The Gradual

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I think you do. I am the same age as Ellois – in fact I am a year younger than her, but that’s not what you are asking me, is it, Sandro? I hope you don’t mind me calling you by your first name – for many years I have been a great admirer of your music, and I defer to you. For a long time I thought of you only as Sussken. The traditional compliment of one artist to another, using only the surname. But, Msr Sussken, now we have met—’

  ‘What is it you are saying?’

  ‘We have travelled in the islands, you and I. Not together, of course – we both know that. But we have followed the same routes. East or west. Across the straits, following the currents, responding to the allure of the islands. Time has a gradual effect. The direction makes no difference in the end. Look at the both of us!’ He was standing in front of me, staring directly at me. He opened his hands towards me. ‘You are in fine physical shape, for a man of your age.’

  ‘And so are you.’

  ‘We have both travelled through the islands. Look at me.’

  We were standing only a short distance away from each other. Suddenly, I could see past the superficial evidence of youth. His skin was clear, his eyes were bright, his hair was full. He looked fit. He looked agile, strong. He looked like a healthy man in his early or middle thirties. So did I – every day I relished the return of the youthfulness gifted to me by the gradual.

  But beyond the suppleness of Ormand’s body, the physical energy, I could now detect something in his expression, his demeanour. There was a sense of weariness, of experience of the world, of a history of achievement and disappointment and hopes and happiness and despair. He had the look of someone who had travelled a great distance, lived long beyond the normal span.

  ‘Drink your beer, Sandro,’ he said and tipped his own bottle against his lips, swallowing twice or three times. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. I had felt the neck of the bottle warming in my hand so I drank some of the beer while it was still cold. In the corner where we were standing the volcanic ash had accumulated – blown there, perhaps, or swept deliberately to clear the larger area. It was all over my sandals, clinging to my bare lower legs. I tried brushing some of it away, but it made no difference. ‘What happens to you and me when we cross the gradual tides does not happen to everyone,’ Weller continued. ‘My wife, my daughter, all my friends, my neighbours, the people who pass me by in the streets, the musicians with whom I play, the audiences who come to watch us – they also travel, they too move from east or west, they too sail across the straits that lie between islands, but they do not, cannot, respond when the islands speak.’

  ‘Speak?’

  ‘The islands speak. We both know that, Sandro. We are adept.’

  ‘Why do you use that word?’

  ‘What other word would you use?’

  ‘I don’t know. I met some adepts while I was travelling. I wasn’t sure who or what—’

  ‘You would have met them, I know. There are many of them, hanging about in our seaports. Cea thinks they are all thieves, but I am more sympathetic. They assume they are the same as us but we are different from them. What I mean by that is that we have the same skills, the same sensitivities as them, but you and I are musicians and they are not. Musicians are not more greatly adept, but music gives us a focus for what we perceive of the islands, what we hear when the islands speak. Some of the adepts I know have a commitment to the arts of other fields, some of them are philosophers, writers, painters, innovators, entrepreneurs, doctors. They hear the voices of the islands too. But you will not meet adepts of that sort hanging around outside the Shelterate office on a small island. Those people you have met, and will probably meet again, are adepts who have become skilled in the gradual slippage of time. Time graduality does not interest me, and I assume you feel the same. They draw from the islands the strength to resist the gradual and with that they make a living from the tourists who pay them. But their adeptness is superficial, variable. Tell me now, more interesting to us both – have you heard the music of the islands?’

  ‘I heard music a few moments before the first tremor in the ground, when the volcano blew.’

  ‘A long piece?’

  ‘A whole orchestral piece,’ I said. ‘I had never known anything like it. It was scored, arranged. It came to me as inspiration.’

  ‘Yes – inspiration!’ he said.

  ‘Then there was another when the volcano erupted but there was so much going on around the house that it faded, and I could not recollect it afterwards.’

  ‘You were never before inspired by the islands?’

  ‘Well – yes.’

  A hundred times, in fact, from a hundred islands in the stream. I knew all their names, knew their harmonies. But suddenly I remembered the day when I was seven years old, in my parents’ junk-filled loft beneath the roof, pressing my hands against the steep window. Looking out to sea for the first time, looking out at three island shapes in the sea beyond my town, dark, mysterious, full of promise. Something had resonated then. That first time. Music had flowed on that day, music had been heard. I could do nothing about it at that age, but my talent was prodigious.

  ‘I too have heard music all my life,’ said Ormand Weller, Cea’s impossibly young father. ‘Some of it was what I now know to be yours. I heard tides and winds and the sounds of seabirds, the blast of wind on a moor, the suck of a retreating tide. It was beautiful, moving, mysterious, deeply true. I was young, I thought the music was mine. Inspirational, as you say. Later I discovered it was Sussken’s, not mine. Yours, Sandro. The music that speaks to us from the islands is not unique, as we believe or as some of us prefer to believe. It is in fact communal, consensus, shared, part of the gradual. It is present in the fields of time that lie around every island. It is the great hall of music, the fundament, the sky, the world. Some of the other adepts describe a vortex, a gradient, a distortion of time, but to me the gradual is a heart, a living soul, a continuum of musical response, sung to us, played to us, spoken to us by one island, by the next island, by all islands. We alone understand it.’

  ‘You say you know the music was mine?’

  ‘Yours as much as it was mine. It’s a commonality, Sandro. I found out about your work, what you had made of the islands. I was confounded by what I had done. As soon as I understood what the gradual was capable of, I never used it for inspiration again.’

  ‘I know you,’ I said. ‘I know your work. I know what you have done. I have bought copies of your records.’

  He nodded his acceptance of that.

  ‘You are And Ante!’

  ‘I am. I was. I am no longer. I am also sorry for what I did.’

  He raised the beer bottle to his lips once more but this time I noticed that his hand was shaking. His eyes were moist and for the first time he looked away from me, evasively.

  Cea said, ‘I am going to take my mother for a short walk.’

  She had already turned the wheelchair around and was pushing it towards the passageway. I wanted to go with her. I did not want to be left here alone with her father.

  ‘You have to embrace the gradual, Sandro,’ he said as Cea went away. ‘It comes to you, but you have to surrender to it. It is not an option for you. Or for me. It is not a creative force as we think, but a reflection of our own imaginings. All your life you have felt that response, the surge from the islands. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  I stood there in the courtyard with Weller, still not truly understanding, still remembering the music I had heard in my mind, still not able to acknowledge the truth of it. Dust and fallen ash we had stirred up with our agitated movements were drifting about in the sunlight, fine debris from the volcano. I could smell it in the air I was breathing, feel it stinging my eyes.

  But I knew the music would come again.

  Ormand Weller, And Weller, And Ante, went across to his guitar case. He took out his instrument, slipped the strap across his shoulder, then he sat down
on the low wall around the pool and he started to play.

  It was the same music that had come inspirationally to me from the earth tremor.

  67

  I left Weller in the courtyard. He remained seated on the wall of the pool, one leg crossed over the other, the guitar resting on his lap. His head was bent low as he played. The tips of his callused fingers made the strings squawk as he moved his left hand across the frets.

  The sun was at its highest, the heat a kind of unmoving mass in the street between the tall houses. I walked along, feeling as if I was forcing my way in the heat, heading back the way I had come, hoping to see Cea again. Ash flurried around my legs as I walked.

  It was briefly possible to glimpse the Gronner from this part of the town and I could see that although the outflow had decreased the eruption was still going on. The wind was spreading the ash cloud – some of it was moving above the town. The rotten-egg smell of sulphur dioxide was stronger than before.

  If the island was speaking to me then, I could not hear it.

  The way back towards my house led past the harbour, but because of the smell, the unhealthy feeling of ash and dust and expelled gases, I turned off down a narrow side street, which I thought would give me a shortcut to the sea and the chance of a fresh breeze.

  As I reached the coast road, with the harbour in sight, I met Cea. She was walking alone, holding a cloth across her mouth and nose. There was no sign of her mother or the wheelchair. When she noticed me she reacted at once, looking quickly to one side, as if seeking an escape route. Or that is how it seemed to me.

  ‘You were deep in conversation with my father,’ she said, when we came up to each other. ‘I didn’t want to interrupt.’

  ‘We finished. Where is Ellois?’

  ‘I took her to the … the residence.’

  ‘I thought you said— She doesn’t live with you, then?’

  ‘Not all the time. Are you returning to your house?’

  ‘For the moment.’

  ‘I hardly saw you, Sandro.’

  ‘You wanted me to meet your father,’ I said. ‘And you said we would get together again this evening. Shall we?’

  We had moved to the side, into the shadow of one of the warehouses on the edge of the harbour area. When we were out of the direct sun it was a little more comfortable, but the hot air and the ever-clinging dust were just as unpleasant. Cea was keeping her distance from me, still holding the cloth across her mouth.

  ‘Let me phone you later,’ she said. She edged around me, stepping out briefly into the sun’s glare, then pressed herself back into the shade. She was looking along the street, towards where she lived. She wanted to get away from me.

  ‘Cea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s happened? Why are you like this?’

  ‘I heard what my father was saying to you.’ She moved out from the shade and began walking back towards the house. I followed her. ‘I realized what you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve always sensed it in you but today I realized what it really meant. You’re the same as him. I can’t deal with another like him. He knew all about you before you came to Temmil, but then he would. He has the adept abilities. Look at him, Sandro! He’s in his eighties and he acts like a young man! He has spent most of his life as a young man. How can I ever understand that? My father! And now you.’

  ‘I’m much older than you, in my fifties,’ I said. ‘You know that. I have never tried to deceive you.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘You are adept, like him. I can’t – I want to leave this island, I want to get away, leave my parents, go back to the life I had before I met you—’

  ‘Why should I prevent you from doing that?’

  I tried to take her arm but she pulled it sharply away from me, changed direction, dodged into an alley running between the backs of two rows of houses. I turned to follow her, but she was walking more quickly. Her head was bent forward, the cloth was pressed over her nose and mouth. Of course I could have caught up with her, but her meaning was clear. I watched her hurrying away from me, into the deeper shadows of the narrow lane, past more houses, never looking back. Then she turned, climbed some steps that led up from the roadway. I lost sight of her.

  I stood for a while where she had left me, wondering if she would come back, and also wondering if I wanted her to. Some quirk of the street layout made the sound of the volcano louder here, its intermittent rumbling channelled by the narrow roadways. I had not really paused to listen to it until now, because from the start it had been a deep sound, more a feeling in the gut than a sound, happening below the threshold of audibility. But as its own internal built-up pressure was eased its voice was less threatening, as if its throat was being cleared. I could not see the volcano from this part of the streets although the thin haze of its outflow was drifting across the sun.

  I walked into the centre of Waterside, hoping to find a taxi to carry me home, but it was the early afternoon when everything closed down and the shops were shut. I saw several unattended taxis lined up in the town rank.

  Half an hour later I was back at the villa. As soon as I was inside I stripped off all my clothes and went gladly into the shower cubicle. The dust and ash washed away, making a thin gritty smear across the white plastic base as they poured into the drain hole.

  The shower spray made a light staccato sound as it bounced off my head and shoulders, a rhythm, a simple melody. Was it speaking to me?

  I towelled my hair then went out to sit naked on my balcony, letting the sun dry me. I did not stay there long – I could feel the thin grit still drifting around me.

  68

  As once before I knew I should depart from Temmil as soon as possible. It was not the place I had imagined it to be, it was not a place I wished to stay. I had begun to dislike it. And the past – I had not come to Temmil to find Cea again, but that is what had happened and it could not be denied. I had also discovered that a fragment of the past does not fill the present, nor provide a future.

  I slept uneasily that night, and alone. Cea made no contact and I did not expect her to. Her silence provided me with possible answers to questions I had glimpsed but in my half-awake state could barely form: will she?, do I?, can we?, should I?, what is it? … and so on, the inevitable circling enigmas of insomnia. None could be answered, except by the breach she had made, by our absence from each other. If I did not see her, answers were unnecessary.

  I was awake several times in the night, thinking about her, finding it hard to breathe in the tropical climate: the smell of gases, the feeling of dirt and dust everywhere, the ever-present heat and humidity. A thunderstorm rolled in, drenched the hillside with a cloudburst, soon rolled away. It was nothing like the storm I had experienced on Demmer but for fifteen minutes my room was intermittently lit up by the flashing lightning. Through the wide open windows I felt the thrill of being close to heavy rain without being caught in it. The thunder was loud and close but that was all. I did not sense any threat from it. For a few minutes after the storm moved away the air felt cooler, but that did not last.

  The volcano grumbled all night long. It sounded less menacing than before but it was something I had grown accustomed to during the last few days. Was it speaking to me at this moment, as Ormand Weller had described? I drifted back to sleep before I could gain a clear reply. It was a night of questions without answers.

  In the morning I sat at my table, ate some breakfast and drank two cups of coffee. The outflow from the volcano had shifted again with the wind, so now the sun was undimmed. The fierce rain in the night had washed away much of the dust and ash around my house.

  I had to leave Temmil. The resolution I made the evening before returned. I felt it as surely as anything I had ever known. There was nothing to keep me here any longer. The town bored me, I knew no one except Cea, and perhaps her father, and it was not the place where I had thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

  But I
felt beset by practicalities, large and small.

  The house: rent paid ahead, agreements signed for land taxes, the supply of electricity, water and so on. Unfinished work: I wanted to write and compose and now I had found a house that I felt comfortable in and where there was a splendid piano. I knew that if I set off on my travels once more it would mean another postponement of work. I could not compose while on ships. My illicit money: held for now in a Temmil bank and I wasn’t sure how safe it would be to try to withdraw it from the account. Property: I had started accumulating books and magazines, and records, sheet music, manuscript paper, new clothes, pairs of sandals. I now owned four broad-brimmed hats made of different materials. The prospect of carrying all that stuff around with me, taking it on the ships into those cramped cabins, made me tired to think about it. And the ships themselves, with those cabins, the occasional need to share with a stranger, the constant engine noise and vibration, the smell of fuel oil, the long halts in ports. Much of the romance of a life on the sea had fled, or proved illusory.

  I was all too aware of the inconvenience of shipboard life, the discomforts, the feeling of being trapped by it.

  And I could not, should not, forget the fact of the arrest warrant. I felt reasonably safe from the long reach of the military junta so long as I remained on Temmil, but I worried that the moment I started making myself known to authorities by passing through official border controls I would be identified and arrested. I did not dare to imagine the retribution the Generalissima and her cronies would exact on me.

  Above all I felt a dread of having to engage again with the gradual and the time detriment it created. Every port of call that I made on my travels would involve having to deal with the adepts, never resolving the mysteries of the stave, never finding a solution to the tiresome carrying of my baggage through hot streets and on small boats. Nothing would be explained and I would suffer a constant drain on my money.

  All practicalities, some of them dreary. Music for me was the voice of the human spirit. It existed only in the space between the instruments that produced it and the ear that appreciated it. It was the movement and pressure of molecules of air, dispersed and replaced instantly and unceasingly. It lived nowhere in reality: gramophone records, digital discs, were merely copies of the original. The only real record that existed of music was the original score, the black pen marks on the staves, but they were cryptic, had no sound, were written in code – they had no meaning without the human spirit that could break the code, interpret the symbols. And music survived not only the lives of those who played it, but the life of the man or woman who composed it.