“Listen,” I said in a jerky voice, “whatever you do is between you and your conscience, but I want that manuscript for Jessie. He didn’t give it to you, he lent it in good faith. It belongs with his papers. Jessie will respect your wishes.”
Stony-faced, eyes fixed on a row of cars parked just ahead of us on the side of the road, Fox-Bourne quickened his pace without a word. Once again I caught up and this time grabbed his arm, holding on when he tried to break my grip. That stopped him.
“I advise you to let go,” he said.
I knew that tone from barroom brawls, Ford. It was serious, a warning, a prelude, even, I suppose, an invitation, which I would have happily accepted if he weren’t fit enough to make short work of me. I was aware of how utterly ridiculous and inappropriate the confrontation was. There we were, toeing an invisible line, while the gravediggers were probably still tossing dirt onto Conrad’s coffin, on the verge of a fight that couldn’t be prettied up by thinking that I was standing up for Conrad, making a reasonable request for his heirs and posterity. To top it off, a cricket game was in progress in a nearby field, the crack of the bat reaching us along with the shouts of the crowd.
“That was stupid of me,” I said, releasing my grip. I fumbled in my pocket for my wallet, took out a card, offered it to him, saying, “Please send it to me. I’ll see that Jessie gets it.”
It was all I could think to do. I half expected him to brush my hand aside but he took the card, read it, stuffed it into his pocket and was off again. This time I didn’t try to catch up, there was no point. I followed him down to the road, where he opened the driver’s-side door of a green car and slipped in. A woman was in the passenger seat, a quite lovely woman in a black hat. I vaguely recollected seeing her in the church and wondered why she hadn’t stayed with Fox-Bourne. Had they argued? Had he told her to wait in the car while he went alone to the grave and stood over the freshly turned earth? It was like arriving late at a theater just as the last act begins. I had no idea what was going on. His wife was no help, her face as blank as a porcelain statuette’s, a geisha’s. Fox-Bourne gripped the steering wheel. When he spoke she turned to him, her face suddenly animated, red lips moving as she gently touched his shoulder and he turned his face upward so that he was gazing at the roof, still talking to her. I would have given anything to know what he was saying, what she knew, and I watched, fascinated, even though I knew that this tableau, this intimacy between husband and wife, was not for me to see.
Suddenly he started the motor and I heard the crunch of gears as the car shot away from the curb directly into the path of another vehicle. The driver veered sharply to avoid a collision, his car bouncing over the shoulder of the road into a field, where the dust pluming behind it filled with a vision of the Valkerie disappearing beneath the minesweeper’s bow while the yellow cylinder hovered in the background like a wraith. Inexplicably, my attention drifted into an imageless gray space. Something was there, Ford, I felt it in my bones, and then I realized that Fox-Bourne had destroyed the manuscript. It was neither a presentiment nor a guess nor a hunch but absolute, unshakable certainty. I imagined him standing on the fan-tail of the Brigadier, feeding one page at a time to the air and watching them float off like gulls, circle, rise on updrafts, and eventually fall into the sea, where they were drowned by the ship’s wake. He could have done it at home, stuffed the pages into a blazing fireplace, the words readable for a second or two before the paper flared and curled into ash. Or he simply could have dropped the manuscript into a dustbin as he might a bag of rubbish. I should have known. I should have warned Conrad, but even if I had it would have been too late. Besides, the possibility had surely crossed his mind—it had to have occurred to him.
At that point the driver staggered around to the front of his car. He did not appear to have been hurt but I went over to make sure. Fox-Bourne’s recklessness was at least in part due to my hounding.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” he snapped, dusting himself off. “No thanks to that bloody idiot.”
“Well, no harm done.”
“There could have been.”
“Yes.”
“That’s always the way, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The ones who make a mess just get off like nothing’s happened, like a law of nature.”
“Generally, I suppose.”
“Generally? He’s gone, isn’t he? He won’t be paying for any damage, will he? The undercarriage hit something. I might be leaking oil. He wouldn’t care, would he?”
I suggested that he start the motor and keep his eye on the oil gauge. It sounded fine when it turned over.
“Is the needle where it’s supposed to be?”
He nodded.
“Well, then, you’ll be fine.”
I walked up through the perfect roses, not a withered petal in sight, not a fallen leaf or twig, the rake marks reminding me of a Zen monastery I once visited in Kyoto whose gravel courtyard was supposed to make one think of the sea. I suppose that was why I imagined once again the pages of the manuscript floating off to the four corners of the world, the words washing off the pages, infusing the sea with a terrible story of the sea. It seemed to me at that moment that Conrad had to know what Fox-Bourne might do with his work. It was an unconscionable risk sending it to him, irresponsible, but only if he cared about the future of the manuscript as I did and he had not. The only reader who mattered to him was Fox-Bourne. Had the words stayed in his mind, I wondered, had he believed them or found some way to discredit Conrad’s views? I would have to know Fox-Bourne better than I did to be certain, but I knew what I wanted: I wanted him to hear those sentences ringing as loudly as church bells every day, wanted him to be visited by the ghostly cries of the Germans every night, wanted the story to do the work the board of inquiry had failed to do. I was certain that if he remembered even a fraction of those words, justice would be served more keenly than if he were imprisoned or drummed out of the service.
I had been gone no more than twenty minutes though it seemed longer. Mourners were scattered like magpies across the lawn, their black clothes startling against the green. The priest was standing with the Polish contingent and his white vestments glowed as he took Jessie’s hand and spoke earnest words to her that I was glad I could not hear. The gang came out of nowhere, the three of them irritated, asking where I’d gone to, and I kept up the ruse I’d begun with Barnes and they all hoped seeing the fellow had been worth keeping them waiting and I said that, on the whole, it had been. Everyone was leaving in groups, walking away from the church, whose bells pealed with the melody of an old hymn, all of us going off toward the rest of our lives with those commemorative notes singing in our heads, leaving Conrad to what I hoped would be his ease.
The four of us got into a cab that passed the rose garden on the way down to the road, circled the church, and came out by the cricket pitch, the players looking like a band of jolly ghosts in their immaculate white clothes. Then they were gone and we traveled in Fox-Bourne’s wake, lost in our thoughts and saying nothing until we reached the station and hurried into the bar for a drink.
BECAUSE THE TRAIN was crowded with cricket fans who seemed about evenly divided between celebrants and mourners, we had to split up, each going to different compartments. Mine was filled with students from the University of London, whose chaps had won, the three tipsy, passing around a bottle of champagne, which they offered to me and I declined only because there wasn’t much left and they needed it more than I did. Noisy as they were, I was happy to be with them, harbingers of the world I was returning to, easier company than the gang, who probably felt the same as I did with whomever they rode. Even though the students were well on their way toward getting drunk, they sensed that I had been through something and quieted down, speaking more softly than before, tittering occasionally. I remembered Fox-Bourne looking up at the roof of his car talking, explaining, defending, admitting, his wife counterin
g what he said, it seemed to me now, as I recalled the way she touched him and the urgency of her gestures. As I have said, while I was watching them, I had no sense of the nature of their conversation, only that it was intense and affected them deeply. As the train made its way toward London I could not let go of it. Fox-Bourne might have learned something at the gravesite that he hadn’t expected.
Other possibilities nagged at me for most of the journey. Only when we reached the suburbs did my thinking shift back to the manuscript and my hope that it had stayed in his mind. I had imagined the voice would have been that of Under Western Eyes or Nostromo, but now a new prospect occurred to me. The narrative might very well have been collective, I thought, choral, the doomed sailors speaking directly, unmediated, to Fox-Bourne and the board of inquiry, the man alone in his office in Whitehall or wherever it was.
Not long after the notion came to me, we reached Victoria Station and stepped out of the car into shadows thrown by the vaulted steel girders of the roof, thick lines that netted the clock with its arrow-shaped hands, food stalls, people running to catch trains, greeting family and friends, saying good-bye, their voices lost in the deep rumble of engines and the dissonant clatter of couplings. I looked around as I once had done on the deck of a ship while trying to discover the direction of the weather, aware of something working its way out of the day’s rituals though I hadn’t a clue about what it was. At that point Harrison came over and put his arm around my shoulders in his usual avuncular way and said, “Come along, Malone. No use brooding.” We walked through the station toward the light of the waning day, the shadows patterning our hands and faces like signs whose meaning I had known once, a long time ago. Something concerning Conrad, I thought. I was sure that was it.
Outside, in the mundane hubbub of the streets, stranded on the curb in our undertakers’ clothes, doleful, directionless, the camaraderie that had held us together all day loosening, fraying a thread at a time, we were not ready to go our separate ways. We needed one another more than hearths and wives and children, Ford, needed the comfort we had drawn from one another and were still drawing. The day had been ordered in such a way that all we had to do was follow a predetermined path. Now we were set loose in the heart of the harsh, indifferent city, where our sorrow was meaningless to everyone but ourselves. Barnes suggested that we retire to a pub across the way and have a pint or two in Conrad’s memory. God knows everybody wanted a drink, yet no sooner did he propose it than I thought of what we would encounter—the racket at the end of the day, men tired to the bone talking, shouting, singing, cheering at the outcome of a dart game. It smacked of impropriety, even sacrilege, and I knew they felt the same. The moment I said we ought to go down to the Nellie and finish off with a decent wake, their faces lit up like beacons. Harrison offered to buy whisky but I told him it wasn’t necessary; I had several bottles of single-malt that would do just fine.
HALF AN HOUR later we trooped up the gangway. While they broke out the deck chairs I went below for the whisky and Waterford glasses I’d inherited from my aunt, the kind from which old women sip sherry until they’re tipsy. Back topside, I lit a lantern and put it down on the deck in the middle of the circle of chairs, the golden light taking a few years off everyone. We had been happier in the cab, relieved that the day had been extended. Now we were acutely aware of Conrad’s absence. The bottle went around and there were toasts and when there was nothing more to say in the way of praise we fell to reminiscing, everyone doing what he could to be cheerful. Kepler went off on a tangent, waxing rhapsodically about the church service. He thought the whole thing couldn’t have been better if Conrad had orchestrated it himself.
Harrison scoffed, saying that in his humble opinion a churchyard was the last place for Conrad.
“Why?” asked Barnes.
“It’s bloody obvious. Think about it. There he is for eternity, surrounded by the good burghers of Canterbury, planted next to grocers and housemaids and gamekeepers, a shady businessman or two, not one of his own kind within shouting distance.”
“What would you have done,” I asked, “put him in Westminster Abbey?”
He tossed down his drink and held out his glass to Barnes, who had the bottle.
“That’s not his style either.”
“All right,” Barnes said. “What is?”
“Something more apt,” Harrison replied, “and more poetic, what the Vikings did with their great ones.”
The Vikings were a hobby of his, a rather passionate one. With the least encouragement he would go on and on about their homesteads and ships and views of the afterlife. I knew what he had in mind.
“A fireship,” I said.
“Absolutely. We should have stocked a boat with food and drink, put his favorite things on board, got him up in his captain’s clothes, touched a match to her, given her a good shove seaward, stood onshore toasting him with cups of mead while he sailed off to Valhalla in a blaze of glory while someone played a flourish on a sheep’s horn.”
“I rather think the priest would have objected,” Kepler said.
“Bugger the priest,” Harrison replied. “You know how Conrad felt about them.”
Kepler and Harrison were famously opposed on the subject of religion. Over the years, they had argued at the drop of a hat and this appeared to be the beginning of another set-to. But to my surprise they let it go and in the aftermath we fell into a reflective silence. I thought of Harrison putting us together on the beach, watching the imaginary ship disappear. Whether he had intended it or not, the scene reflected our situation on the Nellie. No one had mentioned it and no one would, but we were also holding a wake for ourselves, our way of life together already history. Barring some unforeseen event, it wasn’t likely that we would meet again on board, or anywhere else for that matter. A glance round the circle told me that my friends were replaying our collective past just as I was, journeying through old times, making their accommodations with what was gone and would come no more. The effect was akin to a daydream, or maybe those minutes just before you fall asleep, when boundaries of space and time slip away and whatever’s on your mind seems part of a continuum, past and present mixing freely. I recalled details of the church, Fox-Bourne’s anguish, his wife’s red lips, the cricket players, the intricate shadows that fell on us at Victoria Station, the presentiment that now seemed even more clearly to have to do with Conrad. I felt closer to the source, whatever it was, the sensation like having a word on the tip of your tongue, and I returned in my mind to Victoria Station, retracing my steps and what I had seen. The shadows came back in all their intricacy, the striations they cast on the face of the clock with its Roman numerals, the minute hand ticking forward. I remembered people streaming toward me, individual faces, items of clothing, a red hat in particular, and now, in the distance, moving along with the crowd, I saw a man with long curly hair wearing a tunic or a breastplate, the Roman legionnaire Marlow describes at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. Was he the source of my presentiment, rather than Conrad? At first I was inclined to think that it was nothing, that, at the end of the day on which we had buried Conrad, I would naturally incline toward rehashing history and the legionnaire would put in an appearance, fully revealing himself only now that I was looking back at my experience in the station.
I remembered the long-ago afternoon that had slipped into evening when I told Conrad and these friends gathered round me of my Congo adventure, ruminating on the commander of the trireme sent out to the provinces to quell the savage Britons and perhaps civilize them a bit while he piled up whatever loot he could to better himself and fatten the coffers back in Rome. What I said hadn’t amounted to more than two or three sentences that were intended to set the tone for my run-in with Klein. Everything memorable and important about the Roman sprang from Conrad’s imagination, and I mean everything—his devotion to work, the wear and tear on his psyche, his battles with disease and weather and homesickness. It was Conrad who judged him and his kind, who went out into t
he darkness equipped with a sufficiently persuasive idea to blind them to the depredations of colonialism and let them grab whatever they wanted. In that, the legionnaire was a child of his times just like the Belgians I had seen ripping up the Congo. Of all Conrad’s characters, I had mused on that Roman most often over the years, sympathizing with him because he wasn’t so far from other young fellows I’d actually known who manfully tried to work themselves out of a jam of their own making, myself included. But the main interest was the way Conrad felt about him, something I had noticed when I first read the opening pages of the book and saw that he represented something special that had to do with the difficulty of his task, the almost impossible challenge of doing what he’d been ordered to do by his superiors back in Rome. I know you remember the passage, Ford, but it won’t hurt quoting a few lines for the flavor:
Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages—precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in the wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempest, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying likes flies here. Oh yes—he did it, did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps.
Copying out those lines I sensed the contact between them in every sentence, yes, despite the difference in their times and politics, despite Conrad standing against the idea of Empire and its thievery. Don’t you, too, Ford? And doesn’t it suggest something rather mysterious and wonderful about what was happening as those sentences rolled off the end of Conrad’s pen?
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 20