust. He watched it dwindle until like a gnat it was lost among river and cloud and forest.
X
The day after tomorrow it’s Pará again & a thousand miles of the Amazon will have slipped by in a dream. The nights are loud with saxophones & revelry in some of which I’ve taken part. No doubt one day someone – quite likely Maddrell or even Pyce – will remember me as a gay old dog. It has all remained a dream nonetheless. I catch sight of my body in mirrors behind the bar &c doing the most extraordinary things such as standing with its head thrown back & its mouth open, laughing. It seems to have become all moustache and waistcoat. I’m not at all certain who the ‘I’ is writing this Journal nor whether he inhabits that body. Once upon a time, tho’, I’m sure he was a person who thought of dreams as productive. Indeed I cd. even now catch myself writing that dreams are all that matter. How else can anyone live but in the imagination? (A cruise ship is the perfect provoker of such a question – the general silliness has to be seen to be believed. And participated in …). Well, the world’s undoubtedly now & then diverting but it’s awful flat & thin stuff on which to get through threescore years & ten … Sardonic visionary! What if the imagination fails or suddenly defects? With what alacrity the world rushes in to fill the gap with blandishments!
Yet in spite of everything the desire if not the ability to create still does remain. Manaos left its painful reminder. A lifetime’s work (unfortunately not as voluminous as the phrase implies) now beginning to gather dust on library shelves & in the score-cupboards of orchestras & choral societies & I now know nothing has really been achieved, far less assuaged. Did Schumann feel the same before trying to kill himself in the Rhine? I’m not myself about to follow the late Dr Ashe’s brave example, at any rate. Suicide is not in the least unthinkable but there are limits. The Rhine is one thing, the Amazon quite another. The Severn now … but an ever-ungrateful thing to do to such a dear old stream. It would be like killing oneself in a friend’s house.
I see from a copy of Thoreau in the ship’s library that he wished ‘to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering away among the reeds. It will be a success if I shall have left myself behind.’ Even as I write it out I’m shaken with desire, my pen is unsteady with it. But always those bold leaps, those brave retreats from the world are made on paper. Or if not, then they’re made by people who still have energy. But I’m tired & dispirited beyond revival. It’s all work. The imagination’s all work. Nothing is heard except through listening. Nothing is seen except through watching. Nothing is understood except through thinking. Nothing worthwhile ever presents itself. What choice did we ever have but to do this work? It demands to be done. And yet shockingly, cheerfully, most people allow everything to skid off the retina & whizz through their ears like wind, leaving nothing behind. It’s a kind of death. A corpse couldn’t have less say on the paths the worms take through it.
Well, now I too have run out of whatever it takes to deflect worms. My hand in the lamplight holding this pen has grave-marks on it & yet is recognisably my hand. Surely only the other afternoon it trailed idly in the Severn amid summer’s hum or was wrapped in kite string & left with white grooves visible hours later? Harder to bear is having come so close, as close as the distance between pen & page the instant before writing. For as nib touches scorepaper a door slams far away & whatever it really was is cut off & we’re left with pieces of tune wriggling in the foreground like shed lizard tails. We work from haunted memories of nothing (but O! such nothings!).
I’m old. Nowadays great yearnings have little meaning. A life indentured to the imagination is a mad anachronism. No doubt quite rightly, too. Why bow oneself beneath such a hopeless task, so ghoulishly watch that inner passing? ‘It is thy very energy of thought/Which keeps thee from thy God.’ That was what the Angel said to Geron
tius in a bit of the poem I didn’t set. Maybe I should have. Well, having got everything wrong & before it’s finally the worms’ feeding-time I suppose I should ‘use well the interval.’ But the energy is lacking. I & my body seem unable to do anything now but be carried along with the rest of the gallimaufry aboard this ship. We drink & play chemin-de-fer & watch the antics of a self-described ‘roaring cad’ who shrieks a lot (I fear he reminds me rather of some of poor Frank’s more dangerous friends). On & on we go, drinking & laughing & gassing & thus we shall arrive the day after tomorrow in Pará.
And on an afternoon sitting on deck beneath stately ephemera of clouds there came a lurch which was not so much an insight as a momentary shift of viewpoint. He was aware of an absurdity: of an old man wrapped in eminence and wearing his carapace of clothes being carried along within an iron boat, and yet inside his head a bluish freedom – very calm and pleasurable and crossed by vapours constantly turning in upon themselves. Among the things beside linen and metal which so easily came between this old man and his real domain: the roaring of crowds, the roaring of guns, the roaring of cads. On the far side of such confusions rose les barricades mystérieuses which guarded the land beyond, whatever those cloudy ramparts were which now excluded even himself. (The enigmatic quality of this phrase, the title of a piece in Couperin’s 6th Ordre, had always delighted him even though he knew it probably referred to something banally topical in eighteenth-century Paris.) These barricades cut him off from a lost world for which he ached, had always ached. Was he not like Professor Challenger’s pterodactyl which triumphantly escaped from the Queen’s Hall in London and headed south-west out across the Atlantic towards its prehistoric home? (He glimpsed himself in passing, a black and monstrous outline swiftly crossing the moon.)
Intense though it was, this longing was yet quite calm, just as it had been when he was young and as if it could only be met by a lifetime’s devotion. Had not Plato described music as a science of love-matters occupied in harmony and rhythm? The love was correct, he thought, but it was evident Plato had not been a composer else he would surely have mentioned the harsh conditions for the existence of that love: a loneliness which not marriage, not even friendship might dissolve.
What had it been, this life, that work? The loneliness? Nothing, because the longing had remained unchanged, being the only thing which did not diminish and die. Nothing at all. No rewards, no knowledge. Only an inner exile. Somewhere in a land far ahead his wife and his sword mouldered side by side, fortiter et fide. Somewhere in a city astern an unanticipated ghost was still going solidly about her business. And here in his deck-chair the wilderness he carried about him ached even as it enfolded with its view of an infinite emptiness entrancingly decked out. It echoed with a voice such as might be raised from a tower to greet the breaking of day in an ancient land. And from it there rose – by what bizarre alchemy he could not guess – a great fume of pleasure and compassion. This was how it had always been; nothing much had changed after all. From the kite-flown skies of boyhood to the cloudscapes of Amazonas his whole business remained with this longing, the limitless garden, and with the love which flew up before the least footfall into it like minor moths from long grass at dusk.
Afterwards when he tried to recall his trip Edward was vague about the return journey. He could not imagine how he had spent the time, above all the two days in Pará. Impressions came to him of luncheon and dinner tables, but who had sat around them? He had no idea. He still associated that town with Kate and Dora, the ladies of the outward journey. Merely knowing they lived there had given the place a certain flavour in his mind, something to do with gaiety and candour, though he had never again set eyes on them.
But if he could not remember Pará he did have a clear memory of the last of Brazil. The slow vanishing astern of a continent and people he knew he would never see again had stranded him in his deck-chair with a sense of finality as of a door closing on yet another incident in his life which had caused him disquiet. As Marajó Island with its majestic portals of cloud receded he was left poised above three thousand miles of rolling waters, thinking he had failed without knowing what had been attempted nor what might have made success. A revivified Muse? Too foolish. The hopeless conundrum came again which had balked him ten days earlier at the library window of Lena’s institute: that it ought to be possible to slough off the tyrannous cocoon in which one became encased – of yearning for days gone, of distaste for the present and dread of the future. Only thus might an artist enter his domain.
A flaw of the affection, then. A failure of imagining, a despair born of thwartedness – whatever his infidelity he had been judged and still found wanting. And he looked back at the dark stain through which he had travelled as at something seen at more than distance, oneiric, ungraspable as cirrus, scribbled by winds.
*
He crossed the Atlantic in full retreat before steady westerlies. Somewhere between Pará and Madeira, which they reached on Christmas Day, and in a gesture of exorcism he put his Journal in a weighted sack together with Lena’s last letter, still unopened, and threw it all into the sea. It was only later he discovered that his manuscript sketchbook must have been tucked into the Journal, for he never found it again. By then a different abandonment was sweeping the ship with its seasonal roarings.
‘Merry Christmas everyone …’
‘… comfort and joy …’
‘… not goodwill to all men, that’s a mistranslation, you know. It’s to all men of goodwill. Absolutely not to rotters and bounders …’
‘Happy Christmas.’
‘Down the hatch.’
Bemused in the midst of all this he caught sight of a rosy and clubbable Sir Edward in the bar mirror raising his glass in a toast and simultaneously raised his own. A holiday – of course, that was what it had all been. A well-earned holiday, and a very jolly one too.
The Hildebrand finally docked at Liverpool at nine o’clock on the morning of December 31st. The last day of the year was grey, the air held its breath with the sense of oncoming snow.
‘Did you have a good trip, sir?’ asked Tom Shannon, who had been on the quay since seven.
‘Capital, thank you. Rattling good time. Oh-oh,’ he clutched suddenly at the young man’s arm with a gloved hand, ‘steady as she goes. This ground is more mobile than I remember it.’
‘It’ll firm up, Sir Edward.’
‘No doubt. Thank you for meeting me, Tom, it’s most kind. Having to get off a boat like this first thing in the morning with all one’s belongings – it’s like being chucked out of a hotel into the street … I say, is that my luggage? Well hang on, I have something for you.’
When he had passed perfunctorily through the Customs shed Edward unstrapped his suitcase and scrabbled among underwear before handing his escort a blackish lump. ‘There,’ he said proudly, doing up the bag again, ‘there’s a bit of exotica for you.’
‘It’s extremely kind of you, sir … What exactly is it?’
‘An alligator, can’t you see? I agree it’s crudish. The point is not the model but what it’s made of. It’s compressed stuff called guaraná which makes a dashed fine drink.’
‘This is a drink?’ Tom turned the lump uncertainly in his hands.
‘Many, many drinks. You’re supposed to scrape it with a file made of dried fish-tongue to get the powder, so they tell me. Personally I’d be inclined to try a nutmeg grater.’
‘Rather a pity to spoil it,’ the young man said, putting it away in his pocket. ‘It would look well on the mantelpiece. Not the sort of thing everybody has in Knowsley.’
‘Well, just as you like.’
‘Your train leaves in half an hour, sir. You must be anxious to get home.’
‘Oh yes, I suppose I am. Can’t wait to see the dogs.’
At the station Edward surprised himself by finding his ticket, an impressive document since the voyage was inclusive of the rail journey to London. Safely into the guard’s van went the great cabin tru
nk, its japanned expanses no longer as virgin as six weeks before, being scratched here and there and having acquired the crayoned hieroglyphs which only Customs men and porters understand. Once in his compartment he settled his bags and then himself. From beneath the carriage a cloud of steam was drifting up beyond the window making a ghost of Tom Shannon as he waited patiently on the platform. Suddenly Edward sprang to his feet and threw his weight on the leather window-strap. The pane fell with a bang and warm steam eddied in.
‘I say, Tom, ghastly thought’s just struck me. Sorry and so on but I seem to have given all my immediate worldly wealth to a very fly customer named Pyce. You wouldn’t by any chance have a cab fare about you? It’s really too embarrassing. I’ll be all right once I get to the club. I’ll cash a cheque and send you back the money first thing tomorrow, of course. Oh Tom, bless you. Noble indeed.’
As the train laid its plume of smuts across a bleak and wintry landscape the excitement of arrival ebbed away. Everything was exactly as comfortless as he had known it would be. He was back. Maybe he had never left after all. Maybe six weeks ago, six minutes ago, he had fallen asleep in the club as he so frequently did and there would come a deafening rattle in his ear as of wheels over points and junctions and he would suddenly awake to find the tea-things arriving on a silver tray. A panic at having left something far too late gripped him. It spoke urgently of being drawn back into an elderly world full of the servility which conceals an utter want of interest. And behind this world another, a vast and stolid provincial precinct grey with cathedrals and choral societies.
But it was not a dream. When an hour or two later his cab drew up in St James’s he could see the familiar doorman hurrying out across the pavement towards him, a large umbrella poised in readiness. As he wearily marshalled his gloves and stick this man leaned in across the trunk strapped in front to pay the driver. Then his own door opened and cold air blew in together with a few whirling white fragments. Passively, like any invalid or supplicant, he watched a sleeve which seemed to extend for ever reaching slowly down towards him as if stretching from another world, dusted with snowflakes and encrusted with gold braid. He took the white-gloved hand with resignation and was dragged deferentially out.
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