Hamilton-Paterson Gerontius

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ISBN: 978-0-571-31402-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Nearing the end of his career, Sir Edward Elgar impulsively decides to travel by ship to Brazil, where he encounters a woman from his past. Set in 1923 and based on true events, Gernontius is a modern classic, and takes the great composer out of his depths in this beautiful, episodic, mysterious novel set in 1923.

James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated books are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca, and the autobiographical Playing With Water. Born and educated in England, he has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hamilton-Paterson, James

Leseproben

The jerk woke the sleeper in the train. The lights in his compartment, whose sole occupant he was, had not been switched on, possibly out of deference to his slumber. Consequently the window had not turned into a black mirror obliging him to stare at his own reflection and that of the plump, buttoned upholstery which the LNWR considered suitable for their First Class travellers. Instead he could make out scattered lights, signs of a city, hints of dockland. At once from the darkness beyond the rain-speckled pane came the sad blare of a ship’s siren.

‘It ought to be dawn,’ thought the man sleepily to himself, for by chance it was the very note which, twenty years before, he had written for the Shofar in his oratorio The Apostles: a clear C to herald the rising of the sun, the beginning of a new day. This thought stirred another, far more recent, memory as of a fading dream which slipped obliquely away beneath the full realisation of who and where he was: Sir Edward Elgar OM arriving at Liverpool on a late afternoon in November 1923 to embark on a voyage up the Amazon. Above him the netting of the overhead luggage racks bulged with the two light leather cases his valet had brought to Euston from the club in St James’s. Beside him on the seat lay a cane, an overcoat and a hat. In the guard’s van was a metal cabin trunk full of the sorts of things a gentleman might need for a six-week cruise into the primaeval heart of the world’s largest unexplored tropical jungle (the phrasing was that of the cruise company’s handout). The cabin trunk was stout and japanned. The valet, who had bought it a week previously in the Army & Navy Stores, thought it looked quite the thing: serious and intrepid. Unlike all his master’s other tin and steamer trunks this one was double-sealed against termites, the locks were acclaimed proof against even the most nimble-fingered lascar or coolie, the hinges and corners were reinforced with brass. Empty, it weighed a ton. Edward had himself classified it as appropriate in the sense that Alice would have approved the air it gave off. Privately he thought it faintly absurd to go cluttered up with so many suits of clothes for so short a time. The memory of the trunk in the guard’s van now brought him a whiff of vexation, reminding him that for all his best intentions it had in the end turned out impossible to make this trip as he would have liked, light and unencumbered. Instead he was dragging baggage behind him which dated back far beyond last week and the Army & Navy. But then he supposed one did not shed sixty-six years merely by abandoning habit like a heap of clothes smelling of mothballs. Nor was he sure he really wished to.

Imperceptibly the train started again, this time achieving no speed beyond that of a noiseless gliding past unlit deserted platforms without name which had the air of wharves. He did not quite recognise anything but the mere fact of knowing this to be Liverpool made it familiar from the old days, those penniless days of a quarter century ago when he had so often come to conduct his own works in the hopes of making a name (a name! the futility!), staying with Rodewald in Huskisson Street. It was, he suddenly realised, exactly twenty years to the day that Rodey had died, having nearly single-handedly turned the largely amateur Liverpool Orchestral Society into an ensemble capable of playing the best of the moderns: Wagner and Strauss as well as Elgar himself. Poor Rodey. How typical it was that so powerful a champion of music in England should have been a textile magnate – precisely the sort that ignorant London snobs had made their jokes about – the trade of music and the music of tradesmen, and so forth. Twerps, the lot of them; so pig-headed and cloth-eared they couldn’t hear that for decades the heart of English music had beat in the provinces, hundreds of miles from the capital with its society dunces and fashionable virtuosi playing pot-pourris of Sullivan. Well, damn them, men like Rodey had helped change that although the poor man had scarcely lived to see it: dead at forty-three but not before Pomp and Circumstance no. 1 was dedicated to him and not before his orchestra got first sniff at both it and no. 2. How the twerps had gnashed their teeth in London! More to the point, the awful suddenness of his death had inspired the Largo of the second symphony which was far more his memorial than the King’s. Well. It all seemed so long ago now. How could he, Edward Elgar, already be sixty-six? It was as if Rodey appeared in the shadows on the other side of the compartment, unaged, to confront the old buffer opposite him.

‘Still visiting Liverpool, Edward?’

‘Hardly at all for years. I’m just passing through. Off to South America. The Amazon, in fact.’

‘The Amazon? My dear Cocky, what on earth for? Don’t tell me Gerontius has conquered the cannibals?’

‘Good Lord no. At least, not so far as I’ve heard. No, it’s more of an adventure. A bit of a jape. Just to get away from it all.’

‘It all, Cocky? H’m. What does Alice have to say about it all?’

‘I don’t live my life just to …’ he began huffily, but then, ‘Alice is dead.’ Could he have forgotten for that instant?

‘Oh Cocky. My dear man; I’m so sorry. For you, I mean, not for her. After all, I’m dead too.’

Silly, such conversations. Yet nowadays after the great evisceration of the war conversations with the dead went on all the time and all around, so much realer were the departed than the ghosts who remembered them, the words heard than the words spoken. Thus, long after the dim figure opposite had been reabsorbed into the London & North Western Railway’s plush upholstery and become pure shadow the warm and questioning voice lingered: ‘Oh Cocky, what are you writing now? What great work is brewing for that ungrateful world?’

And there was no answer he could give. There was no way he, the living, could say, ‘Oh Rodey … Dear old man, I’m finished.’ And just then the train stopped, doors began to open, people to shout for porters.

‘Sir Edward,’ from the doorway. Hell, they’d tracked him down already. But it was only Tom Shannon the choirman’s son come to see him onto the boat. Stepping out of the glossy carriage to the platform Sir Edward Elgar might have been caught in a series of sepia pictures for the Pall Mall Gazette: an obviously distinguished man of a somewhat military bearing, grey haired and grey moustached, buttoning his coat and adjusting his hat against the squalls of November rain which blew inwards between the train’s glistening roof and the fretted overhang which sheltered the platform. This was Sir Edward Elgar the public figure – not so easily recognised as in the heyday of the prewar years, maybe, but still with the same appearance of purposefulness. A close observer might have noticed that Edward Elgar, on the other hand, was vaguely trying to fit the wrong hand into the wrong glove and had about those deeply hooded eyes a remoteness like one lost in a strange land.

It was only when they reached the quay that the cruise passengers could appreciate quite how bad the weather was and how it was shortly going to affect them very much indeed. Railway travellers were, after all, used to sliding effortlessly through the worst storms, no more attention needing to be paid to the sluicing blusters beyond the carriage panes than that someone might get up and lean his weight on the leather strap to force it and the window a final notch tighter. But here, huddled in the open-fronted sheds, the boarding travellers were reminded they had come to the end of solid land. In the brilliance of overhead derrick and bunkering lights they caught glimpses of rigging bowed into arcs by the wind, of rain-slicked paintwork, buffeting tarpaulin and – beyond the ship’s hull – an impression of the wild surface of the Mersey. Certain of the passengers must from the moment of dressing that morning already have supposed themselves magically a thousand miles up the Amazon beneath tropic skies brilliant with parakeets; their clothes were absurdly light for an English winter evening. They almost ran aboard, one hand pressed to their hats, up the gangway with its slapping canvas sides, to be handed down over the calm, warm threshold smelling faintly of oil and brass polish by immaculately uniformed officers.

Edward stood a little apart from the rest in the sheds, seeming not to mind the gusts of rain in the open doorway. He had clearly been recognised by several of his fellow-travellers but gave no sign of having noticed their glances in his direction, their whispers. The squalls beat the flaps of his overcoat against his legs but he disdained to turn up his collar. He might almost have been relishing the elements as proof of his presence here, on this dock, on a dark winter’s evening in the north of the world. Head tilted back and face wet with rain he examined the Hildebrand from stem to stern as his home for the next month and a half. He saw an elegant small liner, graceful almost to the point of daintiness, with a grey hull below the white strake, white upperworks and the all-black funnel of the Booth Steamship Company. He was a well-travelled man and his eye was practised enough to judge the vessel’s tonnage at about seven thousand and its length at some four hundred feet. He was surprised that so large a craft would be able to go a thousand miles up any river, even the Amazon, and wondered how many feet of...