Gerontius Read online

  ‘It’s true,’ the dreamer admits. ‘I did once imagine such a thing.’

  ‘Well, now you must go,’ says Simyun. ‘You already know what to do to be yourself.’

  ‘Do I?’ He is lost. Already the night is over, or at least the sky is becoming light. He cannot bear to leave this man, this music which still streams from the shadowed garden beyond the pavilion.

  ‘It isn’t music,’ comes the voice. ‘You merely hear it as music. Somebody else might perceive it as colour, another as a scent, still another as a vision of extraordinary cities. It never ends and nor will it ever leave you. It is the garden itself. You need only discover the gateway – but no-one can help you do that. We are unique. None can do it for us although sometimes things can happen of their own accord, out of a clear sky. Be alert. Use well the interval and don’t be dismayed. Anyone who searches is forced into exile, even if it is only sixty feet up a pole. Perhaps going on long journeys is helpful after all because I can tell you that one day, in many more than a thousand years’ time, a certain Jew will travel a great distance from a cold country and visit this place. He is a rabbi, one of the Hasidim, maybe more thoughtful even than most. He will stand on what he is told are the ruins of this very column and look across at Mount Admirable as the sun is rising, just as we are now. So overwhelmed is he that he instinctively covers his face. Then he goes home to his distant country and in time he writes down his discovery. What he writes is this: “As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full; and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one who draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.”’

  From somewhere beyond the parapet there sounds a strange note very like that of the ram’s horn Shofar the Jews blow in their synagogues.

  ‘It appears that I can see into the future but I’m often less certain about the past,’ Simyun admits. ‘For example, Who built this tower? I am quite sure I didn’t: I’m no mason. I’m equally certain nobody else would have done it for me. And if they did, who paid for their labour? Sometimes I even wonder if I may not have invented it. Maybe I dreamed it into existence one night as I lay on my rock below. Another mystery to ponder on,’ and he gives a slight laugh.

  As the dreamer turns to him his arm bangs against the wooden lectern and a clawed brown hand steadies him. His head sinks to the level of a pair of monstrous feet from whose rotting toes curl yellow nails. He looks up in awe and against the sky’s sudden glare glimpses the silhouette of unkempt hair and beard, the iron collar clamped around the running sore of neck, the fall of black chain. As he begins his descent the Shofar sounds again. In no time he feels Rahut’s hand on his ankle.

  ‘That was damned quick,’ says the acolyte, chewing a fresh quid. ‘Straight up and straight down, eh, boy? Don’t suppose he had much to say to you. Never mind,’ he adds half to himself, ‘we can fit an extra one in before noon.’

  Once more the Shofar sounds and the world jerks to a halt.

  The jerk woke the sleeper in the train. The lights in his compartment, whose sole occupant he was, had not been switched on, possibly out of deference to his slumber. Consequently the window had not turned into a black mirror obliging him to stare at his own reflection and that of the plump, buttoned upholstery which the LNWR considered suitable for their First Class travellers. Instead he could make out scattered lights, signs of a city, hints of dockland. At once from the darkness beyond the rain-speckled pane came the sad blare of a ship’s siren.

  ‘It ought to be dawn,’ thought the man sleepily to himself, for by chance it was the very note which, twenty years before, he had written for the Shofar in his oratorio The Apostles: a clear C to herald the rising of the sun, the beginning of a new day. This thought stirred another, far more recent, memory as of a fading dream which slipped obliquely away beneath the full realisation of who and where he was: Sir Edward Elgar OM arriving at Liverpool on a late afternoon in November 1923 to embark on a voyage up the Amazon. Above him the netting of the overhead luggage racks bulged with the two light leather cases his valet had brought to Euston from the club in St James’s. Beside him on the seat lay a cane, an overcoat and a hat. In the guard’s van was a metal cabin trunk full of the sorts of things a gentleman might need for a six-week cruise into the primaeval heart of the world’s largest unexplored tropical jungle (the phrasing was that of the cruise company’s handout). The cabin trunk was stout and japanned. The valet, who had bought it a week previously in the Army & Navy Stores, thought it looked quite the thing: serious and intrepid. Unlike all his master’s other tin and steamer trunks this one was double-sealed against termites, the locks were acclaimed proof against even the most nimble-fingered lascar or coolie, the hinges and corners were reinforced with brass. Empty, it weighed a ton. Edward had himself classified it as appropriate in the sense that Alice would have approved the air it gave off. Privately he thought it faintly absurd to go cluttered up with so many suits of clothes for so short a time. The memory of the trunk in the guard’s van now brought him a whiff of vexation, reminding him that for all his best intentions it had in the end turned out impossible to make this trip as he would have liked, light and unencumbered. Instead he was dragging baggage behind him which dated back far beyond last week and the Army & Navy. But then he supposed one did not shed sixty-six years merely by abandoning habit like a heap of clothes smelling of mothballs. Nor was he sure he really wished to.

  Imperceptibly the train started again, this time achieving no speed beyond that of a noiseless gliding past unlit deserted platforms without name which had the air of wharves. He did not quite recognise anything but the mere fact of knowing this to be Liverpool made it familiar from the old days, those penniless days of a quarter century ago when he had so often come to conduct his own works in the hopes of making a name (a name! the futility!), staying with Rodewald in Huskisson Street. It was, he suddenly realised, exactly twenty years to the day that Rodey had died, having nearly single-handedly turned the largely amateur Liverpool Orchestral Society into an ensemble capable of playing the best of the moderns: Wagner and Strauss as well as Elgar himself. Poor Rodey. How typical it was that so powerful a champion of music in England should have been a textile magnate – precisely the sort that ignorant London snobs had made their jokes about – the trade of music and the music of tradesmen, and so forth. Twerps, the lot of them; so pig-headed and cloth-eared they couldn’t hear that for decades the heart of English music had beat in the provinces, hundreds of miles from the capital with its society dunces and fashionable virtuosi playing pot-pourris of Sullivan. Well, damn them, men like Rodey had helped change that although the poor man had scarcely lived to see it: dead at forty-three but not before Pomp and Circumstance no. 1 was dedicated to him and not before his orchestra got first sniff at both it and no. 2. How the twerps had gnashed their teeth in London! More to the point, the awful suddenness of his death had inspired the Largo of the second symphony which was far more his memorial than the King’s. Well. It all seemed so long ago now. How could he, Edward Elgar, already be sixty-six? It was as if Rodey appeared in the shadows on the other side of the compartment, unaged, to confront the old buffer opposite him.

  ‘Still visiting Liverpool, Edward?’

  ‘Hardly at all for years. I’m just passing through. Off to South America. The Amazon, in fact.’

  ‘The Amazon? My dear Cocky, what on earth for? Don’t tell me Gerontius has conquered the cannibals?’

  ‘Good Lord no. At least, not so far as I’ve heard. No, it’s more of an adventure. A bit of a jape. Just to get away from it all.’

  ‘It all, Cocky? H’m. What does Alice have to say about it all?’

  ‘I don’t live my life just to …’ he began huffily, but then, ‘Alice is dead.’ Could he have forgotten for that instant?

  ‘Oh Cocky. My dear man; I’m so sorry. For you, I mean, not for her. After all, I’
m dead too.’

  Silly, such conversations. Yet nowadays after the great evisceration of the war conversations with the dead went on all the time and all around, so much realer were the departed than the ghosts who remembered them, the words heard than the words spoken. Thus, long after the dim figure opposite had been reabsorbed into the London & North Western Railway’s plush upholstery and become pure shadow the warm and questioning voice lingered: ‘Oh Cocky, what are you writing now? What great work is brewing for that ungrateful world?’

  And there was no answer he could give. There was no way he, the living, could say, ‘Oh Rodey … Dear old man, I’m finished.’ And just then the train stopped, doors began to open, people to shout for porters.

  ‘Sir Edward,’ from the doorway. Hell, they’d tracked him down already. But it was only Tom Shannon the choirman’s son come to see him onto the boat. Stepping out of the glossy carriage to the platform Sir Edward Elgar might have been caught in a series of sepia pictures for the Pall Mall Gazette: an obviously distinguished man of a somewhat military bearing, grey haired and grey moustached, buttoning his coat and adjusting his hat against the squalls of November rain which blew inwards between the train’s glistening roof and the fretted overhang which sheltered the platform. This was Sir Edward Elgar the public figure – not so easily recognised as in the heyday of the prewar years, maybe, but still with the same appearance of purposefulness. A close observer might have noticed that Edward Elgar, on the other hand, was vaguely trying to fit the wrong hand into the wrong glove and had about those deeply hooded eyes a remoteness like one lost in a strange land.

  It was only when they reached the quay that the cruise passengers could appreciate quite how bad the weather was and how it was shortly going to affect them very much indeed. Railway travellers were, after all, used to sliding effortlessly through the worst storms, no more attention needing to be paid to the sluicing blusters beyond the carriage panes than that someone might get up and lean his weight on the leather strap to force it and the window a final notch tighter. But here, huddled in the open-fronted sheds, the boarding travellers were reminded they had come to the end of solid land. In the brilliance of overhead derrick and bunkering lights they caught glimpses of rigging bowed into arcs by the wind, of rain-slicked paintwork, buffeting tarpaulin and – beyond the ship’s hull – an impression of the wild surface of the Mersey. Certain of the passengers must from the moment of dressing that morning already have supposed themselves magically a thousand miles up the Amazon beneath tropic skies brilliant with parakeets; their clothes were absurdly light for an English winter evening. They almost ran aboard, one hand pressed to their hats, up the gangway with its slapping canvas sides, to be handed down over the calm, warm threshold smelling faintly of oil and brass polish by immaculately uniformed officers.

  Edward stood a little apart from the rest in the sheds, seeming not to mind the gusts of rain in the open doorway. He had clearly been recognised by several of his fellow-travellers but gave no sign of having noticed their glances in his direction, their whispers. The squalls beat the flaps of his overcoat against his legs but he disdained to turn up his collar. He might almost have been relishing the elements as proof of his presence here, on this dock, on a dark winter’s evening in the north of the world. Head tilted back and face wet with rain he examined the Hildebrand from stem to stern as his home for the next month and a half. He saw an elegant small liner, graceful almost to the point of daintiness, with a grey hull below the white strake, white upperworks and the all-black funnel of the Booth Steamship Company. He was a well-travelled man and his eye was practised enough to judge the vessel’s tonnage at about seven thousand and its length at some four hundred feet. He was surprised that so large a craft would be able to go a thousand miles up any river, even the Amazon, and wondered how many feet of water she drew.

  He shook hands briefly with his escort and walked in a soldierly manner up the gangway. When he was halfway up a clout of wind caught the side of his head, lifting a spurt of grey hair and twirling his hat away into the sky. For an instant a dockside light caught a pale reflection from the maker’s lozenge in its crown before it vanished over the Mersey towards New Brighton. The Hildebrand’s officers were most perturbed as they welcomed him aboard.

  ‘It’s only a hat,’ he told them gruffly and then a steward led him along a neatly-caulked deck with a strip of green carpet running down its centre. On the left were cabin portholes, curtained and with lights burning inside. On the right was a line of larger, seaward portholes through which could be glimpsed the edge of the quay and wooden pilings. This passageway, after the blustrous weather outside, was warm and quiet and trembled slightly underfoot. Polished mahogany handrails ran along both walls. Eventually, after certain turnings, the steward’s gleaming heels stopped outside a door with a brass figure 2 on it.

  ‘Your cabin, Sir Edward.’ He unlocked the door and helped his passenger over the few inches of coaming. ‘Steward Pyce, sir. I shall do my utmost to ensure your trip will be happy and comfortable. I’m entirely at your disposal, sir. Should you need anything you have only to ring the bell. Meanwhile I shall have your luggage sent along as quickly as possible.’

  As he spoke he was helping Edward out of his wet coat, tut-tutting as he felt the sodden velour facings. ‘With your permission I shall take this away with me and have it thoroughly dried. Dinner is not for another two hours, sir. Captain Maddrell does still hope to be able to sail with the tide, that’s in about forty minutes, but they say there’s quite a sea running out there tonight and perhaps in the circumstances he’ll prefer to delay a little.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Edward. ‘Personally I came to travel, not to sit tied up to a Liverpool quay.’

  ‘Ah, you’re a good sailor then, sir. Not like some others aboard, I should fancy, judging by …’

  ‘The rougher it is the better I like it. Oh, and you might be so good as to ask them to be careful with my trunk. I have some instruments in it.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. They’ll treat it like it was eggs.’ Steward Pyce made a pecking gesture with his upper body, all that was left in this democratic postwar wasteland of a servant’s bow, Edward reflected as the man withdrew.

  Outside, Pyce walked noiselessly off up the carpet mimicking his passenger’s gruff bravado under his breath. ‘“The rougher it is the better I like it.” Ho. Says you. They all do, don’t they? They all think they’re the best sailors who ever set foot to deck until it blows a bit and then watch ’em not turn out for breakfast. Restaurant empty and the cooks all sitting on their thumbs in the galley looking at half a hundredweight of toast getting cold. Evening sir, madam,’ he raised his voice and adjusted his vowels as other passengers passed in the wake of their own steward. Eventually he tracked down Hempson and ran his finger along the list his colleague was holding. ‘Elgar. Number 2. Says he’s got a trunk with trombones in it and to be careful with it.’

  ‘Not another bloody musician? We’ve already got a band aboard, ain’t that enough? Trombones, indeed.’

  ‘Ought to be thankful it’s not a joanna, mate.’

  ‘It’ll weigh,’ said the man sagely, ‘it’ll weigh. Not one of ’em but don’t bring a ton of junk for six weeks. “Kindly be dashed careful with that, my man. That one’s got my medals in it.”’ Hempson had lost three fingers near Arras six years ago and had pronounced views about the officer class.

  Meanwhile Edward was sitting on the edge of his bunk, staring through the open doorway at his small sitting room with its shaded lights and writing desk. In one hand he still held a booking slip which read ‘Sir Edward Elgar OM. Cabin Deluxe no. 2’.

  ‘“Happy and comfortable …”,’ he said to himself. ‘What on earth am I doing here?’

  He got to his feet, throwing the ticket on the bunk. In the sitting room he stood beside the writing table and riffled the tops of the headed stationery in the rack so that the Booth Line crest shimmered with a faint husking sound. It was the vacant gestur
e of a man newly arrived in a hotel bedroom unable to think of what to do next.

  It was when, in response to the bugle, he took his seat in the restaurant that Edward finally appreciated how at variance were the actuality of the cruise on which he had embarked and his advance fantasies of it. He had vaguely supposed a small, intimate group of civilised persons, none of whom had the faintest connection with music, being carried for a breathing space to an exotic land and back. He had imagined diverting, worldly conversations, tales such as those found in Conrad and Maugham told over dinner by rubber planters returning to their jungle fastnesses. He had even speculated about – well, why not admit it? – some flutter of interest at the taffrail, a moonlit equatorial night bringing him and an indefinite feminine presence into contact like amber and silk to rub a brief crackle into his old life. In short he had imagined shedding himself for a few weeks and entering a little world so absorbing and self-sufficient it would be almost an imposition having to write dutiful shipboard letters home to the ever-dwindling tally of friends and family.

  It was in the restaurant he discovered the Hildebrand was carrying nearly sixty First Class passengers, thirty-eight of whom were making the round trip. There were another three hundred-odd Steerage passengers to be picked up in Oporto and Lisbon – mainly Portuguese migrant workers, he gathered, bound for Brazil and their fortunes. There would be no need ever to clap eyes on them; but even so, merely knowing about fresh hundreds of people tucked away on another part of the ship destroyed the last remnants of his fancy of quiet intimacy. He did, however, discover he had been placed at the Captain’s table and as time went by he was to find this mere fact created some kind of invisible bulkhead between those select few who shared this table and the rest of the First Class. Tonight the Captain was not at table. He had sent his apologies via the Chief Steward and was sure his guests would appreciate that he was preoccupied with getting under way in one of the severest storms for some years. The Booth Line prided itself on the punctuality of its steamers on the Madeira-Pará run but was no less proud of its safety record. Shipping companies always operated in the shadow of the most recent maritime disaster, such disasters being regular enough to remind them that modern engineering was not invincible. Not three months ago the French steamer Député Emile Driant had foundered off Dungeness with the loss of seventeen lives. While Captain Maddrell was wrestling with such problems on the bridge his passengers ate their first meal aboard still tied up to the dock in Liverpool.