Sailors on the Inward Sea (28 page)

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.

B
ECAUSE 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 countering 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 the 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?

I got up to stretch my legs, patting Kepler on the shoulder as I went by. Standing by the cabin door, I saw the navigation lights of a ship making for port and beyond it the tiny gleaming points that were windows and street lamps. I had never been so aware of the closeness between Conrad and the legionnaire. My sense of their bond had pushed the question of the Roman's presence in my recollections of the station to the back of my mind, where I assumed it would stay. At that point Harrison called to me, asking what the devil I was up to. The next instant I put my finger on what the attraction was for Conrad, what linked him to this man he had created out of a few suggestions from me. I have always been leery of the word
revelation
—it smacks a bit too much of deux ex machina for my tastes—but it is the only way to describe my feelings about what I now saw, that in a metaphorical sense Conrad and his legionnaire were one and the same.