Gerontius Read online

  ‘But what made you embark on such a trip in the first place?’

  ‘Sir Edward, are you good at answering direct questions about yourself ?’

  ‘Not a bit, no. I had no business asking. Pray accept my apologies.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t need them. All I meant was it would take time for me to tell you enough for it to seem less like an act of wilful truancy. One explanation would be simple: I’m an artist and a botanist. I like painting exotica. The further into Brazil we steamed the more I realised how much I loved tropical landscapes. All that grand gloom, sudden colour, huge skies full of clouds straight from the lungs of the jungle. I thought if Marianne North could have done botanical paintings in Sarawak and places then so might I in the Amazon. It’s still far less explored even than Borneo and hundreds of times bigger. I want to be the first to paint peculiar orchids, huge gorges with unnamed falls whose spray drifts like smoke for miles. I want to see things no-one else in England or Europe has ever seen before. No doubt it sounds silly to you, but those are my reasons.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Well no, of course not. I’ve grown apart from my family. Different views, you know. Also I was a nurse in France for a year before the Armistice. You can imagine it was all but impossible to go back to being demure, dependent, innocent if you like. Since when I’ve never been able to settle – along with thousands of others like me, I’d think. But I need hardly tell you about war, Sir Edward.’

  He wondered what this Modern Woman meant. Surely not the Boer War? Perhaps a son, two sons slain at Ypres, the Somme? Maybe it was just that she was still young enough for someone of his age to have no particular past; beyond a certain point any personal history would strike her as equally likely. As far as she knew he might once not have been a composer, might at forty have held a commission in the Dragoons, have served – for heaven’s sake – in the Crimea even though he had not actually been born.

  ‘I think you’re very brave,’ he said.

  ‘But I’m not.’ The creases from her nose to the corners of her lips were accentuated by her seriousness, a natural mask her face assumed along lines of old horror or resolve. ‘I’m finally doing what I want. I should think that took abominable selfishness rather than courage.’

  The Café was practically deserted. The continued absence of most passengers was emphasised by the occasional wan couple or jovial stranger who moved about the ship looking for diversion. Sometimes it seemed as though Molly Air and he were the only people aboard a vessel carrying them off to some unspecified place and for some unguessable purpose – to found a new race, maybe, or collaborate on a new ballet safe from the interruptions and curiosity of the metropolitan world.

  ‘And what is Manaos like once we get there? If we ever do?’

  ‘Wonderful. On the way down. You presumably know it was the centre of the rubber boom twenty years ago? I’m afraid a cad of an Englishman, a Mr Wickham, put paid to it by smuggling rubber seedlings to Malaya or somewhere out East with a similar climate. Or maybe his name was Wickstead and it was Ceylon? I heard so many people grouse about it I’ve quite forgotten the details. In any case Manaos’s glory is fading. It already has that marvellous feeling of decadence and nostalgia even though the economy’s only just beginning to suffer. People wander around moaning about going broke but they don’t do anything much about it. Just mope in cafés and spit in the river and mop their foreheads and laugh. Most of the real brigands have moved out or are mellowing. The foreign business community is ageing visibly. Nothing much now between the older generation of entrepreneurs – especially Germans: you wait till you see them, concerts at the Schiller Institute – and boys like the one at our table – Peter? – who are all homesick. Fever-meat, I’m afraid. They’re invalided home within six months. All day they sit on clerks’ stools perspiring, and they live on quinine. Poor things?’ She finished this fervent sketch interrogatively as if to discover where Edward’s heart lay.

  Promptly at eleven that night the Hildebrand sailed for Madeira. The next morning found Edward restored to health although the sea was still far from calm. As he breakfasted the ship plunged, wood creaked, somewhere in a distant pantry several glasses broke. In a short while Molly joined him at the Captain’s otherwise empty table and her presence further invigorated him. How old was she? He could not be certain. Her war service was a clue to a minimum age but when the previous afternoon she had referred to feverish clerical boys it was as if whole generations lay between them and herself. So unused had he become in his self-imposed stuffiness to lively and voluntary talk by strangers that after the reassuring stagnations of clubland and the shires he was adrift. If this sort of thing typified modern shipboard life then he had yet to find his sea-legs.

  Meanwhile a good proportion of the other passengers were still keeping to their cabins, ministered to by stewards, stewardesses, a harassed nurse, an ex-RAMC medical orderly with a red moustache and finally the ship’s doctor himself, Dr Ashe. From previous experience Edward expected the doctor to be friendly, perhaps jovial, even booming. Dr Ashe on the contrary had a derisive, acidulous face and prowled the shelter deck corridors with his red-moustached orderly trotting behind him bearing a white enamel kidney bowl, empty. He looked as though he were quite prepared to watch a passenger’s canvas-shrouded body weighted with old belaying pins slide from a tilted plank to raise its own momentary headstone on hitting the ocean. Edward, not in any case drawn to doctors as a race, made a mental note to remain aggressively well for the rest of the voyage.

  Some time after breakfast a message reached him from Captain Maddrell saying the bridge needed some new conversation and would he care to step up? So he spent his fifth morning at sea once more surveying through thick glass the tousled Atlantic, cocoa mug in hand. The Captain was quite unrepentant about not having skipped the first two ports of call.

  ‘I know if we’d gone directly to Madeira we would have been through this weather several days sooner,’ he said. ‘But we’re in business. It would have meant not taking on two hundred and fifty Portuguese migrant workers, a considerable loss to the company. Mind you, I bet the poor devils are regretting having sailed with us, packed in down there below decks. On some lines they travel no better than cattle, and pleased to be able to do even that. You can hang over the rail and watch ’em come aboard: black soft hats, long shapeless jackets, cheap fibre suitcases and those young-old faces – real Mediterranean types. Now and then I think they’re not physically forced to go but even so … There are things which drive a man as effectively as whips and shackles, it seems to me. The difference being that people like me are supposed to be able to carry them into exile with a clear conscience. But I know that Brazilian coast, Sir Edward. It can change a fit man into a tottering skeleton inside half a year, and these fellows often don’t even start fit. Well, there it is.’

  ‘Our Captain’s a humanitarian, wouldn’t you agree, Sir Edward?’ Mushet the pilot turned away from his customary place in one corner, which for all his unsettled way of life he appeared to fit much as a ship’s cat will be found habitually curled up on a discarded towel in its allotted retreat.

  Edward did not answer directly but when he did speak it was to say: ‘I suppose desperate men must take gambles. Brazil has to be developed and our own history shows that the sort of people who found colonies and spread civilisations are seldom meek and mild. Look at Australia, conquered by a rabble of convicts and deportees. But I must say I do applaud the Captain’s views. When we’re onlookers we cover things up by the phrases we use. We say “a new life” as easily as we say “a spot of bother” even when both might entail death. I was once myself carried away by an event where people were actually being killed.’

  ‘War, Sir Edward?’ The Captain looked knowingly round at him as though he too had once watched shells explode with an eye to their colour.

  ‘Of a kind. Not one of ours, though. We were wintering in Italy, my family and I, in early Nineteen – I suppose in ’08, it must ha
ve been. I was trying to write a symphony or some such rot. We were actually in Rome when riots broke out. I think there was a general strike – I seem to remember all the shops being closed and the trains stopped and I couldn’t get manuscript paper for love or money. We heard a lot of shooting one morning and my daughter Carice insisted on going with me to see what all the fuss was about. It turned out that the troops had opened fire on crowds of demonstrators. It’s a terrible thing for an army to have to shoot its own countrymen. The rioters were Socialists, but even so. When we reached the Piazza di Gesù it was all over – I was too late, as usual. But you know how even the aftermath of dramatic incidents is as exciting sometimes as the events themselves? The streets were full of soldiers and bright sunshine: glittering fixed bayonets and shining badges and buttons. The square itself was empty except for the cavalry picketed along one side. The brilliant uniforms, the gleaming steel all under that intense Italian sky made one heady. The air, I remember, was quite still. Some of the poor horses were nervous and the echoes of their hooves clopped round the piazza and from the side-streets leading to it from all directions you could hear the restless crowds, backed up and murmuring. The smell of gunpowder was everywhere. There was something historic, barbaric even, which I confess I found intensely thrilling. I mean it wasn’t at all hard to imagine the Colosseum two thousand years ago, the flashings of steel, the roars and groans of the crowd, and then tiny individual human screams lost in the middle of all that implacable baying. Then we suddenly noticed bloodstains on the cobbles: in one place a whole puddle of blood with dust settling on it and all sorts of red scrapings and daubings as if bleeding people had been hurriedly dragged away. And everywhere around the walls there were white pocks in the old stonework. But only afterwards did I really feel shame that for quite some time – until I saw the human evidence – I had enjoyed it.’

  For a while Edward stared ahead in a kind of horror, quite unsure how what had begun as reminiscence should have been turned by some malicious inner voice into confession. But the Captain said helpfully: ‘The human animal, sir. It’s in all of us, like as not.’ Then, ‘Would you be at all interested in the engine room? Our Chief down there is always happy to show off his infernal den.’

  Edward gave a start. ‘I say, I should. But there’s just one thing since I’m here …’

  And for fifteen minutes Sir Edward Elgar took the helm of the Hildebrand. The cox stood with his back to the bulkhead, at ease, looking nowhere in particular as Edward initially gave the spokes several nervous twitches and finally, beginning to sense the ship’s weight and desire to turn her head, spinning the wheel. Captain Maddrell took up his customary position behind the helmsman, enough aside to read the compass over his shoulder, giving advice.

  ‘Feel her through, Sir Edward. See that series of rollers ahead? She’ll slice the first two but the next one will begin to turn her. You need to lay off to starboard a few points … bit more … hold her there. Oh, feel how she takes them? There’s a real heart to this ship. But the weather’s slackening. I believe we’re through the worst.’

  ‘It looks no different to me. But I say, this is a lark.’ For, whatever anguishes and peppery despondencies had contrived to mould this grey-haired man into the simulacrum of a courtier, the deep eyes were full of a far younger happiness. As he watched a path sort itself out of the malleable wastes ahead he might have been conning a skiff past a notorious weir on the Severn fifty years earlier, so avid and childish was his expression, such pleasure was there in the feeling of lively wood beneath the hand, so beguiling the illusion of captaincy over his immediate or ultimate fate.

  That night the wind dropped, the sea lessened and the Hildebrand ran out from beneath the westernmost edge of a slab of cloud which pressed down over Europe like funerary marble. The first stirrings of night life were felt as the more resilient passengers threw off malaise and donned formal dress. The carpeted corridors and stairwells which had previously lain empty but for the lugubrious tread of the doctor and a few diehards now trickled with highly polished shoes as circulation began returning to the ship’s arteries. At the heels of certain of these shoes – not all of them women’s – trailed whiffs of Guerlain.

  ‘Odd how quickly one recovers … I say, Bernard, it’s odd how quickly one recovers.’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘My dear, you do look ever so slightly fragile. But terribly brave, too. Like a meringue on the Western Front. Rather becoming, I should say. Goodness, when I think how badly I wanted to die this afternoon and now I’m ready for anything.’

  ‘I can well imagine. But as far as this girl’s concerned anything’s off the menu at present.’ Just then a tall waiter emerged from a door and hurried by, leaving an impression of oiled hair and long lashes. ‘On the other hand …’

  ‘On the other hand if that’s on the menu you might just force yourself to a little nibble.’

  ‘I rather think one might stretch to a mouthful … For the first time I’m beginning to be glad I came. What a sheik.’

  ‘Well you can’t have it, you’re still too tottery. In your present condition you might keel over entirely. There’s nothing at all chic about being buried at sea. Not when you were planning to lie in state at St Michael’s, Chester Square, surrounded by loyal subjects in wildest mourning. Anyway, did you see the look he gave me?’

  ‘I did. Pure dismay. I shall reassure and comfort him at the earliest opportunity.’

  ‘I really think, Bernard, you’d much better leave that one to me. For the sake of your health.’

  ‘You’re so caddish, Desmond.’

  ‘Howling.’

  And the giggles and Guerlain died away.

  Elsewhere quite, in a middle-aged saloon, two middle-aged ladies had been persuaded to try their luck in a friendly game.

  ‘I suppose just this once,’ one of them was saying dubiously.

  ‘A little flutter never hurt anyone,’ insisted her new partner whose silly-ass monocle nearly disguised a certain canniness of expression. ‘We shan’t be playing for money. Just matchsticks or something. Well, pennies then.’

  ‘I’m an awful dunce at cards,’ said the other middle-aged lady. The two men swapped glances.

  ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ urged the man with the monocle. ‘Look, why don’t we have a dry run to clear away the cobwebs?’

  An hour later it could be observed that his beady expression had changed to one of glumness.

  ‘It’s coming back to me now,’ his partner was saying.

  Still later unspoken recriminations hung in little black clouds over the table.

  ‘One never really forgets a card game, does one? It’s like bicycling. One may get a little rusty but the knack never disappears completely, I find.’

  ‘I wish I could say the same for the money we’ve been losing,’ said the man with the monocle bitterly.

  ‘Oh dear oh dear, I’m awfully sorry to be such a dunce.’ And had the two men been less distracted they would surely have noticed the look the ladies briefly exchanged, for it was one of pure mischief. ‘I tell you what, why don’t we do something quite unladylike and play poker instead? Then it’s everyone for himself.’

  But there was no doubt luck was running against the monocled man that night. The ineptness his erstwhile partner had shown in her bidding seemed at last to have settled down into the occasional moment of recklessness. The rest of the time she made respectable little wins and by the end of the evening’s play had done rather well.

  ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘you did have some awful hands, Mr Barstow, you poor man. I can’t think what got into the cards tonight. Normally I’m the one forever trying to make a pair of fours sound like a straight flush or whatever it’s called. Why don’t we all try again tomorrow? Your luck will have changed by then. Do let’s.’

  That same evening also marked the beginnings of several shipboard romances. The shared oppression and enforced reclusiveness of the first days of the voyage made for flur
ries of alliance as eye caught speculative eye. Gentlemen in full fig came upon each other preening themselves anxiously before washroom mirrors and remarks were heard about ‘the corker in the blue dress with the little dog’. The younger element soon found their way into each other’s cabins (where all sorts of shrieks and evidence of high jinks were wafted into the corridors by opening and closing doors) while the youngest element of all, two morose boys of ten, met at dinner and loathed one another on sight.

  But things were as yet exploratory, uncertain. What everyone asked themselves was, ‘Am I going to get any fun? And if so, when might it start?’, a question hardly confined to newly-assembled cruise passengers.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked one of the card-playing ladies of the other as they prepared for bed in their shared cabin. ‘I quite fancy my Mr Monocle. Barstow – such a reliable, straightforward name and, unless I’m much mistaken, a straightforward gentleman. Straightforwardly greedy, I mean. Did you notice his tiepin?’

  ‘Oh yes, and his cuff-links. Whereas mine …’

  ‘I’m afraid there was something ever so slightly déclassé about yours, wasn’t there? All that talk about nipping over to Brazil to settle some contracts. You saw his hands? That one’s accustomed to lugging something far heavier than a briefcase.’

  ‘Golly, how Sherlockian we’re becoming in our old age.’

  ‘My dear, a commercial traveller’s a commercial traveller, dress him up how you may and send him to the other side of the world if you will. No, I don’t think you can look upon that one as a man of substance. Bad luck.’

  ‘Never mind. It was a start, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’m going to turn the light out now. Ow. How very hot these glass shades become.’ The two ladies lay and listened to the engines and the sea catching at the rivet-heads only an inch or two of steel plating away from their blanketed feet. From somewhere – maybe the deck above or the deck below them – came an occasional muffled strain of dance music, a sedate waltz as befitted the lateness of the hour. ‘Yes, it’s a start. I like the look of things. You know that feeling? It’s going to be an interesting trip.’