Gerontius Read online

  ‘Not when a man’s fifty-two and feels the sun.’ The pilot spoke still gazing out of the window as if expecting the skyline of Liverpool to heave into sight.

  ‘Mr Mushet,’ the Captain explained, ‘sailed on this ship for nearly five years within recent memory, Sir Edward, and not once in that time did we ever hear him complain of feeling the sun.’

  ‘And nor would a man who treks to and fro between Iceland and Norway.’

  ‘You had another route in those days?’

  ‘The Captain here’s referring to the war.’

  Edward looked around the bridge as if some vestige of that awesome conflict were still visible as splashes of dried blood or the odd shell casing overlooked in a corner. ‘This ship served?’

  ‘It did indeed, Sir Edward, and most gallantly too. Three of us on this bridge today were bluejackets in her throughout the duration: that’s First Lieutenant Simon Givens yonder. Have a warmer and I’ll tell you. Tea or cocoa? We don’t touch coffee on the bridge although if you wish it we can have a steward descend to more Bohemian zones to fetch some. But our galley understands cocoa. It talks cocoa in its sleep.’

  ‘Cocoa would be splendid. Incidentally, I must correct you rather belatedly as to something you said at breakfast and just now when you introduced me. I’m not the Master of the King’s Musick, you know. In England they reserve that kind of thing for the right sort of man. Cambridge academics mostly, I believe; real composers.’

  Judging from a sharp glance the heat with which this was said was not lost on the Captain but he only said mildly, ‘Then I stand corrected, sir.’ As if to cover the moment’s awkwardness he moved purposefully to place himself once more by the coxswain, watching waves and compass. His posture was that of a doctor attentive and silent next to a patient, deliberately not feeling the pulse but listening to all the sounds of a living body.

  ‘She loves it,’ he said happily. ‘Feel her. Tight. She thrums. Not a groan anywhere. When I first caught sight of her my thought was, “H’m; pretty ship. Soft, maybe.” But I was wrong. Wrong about the soft, I mean, for that was in late ’13 when she was in civil trim and the old world was still going strong. She was young then, not three years from her maiden voyage. Black hull, white strake and upperworks, black funnel. Neat, graceful. No clutter anywhere. Something after all of a steam yacht about her, what with that sheer, light stern. The masts –’ and through the blurred glass the fore-truck jabbed at the shattered sky ‘– were both white up to the halfway point and the topmasts plain varnished wood. They should have kept that, in my opinion. Maybe they’ll change it yet.

  ‘Ah, it was happy running in those days. Only ten years ago but it’s not the same world we sail across today and they’re no longer the same ports we reach, either. Not merely that they’ve changed physically because Pará, for example, Manaos, they’ve hardly altered at all. A few motor cars apiece, maybe, but not much different. It’s the feel, I can’t put it more exactly than that. There are no edges to anything now?’ He glanced for confirmation at his distinguished passenger as if he had suddenly remembered, half-apologetic, that there stood a man who had already been over forty at the turn of the century and who no doubt felt even more acutely the falling-away of what had once seemed permanent.

  ‘Well, as I say, she was a pretty ship. But then the war came and the Admiralty bagged her for their own.’

  ‘Did you have guns?’

  ‘Eight. When they converted her to HMS Hildebrand they changed her quite a bit. All her upperworks were grey and later on they painted the hull grey as well. So elegant she was.’ The Captain might have been remembering a woman glimpsed in his youth who had on the instant set up a model for the elusive thing, the object which wounds fervently before it vanishes. ‘I can see her now, sitting on the water in Scapa Flow, light as a dove. But she had claws. They gave her six quick-firers and two 11-inch howitzers before assigning us to the Northern Patrol: either Iceland to St Kilda or 20 degrees west to the Norwegian coast. We were supposed to maintain the blockade of Germany, which meant boarding any ship we intercepted. If we found a German raider we were to engage it.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Oh, several times. The worst was in 1917. We were on convoy escort work by then, a “Q” ship. We were taking a convoy into the Clyde when torpedoes began scurrying about. Wherever you looked you could see their white tracks. The place was crawling with German submarines. The Drake took a fish amidships right next to us while we were pounding away at one of the subs on the surface. To this day I think we killed it for it disappeared in a cloud of smoke and steam.’

  ‘Surely we got it,’ said Mr Mushet. ‘If we didn’t we’re not the heroes we’ve been telling everyone we are.’

  There was nothing of reproof in his tone. The Captain said mildly, ‘Oh, heroes. H’m. They were good days, weren’t they?’

  ‘The Drake went down,’ objected the pilot.

  ‘Capsized at anchor. She made it after all to Rathlin Sound. Notice served. Minimal losses.’

  ‘But was this ship ever hit?’

  ‘Never once, Sir Edward. Oh, plenty of times by shrapnel, odd rounds of this and that, slight damage to upperworks. But never anything serious. Never anything serious at all. You couldn’t believe it, a dainty tropical cruise ship with borrowed teeth prowling the sea with submarines for company without getting a hole in her. For that matter, coming through arctic weather with her heart uncooled. None of our sister ships on this Brazil run was as lucky. All three of them went down in 1917, you know. Hilary was torpedoed in the North Sea, so was the Antony; and the Lanfranc was sunk too, for all that she’d been converted into a hospital ship. By the time she was de-commissioned the old Hildebrand was the only one left. Still is, come to that, although they keep talking about building another Hilary. But I’m not sure the trade’s there as it used to be before the war. Those were our great days. You’re aboard a real survivor, Sir Edward. The Hildebrand’s the last of the old world, our old …’ he let the sentence wander off. ‘You’ll forgive me I hope, sir,’ he resumed. ‘I have a weakness. I like to talk about my ship. Damned selfish of me. I’m afraid I’m sadly ignorant of music.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I am too.’

  Several of those on the bridge looked round with surprise before fixing their faces back where they had been, attentive to the ocean ahead as if it could hardly be distinguished from their Captain’s narrative.

  ‘Ignorant, Sir Edward? Surely you’re joking. Or perhaps … If it comes to that I suppose I’m aware of my own ignorance of the sea. No man can ever really know the sea. No doubt the same might be said of music. They’re things of a lifetime.’

  ‘That’s a grim thought. Personally, I was just making a living – and not very much of one, either, for a good many years. It was a trade, that’s all. It served me for a while. I’m thoroughly bored by it now. If you ask me there’s a lot more to living than sitting at a table breaking one’s head over a tune. This, for example.’

  Staring at him now Captain Maddrell saw something boyish in the distinguished and slightly portly man, excited by being at the front of the ship as it bounded along over precipices of water, dropping and slamming and rising again.

  ‘I can see why you despise us,’ said this man.

  ‘I despise you, sir? Where could you get that idea?’

  ‘I mean us passengers. We’re cargo, that’s all. A fretful, moaning cargo which has to be appeased. Too many changes of clothing to be serious.’

  ‘No, sir. We none of us feel that at all. Though since you’re so frank I will admit that in general I’m always apprehensive when I wear my social cap. I’m no hand at table talk, as you’ll have realised at breakfast this morning. I … well, the Purser’s an excellent man for that. He’s never so happy as when he’s helping to plan games or getting the band to play a special tune for the couples.’

  ‘The band? You don’t mean there’s a blasted band aboard?’

  ‘Yes, sir. For the dancing.
Tommy Hawtree and the Melodeers, I believe they call themselves.’

  ‘Great God. This is awful.’

  II

  Really, discovering there’s a band aboard has chilled me rather. First Alice’s book … Next they’ll start ‘Salut d’Amour’ or ‘Rosemary’ in the middle of an otherwise blameless sole meunière. It’s hardly a new idea, bands on board passenger ships – look at the wretched ‘Titanic’ & remember those trips to Sanford in America – but I suppose it was yet another part of my silly phantasy – that at least one could get several thousand miles away from music. The time can’t be far away when it’ll be virtually impossible to hear silence. Motor cars and aeroplanes everywhere, bands everywhere, maybe even the wireless will find a way of setting a nigger minstrel to dog the heels of every last sane man on earth. Oh! I feel querulous but don’t want to be. It isn’t me, but it has come to serve as me just as it serves everyone else old enough to be too lacerated & weary to put anything back in its right place.

  The bridge – exhilarating! I felt dis-honoured before such plain men as Maddrell. All those dratted honours of mine – those meaningless bits of gold and ribbon I pretended to covet for Alice’s sake – they fell into dust as he spoke about the war aboard the ‘Hildebrand’. I only ever felt honoured by the OM although it was such a new Order nobody in Worcester thought it worth a fig in 1911. That was the year after Florence Nightingale received it on her death-bed. ‘Too kind, too kind …’ she murmured but those present swore she had no idea what it was; as far as she was concerned they were giving her the Last Rites. But when I first heard the King was intending me to have it in the Coronation Honours List – that first dreadful thought like a telegraph message whizzing through the brain – Oh, they don’t want me to write anything more – & then at last the pleasure &c. Ten or fifteen years earlier my honours could have come as encouragement; as it was they fell into my life with the dead weight of full stops. I know it’s stupid to think of my life as ending with that List in 1911 but that’s the thought which came & betrayed me. Probably the very moment of this ship’s launching, judging from what the Captain said. Such interlocking trivia … So when he talked about the war I felt I’d been neutered – hadn’t even any son to have hung maggoty and inglorious on that barbed wire like so many thousands, had been too old for this body to have been worthy even of a common grave with them – I had just to make tunes. (In any case the best tune of the war was ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ by Ivor Novello I think although immodestly I can’t get out of my head that he might never have written such a good one had I not done P & C first – the falling fourths altho’ his are concealed as falling thirds which are really appoggiaturas). What a mockery that I should have had a sword. What better sign of official impotence than the awarding of an outmoded weapon? Maybe one day the King will dole out diamond-studded Mills bombs or gold-plated Webleys to pink-cheeked dodderers. The sword, of course, went into the ground with Alice three years ago, stupid damned thing, I couldn’t bear to see it. It’s in the best place, in all senses. It was what she wanted for me & that part she can keep as far as I’m concerned.

  Well, finally it seems I’ve wasted my life. It’s a hard age at which to drink spider-juice but I submit. Suddenly on the bridge this morning I felt the flimsiness of all my substance, but not so much because I’d missed something. Quite the contrary – it was because of something of which I’ve had all too much: myself. I doubt it ever occurs to people who are not cursed with this ‘urge to create’ (whatever that is) how, far from living in sublime communion with one’s Muse, one grows thoroughly to hate her. Oh I do hate that familiar voice – her voice, my voice – which has ever since I can remember provided a commentary on everything I looked at, everything I did, every moment of my life. When one is a child one is spellbound by a voice which speaks with such immediacy to ear & eye & nose. ‘Translate me,’ it used to say & the sun made a tune on the skin of my forearms as I sat in classrooms with high windows. ‘Take me down,’ it said, speaking as aspen leaves trembling uneasily, their white always seeming to blow against late afternoon banks of dark cloud – water meadows with a few lonely cows and me. The voice was always at once of exhilaration & sadness. It’s the sadness one remembers best with increasing years: the exhilaration has come to feel like empty gesturing. Those Shed books I take down and look at still, those various boyhood scribblings which still remain unused (few indeed) – no longer bring back those days as immediately as they once did, despite what I tell myself & friends. They merely bring back all the other occasions I’ve tried to re-live them. No more the real moment, the whizzing imperative, the yell by which things served notice that they were ripe to give dictation. Yet still that fossil voice demands my fossil attention. Not even Wordsworth had the power to stop once he’d reduced it to a trade. We’ll never understand it. People tell me about my ‘imperishable gifts to Humanity’ – kindly, as they think. Well enough for Humanity, say I. But those of us who are haunted by that cracked old voice & plagued by that sniveller who demands more & more attention – we’re the ones left with ashes.

  The egregious Pyce has just been in to ask whether I would wish him to unpack my trombones and have them polished. I can’t understand the fellow’s impertinence – I give him far less trouble than any of the other passengers who are still supine in their bunks endlessly ringing for soda or beef tea yet he singles me out for such silly pranks. I shall think of a way of putting him in his place. Trombones indeed. Knavish he is.

  In any case plenty of people become distinguished literary gentlemen. Why should I not have been at ease enough with my own Muse to have turned myself into a distinguished musical gent? I may look like one, I may sound like one but underneath it all I know I’m not. Nothing to do with class or anything like that – Parry’s not a musical gent because he went to Eton but because he writes music like one. I started out by being wayward and have ended by being at war. Why? I’ve not written enough. Stanford writes more in a year than I ever did in ten. So did Mackenzie, even if the results were narcotic. (How kind of that newspaper critic reviewing ‘The Troubadour’ when he said the audience were reluctant to leave the theatre afterwards, forbearing to explain that snow was falling outside, the theatre was delightfully warm and the entire audience comfortably asleep.) My own efforts seem largely to have gone into warfare with myself. But why?

  The gale blew throughout the second and third days of the voyage and the Captain, apprised by wireless of conditions off the coast of Spain and Portugal, kept toying with the idea of proceeding directly to Madeira. This was no light decision since eleven of his passengers were bound for Oporto, including the knight of commerce at Sir Edward Elgar’s table. A further eighteen were headed for Lisbon. The remaining passengers were also expecting to go on short excursions at both stops, to wine lodges at Leixões for the ritual tasting of ten-year-old port and in cars from Lisbon to the Moorish town of Cintra. There they would wander on wobbly legs to the castle of Pena on the summit and through the grottoed Gardens of Monserrate dug into the hillside.

  In the event the Hildebrand kept to her scheduled course, reaching the mouth of the Douro at midday on November 18th. Such had been the effects of the weather on her passengers, however, that practically no-one disembarked at Leixões clutching their Booth Line tramway coupons for the sevenmile ride into Oporto. Even Edward himself felt out of sorts, as much from the contagion of finding himself aboard a ship of invalids as from any real sickness. They sailed again at 11 p.m., arriving at Lisbon the following noon. Still Edward kept listlessly to his cabin except to take tea in the Café aft of the smoke room. There he met Molly Air. Through the portholes were glimpses of white subtropical buildings against a grey sky, looking bleak and uninviting.

  ‘We can console ourselves that we shan’t be missing it at its best,’ she told him as they shared a table. ‘Cintra and all that, I mean. I made the excursion myself in early June a little while ago and it was ravishing then, just as Byron described. You cool yoursel
f up there in the courts and halls of the castle, it’s all glittery arabesques and fountains and arcades. Then you’re whirled down straight to the Estorils, baking riviera beaches with gardens behind them full of oranges, pepper trees, mimosas and eucalyptus. Everywhere there are geraniums and bougainvillaea: nothing but savage colour and bright heat to remind you of all those marvellous long miles between you and England. But it wouldn’t be the same in November, especially not in weather like this. Cintra would just seem cold, the castle gloomy, the beaches deserted. I’m afraid of that out-of-season feeling, aren’t you? It suggests time rushing by and emptiness. It also always seems to imply that everyone else knows something you don’t and is elsewhere.’

  He hardly knew how to respond, taken aback by the vividness of her description and her tone. That little rhetorical turn ‘aren’t you?’ was somehow informal enough to suggest intimacy but without the least presumption. It casually implied a friendship stretching back several years, precisely the sort of thing which normally made him bristle.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d made this trip before?’

  ‘Eighteen months ago. I went to Manaos on this very ship but I came back on another. An adventure, I suppose. Having got to Manaos I thought well, it’s silly to come all this way for just five days and then go straight back home again. So I simply caught a river steamer and went on to Iquitos in Peru. That’s another thirteen hundred miles upstream. It’s a strange feeling getting further away from the Atlantic and ever closer to the Pacific. It really is like breaking through into the other half of the globe, the one which doesn’t have all the familiar place-names. Except for Darien, of course.’

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me that you made the trip on your own? Surely your … er, husband …?’

  ‘If by that you mean unaccompanied, yes. But it was all right, you know. The Iquitos steamers also belong to Booth’s.’