That night as most of the passengers – including Edward – slept, the Hildebrand sighted a far-off lighthouse and ninety minutes later dropped anchor in Funchal harbour so that when they first came on deck in the morning they found themselves suddenly dwarfed by the threadbare mountains of Madeira seemingly at arm’s length. Instead of a great emptiness of sky the drabbish steep hills with their mufflers of terraced olives bore down on top of them. Pleased (in some cases downright relieved) to see land again many nonetheless intuited a sense of displacement. Where exactly were they? What were these islands? Detached remnants of Africa? Vestiges of scenery which hinted mockingly at remembered bits of Mediterranea? Certain of those on deck tapped their hats casually on the rail while waiting for the motor launches to ferry them ashore. There was perturbation in this gesture; it expressed an imaginative impasse to which they had come. If, their musing selves insisted, if on the straight line between the British Isles and the mouth of the Amazon were no dry land and if one could leave wintry Europe and a fortnight later reach malarial tropics, what would a theoretical halfway house look like? There was no answer to this, even though a few quite enjoyed the speculation of a gradually changing seabed thrusting itself up in mid-Atlantic to show how far the transformation had advanced. But however they imagined the result, Madeira was not quite it. Somehow the Portuguese element was wrong, the ochre and khaki rocks amid all that blue ocean too parched. Maybe the sight of the odd parakeet might have saved things: were these not also known as the Canary Isles? Many in the speeding launches rather thought they were.
Holding his straw panama on his knees and wearing a dandyish linen jacket, silk handkerchief fluttering in breast pocket, Edward was skimmed across the dimpled surface of the harbour. Beside him sat Molly. On her head was an intrepid hat which had the air of having come between many a torrid sun and its owner’s thick brown hair. It was the colour of sand and had around it a narrow ribbon of much the same tint but with a faint and mountainous line reminiscent of an effect of watered silk wandering up and down its surface. This delineated the tide-marks of sweat which had resisted all launderings. The hat’s broad brim bent in the launch’s breeze; the string beneath her chin was taut as she kept her head tipped back to survey the terraces with their scattering of whitewashed villas.
When they disembarked she asked: ‘Are you a good tourist, Sir Edward?’
‘I used to be an inveterate sight-seer, if that’s the same thing.’
‘It probably is if they’re the same sights as everyone else’s. I imagined that in your case they mightn’t be.’
‘Maybe one does try to bring a different mind to them.’
‘Well I can tell you there isn’t much in the way of sights here for people on a long journey with only a few hours to spend. There’s a sort of cathedral if you like sort of cathedrals. It’s got a quite pretty Moorish roof of cedarwood. More to the point, there’s a restaurant I happened upon which does beautifully tender squid stewed in their own ink. You can cut them with a fork. Are you partial to squid, Sir Edward?’
‘I’ve had them fried in Italy. I found I liked them better when they weren’t called “squid”: there’s something unappetising about that word. Disguised as calamari fritti, however, they were agreeably marine. “Stewed in ink” is not an enticing description, either, for anyone who has made his living with a pen.’
‘As someone who intends to make it with a brush I assure you they’re enchanting. A bed of white rice and black puddles strewn with fat pink shapes like finger-stalls with collar-stiffeners in them. The colours are most eccentric.’
‘Good heavens, Miss Air. If I were wearing my hat I should raise it to your stomach. There’s something about the colour black I don’t at all associate with food.’
‘Have you never eaten black pudding, then?’
‘Touché! You’ve hit on a great favourite of mine. Only better not tell anyone or they’ll think you invented our acquaintance. Who was that gentleman you so recently described, now? Celebrated patriot, friend of Royalty, heir-presumptuous to the mastership of the King’s Musick? They’re not going to believe a stuffed ass like that eats black pudding. And comes back for seconds if there’s another pint of beer to go with it.’
‘My turn to cry “Touché!”, Sir Edward. Please don’t remind me.’
‘It’s already out of my mind. Not the black puddings, though. Do you know until quite recently I lived in Hampstead, which is not by any means the most deprived quarter of London. You can get most things in Hampstead, even some fairly exotic food for the various foreigners of substance who stay there from time to time. But do you think one can obtain something as stalwartly English as black pudding? I used to have to take the bus all the way down to Fleet Street and patronise a little shop which has them delivered fresh from Birmingham every week. My wife objected strenuously. She thought it was infra dig.’
‘Which? Bus or sausage?’
‘Both, I’m afraid. I was quite unrepentant. The one was a necessary economy, the other sheer pleasure. Not but what she wasn’t perfectly happy to eat it herself in the old days … Where are we going, incidentally? Have you any idea?’
‘Yes, to the top of Bella Monte. I took the liberty of buying us tickets from the Chief Steward. We get a round trip including a late breakfast at the top. Or an early luncheon.’
‘That’s absurd,’ said Edward sharply, then, ‘You’re too kind. One’s not used to having arrangements made by young ladies one scarcely … I’m a bit nonplussed.’
‘But not for long,’ Molly said cheerfully.
Above them the mountain obscured a good part of the blue sky. Its topmost crags seemed as near or as distant as the moon which, as a ghost of its night-time self, perversely lingered in the light of morning and balanced upon Madeira like an eroded pearl. With the herd instinct common among day-trippers their fellow-passengers, most of whom presumably had never been to Funchal before, found themselves getting gingerly into drawn-up bullock waggons.
‘I can’t see this getting us very far,’ Edward observed as he stooped under the gay cretonne canopy and settled himself on a hard wooden seat covered in leather. ‘Don’t tell the gentleman up front but I think somebody has pinched his wheels.’
‘Ah, there’s a reason for that which you may not know. Many centuries ago a certain Teofilo was appointed first Bishop of Madeira, a young man whose conversion to Christianity had taken place while witnessing the martyrdom of St Catherine. He fetched up in Lisbon as a mendicant theologian famous for two things: his charity and his horror of wheels – for ever since that awful day he couldn’t bear to see anything which reminded him of Catherine’s torment.’
‘He must have had a trying time crossing Europe.’
‘Abominable. He walked, of course, and to drown the sound of carts and carriages on the few roads he was forced to take he used to stop, face the ditch and sing a psalm as loud as he could. You can imagine he arrived in Lisbon after an unconscionable time and quite hoarse. But what nowadays would be thought eccentricity was in those times accounted piety and he rose rapidly in the Church. When he was appointed Bishop here he was for the first time able to exercise real power in the service of his pet aversion. He simply banned all wheels on Madeira.’
With a jerk the bullock took up the slack in its harness and they set off along the cobbles, rumbling and juddering.
‘This is nothing but a sled!’
‘Exactly,’ said Molly. ‘They all are. Not a wheel among them. Oh, you’ll see wheels here now and then. After all, despite the monstrous piety and conservatism of the Madeirans it is nearly eleven centuries since Teofilo died. But not many – you look. I believe these things are called carros,’ she added.
‘Pray excuse me,’ broke in a gentle voice from the seats behind them, ‘but I couldn’t help overhearing your account.’ Turning, they found the two spinsters from their table leaning forward. ‘Good morning, Sir Edward. Good morning,’ these ladies said in parenthesis. ‘But,’ continued the first, ‘surely your version is at variance with the explanation given in Calixões?’ She held up a battered red volume.
‘Ah, Calixões,’ said Molly, somewhat in the indulgent tone of a renowned chemist being lectured by his great-aunt on phlogiston. ‘I don’t believe anybody takes Calixões very seriously nowadays, not since that extraordinary hoax … But here we are. We have to get out here.’
The fleet of carros had stopped outside a rack-railway station, happening to coincide with the arrival of a funicular train consisting of half a dozen coaches of weird aspect, having been constructed at an angle corresponding to that of the gradient. Little rattly parallelograms, they drew into the platform and awaited new custom. Expressions of interest and amusement made themselves audible, mingled with one or two notes of dismay; but in the event twenty more or less resigned Britons soon found themselves seated in staggered rows being hauled upwards. As the winding-station with its quickly-suppressed images of ad hoc bits of wiring and loose girders fell away, so did the electrical whine of the motors until they were ascending in almost complete silence.
‘It’s quite like ballooning,’ offered the red-cheeked explorer, Fortescue. The face which still needed a pith helmet to give it shape was babyish with pleasure. He had brought a pair of binoculars with him, Molly noticed.
Somewhere beneath them a cable transmitted a soft thrum and cogs engaged the metal teeth of the rack with no more than a crackle of grease. On either side terraces, villas and bulks of naked rock slipped away, and as they did so the passengers’ spirits rose in the morning air. Gradually the town spread itself below, the harbour became a map, the Hildebrand – glimpsed now and then among the hydrangeas – a grey-and-white model. The warm scent of baked earth, dew and dust rose in pockets. Some late butterflies investigated the fig-trees’ remaining leaves. Windings of narrow cobbled roadway disappeared beneath them, re-emerging to turn abruptly aside and fall from sight.
‘It’s a pity it’s so late in the year,’ Molly said. ‘Spring must be amazingly beautiful – just look at all the plants: mimosa, hydrangeas, lilies, agapanthus, to say nothing of the things people have growing up their houses. Simply between the harbour and the station I saw bougainvillaea, wisteria, strelitzia, hibiscus and jacaranda.’
‘Very showy,’ a lady remarked.
‘Even so. When I was here in June it was much clearer from the vegetation that we were passing from a hot zone to a more temperate one as we went up. For instance those fields down there behind the town were full of sugar cane and rice but by this point it’s mostly grapes and wheat. I did some sketches in wash: the colour changes were wonderfully subtle.’
‘You can still tell from the trees,’ Edward pointed out. ‘It’s all palms and figs down there but it looks as if those are pines and oaks we’re coming to. I wonder how high up we are?’
This had been one of those semi-public conversations which self-consciously include people who otherwise could not be excluded except by whispering. Fortescue was able to volunteer without embarrassment:
‘About a thousand feet, I’d say. Give or take.’
‘Is this a balloonist speaking?’
‘As a matter of fact I haven’t done that much ballooning, sir. But I can certainly speak as a pilot.’
‘You’ve flown in an aeroplane?’ Edward’s interest was that of someone who had long ago discovered an enthusiasm for motoring and logically regarded flight as the next step.
‘Many,’ admitted Fortescue. ‘I was in the RFC a goodish while.’ Something in his tone implied recognition that war heroes were becoming unfashionable and he hardly wished to be pressed. ‘The altimeters were not always reliable, you see, so we became not bad at judging height. Had to be, really. No trick to it,’ he added modestly as if someone were likely to imply there were. ‘Anybody could do it with a bit of practice. In any case I’ve cheated.’ The amorphous face beamed round upon the occupants of the carriage.
‘Have you been here before?’ Molly asked him.
‘Not a bit of it. But the guide book gives the height of this mountain as three thousand feet and while we were still on the ship I took notice of various features. This line of forest we’re coming up to is about halfway, for instance. And that whitish splash that looks as if somebody’s tipped paint over the cliff, that’s at about two thousand feet.’
This evidently professional approach to landscape by someone claiming to be a pilot and reputed to be an explorer made Molly look at Fortescue with some attention for the first time. Suddenly the binoculars on their lanyard about his neck looked like a tool rather than a prop, and quite well-worn at that.
‘You were wise to bring those,’ she said. ‘The view from the top is quite spectacular.’
‘I never travel without ’em.’
Baby’s dummy, she thought, unaccountably touched by his innocent meaty cheeks, the formless clump of hairs on his upper lip.
Roughly at the point where he had indicated the two-thousand-foot mark they reached a depressed-looking clearing in the middle of which stood a huge house of un-Madeiran aspect. Here the train halted but nobody got in or out and after a minute it started again.
‘What an extraordinary house. It looks like the sort of hotel one blunders on towards nightfall in Scotland.’
‘Or one of those places which advertise in the back of Ward Lock’s Guide to Harrogate. You know, “Premier position. Near Moors and Gardens. Electric light throughout. Lift to all Floors”.’
‘“Special Suicide Suite”,’ put in Fortescue and went an immediate red.
‘Well really,’ said one of the spinsters, she and her companion turning away abruptly to glare out of the windows.
Despite the season the little terminus of Monte at the summit was bright with potted flowers. A uniformed official with operatic moustaches bowed to them as they disembarked and directed their attention to a nearby house where, he intimated, quite exceptional cups of chocolate and glasses of port might be had of his wife.
‘Later,’ they said in English and with gestures of stirring above their abdomens mimed that they had already breakfasted or maybe that the sudden ascent had destroyed all appetite. The official made several more melancholy bows and then went and watered his geraniums using a wine flask with an exaggeratedly long neck. The sun winked off the frogging on his shoulders and made pinkly translucent the ears of a motheaten tabby cat dozing on a folded copy of O Correio. A notice board nearby announced the height above sea level. The voices of today’s visitors died away.
They straggled across a shady square which, had they been able to ignore the surrounding terrain, they might easily have supposed a well-visited Mediterranean village. But in one direction lay a gloomy pine forest in front of which a single-storey building with tall windows stood amid the sort of terraces on which tourists take tea and tell each other how lucky they are to be there.
‘I say, what an abominable place,’ said Edward.
‘Isn’t it?’ Molly agreed. ‘That’s the –’ she consulted her ticket ‘– the Chalet-Restaurant “Esplanade” in which we’re entitled to eat and drink.’
‘But not to be merry, I shouldn’t think. How awful pines are. What’s that church over there?’
‘Our Lady of Something, I forget. But when I was here before it happened quite by chance to coincide with an immense event. The place was stuffed with bishops and sightseers. We almost missed our boat because the trains were all full. It turned out they were cementing up the Austrian Emperor into his tomb. Charles the Somethingth – Fourth, possibly? Lots of processions, trumpets and whatnot. And about a million little brown choirboys all with cropped heads and monkeyish grins. We sat on that verandah thingy and made jokes about Catholics. Oh heavens, I suppose you’re not by any chance … You are, aren’t you? Sir Edward, I’m most … I mean, of course I shouldn’t have …’
Much as her confusion amused him he ended it by reassuring her that he was not remotely offended. ‘I daresay it was pretty much of a spectacle.’
‘Oh it was. But even so. I’m afraid I’m always putting my foot in it like that,’ she said gratefully. ‘Now, we don’t want breakfast yet, do we?’ she turned to Fortescue and the spinsters who were a pace or two behind in the delicate manner of those who might or might not be considered part of a group. ‘Let’s earn it, then.’
‘You’ve planned us some exercise?’ Fortescue asked her. She thought he still had the air of a puppy eager to make amends after a noisome gaffe.
‘Only a little. But having come this far it’s well worth getting the view. You’d think people would be glad to stretch their legs after lying in their bunks for the best part of a week.’ She glanced meaningfully towards a divergent group of fellow-passengers who were heading determinedly for the Chalet-Restaurant ‘Esplanade’ before she led off along a path skirting the forest of pines.
They walked uphill to where the cranium of the mountain broke through all pretence of plants and soil, a fissured plateau of baked rock meeting head-on the subtropical sun. All of a sudden they stopped being on Madeira and were instead on a point above the surface of the globe. In nearly every direction the sea stretched its crinkling sheet over the rim of the world like a drumskin on which solar rays and meteorites were falling in motionless profusion, making a great empty pattering sound they felt rather than heard. There was the sense of having been lifted out of the world, of having been extracted from it even as their memories of it as containing large and solid things such as buildings were replaced by the panorama of Funchal below, a mere map of a town on a toy planet. This majestic detachment was still further heightened by the brilliantly clear morning air, the windless expanse of blue above them and the ruffled pan of deeper blue below, neither of which elements seemed to contain them. What was more, the far-off northern port they had left behind, somewhere over many a stormy horizon together with unreal images of urban fogs and glum wintering, belonged now to a different planet and to people other than themselves.
Fortescue was studying the harbour with his glasses. Edward could see the Hildebrand was being joined by a rectangular vessel whose stern trailed a short white stalk of foam.
‘I think we’re going to take coal on,’ he said around his lenses. ‘It looks like some sort of lighter.’
‘The Chief Engineer told me we burn seventy tons a day, but maybe we burned more coming through that storm. This really is a splendid vantage point. I suppose you aviators get quite used to views like this.’
‘Not at all, sir,’ said Fortescue surprisingly. ‘That is, one becomes accustomed to them but so far as I’m concerned they’re never boring. Still, to get the full effect you do need that feeling of hanging in air instead of standing on an edge. You’ve never been up in an aeroplane I presume, sir?’
‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, you must. It’s really the only thing. You’d be amazed by how solid it is. The air, I mean to say.’
Edward thought of standing on Worcestershire Beacon in a gale, leaning against the wind, letting more and more of his weight tilt off his toes until for a fraction of a second the airstream might actually have been supporting his body like a yielding bed until he fell forward with a laugh. Oh days.
‘I must make the effort,’ he said half to himself.
‘I really would, sir. It won’t cost you much just to do a flip from some aerodrome but once you’ve got a taste for it there’s no knowing where it’ll stop. All sorts of people are taking to the air now. Someone told me there’s even a titled lady in her seventies – a duchess, I think – who’s learned to fly and is buying her own machine.’
‘You’re such a convincing salesman I can only suppose you must sell the things.’
Fortescue laughed. ‘Not a bit of it. Really, I’m just enthusiastic because I’ve spent so much time in the cockpit.’
‘I hope you’ll excuse me but I believe you introduced yourself on our first evening as an explorer? Is this the latest craze, exploring by air?’
‘It may become so, sir. The advantages are obvious.’ And he told a story of a scheme he and an old comrade had dreamed up, to go to unmapped areas of the world and offer to carry out aerial surveying on behalf of governments. The Amazon region had seemed to them a sensible choice since so much was completely uncharted but, as the recent rubber boom had shown, there was clearly untold wealth to be had there. He had already made an exploratory visit to confirm this and now, having raised the capital in Europe, he was returning to Amazonas to put the scheme into operation. The old comrade had gone on ahead; Fortescue was following on with two machines.
‘But for some reason you had to leave them behind?’ hazarded Edward.
‘No, they’re aboard the Hildebrand. They’re all crated up in the hold. I must say I was a bit bothered in case they got too badly shaken about by that weather. But they’re both stout little buses. Johnny – that’s Johnny Proctor – has got our two old riggers and fitters from service days with him and they’ll have them together in a jiffy.’
‘I believe you’re an adventurer,’ said Molly who had been listening with evident interest.
‘Well I suppose it is a bit of a lark. But we’ve both sunk so much money into it now we’ve got to make it work or frankly we’ll be on our uppers. It’s a commercial proposition, all right. Regular government salary plus we can undertake work on commission for interested parties. What I mean is, we can map a river for the Brazilians but we might tell only Fry’s or Cadbury’s that its banks are lined with cocoa forest, what?’ And though his thirtyish baby’s face creased and dimpled Molly noticed a beadiness in his eyes as if behind the amiable, malleable world his outer person created as he moved through it certain hard experiences lay which had fixed all manner of edges and limits beyond which there would be no budging.
By now others of the party who had also spurned the comforts of the ‘Esplanade’ had followed on and were scattered across the rock. Edward, Molly, Fortescue and the two spinsters had remained loosely together and at last turned from the panorama of Funchal and its harbour towards an inland view of Madeira. They reached a point from which they could see a hillside opposite them and several hundred feet lower. This was largely covered in scrub except where vast rectangular bites had been taken from its core of ochre rock. Whatever had once been quarried here must have been exhausted or no longer worth the effort to mine since the working was quite obviously abandoned. Some rusted cranejibs lay on its floor but all the access tracks were now covered in the ubiquitous tough bushes.
‘I sketched here too,’ said Molly. ‘I liked those iron-coloured stains. I suppose it used to be for iron ore.’
‘Now there I can be of information,’ came the unexpected remark of the spinster who had earlier addressed her in the carro.
‘Ah, you know what it is, then?’
‘I do indeed. They are the worn-out workings of a cakemine.’
Molly tried to think what substance this might be when rendered in Portuguese, as she presumed this was. Caïque? Queìque? Maybe after all it was a technical English word for china clay or something.
‘What did they do with this cake?’ she asked, hoping for clues.
‘Exported it, mainly,’ said the spinster. ‘It was of particularly fine quality just here. Its colour which you noted is believed by geologists to have originated from beds of clay first laid down in the Pleistocene Era. It was on that very spot over there it was first excavated in any quantity for export around the world. As a matter of fact it’s your maligned Calixões we have to thank for the archival discovery that Bishop Teofilo died not as believed from apoplexy brought on by hearing a child bowl its hoop beneath his palace window but from a surfeit of Madeira cake – a substance to which he became hopelessly addicted quite late in life.’
This was delivered so precisely in the expected dreary monotone of one who imparts guide-book information that it was a moment or two before anyone could find no reason not to laugh.
‘By Jove, Molly,’ said Edward, wiping his eyes. ‘I do believe you’ve been japed. And by a master-japist, too.’
Molly Air had gone a slight red at this unimagined reversal of casting. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I deserved that.’
‘“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”’
‘I hardly think that, Sir Edward,’ said the tall lady. ‘Merely someone else who tries to relieve life’s awful expectedness with a little flexing of the imagination. You’ve no idea how dreary our two lives are shortly going to be.’ She indicated her companion. ‘Mrs Hammond and I do our best to keep ourselves amused, but in the interior of Ceará or Piauí that’s often impossible for whole weeks at a stretch.’
If Edward was surprised by the ‘Mrs’ he gave no sign. ‘I suppose life in the Missions can’t always be as, well, fulfilling as the rest of us imagine.’ Then he added, as if invoking some kind of authority, ‘My own sister Dot’s a nun. In fact she’s a Mother Superior.’
‘I think you’re under some misapprehension, Sir Edward,’ said Mrs Hammond. ‘Dora and I are rejoining our husbands in Pará. We’re just business wives, you know. Part of the little British community there, except that sometimes we go with the men on their trips to the interior. We’ve no connection with any mission. To be frank, we’re neither of us very religious at all.’
‘In that case I beg both your pardons.’
‘I’m afraid, Kate, that Sir Edward looked at us, saw two dowdy creatures and drew the obvious conclusion.’
‘Scarcely helped, Dora, by your choral reminiscences of yesteryear.’
‘Nor by your pretence of being shocked by betting.’
These two mischievous women at once managed to produce, as if by magic of their candour, an intimacy among the others which had that quality of appearing inevitable only now it had happened. On the way down to the ‘Esplanade’ Dora Bellamy said:
‘I’m a prankster, Sir Edward, but not a liar. I promise you I shan’t mention it again but what I said our first evening about being deeply affected by singing in The Apostles was utterly the truth. There. Now we should have some lime-juice or chocolate or something.’
How jocular were Britons abroad, thought Edward. Maybe it was a relief from the formalities of home or perhaps just the seeping-through of a genial contempt for the rest of the world spreading from a damaged heart, as a stain on the outside of luggage betrays an object broken within. But at the same time he knew he was being made up to by all three women and was very far from disliking it. Avoiding the bleak expanse of the chalet’s terrace they went round to the garden at the back where he sat quietly at a metal table while the brilliant November sunshine fell through trellised vines patchily onto his grey hair and linen jacket. Like a cat on a newspaper he basked; but the restaurateur’s wife, supervising the refreshments and covertly noting the distinction of her party’s oldest member, noticed also the alertness in the way he sat which only partly concealed a remoteness in the gaze he sent at his neighbours’ faces, at the calves of the serving-girl, at the sky between the leaves.
‘Well, Sir Edward, are you ready for an experience?’ Molly asked him.
‘I’m always that.’ He set down his cup.
‘Good.’ She led the way down through a gap in some oleanders towards the square. They found themselves at the end of a cobbled roadway much stained with grease. The thin soles of their shoes made tacky noises as they crossed it. To one side was drawn up a line of curious vehicles. They were wicker sleds of lighter design than their counterparts down in Funchal, clearly not drawn by bullocks. Nearby loitered a group of swarthy youths wearing some sort of national costume. Their thighs bulged and their bare arms were sinewy.
‘Heavens,’ said Edward faintly. ‘D’you not think the railway?’
‘On no account. You wanted an experience: this is one.’
The wicker creaked as they settled themselves.
‘Do you mean we’re going to toboggan down to the town?’
‘Oh yes.’
Behind them once again sat Mrs Hammond and Mrs Bellamy.
‘I say, I’m not faint-hearted, but, you know, stopping … ? Might we not shoot off the mountain?’
‘Don’t worry, Sir Edward, they’ve thought of that. Nobody’s in business to kill their own customers.’
‘Sweeney Todd?’
‘Nonetheless, this is a much-used form of public transport. You’ll enjoy it.’
A pair of buttocks appeared at Edward’s ear, sheathed in crimson cloth. A spasm ran beneath, the material bulged in implausible lumps and they were off. It soon became apparent – to everyone’s unexpected relief – that this was not to be a nightmare career down a piste but an ungainly slither down a cobbled road at a stiff jogging pace. Once it was clear that the two young men who ran on either side were not going to let go the ropes they held and with which they steered the sled around the sharp bends the passengers relaxed and enjoyed their unusual descent. The cobbles were not too uneven and slick with repeated oilings. Now and again one of the youths reached inside for a can and, still jogging, poured a stream of oil over the upturned snout of the nearest metal runner which curved away beneath the sled. For a while the scrunching and grinding lessened.
Soon they had left solemn stretches of pines behind and had entered the lands where villas appeared momentarily behind wrought-iron gates and whitewashed walls. Sometimes they shot through a tiny tunnel as the roadway curved beneath the funicular track and for a moment the dank hole roared with the screech of iron, the slapping of feet and panting of the men. Then sunlight blazed again and the sound fell away on either side into the patches of tobacco roots and bleached maize stalks. Towards the end of the journey the Caminho became more populous with trudging peasants, water-carriers and the occasional ox. As they approached them the runners would yell.
‘I like the way he shouts at ’em to go faster,’ said Edward. The excitement of their hectic descent was in his voice as he half turned to include those behind.
‘Do you know Portuguese, Sir Edward?’ Kate asked him.
‘Nary a word.’
‘Well, “Afasta!” actually means “Get out of the way!”’
‘All the same they’re doing it quite quickly.’
The first roofs of the town swam up and the road tipped sharply into a last steep descent. At the same instant both men jumped onto the sled’s runners as if to add their lot to a final suicidal rush. But perversely their additional weight merely slowed the thing and brought it to a perfect halt by a ticket collector wearing a crimson head-scarf. The experience was over.
‘Surely the most preposterous mode of transport ever invented,’ observed Edward as he climbed stiffly out. ‘Tobogganing on cobbles: talk about crude. Your Bishop Whatsit has a lot to answer for.’
‘Poor Teofilo,’ said Molly. ‘He was a troubled man. I fear his name will not outlive our visit.’
‘How do you mean? He’s in that guide book of Mrs Bellamy’s.’
But Dora simply handed him the battered red book. It was a copy from the ship’s library of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
‘Now do you see to what extremities of games intelligent people like ourselves are reduced?’ said Kate.
Fortescue’s sled had now arrived. ‘I made that about four miles in twenty minutes,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I was just beginning to miss the twentieth century.’
‘That’s something I can’t imagine,’ Edward told him. ‘I often wish I had missed it. In a funny way I think I probably have after all.’
This feeling intensified during the early luncheon they took together in a restaurant overlooking the harbour. Several hundred yards away the Hildebrand lay reassuringly at anchor, the thinnest wisp of smoke drifting from her funnel. She was due to sail at two-thirty so nobody needed divide their attention between the dishes of seafood and the clock on the wall. The mood of the table was animated. They told stories, as travellers usually do: of other times, other little adventures, other company. But even as he spoke Edward could hear the drone of some imaginary biographer describing the scene as recalled later by one of the others. ‘Sir Edward, no mean raconteur himself, drew on memories of a long and varied life to the great amusement of everyone present.’ What were these stories of his, many times told, if not fables of a distant self, a self who had lived forty-three years in a different century? He was nearly twice the age of anybody else at table. The things he remembered best had happened years before they were born and if dragged up into the light of present day – weighted with a little over-explanation and set adrift in this treacherous company – might they not sink down again contaminated with incomprehension? Better keep silence. The conversation turned to fairies as Fortescue, evidently neither ill-read nor unreflective for a man of action, leafed through The Lost World and remarked that he’d always found it odd that a ‘scientific’ author of Conan Doyle’s character, a doctor, a man of acutely forensic imagination, should in his later years have developed a passion for photographs of fairies.
‘As far as I know he’s convinced the camera sees things the eye can’t,’ said Edward. ‘If X-rays can do that – or a microscope, come to that – why might not a camera?’
‘There was a witch who came through Pará last year claiming the same thing, do you remember, Kate?’ asked Dora. ‘That blackamoor with the French name, Madame Veyrou, Voisy, something like that.’
‘Oh her. She claimed to be an ectoplasmist. One took a photograph of her in a trance and when it was developed the plate showed all this white stuff coming out of her mouth. It looked like butter-muslin to me.’
‘Of course it was a trick; but it was quite well done for a fake medium. Still, she did cure some child’s sickness in a séance.’
‘The Aylings’ little boy? She didn’t have to fake a thing, the child did it for her. It was no more sick than we are.’
‘However,’ continued Edward, ‘I won’t allow that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a cheap fraud. I’ve met him and he’s as straight a man as ever there was. So how do you explain the fairies in the photographs?’
‘Have you seen the pictures, sir?’ asked Fortescue.
‘Well, not the actual photographs, maybe. Copies. But in some reputable source – a magazine or something.’
‘One thing always strikes me about those sorts of photographs,’ said Molly, ‘as also about the ghosts people claim they’ve seen. Why is it they always look as they’re expected to look? Conan Doyle’s fairies, for instance. I’ve seen pictures of them too and they’re all wearing Kate Greenaway costumes. Why? Are there fashions in the fairy world? Why weren’t they all in miniature suits of armour, or woad? Or stark naked but for a moleskin cache-sexe? I think it’s significant that Edwardian photographs of Edwardian gardens should show fairies wearing idealised Edwardian children’s costumes.’
They were drinking a light Portuguese red wine of the kind which makes the English think of sunny holidays abroad but which is not strong enough to remind them of mid-afternoon headaches and lassitudes of Calvinist guilt. It was just the sort of speculative conversation Edward had once delighted in and for an instant an unstoppable sense of good times past welled up and flowed over him so that he half expected to see old faces, his little daughter still impatient to leave the table and climb back on Gaetano the mule, the sunlight outside to be Italian. But there were only the faces of four near-strangers, his fellow-countrymen abroad. A weary passion came to him that postwar scepticism should not have everything its own way.
‘I have a theory,’ he heard his own voice saying with pompous defiance, ‘that the human imagination is far more powerful than is convenient to admit. I believe that in certain circumstances the mind of the photographer might well impress its imagery onto the collodion surface of a film. We may not yet have any scientific way of proving how this happens, nor indeed that it does. But it seems to me a much more rational approach than assuming automatically that men like Doyle must either be deluded or lying in their teeth. Besides, nobody need be surprised when the images he captures conform to the imagination of the times.’
This was so clearly, even fiercely, delivered the others were evidently impressed.
‘Now that’s an interesting theory,’ said Fortescue. Strangely, he had not taken off his binoculars when he sat down but had merely tucked his napkin behind their eyepieces. As he ate they stirred slightly behind the fall of white linen. ‘I’ll tell you why. When we were in France I flew for a time with a squadron doing photo recces: photographic reconnaissance, you know. We’d fly behind the enemy’s lines and take pictures from the air of various strategic points and then our experts would try and decipher what they meant. Of course the Germans were doing the same to us so we all had to become more or less tricksters. There’s quite an art in camouflage but there’s an even greater one in hoaxing. For example, if it becomes necessary to advance some troops over open ground while being essential they’re not seen one can tie bushes to their backs and tell them to freeze each time a machine comes over.’
‘The Birnam Wood principle,’ said Edward.
‘Exactly. That’s camouflage. But supposing you needed to give the enemy the impression you were advancing forces into a certain sector but without deploying the troops which you anyway may not have? You get bushes and dot them about the landscape but after the dawn recce’s gone over you move them all slightly and add a few. Next time the photographs show fake bushes on the move and with a bit of luck they’ll mistake them for troops. That’s hoaxing.’
‘Rather ingenious,’ said Kate. ‘I never knew that sort of thing went on.’
‘Oh Lord yes. I once helped to build an entire British airfield with a squadron of FE 2b’s out of cardboard and plywood. We had one or two old buses beyond repair and parked them with their engines ticking over for the sake of realism, even some brave souls walking about. We called it Honeypot Squadron. It was a lure, you see.’
‘And did it work?’
‘Oh, it worked. It brought over a whole circus who’d been giving us hell but this time we had a couple of squadrons waiting in the sun.’ There was now no trace of boyish enthusiasm in Fortescue’s eyes. Absently he used his fork to prise open the mouth of his fish and examine its teeth. ‘It was a carve-up. But anyway, to return to the subject,’ he pushed shut the unresisting mouth, ‘I was merely meaning to say that I can never look at a photograph without wondering what’s been arranged, and why. But even in those unromantic times there were some strange occasions. For instance, a pilot could fly over a dead wood and take pictures which later showed a lot of mounted troops sheltering. Then another pilot would walk in with a picture taken of the same wood at much the same time and show not a man anywhere. That happened once at Bapaume and we never did get to the bottom of it. There was nowhere for all those men to have gone, unobserved, in five minutes. And we took that wood a day later after a lot of unnecessary shelling and there wasn’t even a foxhole in it, let alone a tunnel. So where did those men go? Nobody knows to this day.’
‘Maybe they were ghosts,’ said Dora.
‘Don’t worry, that was suggested,’ Fortescue said perfectly seriously. ‘A lot of men including quite high-ranking officers managed to convince themselves that they were the ghosts of a squadron of cavalry which had been caught in a gas attack in that wood two years before. It was late on in the war by then and far easier to believe in such things. There was nothing rational left about any of it. So if Sir Edward’s theory is correct perhaps the first pilot, knowing at the back of his mind of the gas attack, somehow projected onto the photographic plate an image of what he imagined might be there, even though he actually saw an empty wood.’
The effect of this account from a somewhat unexpected source was to throw Kate and Dora onto the defensive.
‘You’re in danger of ruining the gaiety,’ Dora told him with mock severity. ‘Awfully morbid.’
‘Just history,’ said Fortescue. ‘Just history.’ And he too looked up as if half expecting to see old faces.
Edward was evidently much moved. ‘The horses,’ he murmured. ‘The poor ghost horses.’ It came to Molly that the tears which suddenly stood in his eyes were shed for something other, had been almost relieved to find so ready a pretext. For the first time she was touched by him, wondering at the source of an abundant emotion which in its turn had had the power to move others. What else was art if not this contagious sensibility? Equally she felt the incongruousness of this man, once apparently on hearty terms with a dead king and now being wrenched into the company of very ordinary strangers in an unfamiliar world by the mere circumstance of having survived long enough.
After a moment’s withdrawal Edward rallied, however. Resuming the theme of fairies he told them he had once written some music for an adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s Prisoner in Fairyland.
‘Not a title which gripped me with enthusiasm,’ he said, ‘given that this was in 1915 at about the time of the events Mr Fortescue was relating, and given that a good many people had sons who were even then prisoners in Germany. The thing was for children, of course, and they re-named it The Starlight Express. Still, Algie Blackwood’s a good sort. I don’t quite know what I expected when I first met him; in my experience writers are often a pretty rum bunch – except for Doyle, of course. I suppose I vaguely thought he might go on rather a lot about wands and toadstools but actually he said “A pint of something would go down nicely” and told me how Black Jester, who won the St Leger in 1914, had been entirely reared on dried milk. Imagine, dried milk by the gallon. They steeped his mash in it. Well, for an author he struck me as being a normal sort of fellow but I fear I made a more eccentric impression on him.’
‘Eccentric, Sir Edward?’ It seemed incredible that anyone should think such a thing about someone who looked so like a denizen of the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
‘It seems so. Because of a toad I was carrying in Hampstead. It was in the butcher’s. No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t got Gallic tastes. I was buying two chops but I found difficulty in getting my change out because I had this toad in a handkerchief. So I set it down on the counter momentarily although this did cause a good deal of squeakage among the butcher’s female patrons. Then a voice said “Ah, Edward, I see you’ve got your Sunday roast with you but who are the chops for?” and it was Algie Blackwood. I explained I’d been for a walk and had come upon these two boys with the toad and since I like toads and this one seemed unhappy in their company I bought it off them for twopence and was on my way back to Severn House to release it in the garden. Sort of thing anyone might have done, except that Algie happened into the middle of the story. So there and then I told him I’d decided to name it after him in honour of the occasion and in due course into the garden Algernon went. But I’m afraid the story got about, rather, and people started to think I was pretty much off my head. The butcher, especially, became noticeably cool although I didn’t mind that since he was a most inferior sort of butcher: wouldn’t even sell black puddings. The best comment came from Jack Littleton at Novello’s. He just said “H’m. Toad and Verklärung” which I think’s quite witty from one’s own publisher who’d give his right arm to be publishing Strauss as well.’
There was considerable laughter at this but on the way back to the ship it occurred to him it was likely nobody at the table had had the least idea of what he was talking about. There was nothing like people’s failure to understand a reference which could so give one the feeling of having already stepped into a coffin whose lid they were purposefully nailing down bit by bit in small sections. Each day one’s own understanding of the world became more partial, the view a little darker. Yet only the occupant knew how astonishingly clear had become his vision of what was left. The clarity was one thing, the astonishment was for its lateness.
Back aboard the Hildebrand Edward lay in the cool of his cabin and allowed himself to fall into doleful rumination brought on by the morning’s activities and the wine he had drunk. The business about fairies hadn’t helped, either; had let a vague disquiet edge in. It wasn’t that the new world of the Bright Young Things with all their extravagance and awesome silliness was so much more rational than the old, rather that a whole culture had become outmoded. A world ruled by Lyddite and phosgene and ‘Archie’ would have made short shrift of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, while Peter Pan would have had his own troubles in the trenches. Trying to look at it through modern eyes he could quite well see the ridiculousness of it all; but then surely it had never been more than a way in which people of a stolid race living in a stolid time had dealt with the whole uneasy business of childhood and, well, of the imagination, the poetic dream. True, the mode of expressing the vividness and anarchy of an infant’s vision might have degenerated a bit since Wordsworth’s day but … Or maybe … Who could blame those authors like Barrie and Algie Blackwood for doggedly holding out against the horrid tide of materialism, to say nothing of all those psychologists banging on about how the thoughts of children are really unspeakable? Modern grown-ups were indeed wumbled; and if regrettably they were no longer to be unwumbled by anointings with holy water or fairy-dust or stardust then …
Into his drifting mind came snatches of the private language he and Alice had written to each other in the form of jottings, notes in each other’s margins, a language which if brought out into the light of day coram publico would frankly appear as baby-talk. It was insane, this black world. How could ‘Pease wite more dis booful music’ now lie beneath the inscription Fortiter et Fide? All too easily. He closed his eyes on such things, tears welling from beneath his lids, almost in exasperation at what was the whole of him and would not let him go, only to awake with a small jump and discover that two whole hours had elapsed. He had expected to find it mid-afternoon at the latest and the ship back at sea with Madeira a diminishing smudge intermittent behind a flapping Red Ensign. But when Steward Pyce came in as requested at four-thirty with a cup of tea the floor was not quivering with the power of Chief Stanford’s engines.
‘Are we not under way, Steward?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir. There’s been a slight delay. Something to do with one of our fresh-water tanks, sir. The Captain assures us we’ll leave by five-thirty at the latest.’
Edward remembered something he had meant to do earlier but forgotten. The delay in starting was a bit of luck. ‘In that case would you mind very much getting me another bucket of sea-water, Pyce?’
‘Sea-water sir. Of course. But if it’s from the bows again I’m afraid I shall have to do it without your assistance: Captain Maddrell was quite firm about ship’s regulations, sir. Strictly speaking I shouldn’t have taken you so far forrard last time.’
‘Well, I’m sorry if I got you into any trouble.’
The man has some imagination after all, thought Pyce. Few passengers in his experience would have bothered to draw such a conclusion. A not very strong feeling of indulgence for this old fellow allowed that, barmy or not, he was probably a decent enough stick.
‘I’d like it from the stern,’ said the stick. ‘Assuming we’re anchored head on into the tide or current?’
‘Very well sir; the stern it is. A whole bucket or just your hip-flask, sir?’
‘The hip-flask. Wait a moment.’
His passenger took the flash from the desk where it stood among the mysterious wooden boxes, went to the wash-stand in the bathroom and could be heard rinsing it out thoroughly before returning and handing it over.
‘I’m much obliged.’
‘My pleasure sir. Before we sail, sir.’
‘Should I not be here kindly leave it on the desk.’
Despite his relayed assurances it turned out to be not until seven o’clock that Captain Maddrell finally weighed anchor and sent a single abrupt C like a shell into the town of Funchal, its echoes rolling back from the facets of the mountain, the rocky slopes, the woods and crevasses which rose high into the dusk above it. The evening was not quite warm. The passengers hugged themselves at the rail as they watched a battered tug slew the Hildebrand’s head round so she faced 2,200 miles of empty ocean and nine landless days. The top of the island was cinnabar in the last light of a sun which had long fallen beneath their horizon. Edward was on deck with his cane and boater. He cut a dapper figure at the rail, standing a little apart or – Molly thought as she joined him – stood a little apart from.
‘I suppose captains never feel as we do each time they leave,’ he said as the bodegas of the waterfront slowly revolved and passed astern. ‘I’m never unaffected by departures.’
‘Nor me. The funny thing is I haven’t travelled very much by ship except across the Channel and the trip last year, but sailing out of a port on an evening like this I feel I already have a lifetime of leave-takings and journeyings behind me. Memories of things which never happened: how are they possible?’
‘It’s the melancholy that’s familiar. That always did seem ancient because one could never remember a time without it.’
She abandoned her undiscriminating gaze to turn her head and stare sharply at the side of his face. ‘Would you describe yourself as a melancholy person, Sir Edward?’
‘Good Lord yes,’ he said in surprise. ‘Wouldn’t you describe yourself as one? I’ve never met an English person who was even slightly thoughtful who wasn’t a bit of a melancholic.’
‘You’re not happy, then?’
‘That has nothing to do with it. One may be very happily melancholic: it has its own delights, as Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton well knew. But as it happens, no, I’m not happy. Nor can I think of a single reason why I might be. My wife is dead, my friends are dead, my music is dead. Only I, inconveniently, remain alive. I shall continue to be so for an undisclosed length of time and for no discernible purpose whatever except that I’ve got to provide some idiotic music for a damnfool occasion at Wembley next April. That in itself is hardly an adequate reason for prolonging someone’s life. With any luck there may turn out to be a Supreme Being who agrees, but I know it’s unlikely. Not for nothing is he familiar as the Arch-Jester.’
Somewhere far off, borne to them through a large metal duct like the horn of a gramophone bolted to the deck there came the sound of a bell and at once the engine’s beat increased. The boards began to vibrate under their feet and foam slid past the ship’s side with a rinsing hiss.
‘You’re silent,’ he said and she thought crossly that there was satisfaction in his voice.
‘What is there for me to say? I wouldn’t presume to try and talk you out of your view of your own life even if I thought I might succeed. I’d gain nothing but a deserved rebuff.’
‘Do I strike you as so very prickly?’
Had he been thirty years younger Molly thought she might have identified a flirtatiousness in this question. But it was not in the least teasing nor even anxious, merely an enquiry of fact. The idea that he should care to know left a taste in her mind identical to the one which had provoked her outspokenness a couple of days before. There was something faintly disgusting about so famous and – in worldly view – so successful a man still insisting on having everything on his own terms: something of the child which devours the world it dominates. The self-pity was quite bleak enough to be acceptable, even to transcend itself. But it was odious to retreat behind inviolate grandeur or hooded withdrawal while reserving the right to emerge suddenly and demand assessment from a comparative stranger – more particularly as she was certain he would never normally dream of doing such a thing. She had never known the habitually reserved break their habit without seeming to surprise themselves, and this she found particularly distasteful. In fact the experience of nursing in France during the last year of the war had changed her irrevocably. The juvenile, undifferentiated kindness towards her fellow-men with which she had gone had been abraded – or at least refined – into something she valued enough not to bestow indiscriminately. Like many other nurses or professionals whose work is among suffering people she had acquired a fine recognition of the often modest symptoms of courage. Equally, she had an impatient category of her own: what she called ‘DBB’ or downright bad behaviour. She had coined this term herself, partly because she found she needed it and partly as a satirical comment on the despised pseudo-medical diagnosis of ‘LMF’. Now, five years later, Molly would never have dreamed of accusing anybody, no matter what the provocation, of lacking in moral fibre; but at this moment it did occur to her that Sir Edward Elgar was indeed capable of downright bad behaviour.
Declining to answer his question she said instead: ‘My steward told me this ship was delayed because of a drinking-water problem.’
It was Edward’s turn to look sideways at his companion staring down at the waters of Funchal harbour. Eventually he said, ‘So did mine.’
‘Well, I ran into Dr Ashe, the ship’s doctor – have you met him? Looks like a vulture and is wonderfully indiscreet. The whole story’s bunkum. The truth is exactly the reverse: the problem which delayed us all was quite precisely not caused by drinking water.’
‘What then?’
‘Good old drinking alcohol. It appears a few of our passengers, so relieved at having weathered the storm, went ashore to celebrate being alive with Madeira’s most famous export.’
‘Not cake. They went to ground in somebody’s bodega at about ten this morning and the Captain had to send a party of crew-men with an officer to comb the dives of Funchal like a shore patrol looking for delinquent sailors. Dr Ashe said they were found at about three o’clock but they all wanted carrying.’
‘My goodness,’ said Edward with a suggestion of admiration. ‘Pie-eyed on Madeira for five hours. I hope the doctor has a good headache remedy aboard. Conditions down in Steerage may become a little unsavoury, too.’
‘They were all First Class passengers.’
‘Really? We’re turning out rather a lively lot, in that case. I wonder who they are? Presumably no-one at our table. What the Varsity types call “bloods”, I expect.’
‘And what I’d call drunks.’
‘You object, of course.’
‘Not on moral grounds; possibly on aesthetic. I’d call them drunks simply because they were drunk.’ Molly looked at him with great directness. ‘I don’t object just because I’m a woman, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
Edward, who had indeed been thinking that, said ‘It’s silly our fencing like this.’
‘Quite. Incidentally, I did want to say that I completely agreed with what you said at luncheon. I mean your theory about photographing fairies.’
‘It was just an idea. I’m not at all sure I believe it myself, you know. But all of a sudden I couldn’t bear to let this hateful century get away with it once again – not without putting up some resistance. Nothing is avowed to exist nowadays unless it can be bought or sold or measured by scientists. Why should artists have to acknowledge the complete supremacy of materialism? Must everything mysterious be exploded or all unaccountable things explained away? And if so, what’s gained? Plain men drudging in a world of plain things. That’s not the world I know and it’s one I’ve no wish to know.’
The distant bell rang again and the engines further increased their speed. The sound was suddenly reflected from behind and both turned to look across the deck towards the opposite rail beyond which the mole guarding the harbour entrance was sliding by only a few yards away. There were no old men and boys with rod and line around the squat stone lighthouse at the end. Instead a lone cat was sitting with its back to the ship, staring out to sea. The animal’s posture at once made it memorable: its motionless attention to the horizon was so complete that a seven-thousand-ton liner passing within yards was in another universe, a shadow crossing behind muslin. The cat ignored the Hildebrand and her two hundred souls, not with disdain but with a profound distraction. It sped past in unmoving meditation and diminished astern. As the distance and twilight increased Edward during the next few minutes stared back, with difficulty separating the receding lighthouse from intervening masts and davits to discern at its foot the black fur dot. Soon there was nothing of Funchal but a winking beam from the base of an indigo bulk sprinkled with lights. The moon which had been poised above the island that morning had not yet risen but in the limitless blank of unruffled turquoise sky the stars were coming out.
‘There’s no getting used to it,’ said Edward. ‘The beauty of this earth and its animals, and the barbarous wasteland man makes of it all. I don’t know why people aren’t more astonished by beauty. You must paint your jungle pictures with astonishment, Molly. As long as you put something of your own heart into them they’ll be exceptional.’
‘I certainly want to be original in the way I do them.’
‘Yes, of course. Well, remember what Ruskin said: “Originality is not newness, it is genuineness”.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘I seem to remember he did. An academic musician called Henry Hadow was fond of quoting it and he was a man of genuine unoriginality.’
‘You’re not fond of academics.’
‘I suppose some are all right. But finally it’s down to the heart and not the head. What’s the point of having so much knowledge and technique if it dissipates in cabals and rivalries and lectures?’
Molly was struck by his vehemence. There was something so unsophisticated and raw but at the same time confident in what he said that with surprise – as if she had not realised it until that moment – she found herself thinking ‘The man actually is an artist throughout.’ She was impressed by the idea of someone in what she still thought of as an uncertain and marginal line of business being so used to his own idea of himself. It was even exhilarating to hear somebody take for granted that living a creative life was not something which had to be accounted for. At this period her ideal was acquiring enough stature in her art that she would never have to be bluff or apologetic or furtive about it: no modest ambition for a single Englishwoman even in those enlightened days of partial franchise. Edward had with great casualness just displayed the very confidence she herself yearned for and her envy made him again remote and distinguished in her eyes. She no longer even thought of him as a man but as a person who had lived his talent and suffered in consequence. As if he had read this envy he said:
‘You can’t be in much doubt yourself. Even nowadays no young woman takes herself off alone to paint the Amazon jungle without being very certain of something.’
‘That’s no doubt how it looks but it’s not at all how it feels, I promise you. I wouldn’t presume to compare our talents but weren’t there moments at the beginning when you, well, had doubts? Did you never despair just once or twice? Even after what I assume was exceptional promise at college?’
‘Doubts? Despair? My dear girl, I’ve never been without ’em. At this moment I doubt a single thing I’ve done was worth doing and I despair of a life thrown away on something nobody needs or wants. As for my college, I’m a graduate summa cum laude of a cramped flat above a music shop in Worcester. The first time I ever had anything to do with a university was when I made the appalling mistake at the age of forty-eight of accepting a professorship at Birmingham. I needed the money. Disastrous. I never did loathe anything so much. Oh, and I’m forgetting Cambridge gave me some footling doctorate or something a few years earlier. I’m sure Birmingham couldn’t have made its offer had I not already got some letters after my name. Otherwise I contrived to keep myself remarkably unspotted and unstained by academic influence. I was far too busy writing music and trying to feed myself.’
On the basis of their short acquaintance Molly was unable to know how brilliantly he had pitched his description, so exactly did it console her for her own lack of academy training and so precisely did it conjure up the fierce independence of wayward genius. But even he might not have said whom this version of events was designed to impress since he himself believed it a little more deeply at each retelling. Not that it was untrue; it was merely economical with the truth. But Molly had lived in the world for longer than most students.
‘Even so,’ she said, ‘technique has to be learned.’
‘Of course it has. How else but by example? From my earliest boyhood I read every score I could lay my hands on, I played and sang in groups and chamber orchestras without number. I spent every last penny on train fares to London to hear concerts at the Crystal Palace and I was still coughing yellow fog out of my lungs days later. I took violin lessons; I gave violin lessons; I wrote cotillions and quadrilles for a lunatic asylum. Year after year it went, penny-pinching in the provinces. Doubts? Despair? My father wanted me to be a lawyer, you know, and I actually started in one of those offices with high stools. But I soon stopped that, unlike Chabrier who I gather qualified and practised, brave fellow. You ask about doubts and despair when I rejected the respectable career urged on me by my tradesman father in order to be a damned musician with cracked boots and a teaching suit which was more invisible mending than it was cloth.
‘And in all those miserable years not one person gave me a single shred of support or encouragement. Not one person. And my advice to you, Miss Air, is to expect nothing from anybody. An artist is on his own. He’s stuck up a tower preaching to pigs, no matter that now and then they’ll pretend to listen and even to applaud. But don’t be deceived. They soon get tired of rattling their trotters at you and wander off to find someone more diverting. After that they’d cut you down as soon as look at you.’
This last sentence was added with lowered voice as if he were talking more to himself. Confused as she was by the violence it implied Molly hardly liked to pursue it. In any case a steward in a white uniform took that moment to emerge on deck from a companionway and blow a brightly polished B♭ on a brass bugle.
‘We’d better dress. We’re late.’
‘Oh, hang all clothes,’ he said to the passing sea. Like a small boy chafing at being put into his Sunday best, she thought, while observing the paradox of his obviously liking to be well groomed to the point of nattiness.
When they came back on deck after dinner it was clear that the day’s visit to Madeira had sanctioned a change in the atmosphere aboard the Hildebrand. The passengers were in evident quest of the night life whose imagining had enlivened the gloom of their autumns. As far as they were concerned a formal promise had been made the moment their cash had been exchanged for a ticket. They now roamed the ship expecting its fulfilment and enviously presuming it in the various couples talking in low voices at the rail or in pools of shadow. But it was altogether too early in the voyage to think of disconsolation and they drifted towards the ballroom from which came the muffled and lively strains of Tommy Hawtree’s Melodeers. Edward scarcely felt like turning in yet: his afternoon’s sleep had taken the edge off his weariness and he detected the beginnings of that second wind which, when he was in London, increasingly took him on lonely rounds of indiscriminate theatre-going or kept him chatting in the smoke rooms of his various clubs until his mouth was rank with pipes and his brain whirled with the names of horses.
‘Come on everybody, it’s spring,’ said Dora Bellamy’s voice behind them. ‘We allow no moping here.’
‘Quite right too,’ said Edward. ‘What do you propose?’
Dora dropped her voice confidingly. ‘I hear tell of a lively little game starting up below. For those who like a flutter now and then. Only don’t tell Kate, Sir Edward. As you already know, her views on gambling are irreproachable and fiercely held.’
‘They certainly are,’ said Kate from the dark behind her. ‘Never follow an even number by an uneven with two digits.’
‘Very sound advice too,’ said Edward. ‘I never go twice on a red.’
‘I say, the gentleman’s a sport. Give him a gasper, Dora.’
‘Not for me. But by all means go ahead. We’ll follow you shortly.’
Kate and Dora drifted unsteadily away trailing cigarette smoke.
‘They’re rather awful, aren’t they?’ said Molly.
‘Frightful. I like them quite a lot. I don’t believe they care very much what anybody thinks and I always find that endearing. Though I must say I can’t imagine what their husbands are like.’
‘If they have husbands.’
It had never occurred to Edward to question their acquaintances’ self-description. ‘Golly,’ he said. And then, ‘Golly.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they have. In any case I don’t care either.’
Since they were last on deck the sky had darkened into true night. The starfields sprawled in brilliant prodigality, traversed by the running-lights on the Hildebrand’s masts and gaped at by the sooty O of her funnel. No further trace showed of the islands they had recently left behind them. The ship was alone and infinitesimal in the night and the faint sounds of revelry only made it the smaller. The stars’ brightness defined the surface of the ocean beyond the dim yellow cocoon spun by deck-lamps and portholes.
‘“The sun has gone, the tide of stars is setting all our way; the Pleiades call softly to Orion as nightly they have called these million years.”’
He spoke so quietly that he was finished before she realised he was quoting, not addressing her, not addressing anybody.
‘That’s beautiful.’
‘It is. Surprising, really, amid all that twaddle. It’s from the old Starlight Express. About the only memorable thing in it including, some might think, the music.’
Nevertheless it was the music he heard as he watched the stars, music which had first come to him as a boy and had been written down in pencil for a childhood play under the elderly title The Wand of Youth. How those tunes had recurred! Throughout his life they had come back, first in full orchestral guise then once more for pit orchestra in a wartime theatre. And still they haunted him and offered themselves as little mines which had the air of refusing to be abandoned and from which things of value might yet be dug. Two hours later as he undressed for bed he heard the cadence at the words ‘nightly they have called these million years’ and thought of that incomprehensible gap which was no gap at all and could never separate him from that far-off self who had first heard the notes and in time had turned them into his second Suite’s ‘The Little Bells’. He sat on the edge of the bed fiddling absently with studs. There was a spot of port on his shirt-front.
‘What was it all for?’ he murmured. ‘What rot it was … Dear old rot.’ He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘Oh, damn it all.’
Of course Edwardian fairies wore Edwardian costume. My trees sang me music of my time, not plainsong or organum or snippets of the ‘Pastoral’ sym. Being of your time means making everything in the world yours for as long as you’re in it. It may once have belonged to Beethoven but it belongs to me now. Belonged.
We’ve left Madeira (yesterday) and are reportedly facing more than a week’s blank ocean. Staring at the sea – as after breakfast just now – makes one banally reflective. I found myself thinking that eight or nine days without land is quite a long time in these days of steam. But even as recently as Conrad’s (and my) youth it was obviously possible to be becalmed on some ocean for a month or two without the sight of anything more solid than clouds at dawn and dusk. First the unease of being so deserted by the wind, then panic as fresh water needed rationing, then listlessness & torpor. (Meeresstille. I love the sound of that word.) Long before their month was up the sailors must have begun to wonder whether land any longer existed or whether it hadn’t been some kind of communal dream or folk legend. Even now aboard the old ‘Hildebrand’ the reality of England is beginning to seem hazy, faintly in doubt. It still has a solid inner presence but then so does anything imagined & lived with for years. There may after all be no external counterpart to the England we all carry within us. Maybe the ship will arrive back at the right co-ordinates for Merseyside and – sail straight on over vacant waters. It was a myth after all. I think we’ve no confidence in things we don’t constantly touch or see & even then they all the time suggest something else. It’s a shifting wasteland, this world, & necessarily viewed from another. Just as the Patriarch said, the mind moves. So at the moment England no longer exists for me. (I manifestly don’t exist for it.)
Quite enjoyed Madeira & have at any rate become better acquainted with some of my fellow-travellers. It appears I was wrong about everybody that first evening. Mrs (Miss?) Bellamy & Mrs (Miss?) Hammond turn out to be racy while Fortescue seems neither cad nor buffoon. Each in his/her own way – I include Molly – is to some extent an adventurer. I like that (so different from the members of one’s clubs to say nothing of those damned musical asses who keep pestering) tho’ it does make me feel old … I suppose I am old, hang it all, until I’m by myself when I become pretty much ten or twelve again. Talk about keeping faith. There are some things one can’t betray even if one wanted.
Meeresstille … How that word brings it all back tho’ not really with pain. If I’d had a leg cut off in 1884 I’d not now be able to remember the anguish with much acuity nearly 40 yrs later, only much-revised memories of pain. Even tho’ we never saw each other again I did feel a pang 15 yrs. afterwards when I heard from Stämpfli that Lena was married & had left Europe. By then of course I’d got over being turned down, not least because I’d since been accepted by dear Alice; but it did seem the final lopping-off of my painful twenties. Well, putting it into music was as good a way as any of burying an unwanted past & it was a happy accident I was actually writing Enigma vars at the time. An even happier was being able to use Mary Trefusis as the alibi for Lena’s var even tho’ it really didn’t bear close scrutiny. However the dolts swallowed it whole & even Alice never twigged despite my saying that the asterisks at the head of no. 13 stood for the name of a lady who was on a sea voyage at the time of composition & Mary palpably wasn’t. She was, though, later that same year when that brother of hers was appointed Governor of NSW & she went off to Australia with him. So of course it wasn’t the engines of her ship I heard as it rumbled eastwards across the ocean but those of Lena’s as they had carried her away for good many months earlier & in quite the other direction. In any case I wdn’t have written a var for Mary as at that very moment I was dedicating my 3 Characteristic Pieces to her. Nor does anyone seem to have bothered to notice that all the other vars have names/initials so why wdn’t I have put Mary’s? Everyone who knew us also knew there cdn’t possibly be anything mysteriously romantic – it’s absurd. As for the idea that if I had intended putting her initials I’d have made one of the asterisks stand for her title – that’s downright vulgar. It suggests that had I – in a moment when my brain had turned to addle – decided to dedicate a var mysteriously to Dame Clara Butt I’d have put ***!
I think the whole thing started when people saw my sketches for no. 13 headed ‘L’ (I ask you, imagine using a working-title of ‘Lady’ or ‘Lygon’ for a friend like Mary!). Then when we were dickering with the Finale Jaeger with his huntsman’s eye must have looked at one of my original drafts & spotted that I was thinking of working in some of ‘LML’ at that time. Well, I was: but it was Lena meine Liebe I was going to work into the summing-up of my own var. But it didn’t quite go & anyway I’d given her a close enough place to me by putting her own var right next to mine. This neatly satisfied various proprieties: Alice first, me & Alice last & Lena penultimate. The anguish may have long gone but I’m very glad the mystification has lasted so well. It’s part of the advantage of calling something Enigma: the amateur sleuth straightway ignores all verifiable fact such as chronology. If one obligingly puts a ring through his nose one can lead him into the most implausible territory. It’s splendid to behold!
Even the Meeresstille quotation … True, nobody’s likely to know that this was the Overture to the Leipzig Conservatoire concert the afternoon Lena & I first met. But a few with a knowledge of German might have thought that the usual English translation (Calm sea & prosperous voyage) is, if not inaccurate, misleading. Meeresstille isn’t just a calm sea: it’s a desolate menacing becalming as per the Ancient Mariner – the slow intro. – followed by the hopeful lyricism of the happy onward journey (wh. God knows I wished her). How much I wished it her is plain enough since it’s the prosperous voyage bit I quoted from rather than the becalming. But those are the reasons for the quotation: our first meeting, our shared enthusiasm for Mendelssohn, his own connection with Leipzig, the significance of it having been an overture for both of us … And of course her going away did make me sad with old memories so the orchestral light in which I quoted an otherwise lyrical extract is mournful with hints of flat abandonment & shot with unease. Of course it matters not a jot at this late stage, any of it; but it’s funny the wilful way the same amateur sleuths will ignore the evidence of their own ears, mis-read & mis-hear Mendelssohn so as to uphold a shaky alibi for me. Gawd bless ’em!
Later
Made some good slides before lunch. Sample taken from Funchal harbour as we lay at anchor yesterday. Quite a plentiful crop of the plankton I’ve already seen but almost every drop I looked at was swamped with E. coli! Either they’re normally there (drains!) or we aboard the ‘Hildebrand’ were flushing unmentionables into the Madeirans’ water. Perhaps if I run into this Dr Ashe of Molly’s I’ll ask what he thinks. There’s something of a ghoul about the man’s appearance – seems a funny choice for a cruise doctor & suspect he has a past. Never did I think everyone on board wd. have one too, still less that within a week I shd. be slightly privy to several. Strange how briefly being ship-mates together turns total strangers into confidants practically overnight. Even the most reticent souls throw caution to the winds (some of the conversations I’ve overheard, esp. among the younger element!). Why is this? I return to my theory: England’s no longer real to anyone aboard so anything they say is equally unreal & will never be accountable. H’m. We shall see.
Over the rail postprandially (excellent word) I thought some more about the amateur sleuths who from time to time have sniffed me over. I expect they’ll give up now – they’ve done their sleuthing & got it all wrong but everyone’s happy with their version so they can move on to some more fashionable composer. It’s wonderful how much they’ve missed – all those initials in the chorus of Devils in Gerontius! – & heaps more little encodings à la Schumann. Well, they’re just part of the crowd who constantly write about music – talk & talk & talk about it – almost none of whom are performers & still fewer composers. Whom do they think they’re addressing? And about what? Music is what it says & it says what it is through sounds & not the written word. Most of those who prate about music are nincompoops, which isn’t to be wondered at since most people are that anyway. But they’re often musical illiterates, which is intolerable. They’re illiterates in the sense that while they may know all the right terms & technical flummery they’re ignorant of what’s being said. They don’t understand – or even appear much to like – the language & what it expresses so they waffle on about the grammar instead. I except Shaw from this accusation. His politics may be benighted & many of his plays wrong-headed to a degree but not only is he the kindest man who ever stepped, he understands & feels music. He alone among contemporary critics acknowledges that composers & musicians think, but that they do so in A minor & not in words. He alone wdn’t be puzzled by watching an orchestral rehearsal where we stop & start & clarify whole passages with often scarcely a word spoken. That’s how professionals communicate when they’re attuned. I grunt, I mutter, I draw a waggled curve in the air at the violas: they know what I mean. ‘Too h’m,’ I expect I say, leaving out the adjective or adverb. A disappointed ‘Twenty-eight’ will re-start them at that cue but this time I draw the bassoon line in the air & lo! out it comes. Sublime dictation. Shaw knows; the rest are asses & as far as I’m concerned can go & re-bury themselves in the nearest library with Hadow. The concert hall’s got far too much to do with the heart for them.
Pleased to discover that ‘RMS Hildebrand’ yields ‘Brindled Marsh’. This must surely be the name of one of those minor moths which fall into one’s lamp at night. Check South on return.