Cloud Atlas: A Novel Read online

  Monday, 2nd December—

  By day, my coffin is hot as an oven & my sweat dampens these pages. The tropic sun fattens & fills the noon sky. The men work seminaked with sun-blacked torsos & straw hats. The planking oozes scorching tar that sticks to one’s soles. Rain squalls blow up from nowhere & vanish with the same rapidity & the deck hisses itself dry in a minute. Portuguese man-o’-wars pulsate in the quicksilver sea, flying fish bewitch the beholder & ocher shadows of hammerheads circle the Prophetess. Earlier, I stepped on a squid that had propelled itself over the bulwarks! (Its eyes & beak reminded me of my father-in-law.) The water we took on at Chatham Isle is now brackish & without a dash of brandy in it, my stomach rebels. When not playing chess in Henry’s cabin or the mess room, I rest in my coffin until Homer lulls me into dreams a-billow with sails of Athenians.

  Autua knocked on my coffin door yesterday to thank me for saving his neck. He said he was in my debt (true enough) until the day he saves my life (may it never dawn!). I asked how he was finding his new duties. “Better’n slaving for Kupaka, Missa Ewing.” Anyhow, growing sensible of my fear someone would witness our congress & report to Cpt. Molyneux, the Moriori returned to the fo’c’sle & has not since sought me out. As Henry warns me, “It’s one thing to throw a blackie a bone, but quite another to take him on for life! Friendships between races, Ewing, can never surpass the affection between a loyal gundog & its master.”

  Nightly, my doctor & I enjoy a stroll on the deck before retiring. It is pleasant merely to breathe the cooler air. One loses one’s eye in lanes of sea phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens. Last night, the men were gathered on the foredeck laying up grass into sinnet for ropes by lantern light & the prohibition on “supernuminaries” on the foredeck seemed not to apply. (Since the “Autua Incident” that contempt directed at “Mr. Quillcock” is in recess, as is the epithet.) Bentnail sang ten verses on the world’s brothels foul enough to put the most wanton satyr to flight. Henry volunteered an eleventh verse (about Mary O’Hairy of Inverary) that turned the air yet bluer. Rafael was next coerced to take his turn. He sat on the “widow maker” & sang these lines in a voice unschooled yet honest & true:—

  Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you,

  Hurrah, you rolling river.

  Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll not deceive you,

  We’re bound way ’cross the wide Missouri.

  Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter,

  I love the place across the water.

  The ship sails free, the wind is blowing,

  The braces taut, the sheets a-flowing.

  Missouri, she’s a mighty river,

  We’ll brace her up till her topsails shiver.

  Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll leave you never,

  Till the day I die, I’ll love you ever.

  Silence from rude mariners is a grander accolade than any erudite eulogy. Why should Rafael, an Australian-born lad, have an American song by heart? “I din’t know ’twas a Yankee un,” he replied awkwardly. “My mam teached it me before she died. It’s the only thing of hers I got still. It stuck in me.” He turned to his work, an awkward curtness in his manner. Henry & I sensed anew the hostility that workers emanate at the bystanding idler & so we left the toilers to their industry.

  Reading my entry for 15th October, when first I met Rafael during our shared mal de mer on the Tasman Sea, I stand amazed at how that sprite lad, aglow with excitement at his maiden voyage & so eager to please, has become this sullen youth in only six weeks. His luminous beauty is chipped away, revealing the timber-muscled seaman he shall become. Already he looks rather given to rum & water. Henry says this “sloughing off of his cocoon” is inevitable, bon gré mal gré, & I suppose he is right. Those smatterings of education & sensibility Rafael received from his patron, Mrs. Fry of Brisbane, serve a cabin boy ill in the harum-scarum world of the fo’c’sle. How I wish I could help him! Were it not for the intervention of my Mr. & Mrs. Channing, my own fate may well have been of a piece with Raf’s. I asked Finbar if he thought the boy was “fitting in well.” Finbar’s Delphic reply, “Fitting what in well, Mr. Ewing?” left the galley cackling but myself quite in the dark.

  Saturday, 7th December—

  Petrels are aloft, sooty terns afloat & Mother Carey’s chickens roost on the rigging. Fish similar to borettoes pursued fish similar to sprats. As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings. To confirm these portents of nearby islands, the man at the lead shouted a depth of only eighteen fathoms. Mr. Boerhaave ordered the anchor to be weighed lest we drift onto a reef in the night.

  The whites of my eyes have a lemon-yellow aspect & their rims are reddened & sore. Henry assures me this symptom is welcome, but has obliged my request for an increased dosage of vermicide.

  Sunday, 8th December—

  Sabbath not being observed on the Prophetess, this morning Henry & I decided to conduct a short Bible Reading in his cabin in the “low-church” style of Ocean Bay’s congregation, “astraddle” the forenoon & morning watches so both starboard & port shifts might

  * My father never spoke to me of the dendroglyphs & I learnt of them only in the manner described in the Introduction. Now that the Moriori of Chatham Island are a race over extinction’s brink, I hold them to be beyond betrayal.—J.E.

  CHTEAU ZEDELGHEM,

  NEERBEKE,

  WEST VLAANDEREN

  29TH-VI-1931

  Sixsmith,

  Dreamt I stood in a china shop so crowded from floor to far-off ceiling with shelves of porcelain antiquities etc. that moving a muscle would cause several to fall and smash to bits. Exactly what happened, but instead of a crashing noise, an august chord rang out, half-cello, half-celeste, D major (?), held for four beats. My wrist knocked a Ming vase affair off its pedestal—E-flat, whole string section, glorious, transcendent, angels wept. Deliberately now, smashed a figurine of an ox for the next note, then a milkmaid, then Saturday’s Child—orgy of shrapnel filled the air, divine harmonies my head. Ah, such music! Glimpsed my father totting up the smashed items’ value, nib flashing, but had to keep the music coming. Knew I’d become the greatest composer of the century if I could only make this music mine. A monstrous Laughing Cavalier flung against the wall set off a thumping battery of percussion.

  Woke in my Imperial Western suite, Tam Brewer’s collectors nearly knocking my door down and much commotion from corridor. Hadn’t even waited until I’d shaved—breathtaking vulgarity of these ruffians. Had no choice but to exit swiftly via the bathroom window before the brouhaha summoned the manager to discover that the young gentleman in Room 237 had no means of settling his now-hefty balance. Escape was not hitchless, sorry to report. Drainpipe ripped free of its mounting with the noise of a brutalized violin, and down, down, down tumbled your old chum. Right buttock one hellish bruise. Minor miracle I didn’t shatter my spine or impale myself on railings. Learn from this, Sixsmith. When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first-or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher. Hid in a tearoom tucked into a sooty nook of Victoria Station, trying to transcribe the music from the china shop of dreams—couldn’t get beyond a measly two bars. Would have walked into Tam Brewer’s arms just to have that music back again. Miserable spirits. Laboring types surrounded me with bad teeth, parrot voices, and unfounded optimism. Sobering to think how one accursed night of baccarat can alter a man’s social standing so irreversibly. Those shopworkers, cabbies, and tradesmen had more half crowns and threepenny bits squirreled away in their sour Stepney mattresses than I, Son of an Ecclesiastical Somebody, can claim. Had a view of an alley: downtrodden scriveners hurtling by like demisemiquavers in a Beethovian allegro. Afraid of ’em? No, I’m afraid of being one. What value are education, breeding, and talent if one doesn’t have a pot to piss in?

  Still can’t bel
ieve it. I, a Caius Man, teetering on the brink of destitution. Decent hotels won’t let me taint their lobbies now. Indecent hotels demand cash on the nail. Am barred from any reputable gaming table this side of the Pyrenees. Anyway, I summarized my options:—

  (i) Use paltry funds to obtain a dirty room in some lodging house, beg a few guineas from Uncle Cecil Ltd., teach prissy missies their scales and bitter spinsters their technique. Come now. If I could fake courtesy to dunces I’d still be swabbing Professor Mackerras’s arse with my ex–fellow undergrads. No, before you say it, I can’t go running back to Pater with yet another cri de cœur. Would validate every poisonous word he said about me. Would rather jump off Waterloo Bridge and let Old Father Thames humble me. Mean it.

  (ii) Hunt down Caius people, butter ’em up, and invite myself to stay for the summer. Problematic, for same reasons as (i). How long could I conceal my starving pocketbook? How long could I stave off their pity, their talons?

  (iii) Visit turf accountant—but if I lost?

  You’d remind me I brought it all upon myself, Sixsmith, but shrug off that middle-class chip on your shoulder and stick with me a little longer. Across a crowded platform, a guard announced that the Dover-bound train for the ship to Ostend was delayed by thirty minutes. That guard was my croupier, inviting me to double or quits. If one will just be still, shut up, and listen—lo, behold, the world’ll sift through one’s ideas for one, esp. in a grimy London railway station. Downed my soapy tea and strode across the concourse to the ticket office. A return ticket to Ostend was too costly—so parlous has my position become—so a single it had to be. Boarded my carriage just as the locomotive’s whistle blasted forth a swarm of piccolo Furies. We were under way.

  Now to reveal my plan, inspired by a piece in The Times and a long soak’s daydream in my Savoy suite. In the Belgian backwaters, south of Bruges, there lives a reclusive English composer, named Vyvyan Ayrs. You won’t have heard of him because you’re a musical oaf, but he’s one of the greats. The only Briton of his generation to reject pomp, circumstance, rusticity, and charm. Hasn’t produced any new work since the early twenties due to illness—he’s half blind and can hardly hold a pen—but the Times review of his Secular Magnificat (performed last week at St. Martin’s) referred to a drawerful of unfinished works. My daydream had me traveling to Belgium, persuading Vyvyan Ayrs he needed to employ me as an amanuensis, accepting his offer to tutor me, shooting through the musical firmament, winning fame and fortune commensurate to my gifts, obliging Pater to admit that, yes, the son he disinherited is the Robert Frobisher, greatest British composer of his time.

  Why not? Had no better plan. You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you. Uneventful journey to the Channel … cancerous suburbs, tedious farmland, soiled Sussex. Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue. Changed last shillings into francs at the port and took my cabin aboard the Kentish Queen, a rusty tub that looks old enough to have seen service in Crimea. Spud-faced young steward and I disagreed his burgundy uniform and unconvincing beard were worth a tip. Sneered at my valise and manuscript folder—”Wise of you to travel light, sir”—and left me to muck for myself. Suited me fine.

  Dinner was balsawood chicken, powdery potatoes, and a bastard claret. My dining-table companion was Mr. Victor Bryant, cutlery lordling of Sheffield. Not a musical bone in his body. He expounded on the subject of spoons for most of the meal, mistook my civil deportment for interest, and offered me a job in his sales department on the spot! Can you believe it? Thanked him (keeping straight face) and confessed I’d rather swallow cutlery than ever have to sell the stuff. Three mighty blasts on the foghorn, engines changed timbre, felt the ship cast off, went on deck to watch Albion withdraw into drizzly murk. No going back now; consequences of what I’d done struck home. R.V.W. conducted Sea Symphony in the Orchestra of the Mind, “Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only, Reckless, O Soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me.” (Don’t much care for this work, but it was perfectly programmed.) North Sea wind had me shivering, spray licked me from toe to crown. Glossy black waters invited me to jump. Ignored ’em. Turned in early, leafed through Noyes’s Contrapuntals, listened to the distant brass of the engine room and sketched a repetitive passage for trombone based on the ship’s rhythms, but was rather rubbish, and then guess who came a-knocking at my door? The spud-faced steward, his shift over. Gave him rather more than a tip. No Adonis, scrawny but inventive for his class. Turfed him out afterwards and sank into the sleep of the dead. One part of me wanted that voyage never to end.

  But end it did. Kentish Queen slid into Dover’s snaggletoothed twin sister over the mucky water, Ostend, the Lady of Dubious Virtue. Early, early morning, Europe’s snoring rumbled deep below bass tubas. Saw my first aboriginal Belgians, hauling crates, arguing, and thinking in Flemish, Dutch, whatever. Packed my valise sharpish, afraid the ship might sail back to England with me still aboard; or, rather, afraid of my letting this happen. Grabbed a bite from the first-class galley’s fruit bowl and dashed down the gangplank before anyone with braiding on his uniform caught up with me. Set foot on Continental macadam and asked a Customs man where I might find the railway station. He pointed toward a groaning tram packed with malnourished workmen, rickets, and penury. Preferred shank’s pony, drizzle or no drizzle. Followed tramlines down coffinesque streets. Ostend is all tapioca grays and stained browns. Will admit, I was thinking Belgium was a b. stupid country to run away to. Bought a ticket for Bruges and hauled myself aboard the next train—no platforms, can you believe it?—a decrepit, empty train. Moved compartment because mine smelt unpleasant, but all compartments had same pong. Smoked cigarettes cadged off Victor Bryant to purify the air. The stationmaster’s whistle blew on time, the locomotive strained like a gouty proctor on the pot before heaving itself into motion. Soon steaming through a foggy landscape of unkempt dikes and blasted copses at a fair old clip.

  If my plan bears fruit, Sixsmith, you may come to Bruges before v. long. When you do, arrive in that six o’clock in the morning gnosis-ennesque hour. Lose yourself in the city’s rickety streets, blind canals, wrought-iron gates, uninhabited courtyards—may I go on? Why, thank you—leery Gothic carapaces, Ararat roofs, shrubbery-tufted brick spires, medieval overhangs, laundry sagging from windows, cobbled whirlpools that suck your eye in, clockwork princes and chipped princesses striking their hours, sooty doves, and three or four octaves of bells, some sober, some bright. Aroma of fresh bread led me to a bakery where a deformed woman with no nose sold me a dozen crescent-moon pastries. Only wanted one, but thought she had enough problems. A rag-and-bone cart clattered out of the mist and its toothless driver spoke companionably to me, but I could only reply, “Excusez-moi, je ne parle pas flamand,” which made him laugh like the Goblin King. Gave him a pastry. His filthy hand was a scabby claw. In a poor quarter (alleys stank of effluent), children helped their mothers at the pumps, filling broken jugs with brown water. Finally, the excitement all caught up with me, sat on the steps of a dying windmill for a breather, wrapped myself against the damp, fell asleep.

  Next thing, a witch was poking me awake with her broomstick, screeching something like “Zie gie doad misschien?” but don’t quote me. Blue sky, warm sun, not a wisp of fog to be seen. Resurrected and blinking, I offered her a pastry. She accepted with distrust, put it in her apron for later, and got back to her sweeping, growling an ancient ditty. Lucky I wasn’t robbed, I suppose. Shared another pastry with five thousand pigeons, to the envy of a beggar, so I had to give him one too. Walked back the way I might have come. In an odd pentagonal window a creamy maiden was arranging Saintpaulia in a cut-glass bowl. Girls fascinate in different ways. Try ’em one day. Tapped on the pane, and asked in French if she’d save my life by falling in love with me. Shook her head but got an amused smile. Asked where I could find a police station. She pointed over a crossroads. One can spot a fellow musician in any contex
t, even amongst policemen. The craziest-eyed, unruliest-haired one, either hungry-skinny or jovial-portly. This French-speaking, cor anglais–playing, local operatic society–belonging inspector had heard of Vyvyan Ayrs and kindly drew me a map to Neerbeke. Paid him two pastries for this intelligence. He asked if I had shipped over my British car—his son was mad keen about Austins. Said I had no car. This worried him. How would I get to Neerbeke? No bus, no trainline, and twenty-five miles was the devil of a walk. Asked if I could borrow a policeman’s bicycle for an indefinite period. Told me that was most irregular. Assured him I was most irregular, and outlined the nature of my mission to Ayrs, Belgium’s most famous adopted son (must be so few that might even be true), in the service of European music. Repeated my request. Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction, and now was such a time. The honest sergeant took me to a compound where lost items await rightful owners for a few months (before finding their way to the black market)—but first, he wanted my opinion on his baritone. He gave me a burst of “Recitar! … Vesti la giubba!” from I Pagliacci. (Pleasant enough voice in lower registers, but his breathing needed work and his vibrato quivered like a backstage thunder board.) Gave a few musical pointers; received the loan of a Victorian Enfield plus cord to secure valise and folder to the saddle and rear mudguard. He wished me bon voyage and fair weather.

  Adrian would never have marched along the road I bicycled out of Bruges (too deep in Hun territory) but nonetheless felt an affinity with my brother by virtue of breathing the same air of the same land. The Plain is flat as the Fens but in a bad shape. Along the way I fueled myself with the last pastries and stopped at impoverished cottages for cups of water. Nobody said much, but nobody said no. Thanks to a headwind and a chain that kept slipping off, the afternoon was growing old before I finally reached Ayrs’s home village of Neerbeke. A silent blacksmith showed me how to get to Château Zedelghem by elaborating my map with a pencil stub. A lane with harebells and toadflax growing in the middle led me past a deserted lodge house to a once stately avenue of mature Italian poplars. Zedelghem is grander than our rectory, some crumbly turrets adorn its west wing, but it couldn’t hold a candle to Audley End or Capon-Tench’s country seat. Spied a girl riding a horse over a low hill crowned by a shipwrecked beech tree. Passed a gardener spreading soot against the slugs in a vegetable garden. In the forecourt, a muscle-bound valet was decoking a Cowley Flat Nose. Seeing my approach, he rose and waited for me. In a terraced corner of this frieze, a man in a wheelchair sat under foamy wisteria listening to the wireless. Vyvyan Ayrs, I presumed. The easy part of my daydream was over.