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 flurries 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.’
‘Mm. What price Sir Edward Elgar, though?’
‘Under no circumstances.’ The voice came from the darkness in a firm tone as if its owner had come up on one elbow to make the point.
‘Dearest, just think … Position, wealth, and I’m sure I remember hearing his wife died recently.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Well it seems a pity. Rather a waste, I mean. He has the eye, did you notice? And don’t come all over virtuous, it’s such a bore. A touch hypocritical, too.’
‘I suppose he has, yes. Yes, of course I noticed if you insist.’
‘Oh I do insist. I also reserve the right to imagine you becoming more predatory as the voyage wears on. Anyway, I thought we’d long since agreed that anyone with the eye was fair game.’
From either bed there came the sounds of two old friends from whom little was hidden quietly enjoying a joke.
‘I forbid you to have designs on the Master of the King’s Musick.’
More laughter. All around them in the starlight the wavetops wrung their hands unseen and fled continuously astern.
Oblivious of how his presence was already beginning to affect the plans of at least two people aboard, Edward was at that moment returning to his cabin after a bluff evening with new acquaintances. Still restless with smoke and chatter he postponed sleep for a while and instead settled down at the desk with his Journal.
Maddrell was complimentary on my helmsmanship in a gruff sort of way. Told him it wasn’t unlike conducting & nor is it. As a beginner one had the same feeling of being run away with and then of immense power & one’s least act will cause everything to skid off or sing. Maybe I should have been Captain Maddrell although it’s by no means certain what sort of a composer he might have made. Probably rather good: well-made light music which everybody likes to hum and which earns.
Well I could do that too, and did it, except that I never wanted to have to. If only I could have made a halfway decent living out of ‘serious’ stuff I would probably have dabbled quite pleasurably in the odd ‘popular’ piece – & why not? it’s perfectly respectable to be a tunesmith. That time hearing someone whistle the viola tune from Alassio in the street – who it was or where they heard it lawd nose but oh! the pleasure. It’s the greatest compliment a composer can be paid (but compliments don’t buy groceries) and I thought yes, I took the tune down so that other people could hear it too. I would certainly much rather have done salon pieces which people could whistle than all those glees and part-songs for beastly little choral clubs to massacre earnestly. One of those odious commissions (for a pittance, naturally) actually paralysed me with hatred. My hand would not move across the page. It took five days to write a line, such bosh, nobody would have wanted to whistle it & we ate bread that week but precious little else.
I did once tell somebody (pompous ass that I am) that I was folksong, mainly a retort called forth by their endlessly trying to get me to say what I thought about the ‘new music’ (esp. V. Williams) and all that Cecil Sharpery. Perhaps it wasn’t so far off the truth. If ancient folksongs were the distillates of a culture & its language then it wd. be surprising if I who knew the sound of the wind on the Malvern Hills quite as well as Piers Plowman had not occasionally captured something of the essential melody which lies beyond mere tune. And anyway if folksongs are songs the folk sing then ‘Land of Hope & Glory’ – curse every one of its bars – surely qualifies. Not something I ever want to hear again, not even whistled in the street. How I’ve come to detest the thing! You can’t joke with the public: they know nothing but what they do know is always enough to hang you. All my music has now shrunk to that single tune, quite undeserved what’s more since it wasn’t my idea to put words to it but the King’s. They don’t fit – of course poor Jaeger was right about that drop to E – whatever words had been shoehorned into it wd. have sounded vulgar. But dear old Nim didn’t have the full weight of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha bearing down on him, only consumption, and that makes a man unafraid of kings. Mind you I don’t regret the original tune as it was in P & C – it knocked ’em for six as I knew it would – but I never intended a thing which came to me one morning while I was probably sawing wood or something (the rhythm?) should become a perennial excuse for a national bellow.
Well, it was the box office & I played to it & God knows I needed to. One surely can hardly blame penurious artists for trying to make a bit of chink, even a living when they can tho’ in the long run it never pays because you get labelled by the public’s taste, fickle & ignorant as it is. Nobody now gives much of a damn for any of my music, only a remaining handful of dear ones who remember the great times; now we’re fellow-dinosaurs who haven’t yet crept decently down into our coal-seam and joined the fossils of a forgotten age. But I do live and breathe, I lash my tail & still can bite & take pleasure in doing so. The single exception to the fate of everything I’ve written seems to be ‘Land of Hope’, belted out with bombast & that has anyway become national property – it’s no longer by me, just another of those purple tunes like ‘Rool, Britanyah’ and ‘Gawd Save’ which make the public climb onto its hind legs and yell with a tear in its eye (two tears if there’s a pint in its stomach). Oh, foolish! spending a lifetime despising the British public’s musical taste & I realise now my scorn was misdirected. It was really self-loathing for bothering with such things anyway. One is an artist & there’s an end to it. No use trying to suck up to posterity – posterity’s inscrutable & doesn’t pay last month’s gas bill. When dreamers of dreams get turned into national figures you can be damned sure their dreams are misunderstood. Poor old Kipling, now – a case in point. He complains he’s so well known by a famous line here and there but never by the next line which undoes it & still less by all those hundreds of poems which lie unread in the Collected Works. Alas it’s the same for me & probably for all of us. The people who are known by whole pages at a time are either a hundred years dead or Arthur Sullivan which amounts to the same thing. I know some of my things are alive and will last but it won’t be me who reaps the least benefit from them – nor ever did – just a lot of conceited asses not yet even born, conductors & fiddlers & bawlers who are more thought of than the composers without whose music they would be nobodies. Or coxswains.
Later
We’ve all lost our faith, those of our generation – Hardy, Kipling, Conrad – we all went through the motions of producing stuff as if everything were all right, or at least still possible – as if that eye in the sky were still looking down with compassion. But it isn’t; & since that filthy war we all know it never was – such scenes of carnage it wd. have to have witnessed unblinking – & now we’ve all woken up to the fact that it’s dead. It’s all as dead as the machinery roaring everywhere (soon no more horses, no more hooves clopping through the streets, no more friendly smells of fresh sweat & honest dung). I’m like a man who as a child once heard a marvellous bird sing in a miraculous tree & has spent a lifetime trying to take down its song – only to discover too late that it was only a cuckoo clock, springs & pulleys & cogs.
What a fool!