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.
Edward was introduced to a dozen people whose names more or less passed through his mind leaving few traces. Some of them seemed to fall so readily into ‘types’ that he felt excused the laborious gallantry of trying to remember what they were actually called. There was one of those mysterious knights of commerce whose very nationality was vague – Sir Somebody Pereira – port wine, most likely, or rubber. Or even slaves, who could tell? Two spinsters going back to some benighted mission in the depths of nowhere, all shiny knuckles and good works. A young man, practically a boy – Peter? Patrick? – going to take up his first post as a clerk in Alfred Booth & Co.’s offices in Manaos. A young woman in her twenties, rather modern, a Miss Air, self-described ominously as ‘an artist’. There was even an explorer or botanist named – incredibly – Fortescue, with a red face and vague moustache: the sort of features which become visible only when surmounted by a pith helmet.
They all chattered as they ate, more, it struck him, out of excitement at the impending voyage than from a real desire to make acquaintance. Towards him they maintained that exaggerated respect which he had long since come to recognise and often to connive at. The food was good; he ate it largely in silence and listened to their conversation. But towards the end of the meal his reserve was overcome – maybe by the wine or even by the others’ high spirits – enough to remark:
‘I’d take a small bet that this company will be a good deal quieter by the same time tomorrow. Rather less numerous, too.’
‘I imagine, Sir Edward, that you speak figuratively?’ said one of the spinsters. ‘I hardly think betting on the way Providence sees fit to dispose the weather …?’
‘Will anyone here offer me odds?’
‘Well really, Sir Edward …’
‘You think it’ll be rough then, sir?’ asked the Booth’s boy. His evident apprehensiveness seemed to be shared by a majority of those at the table.
‘My steward certainly thinks so.’
‘Ah, one of those old sea-dogs, is he?’ asked the explorer sceptically.
‘More of a puppy, I should say, in every sense. But he claims friendship with the Marconi man in whom nowadays all wisdom is vested. Even old sea-dogs have given up lifting their muzzles to the sky. They shove up aerials instead.’
‘It’s quite miraculous and mysterious,’ said the other spinster, giving him a sharp look he could not interpret.
From somewhere overhead came a melancholy C, loud enough to thrill the panelling and the table and the deck beneath their feet.
‘Maybe we’re off at last?’
But the glimpses of lamplit quay beyond the portholes remained unchanging. However, several guests took this as the moment to leave the table. As Edward himself stood up the first spinster made a nervous leaning gesture with her chest which implied that the eight or so feet of air between them was a momentarily intimate space.
‘Despite our little contretemps I really must tell you, Sir Edward, how immensely honoured we are to have you with us.’
He muttered something. ‘Muh, ah, very kind.’
‘But I should explain that it’s a particular honour for me. You see, I sang in the chorus at the first performance of your wonderful Apostles in Birmingham.’
‘I am sorry, madam, that you should have thus wasted the precious hours of your youth.’
‘Wasted? Sir Edward! It was the greatest possible privilege. It was probably the single most memorable event of my life. For all that it was so long ago I remember it vividly. The year was nineteen hundred and three.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder. But I believe the only thing worth remembering about that year was Rock Sand winning the Derby and the Two Thousand Guineas and the St Leger. Two to five on. Not much chance for a killing with a horse like that. Now if you will excuse me?’
‘Pig,’ he said to himself as he strode off down the passage to his cabin. ‘Pig-pig-pig.’ But then, as if to convince himself that his rebuff had been justified, ‘She’s ghastly. Is there no end to these dried-up creatures who hover around choral societies like vultures? I expect her friend sings drawing-room ballads in K sharp. Cursed pair of sirens.’
‘Pig.’
He let himself into his cabin. His trunk had arrived and seemed to take up most of the bedroom floor. Its new lacquer glittered malevolently. Coffin, strongbox …; certainly it had the air of buried things about it, either of things decayed or of things concealed. Because he had not wanted valeting by a stranger he had not given Pyce the key. He now laid out his own night things, uncovering in the depths of the trunk several polished mahogany boxes with rounded edges, brass carrying handles and keyholes. The lid of each was inlaid with a rectangular ivory wafer where a name could be imprinted; they were all blank.
He read for a while in his dressing-gown, wishing to take refuge from that part of his brain which was vibrating with events, his day’s travelling, the new surroundings. Beneath these lay the deeper upset of a life made suddenly rootless and aimless. His present existence seemed encompassed by the dingy walls of clubs and flats despite his recent move from Hampstead back to Worcestershire. Now that Alice was gone the London place had outlived its purpose. In relief he had returned to the county of his birth where he could finally turn his back on that endless metropolitan coming-and-going which had made Severn House so difficult to work in. Visitors, dinners, receptions, theatre-parties; telephone, telephone, telephone. Lady Elgar had revelled in it. Only he had known that each time the footman opened the front door another bar remained unwritten and another few pence unearned to pay that footman’s wages. Footmen. Dear God, he was a composer. Why did he have to live like a character in Earnest where young moneyed swells could mess about at the piano while the butler brought in cucumber sandwiches? Damn them all, he thought, without trying to identify ‘them’ or, for that matter, having to decide whether he himself were included. A little hummock of bitterness heaped itself momentarily, lurched him and rolled on even as the other, the reading part of his brain, resisted its interfering with the kind of serene melancholy he hoped might permit sleep.
Why had he brought Tennyson to read, of all people? Griefs, longings, loves, ships, boxes, death. The rumble of wheels above the dreamless head. He closed the volume and went into the bedroom. As he did so the carpet transmitted another C to his slipper-soles which was then taken up muffledly by the air within the panelled box of his cabin. This time although the sound died away the carpet remained trembling. When finally he laid his head on his pillow he could hear distant machinery and marvelled at the smooth tumblings of steel, the tons of hot castings and whirling axles on which his life would depend for the next month or two. For a moment he was conscious of savage pressures in boilers studded with bolts.
‘Calm sea. Prosperous voyage. Codswallop.’ On the brink of sleep more jumbled phrases came to him: ‘The watcher on the column’ and ‘autumnal man’. It was what came of leafing through Tennyson before going to bed.
He awoke once during the night, his eyes opening onto a dim circle of light. His first thought was of a hospital or nursing room, one of those places of disquiet and transience whose doors have round observation panes let into them through which white-capped heads were visible from time to time like a muster of ghosts waiting to be joined. Another operation? The pitching of the room still further bemused him. Just before a doleful calm panic set in he remembered where he was and consciously stopped his pyjama’ed arm before it could reach to switch on the bedside lamp. He was on his way to Brazil. Brazil? He must be mad. Therefore the circle of light was the curtained porthole giving onto the shelter deck. The Hildebrand’s plates quivered to waves and machinery. For a moment the motion was disagreeably like his recurrent attacks of Ménière’s disease which had so debilitated him during the war; but once he knew the movement was real and not a trick of the inner ear he began to enjoy it. It was surely rougher now than it had been on any of those crossings he had made to the Continent – rougher, come to that, than on his transatlantic trips to New York in the Mauretania. After a particularly violent lurch which made the toothglass in the bathroom rattle in its retaining ring he thought it might even be rougher than it had been for the Mediterranean cruise with the Royal Navy in 1905.
For a while he debated getting up but gradually an inertia stole over him which was more like abandonment. Why worry? Things had run their course. If by some wilful alchemy his emptied life now consisted of being in a plunging steel box heading towards a dark continent he had never wished to see, why not? As soon do that as continue desolately shifting between the unsettled poles of Kempsey – still all packing cases which he now feared to unpack – and the London clubs where he lived out of suitcases. What drearier rut for an artist than that which led between servile slipper-dom in the shires and the billiard rooms, smoke rooms and theatre crush-bars of the city? The shunting back and forth, the search for a quiet place where the departing Muse might once again be persuaded to settle: such very restlessness guaranteed it never would. Perhaps, then, in Brazil. Perhaps what had deserted him in fading England was now waiting among the energetic canopies of vast forests, its jewelled wings folded. It seemed unlikely; but then everything did.