A spotless cream panama hat moved slowly along a shady avenue, flashing as it left the pools of mango shade and passed through patches of sunlight. At almost the same level beside it progressed a sand-coloured, broad-brimmed floppy hat with a silk band faintly sweat-stained. The faces beneath each – military-moustached and fading English rose – still bore the pallor of a sunless autumn a hemisphere away.

Molly had said: ‘There isn’t a boat leaving for Iquitos inside a week. Until then I’m sure we’ll keep bumping into each other. I suppose now I’m finally here I don’t have to be in a hurry to leave.’

Edward had said: ‘At all events you’d like to see young Fortescue airborne?’

‘And maybe even Sir Edward Elgar safely embarked on his voyage home to where he belongs.’

‘Ah, my dear, I don’t belong anywhere nowadays. According to popular wisdom home is where the heart is and I seem to have mislaid mine.’

‘You may find it again in Manaos,’ she laughed. ‘It seems to be one of those places where hearts inexplicably whizz about. I lost mine here a year and a half ago and I’m not sure I mightn’t be on the verge of doing so again.’

In one pocket of his linen jacket Edward had a sheaf of letters, all unopened. They had been delivered in ones and twos to the Hildebrand throughout the previous day as the news of his presence aboard ran through the English colony, the civic and cultural circles and, he suspected from the aspect of several of the envelopes, missionary and charity elements as well.

‘Shan’t open any of ’em,’ he had said, and Molly could not be sure whether he were genuinely irritated or secretly pleased by this attention. ‘I came here for a holiday. It’s exactly this sort of thing one wishes to get away from at all costs.’

‘Twenty-four pounds.’

‘Twenty-four? I’m paying twenty-six pounds seventeen and eightpence each way. That’s monstrous. Did you really pay only twenty-four? We ate at the same table and reached Manaos at the same instant … Twenty-four.’

‘You’ve never seen my cabin. It’s not a de luxe Stateroom or whatever yours is called. Besides, I don’t have a private steward.’

‘I’m sure I don’t either. He’s very fly, is Mr Pyce. I believe I share him with half the ship. Once or twice he’s answered my bell admirably disguised as an idiot boy of sixteen … Just look at these. Hounded about the globe. Don’t ever become famous, Molly, it’s the death of everything.’

‘What have you got? “The Britannia Club”, “A Câmera Comércio do Manaos”, “O Pais”, “As Notícias” – those two sound like papers, don’t they?’

And before that day was out two Brazilian reporters had come trotting up the gangway together, scowling at one another and each trying to find Sir Eduardo’s cabin first. He went to ground on the Captain’s patch of private deck, drinking iced guaraná and wondering why, now that he had at last reached this legendary place, he didn’t quite feel up to going straight ashore. It crossed his mind that it would be amusing, having come all this way, never to set foot in Manaos but to remain aboard the Hildebrand for the entire five days of its stay, looking at the town over the rim of an ice-cooled glass. He might even start a fashion. Next year he could go to Samarkand or Timbuctoo and turn back on reaching the outskirts. Thus he would make a late name for himself as an eccentric traveller who had once been an inveterate sight-seer but who now could not abide arrivals.

But on this following morning Molly had persuaded him to stroll through the town, at least to see the Opera House and have an ice-cream. And suddenly there had seemed nothing else to do. Fortescue had been met the previous day by an ebullient man in late youth, undoubtedly the old comrade Johnny Proctor. These two had spent much time supervising the swinging ashore of large crates which emerged from the holds looking pale and raw, criss-crossed with stencilled admonishments which none of the Brazilian stevedores could surely have read. Chartair Ltd, consisting of Fortescue, Johnny, the crates and two monkey-like men who had about them a bristling air of Scots stubbornness which might have passed for loyalty, disappeared in a series of ramshackle vehicles towards an alleged airfield on the outskirts. Everybody else on board had gone ashore and the company of the ship’s cat, while agreeable, seemed too studiedly poignant.

Molly was explaining that the slabs of dark jam on sale at a stall were guava jelly, and pointing out that a sign reading ‘pudim’ sort of meant ‘pudding’ but of a quite un-English genre, when Edward became aware of a woman staring at him. She was imposing, probably in her late fifties or early sixties, with greying hair. She held a parasol which shaded her face so he could not read it but the impression her whole figure gave was of someone long used to feeling confident. When she spoke it was with a faint accent he unthinkingly assumed to be Portuguese.

‘Have I the honour of addressing Sir Edward Elgar?’

‘I doubt it’ll do you much honour, madam,’ he ungraciously said after a moment’s hesitation, ‘but yes.’ His voice had taken on a gruffness Molly had come to recognise as that of displeasure at being put out. He was clearly not a man who relished the effort of having to rise to an occasion.

It was the stranger’s turn to hesitate. ‘I … Please forgive me for intruding on you both like this –’ her dark eyes took in Molly but her face remained turned to Edward. ‘I am … You may perhaps have received a letter of me, from me. I heard you had arrived and at once I wrote. But …’

‘A letter? Ah. Now you come to remind me I do have some letters with me. They, ah, arrived but my steward put them on one side where I’m afraid I didn’t see them.’ Like a child discovered he felt in his pocket and produced the sheaf of envelopes. ‘I was just about to read them, you see, over a cup of coffee somewhere.’

‘Of course, Sir Edward; I wouldn’t have dreamed … Yes, there is mine you’re holding.’

‘This one? The, um, Schiller Institute?’

‘Yes, exactly. I … I am Magdalena von Pussels. I was waiting … but you will read it when you read it, Sir Edward. Please not now,’ she motioned with a gloved hand to prevent his opening it on the spot. ‘At your leisure, I beg. Introductions in the street like this are not convenient. I ask the forgiveness of both of you.’

The fraction by which she inclined her parasol and upper spine before sweeping away made him place her on the spot as being German even before his mind had had time to recall the suggestive name she had left.

‘I say.’ He was looking after the green parasol as it sailed steadily off above the dark Brazilian heads. ‘Now there’s a character.’

‘You don’t know her?’

‘Never clapped eyes on her in my life.’

‘How strange. I had the impression she knew you.’

‘Oh, I expect she’s seen a photograph in a magazine or something. I’m afraid it happens all the time. Once one’s face becomes familiar complete strangers imagine they know one. As I said before, pray it never happens to you.’

He dismissed the incident and, resuming their stroll, began to take evident pleasure in the variety of small surprises the town sprang on him. He said he had not expected to see so much civic ironwork a thousand miles up the Amazon – lamp-posts, balconies, fountains and the like – and certainly not stamped with the names of Scotch foundries.

‘Somehow one never thinks of Britain as having exported elegant things,’ he murmured. ‘Why is that? Why shouldn’t we? But I believe our reputation is for sturdy functionalism. Those new cranes down at the docks are all from England, I noticed as we passed. They’re perfectly hideous and I suppose will last a hundred years, highly efficient and perfectly hideous to the end. But look at that lamp-post – it’s really rather something, isn’t it? I thought only the Italians could do that. Have you seen Bologna? The Corso’s so grand, we’ve nothing like it in England. But apparently we could have if only we imported Scotch lamp-posts to replace those mass-produced metropolitan horrors they keep planting in London. The problem with the English is they’re not a race which sets much store by aesthetic values. They mistrust such things because they smack of flightiness and pleasure. I wonder if it isn’t also a kind of laziness … ? By Jove!’

For they had reached the Opera House standing in its piazza, a creation with pink-washed walls likely to remind any English visitor of nothing so much as blancmange. The interior into which they passed hardly lessened the impression of a confection. Edward and Molly stood in the foyer surrounded by gold draperies, tall Sèvres vases on plinths and pillars of marble in various shades of coral and cream such as he had last seen outside the botteghe of funerary masons in Carrara. The same style extended exuberantly through the jacaranda-wood doors into the auditorium itself. Inside among the cherubim and angels it was dim and cool, a lofty rococo temple echoing not to the tremulous vibrato of Tetrazzini but to the cries of several budgerigar-like birds which had somehow got in. A gentleman in torn shorts and straw hat was sweeping the top of an upright piano with a long broom in one corner of the orchestra pit.

‘What a place to conduct in,’ Edward was saying. ‘It’s so wonderfully bizarre. When one has made all the jokes and poked all the fun the solid fact remains that here we have a people for whom music is central to life. Remember the theatre in Pará? That’s grand too. I admire it. It even makes me feel jealous. Had the English as a race been as musical as the Brazilians then composing for them wouldn’t have been such an ungrateful business. Anything to do with music in England’s an uphill struggle from first to last. I always wanted to write an opera, you know. Still do.’

‘Really? Have you got a subject – or is it a libretto?’

‘More or less. But I keep getting disheartened. Nobody wants that sort of stuff nowadays, not there at any rate. All they want is cinema shows and Jazz and sport. Look what happened to poor old Stanford when he tried to write opera. For the English it’s Gilbert and Sullivan or nothing. Or, of course, The Beggar’s Opera. Have you seen the Nigel Playfair revival? It’s splendidly improper and amusing, just a jingle of songs really, but it’s the perfect proof of how radically unmusical the English are. Their imagination never runs beyond burlesque. In our own way I’m afraid we’re barbarians. That woman who spoke to us just now? The Schiller Institute? Good example. I bet we could scour Manaos all day without finding a Shakespeare Institute. The arts simply aren’t a living part of us.’

‘Surely you exaggerate slightly? We’ve some marvellous writers and painters. As well as the odd composer.’

‘Yes, and look how they had to suffer for it. Penury and neglect for a lifetime and then being turned into classics as soon as they’re safely dead.’

His voice had joined the insistence of the budgerigars inside the dome and Molly realised she had once again provoked a piece of autobiographical vehemence. She steered him out of the building and they left it echoing with grievance. The sunlit piazza, the grand trees trailing aerial roots like Krakens surfacing, blotted away this brief mood.

‘I’m holding you up,’ he said at last.

‘No you’re not. I haven’t much to do until my boat leaves except I’m tempted to come up and paint this lost temple one day. There are a few places worth a visit after the Opera House but not many. The Cathedral’s a possibility and I can recommend the Public Library. Apart from being a nice building it’s got the prettiest double staircase in iron which looks as light as a feather. Glasgow again, I seem to remember. There’s the English Club and of course the Schiller Institute, wherever that is. But really apart from those sorts of things life in Manaos seems to be principally a matter of little launch-trips up and down river. There are lots of tiny resorts with bathing-boxes and bungalows where people can go and fish for their lunches. The Purser’s got outings laid on, I think. For me the real attraction of the place is its oddness. I like all this civic splendour on the edges of nothing, and the decay, and the newspapers and the trams and the modern docks all covered with river-mud and naked children. I like taking the tram out to Flores which is still really in the jungle.’

‘A tram in the jungle? That sounds interesting. Flores, you say? What’s there?’

‘Nothing. A restaurant. It’s wonderful fun having dinner. Oh, we should go. I’ll try and detach Forty from his airfield one night, shall I?’

‘I’d quite like to see the airfield.’

‘I bet he’d take you up if you wanted. Why don’t you?’

‘Ah, he’ll have better things to do than fuss around pandering to fogeys … D’you think he would?’

They stopped at a café and Edward read his letters. ‘Did you know they had a racecourse here?’ he asked. ‘Somebody must have found out about my weakness. This is the Secretary of the Club – an Englishman, apparently – inviting me out to the “hippodrome” hoping I might care to view some racing, Brazilian-style. He says here it’s, what, “capital entertainment even if not exactly run under Jockey Club rules. Sometimes there are fatalities.” That sounds quite sprightly. I wonder if he means horses or riders? I hope not the horses … I do like this word, hipódromo. Now, ah, the Schiller Institute. Of course, let’s see …’

But there was something about Frau von Pussels’ letter which seemed to throw him into a clouded thoughtfulness and he said nothing beyond a muttered ‘No shortage of guides, I see,’ which gave Molly a pang of indignation. Later they lunched at the Britannia Club where they found a good many of their fellow-passengers. Edward was visibly irritated by the effect of his unannounced arrival. The Club Secretary bustled up, evidently having been dragged away from a drink in order to greet this celebrity, but neither quite knew what to say to the other and Edward was left with a feeling of being over-dressed and stuffy. From cool rooms in the background came a good deal of laughter and the men were mostly in shirt-sleeves. The food was acceptable but an uncomforting silence fell as they entered the dining room. Neither he nor Molly was sorry to leave.

Returning to his cabin for a brief siesta he found, laid on his desk next to the microscope, another Schiller Institute envelope. ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he said under his breath. Was there no end to this harrying? But he sat on the edge of the bed and opened it resignedly.

And it hit him like an attack of some vital organ midway between heart and head: her eyes, that voice, her carriage as she had walked away down the street. All were Lena’s, disguised by nothing but time itself and her long absence from his thoughts. The more he considered them the more he remembered her and the less he could imagine not having seen it at once, not even in her handwriting, not even though she now spoke almost faultless English. In this of all places … How could he have expected that half-thought, disgruntled act of booking a passage to lead to his past arising like vapour from the Amazon jungle and massing over his head? Once one had reached a certain age there was evidently no place on earth whose neutrality was guaranteed. The entire planet was peopled with ghosts. Even the most alien of its terrains might exude them, the most preposterous place quicken thoughts and memories. Perhaps one had to be young in order to travel, for it could be diverting and adventuresome only so long as there was no past to press. The older one became the less possible it was any longer to travel in that sense: the exterior globe was increasingly displaced by an interior lifetime. It would be an act of great purity to be able to jettison that deadweight of memory and travel at the end of one’s life as if seeing for the first time just clouds, just a forest, just a great river. He knew he would never achieve that purity; there was something relentless about the way in which he felt himself contaminated. It was as if his very culture demanded it.

He lay back on the bed. Once the shock had begun to diminish his initial dismay was displaced by an amicable curiosity. Might it not be interesting to find out what her life had been? Two elderly people would scarcely wish to embroil themselves in anything more emotionally muddying than peaceable recollections of another world, one distant enough to have left nothing but an afterglow, maybe a fondness, surely the comradeliness of survivors. Besides, so far as he was concerned he had – he reminded himself as if addressing her – done her more than justice, all things considered. He had twined her into some of his earliest successes – Enigma, for example – even though doing so had written her a little more irrevocably out of his life. She had lingered for many years after her abrupt departure as The Girl, the unmarried bride such as a young man would have chosen for himself. But she had commenced her gradual fade from the moment the woman he actually married began taking control of his creativity. The one Girl was squeezed out by the one Woman, then by several women – ladies, even, with titles and influence at Court. The team of Edward and Alice had assumed dominion over English music of the century’s first decade even though that music had its roots in a past which pre-dated their first meeting, one which contained Lena as well as pre-dating her too.

There could be no harm now in seeing what had become of her. In any case, what else was there to do here? Somehow he felt he had already absorbed Manaos – it was like Pará only more so – and Molly’s description of its attractions had suggested only a momentary quaintness. Since he had no interest in bathing and picnic excursions he had a matter of four days left to get through before the Hildebrand cast off and began her downstream voyage. It occurred to him that had one of his boyhood friends like Hubert Leicester been there they might have celebrated finding themselves up the Amazon by swimming in it as they had once swum in rowdy groups in the Severn and Teme. In those days country boys had swum naked and he could quite see it would be essential to find a secluded spot. However, from his observation seclusion was one of the things the region was richest in. And think what a jape it would be …

On impulse he snatched up his hat and cane and, having asked directions, walked down the gangway and set off for the Schiller Institute. This building, when he found it, almost bore out Molly’s guess that it might be worth seeing. It was an imposing but very large old house set back from the rumbling avenue by walled grounds with ironwork gates. As he approached the front door he thought for a moment there was evidence of crime or mishap partly concealed by a bush of garish flowers: a single brown leg emerged at an angle, the sole of its foot palely gleaming. But as he walked on he could see it belonged to a sleeping Brazilian lying crosswise in a hammock slung very low between two trees in deep shade. He rang the bell and after a moment the door opened and there stood the lady who had addressed him in the street that morning.

‘You came,’ she said in evident pleasure. ‘Oh, I’m so glad.’

‘Your letter left me little choice, as you intended. Good heavens Lena … What a long, long, time,’ and they grasped one another’s forearms uncertainly. ‘Ah,’ said Edward after a moment, ‘I thought I’d stumbled on the scene of a dramatic crime.’ He indicated the shrubbery. ‘That fellow looked dead to me: I could only see his feet.’

She followed his gaze and laughed. ‘That’s our gardener João. I sincerely hope he’s not dead since only he knows how to put up our Christmas tree. But please, please come in, Edward. I’m going to call you Edward, you see: that’s how you were. The “Sir” is somebody else.’

‘I’m afraid it is. I often fear it’s what I’ve become.’

‘Well, we’ve all acquired our stage names, it was inevitable. See? I’m Frau von Pussels, the widow of a merchant and the director of an institute. But my memory is excellent. And do you remember what it was we played?’

‘I rather think it was a sonata by Rubinstein. I’d guess the one in G.’

‘Ach! There’s nothing wrong with your memory either. Imagine, thirty-nine years.’ She had led the way automatically into the salon as if this were her private house. Now she walked to the piano, threw up the lid and, still standing, played the sonata’s opening few bars, turning her head to watch him with a smile which anticipated his delighted recognition. But he only remained as if turned in wood before saying ‘Terrible rot really.’ She closed the lid, perplexed, even deflated.

‘I suppose one might outgrow Rubinstein,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I’ve outgrown music, Lena. It no longer gives me any pleasure.’

‘Oh Edward, you haven’t changed. It’s incredible. I can still hear you saying how boring it is playing the violin instead of flying a kite.’

‘Did I say that? It shows how wise I was at such an early age. It also shows I’m nothing if not consistent. Now you must tell me about yourself. Who was Herr von Pussels? I seem to have heard the name even though I know it’s on your letters.’

‘Unfortunately, it’s almost the first thing one sees of Manaos from the river. You have entered part of the far-flung empire of Pussels Cronifer GmbH.’

‘That was the name. It’s all over town. Who or what is Cronifer?’

‘A Swiss.’

Edward made a barking sound which caused a momentary hum within the Bösendorfer. ‘Perfect! A bearer of watches. A man with time on his hands.’

‘Oh! He was very hard-working, he had no time for anything. He was here in the early days but his family have since gone back to Zürich. There’s no shortage of Cronifers there. But I’m the last von Pussels now that our son is dead, and of course I’m not a genuine one. Another empire on its last legs, you see. It may survive as a name but it will gradually be taken over by managers. Family concerns don’t last, do they? Even if circumstances allow one to pass on the name the children seldom inherit that energy which founded the firm. How could they? Their laps are full of fruit. They don’t have to clear a patch of jungle and plant the orchard as their grandparents did.’

‘Would your son have been an exception?’

‘Eusebius? He was not interested in fruit. He was a child. I don’t know what he was interested in and neither did he. Sometimes it was music and sometimes it was going to dig up Troy with Schliemann and sometimes it was duelling and sometimes it was learning to drive a motor car. My God, Edward, what did we do, our generation? We killed off our own children before they even knew who they were. And now look: Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, Egypt. Germany.’

‘England too. We’ve all had the same thought.’

‘Well, so we have. Of course. And of course it doesn’t help. Come upstairs at least, sit down, we’ll drink a glass of something. Are you yet familiar with our guaraná? Excellent.’ She rang a bell. A maid met them at the bottom of the marble staircase and Lena gave her orders before they went up. An imposing halfway landing was lit by a window framed in dark-leaved creepers bobbled with flowers or fruit like brilliant yellow beads. In this patch of light stood a plinth with a large bronze bust on it.

‘Our Founder?’ suggested Edward.

‘How irreverent you English are about culture! Now and then I admire it rather. It looks so like courage in the face of immortality.’

‘Not a bit of it. It’s temerity born of pure ignorance.’ With the fond gesture of one habitually kind to dogs he patted Schiller’s laurelled head as he passed. Observing this at the edge of her vision Lena smiled in self-satisfaction like one who has correctly solved a crossword puzzle clue.

‘Still the same Edward. Oh, don’t worry; I shan’t patronise you. I’m far too happy to see you again, you know.’

‘It has been a goodish time. Rather a lot seems to have happened since those days but whenever I try to remember exactly what, I can’t come up with enough to fill the gap. One got married, one did some work, one survived. Don’t ask me what it was all for, though.’

‘Very well. But I must ask what it is you’re doing here? I was amazed, ich war volkommen baff when I heard you had arrived in Manaos.’ She had led the way into her office and Edward sat down creakingly on a wicker chaise longue, his hat and cane on the floor beside him. ‘Shall I tell you the first thing which crossed my mind?’

‘You probably don’t need to.’

‘No. It was only for half a second. I knew it was stupid as soon as it had been thought. You truly didn’t know I was here.’

‘Truly not, Lena. I heard from what-was-his-name, Stämpfli, that you’d finished at Leipzig but after that I more or less lost touch until a letter turned up from him in 1899 to say you were married and had left Europe.’

‘And in 1886 you met your own future wife, in any case.’

‘You’re a good deal better informed about me than I am about you. Why don’t you tell me why I came here?’

‘Don’t you know, Edward?’

‘I’m by no means certain. Come to that I’m not absolutely clear as to why I’ve done any particular thing these last three years.’

‘I was so sad for you when I heard about Lady Alice, Edward. What can I say? A person of considerable gifts.’ The small solecism hung about the room with the flavour of conventional piety, so she added: ‘We have here in our library a copy of her novel, as well as an excellent translation she made of Ritter Glück.’

‘She wrote the novel before she met me,’ he began, only at that moment the maid came in with guaraná and little cakes and said something to her employer in a low voice. Lena motioned her to wait.

‘I’m dreadfully sorry, Edward, but it seems I must deal with an interruption. A countryman of yours is downstairs and I need to have a quick word with him about a talk he’s giving us. Would you mind very much if I went down for two minutes only? I could ask him to call back but he is very busy as well as being amiable and esteemed.’

‘Of course not, Lena … What makes him esteemed?’

‘Maybe that depends on who one is. Some are impressed by his work as a priest since he’s the English Chaplain here in Amazonas – surely Anglicanism’s largest parish. For others he’s simply one of the world’s best amateur entomologists. It’s about moths that he will address us.’

‘Sounds an odd sort of fellow. Why don’t you show him up here, unless you wish to be private?’

‘Oh Edward, he would be most honoured to meet you.’

‘Just so long as he doesn’t want to talk about music.’

‘Why should he?’ Her tone had a sharpness which in the next moment vanished as she turned to the maid. In due course the Reverend Miles Moss was shown in.

‘Mr Moss,’ said Lena, going forward to greet him. ‘Thank you for coming. May I present to you a very old – one might say long-lost – friend of mine who unexpectedly arrived on the Hildebrand yesterday? Sir Edward Elgar, the Reverend Miles Moss.’

‘Honoured, sir, honoured,’ said the entomologist, shaking hands with Edward as he rose. ‘Frau von Pussels is always introducing me to her distinguished guests but this time she has surpassed herself. Welcome to our Green Hell, sir.’

‘Is that what people call it?’

‘Oh yes, and much more besides. Of course it’s paradise for me as a moth-man. I suppose you aren’t a fellow-sufferer? An obsession I fear has reached in me the proportions of a vice, a positive vice. I have to be increasingly on my guard lest my real duties become neglected. Remember Chaucer, sir, and his corrupt prelate?’ “I rekke nevere, whan that they been beryed, Though that hir soules goon a-blakeberyed!”? I sometimes find myself in danger of going a-mothing at the expense of my scattered flock’s spiritual welfare. Most regrettable,’ and he gave a little chirrup and bounced on the soles of his feet.

‘I like moths,’ said Edward cautiously when the Reverend Moss paused for breath. ‘But I couldn’t describe myself as a moth-man. Bit more of a dog-man and a horse-man, I suppose. Yes, I like moths well enough. I don’t swat ’em. Talking of which, maybe you can tell me something. I was going to look it up in South when I got home. Is there a moth called the Brindled Marsh?’

‘Brindled Marsh? Oh dear, I’ve become so out of touch with the British lepidoptera. After a time all those fanciful names start to sound interchangeable, don’t they? Least Carpets and Smoky Wainscots, Grizzled Skippers and Silvery Arches. To say nothing of a Muslin Footman. I mean to say, jolly easy to imagine a Grizzled Footman with Fallen Arches, what? No, let me see. Brindled Marsh. Why yes, I believe there is such a thing. Why?’

‘Nothing really, just a silly thing I discovered. It’s an anagram of “RMS Hildebrand”.’

The Reverend Moss thought for a moment, his head on one side. ‘By Jove, so it is. Clever, that. Dear old Hildebrand. The number of times I’ve watched her come and go. Like clockwork, if a good deal noisier. As a matter of fact I saw you sail past the other evening, Sir Edward. Well, perhaps not you personally although I can’t be certain of that. I was too far away. Actually, I was up a tree.’

‘Up a tree?’

‘Exactly. I was waiting for nightfall. I was just about to light my lamps when I heard the ship coming. You can hear the rumble of engines for miles across water, you know.’

And suddenly Edward saw again the white-robed figure standing at the top of an immensely tall dead tree on the river-bank, facing the setting sun in hieratic pose. ‘I say, was that you dressed all in white?’

‘There, you did see me. How embarrassing. In such a way, my dear Magdalena, one acquires a perfectly undeserved reputation for wild eccentricity. A middle-aged Englishman a hundred feet up a tree in the middle of the Amazon jungle at dusk, wearing a newly-laundered surplice. Oho. What are we to make of that before we send out sharpish for the nearest alienist? But like many a person before me caught red-handed I can explain everything. I’m on the trail of what I believe is an unknown species of the Sphingidae – hawk-moths, you know, Sir Edward. A very weird creature indeed, very weird, since if I’m not mistaken it has trained itself to suck the blood of animals.’

‘A vampire moth, you mean? That’s downright sinister.’

‘Precisely. I have all sorts of evidence I won’t bore you with at this moment since it’s what I’m supposed to be talking about to this Institute shortly. But in brief he’s the devil to pin down – ha! pin down, that’s exactly what I have in mind,’ and he bounced with pleasure. ‘He never seems to come below sixty feet or so. I presume you know, Sir Edward, that there are different layers of jungle canopy, each with its distinct flora and fauna? You didn’t? But yes indeed. The majority of the creatures which live in those aerial worlds never come to earth at all and consequently we remain in sad ignorance of life up there. I now believe this fellow is one such denizen and it therefore behoves the lepidopterist to leave earth and track him down in his inconvenient habitat. One tries with a number of lures, sugaring and the like, but you happened to see me as I was about to stand there in dazzling white beneath three powerful pressure-lamps and tempt him with my blood. It’s a very hot pursuit,’ he added mildly, as if mere discomfort were hardly worth recording.

‘Goodness,’ said Edward, impressed.

‘I know,’ agreed Lena. ‘He tells us these things and people in his lectures can scarcely believe them. Think of the other sorts of insects he attracts up there which sting and pester, to say nothing of tree snakes and poison spiders and all manner of horrors.’

‘Frau von Pussels exaggerates, of course,’ Miles Moss said in deprecation, and at that moment Edward noticed how scarred were the backs of his brown unpriestly hands. ‘From time to time one gets unwelcome visitors, of course, but really when trying to juggle with nets and killing-bottles the greatest danger is the simple one of falling out of the tree. I’ve done that many times but up to now I’ve bounced,’ he said, doing so. ‘But you must excuse all this chat. I’m not used to such famous company and I’ve a tendency to blather. I really came to tell you the title of my talk, Magdalena, and confirm the date. Thursday at seven, we agreed? I’m calling it “Three hitherto unknown hawk-moths”. I had hoped the vampire would be a fourth but I had no luck the other night so it will have to wait.’

While Lena made notes Edward asked, ‘How did you get back to Manaos so quickly?’

‘Ah, that’s sharp of you, sir. I’m lucky enough to have the use of a little steam launch loaned me whenever I come here by one of my wealthier parishioners. It’s really too kind. The boat is very fast and being of shallow draught can be driven with much more recklessness than a liner like the Hildebrand. I overtook you somewhat after midnight, you know. I’d only been down there for the day. Oh dear, I really must go. I do hope we can meet before you go away again, Sir Edward. We could do a swap.’

‘What had you in mind?’

‘Your news for my gossip, at the very least. There are heaps of things I’d like to know about what’s happening in England at the moment and even if I can’t interest you in the petty scandals of northern Brazil there are always some strange tales in circulation wholly unlike anything you might hear in the Home Counties. Though of course your own voyage here furnished one of the most mystifying and sad episodes I’ve heard in ages.’

‘Ah, poor Dr Ashe you mean?’

‘Yes. A wretched business. The banks of the river from Pará to Iquitos are no doubt buzzing with the news at this very moment.’

‘I have heard nothing of this? said Lena.

‘The Hildebrand’s doctor,’ explained Edward. ‘Nil nisi bonum and all that, but he was a rum sort of chap from the outset. Jumped overboard in the dead of night after we left Pará. Suicide, apparently.’

‘How awful!’

‘Yes. In a funny way I liked what I’d seen of him, too. Very direct and outspoken. Ex-Army, so perhaps that explains it.’

‘I’ve yet to speak with Captain Maddrell but maybe we should hold a short memorial service here. There’s frankly no chance that his, er, body will turn up – not in these parts. And had he reached the shore alive I’d have heard by now: that sort of news travels faster than the swiftest launch around here – don’t ask me how. Poor unhappy man. What an eventful voyage you must have had.’

‘Oh, he was not the only intriguing character on board. We also had a most colourful pair of ladies who got off in Pará. If they’re members of your far-flung congregation you maybe know them? Dora Bellamy and Kate Hammond?’

‘Know them? My dear Sir Edward, everybody knows them. They’re famous in these parts. I dare say even a little infamous, for although it’s scarcely part of my vocation to go about spreading calumnies they themselves would be deeply flattered to hear me ascribe a certain notoriety to their reputations. They’re splendidly quick-witted as I’m sure you discovered.’

‘Oh, is that all you’re prepared to say?’

‘For the present yes, since I must fly. I shall leave you, sir, on that tantalising note. Maybe, Magdalena, if it’s agreeable to Sir Edward we might have dinner together after my talk?’

‘I should like that,’ Edward told him and it was clear to her that whatever it was he responded to in the Reverend Moss it had the ability to fetch him out of himself. ‘I want awesome scandals and horrid tales. I wish to be diverted and be-sinistered.’

‘It’s a tall order, Sir Edward, but we’ll do our best. And now I’m off to buy – amongst other things – a quantity of cyanide,’ and the door closed behind the Anglican Chaplain on the Amazon.

‘You never did tell me why you came,’ said Lena at length.

‘That’s because I don’t know myself. Oh, some friends of mine did the trip a while back and praised Booth’s and the scenery. They had a nice time, in short. I was having a rotten time and I wanted above all to avoid Christmas, which I most cordially detest, and I suddenly remembered their cruise. The Amazon – why not? Though I nearly went up the Nile. Ever since the Tutankhamun discovery it’s been at the back of my mind to see the Valley of the Kings but – I don’t know. I suppose I thought it would be intolerably hot and stark. I wanted comfort, I’m afraid. One has grown old.’

‘All the time you speak as if you’ve had a sad life, Edward.’

‘Haven’t you?’

‘No.’ She said this consideringly, as if it were something which had not occurred to her before. ‘I don’t believe I have. I don’t think of it like that. There have been sad things, awful things. But much of the time I’ve enjoyed myself.’

‘Even here?’

‘Why not even here? I’m not an exile, you know. When I met Otto and we were married I was prepared for anything. He was so full of energy I wanted to go anywhere with him. You see by then I’d finally accepted what you had once so kindly tried to tell me: that I was not a genius.’

‘I’m sure I never said anything of the sort.’

‘Of course you did, Edward. You couldn’t help it because you were one. You were right to be impatient with my delusions.’

‘Mr dear Lena, I remember you as a first-rate pianist. Very likely you had the makings of a great pianist but I was not a reliable judge. As you probably recall, the piano’s not an instrument dear to me. People scurry about it more or less adroitly and I’m afraid I miss the finer points. What is true is that it’s fearsomely difficult to make a career as a soloist, especially on an instrument as commonly played as the piano. God knows the violin’s no easier as I found to my own cost. I’ve no doubt we could neither of us have made satisfactory solo careers.’

‘No. That was not my difficulty, Edward; it was that I so clearly lacked something else which you had. Of course I can quite see now this was my own problem and not yours, but at the time …’

‘At the time. Oh, there were good things in those days, weren’t there? Remember that first concert in Leipzig? How wet we were from the rain?’

‘Doch! And the first piece in the programme was a Mendelssohn overture, Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt, and you turned to me and said in German “Out of the rain and into the sea” and it made me laugh so.’

‘I expect my awful German was the funny part. It doesn’t sound very witty to me.’

‘Not now, no. It was at the time.’

‘Did you ever hear of a piece I once wrote called the Enigma Variations?’

‘Edward! How absurd you are! Do you think you’re talking to the wife of a caboclo? It’s enraging.’

‘Oh, sorry. Anyway there’s a quotation in it from Meeresstille, if you remember. I’m sure now it was no accident.’ Even as he made this noncommittal evasion he felt it as a physical lurch, as abrupt as a horse baulking at a hedge, a shying-away from anything more headlong which might lead to unknown tracts of rough country. ‘Odd how such little things go round and round in the mind until they pop up from nowhere years later.’

‘Come here, Edward, I want to show you something.’

She led the way outside across the passage to the Library, the timber of whose joinered floor gleamed like a sheet of oiled iron in the light from the windows. The room itself disseminated a smell of beeswax and frangipani.

‘It would make a splendid club, you know,’ he said as he surveyed the shelves of books and the clock ticking on the mantelpiece. ‘If you allowed smoking and had some decent sporting prints on the wall.’

But she was not to be provoked. She went serenely over to a group of shelves and said ‘There!’

‘Very nice.’

‘No, Edward, but you must look at them. You don’t know what is here.’

He went forward and scanned the shelves in silence which he suddenly broke with small exclamations. ‘Good Lord!’ ‘I say!’ ‘That old thing!’ ‘Well, really,’ ‘Well really,’ he said again, ‘you have been to a lot of trouble. Or somebody has. Time must hang heavy out here.’

‘What do you mean?’ But she already knew she had made a mistake and that in all probability there would be no way of undoing it.

‘I mean imagine the waste of energy. All this time you’ve been collecting me.’

He had never before seen such a gathering-together of his works and of things concerning his works, his life. Or rather, he had; and he had supposed Alice to be the only person in the world thus to have filed away everything. He had hated it but was never able to dissuade her. It smacked to him of hagiology. There was something infinitely distasteful about the thought of anyone dogging his footsteps with a pan and brush, as it were, gathering up with eager impartiality a symphony, a grocery bill, a yellowed review, a letter, his nailclippings. He was diminished by it even as he felt she had demeaned herself. Had she not written poetry? Evidently the man of flesh had not been enough. Why had he never been allowed to get away with merely (merely!) being a composer? But no, it had also been his daily duty to connive at the creation of his own legend, at the erection of some ridiculous monument to himself constructed from torn scraps of paper, a broken favourite pen, interviews he wished he’d never given: a jumble of the ephemeral and the lasting which mocked both. He’d never understood it even as he grudgingly recognised it as one more of the terms she created for disciplining his moody and vagrant Muse. Thus had she tried to temper his dartings between apathy and excitement, between months of inertia and burstings of energy, and on days of precious sunshine had kept him in his study. Edward the intermittently industrious had been swept up in the Elgar industry and was carried along helplessly by it to meet head-on the incoming bills as they poured across his desk.

‘It’s damned cheek!’ he heard himself say, his voice all but lost in the spacious library. Then louder, ‘You had no right, Lena.’

Surprising herself, she remained calm. She had never dreamed he might one day see what she had so painstakingly assembled but now that he had she felt not the slightest cause for shame. ‘I had a perfect right, Edward. I have merely been doing what any decent librarian would do – and, I’m sure, has been doing across Europe and America and everywhere else.’

‘There’s no privacy, none.’

She realised belatedly that he was not really addressing her at all, that the vehemence in his words was left over from another time and another place. ‘You’ll find nothing private here I assure you, Edward. Nothing. All that is here is public property and has been printed and issued. There are no letters, no personal things. I’m sorry if our collection gives offence but you’re a famous composer and your music is now public property. That is the price of fame.’

Somehow her words quietened his alarm. With the unfamiliar cries of brilliant birds which rolled and twirled in the vines outside the window he felt an unexpected drifting-in of an earlier mood which had reminded him both reassuringly and gloomily that something essential remained untouched, unassuaged, unexpressed by an entire lifetime’s work. He looked again at the shelves of material: a corpus, a cadaver. What had this fossil past to do with him? Whom did these Jurassic strata concern?

‘Well, it’s silly to quarrel over such nonsense. I suppose I should be congratulating you, Lena. As a librarian you’ve evidently spared no pains. There’s stuff here I’d long forgotten about.’ And as if to make amends he drew out a part-song and glanced through it. ‘My God, what utter rot! I’ve vague memories of having sweated blood to finish this and I don’t believe it made me a penny piece. But that goes for pretty much everything else you’ve got here.’

He put it back but not before she had glimpsed the attribution of the text. She was perfectly certain he had not been describing his wife’s poetry. How that woman posed a challenge to the conscientious Elgarian! An apparent spinster of forty had swept a struggling, unknown composer of nearly thirty-two to the altar of the Brompton Oratory. Or was it the other way about? She, finally, was the greatest enigma of them all. Lena could sense her puzzling ghost even here, standing at the shoulder of this peculiar man. Was it through her or despite her that he appeared to remain so identifiably the youth she remembered from Leipzig and Worcester days?

‘What a strange place,’ he was saying. He had moved to a window and was looking out. ‘All the way up the Amazon to find what I most wanted to leave behind.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, it’s not your fault, Lena. Just circumstances. Fate. The business of Fate is mockery rather than tragedy, and I feel mocked. Let’s talk about old times, we’ll be on safer ground. Or maybe not … Do you think I should come to your moth-man’s lecture?’

‘Of course, unless you have something better to do. He’s very entertaining. He liked you, you know; he really meant for us to have dinner together afterwards. Are you free?’

‘Yes, I suppose I must be. Anyway I like the idea. Perhaps he can chill my blood.’

‘Then we shall dine the day after tomorrow. Forgive me, Edward, if I … That young lady you were with this morning. Should I invite her too?’

‘She’s merely a fellow-passenger. She gets off here so I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing much more of her. She’s an artist. Name of Molly Air.’

‘An artist? Oh, I should meet her.’

‘I shouldn’t think she’s very famous at present, she’s just starting. But she’s interesting and estimable and undoubtedly serious. She’s come to paint the Amazon.’

‘Unusual. And she’s single too? You shall introduce us, Edward. I insist.’

‘I do admire you, you know, maintaining your cultural outpost.’

‘Do you? Well, I too am serious. You and I have both felt the world shudder. At all costs civilisation must be handed on.’

‘Must it? If you remember, it was that civilisation which caused the shudder in the first place. It was kings and kaisers who fought the war, not Brazilian Indians. I couldn’t believe it was happening. It made everything horrible beyond belief. I loved Germany and the Germans yet practically overnight one had to treat them as an enemy. Incredible. It was the Germans who’d been my greatest friends and champions. They recognised Gerontius when the English were still turning up their noses at it. How could I suddenly repudiate Hans Richter and Richard Strauss or publicly despise the country of Brahms, Wagner, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach … my God, the list is endless.’

‘Of course, Edward. That’s what wars do. They are wholly insane.’

‘Half my close friends were German or of German and Jewish descent. Frank Schuster, August Jaeger, Alfred Rodewald, Henry Ettling. Brodsky at Manchester. Fred Kalisch the critic. Friends of Brahms and Strauss and Tschaikowsky and Fauré … Is an artist to shut himself away like some sort of national hermit? To this day I believe it counted against me. After the general braying about how I was supposed to epitomise England – whatever that meant – there were some filthy little innuendoes about my keeping the company of Huns. You must excuse me, Lena, but you’ve no idea the beastliness of some of our press. There is in England a disgusting fake patriot they’ve just jailed for fraud called Bottomley who ran a rag called John Bull … Oh Lena, you’ve no idea. That war killed everything.’

‘You suppose I don’t know? It killed my son, Edward. Your reputation has survived. And do you imagine we too didn’t have a popular press of our own just as full of hate and lies? Even out here the … the mud and the stink of it came. So what now can we do but try and repair this civilisation so such things cannot be again? Do you think I didn’t come under criticism even out here in the middle of the jungle? That in our echt deutsches Schiller-Institut I was keeping so much music of Edward Elgar, British nationalist composer? I was telling people “Listen – only listen: he has great things to say even to us Germans who already have so many famous voices.” And if that was true in September was it suddenly to become a lie in October? No. Nobody comes with honour from such things.’

She had spoken with such a crescendo of passion he was shaken out of his own mesmerism, perhaps not by the sting of her reminder but by her accent’s decay and incoherence. Harsh words between old people in a quiet library, not directed at each other’s head but hanging above like an evil smoke. It was enough to remind him of a characteristic which he had shed from the bland image he retained of her memory: that she had always been as forceful as he. And for the first time he could clearly recall her attraction, a pungency of temperament when her age and sex had most presumed demureness and self-effacement. This sudden reminder of how she had been in the streets of Leipzig and on the hills near Worcester bumped up against the next forty years which he had lived – it now felt – within a penumbra of correct behaviour and then the long shadow of habit.

‘Well, we’re not at war still.’

‘We? Us, you mean? Oh Edward, I’m … I must apologise. It’s so difficult. So much time has gone by and yet … I have to remember I’m talking to a man whose biography is on these shelves. I last remember you as a boy, a young man, and now … a biography.’

‘And I’m not even dead, you mean.’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Not that. But all those facts: your life, our friendship – why not be truthful and call it our romance? – all of it doesn’t really count, not against what you’ve done.’

For it was strange, she thought, how easily when talking to certain artists or reading their biographies one forgot the greatness of their art. One might read about Schumann, for instance, and his life at once degenerated into a pathetic domestic tally of hypochondria and misery. ‘Towards March,’ one might read, ‘these depressions and aural disturbances intensified to the point where Robert was consulting Dr Carus almost daily leaving little time or energy to spare for composition. Nevertheless he managed to fulfil his commission on time and the Gewandhaus Orchestra began rehearsals. But almost at once it became apparent that Clara was pregnant again with their sixth child and simultaneously his old alarming symptoms began to re-appear …’ For a time we’d been thinking, yes, the usual human problems; we’d even begun to feel slightly superior since our own were not as a rule so doom-laden. But then we suddenly returned to our senses: that ‘commission’ was the Manfred Overture – or the piano concerto or whatever – one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century music. The saga of an artist’s life was on the whole an irrelevance and the public’s voyeuristic interest in the circumstances of creativity so easily and vulgarly overshadowed the creations themselves.

In the silence he watched from the window the clouds in the huge Amazonian sky which seemed to cast never a shadow into the garden below. Two urubus were just visible in the alley which ran beneath one wall of the grounds. Ugly, verminous-looking creatures like turkeys with mange, they were tearing at a dark lump of something, bouncing and sidling before the approach of a gaunt dog. There ought to be some way out, was the idea which filled his mind. There ought to be some way of shucking off this longing for ancient times and grieving for the present and expecting from the future at least an unspecific truce. It was no longer clear where one lived nor from what one drew sustenance.

‘What a strange place,’ he only said once more.

‘It is and it isn’t. If you look at everything like the travellers’ guides do then it’s nothing but contrasts: the modern port, the aboriginal huts; the Opera House, the open sewers; the trams, the bony horses; the newspapers, the illiteracy … That’s how they go on. But the more one sees of Brazil and countries like it the less strange such things seem, the more ordinary. I don’t understand why everybody thinks Progress must be instant and uniform. Anyone can see differences, they don’t have to make them significant by calling them contrasts. Did not Ruskin look at your Industrial Revolution and complain that the railways had filled every green valley with belching smoke? Yes, I’m sure it was Ruskin.’

‘My dear Lena, I didn’t mean … When I said “strange” I was thinking of rather a different thing. But it doesn’t matter. Is there anything particular I should do or see while I’m here?’

‘There are trips. You might go to the Tarumã Falls but they’re really only worth seeing in June and July after the rainy season. It’s quite dramatic – not the Falls themselves, they’re ordinary – but when the Amazon floods the water here rises forty feet and the Tarumã Forest is drowned. One must go by rowboat through alleys between the tops of the trees … What else? You could see the giant lilies at Solimões: I believe they’re called Victoria Regina lilies so you might feel a patriotic urge to visit them? No? Then there’s bathing in Chapéo Virado at Mosqueira.’

‘I don’t know. None of those sounds …’

‘Or we have here in Manaos, believe it or not, a museum of coins which is the world’s fifth largest.’

‘Only the coins in my pocket have ever held any interest for me.’

‘Or you could stay here and talk to me.’