The Voyage

by Murray Bail

Genres: Black Humor; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Frank Delage, a middle-aged Australian, arrives in Vienna with the most daring of propositions. He has invented a revolutionary piano and means to market it to the grand old world of classical music. A chance meeting with one Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities - a soirée, an introduction to her daughter Elisabeth, dinner with an avant-garde composer. But when the sheer audacity of his campaign dawns on him, he takes a slow boat home to the southern hemisphere. As it meanders through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, he is afforded ample time to reflect on tensions between the old world and the new. And, for all his travails, he is not going home empty-handed...

Release date: January 31, 2013

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 144

Sample

IT WAS NOT SO MUCH A HEADLONG RUSH FROM EUROPE, more a slow return to Sydney, instead of hopping onto a plane, which would have been easier, Delage had chosen to return by ship, not one of the P. & O. queens, a container ship, stacked with the rectangles of various faded colours, which stopped at half a dozen ports along the way. On the ship – it was called the Romance – he imagined there would be silence. Not total silence: of all people, the specialist manufacturer Delage knew there was always a sound of some sort, however faint, even an echo, somewhere. One of the attractions for Delage was there would be just five other paying passengers. A priest who was supposed to join ship at La Spezia had cancelled. Delage would have a cabin to himself. Aside from the occasional “Good morning!” and an occasional “Thank you”, he was looking forward, after what he had been through, to thirty-three days of peace without talking about himself, or having a significant conversation of any kind. Most things are not worth saying, yet continue to be said. What is said is a version in a different voice of what has already been said (many times before). From the moment Delage stepped onto European soil and began speaking or spruiking, he became aware his voice was only adding to what had long been there. The dark trees, the streets and boulevards, the clothing of people and the expressions people arranged around their mouths, even the air they breathed, were blurry or furry with the accumulation of words, congestion in the guise of world-weariness. You would think they might have been interested in the views of an outsider, one who had come from the opposite direction, literally from the bottom of the earth. But no, not really – even though, unencumbered by tradition, the New World had a history of throwing up new methods, the fresh solutions. No, they showed little or no interest, preferring to remain standing in the one spot. In Vienna, in particular, to just about everything he said, these exceptionally neat, implacable figures with almost unworldly tanned faces, from skiing recently in the Alps no doubt, almost clashing with their silver hair, remained smiling, while some even, the women, kept their blue eyes on him and began laughing. They knew their Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. How many times would they have heard the “Jupiter”? Strauss used to come around to their houses and play the piano in the panelled drawing room. Before long they would casually, almost dismissively, recall personal anecdotes about poor Schoenberg. The daughter of one of them, Elisabeth, who he met at a soirée – spoke excellent English – took him the following afternoon to a street behind the cathedral and into the apartment where Mozart composed, among other things, “The Marriage of Figaro”. As he climbed to the first floor, Frank Delage realised Mozart’s feet had actually been on these very steps, which were quite worn. The rooms had loudly creaking floorboards and a few bits of fragile furniture, allowing visitors to see nothing more than the space in which Mozart and his family moved and the view of the street he undoubtedly enjoyed from the main window. To Delage’s surprise, Elisabeth had never been there before. She had been born in Vienna, and therefore into music, everyone in her family, the von Schalla family, listening and playing and nodding in time with it; naturally she assumed he too was music-saturated, like everybody else in Vienna.

The very nature of his invented product meant he could not ignore Europe, a “vital plank”, as one of his investors said, with a serious expression. And by normal commercial standards his foray against the ramparts of old Europe could hardly be called a success. At the very least he hoped to have one foot in the door; now, with both Vienna and the possibility of Berlin behind him, he wasn’t even sure he had achieved that. Already he was thinking he might have to go back! If he did, or even if he didn’t, he decided he was going to talk less. It was something he had learnt from the implacable Austrians, the Germans too, for that matter. There was something wrong with people who never stopped talking. Away from home, Australians like to be chatty, not that anyone anywhere thinks or cares about what they say. He himself was not a talkative person, not normally, but in Europe it had been necessary to make headway with the locals, somehow. To Elisabeth, he hadn’t once mentioned the word “piano”. After the Mozart museum they went to a coffee house behind the cathedral, where she talked about her family, the Schallas, as if he knew of them, reserving her perplexed emphasis for her father. In fact, when you added it up, it was she who did most of the talking. In reply, Delage described his sister in Brisbane, who, he said, phoned often three, four times a day. Either she rattled on about nothing really, or complained about a situation way beyond her control, such as the unseasonal wet weather, or else she would report progress in her self-appointed task, even though it was hardly her concern, trying to find him a wife, or a “possible wife”, as she put it. “My sister could talk under wet cement. She has psychological problems, as far as I’m concerned. She has to spill it out. She has to hear herself talk,” he explained, just off the Graben, in the city where it had all begun half-horizontally on Berggasse, the confiding endless sentence. “There’s obviously something wrong with her,” he went on, wanting to rub his eyes, although he knew there was nothing wrong with his sister. “She’ll talk about anything that comes into her head. We’re not like each other at all.” Put them in a room and they didn’t even look like brother and sister. “What’s her name? Jo – short for Joan.” In sympathy, Elisabeth pulled a face. The only thing of interest Delage could remember his sister saying was in response to their new stepfather, “He eats too much jam.” Talking is alright, as long as it makes a difference.

It’s best not to release thoughts immediately. Isn’t it best to pause? An added benefit is that it gives the impression the person is being thoughtful, accordingly someone worth listening to.

It was one of those sensible conclusions he had reached long ago, but hardly ever put into practice.

Frank Delage carried around a notebook for jotting down things he had read or heard, the way some people pick up cigarette butts, they could end up being useful one day, not only maxims, although most of them were, unusual phrases, descriptions too, he liked the sound of single words. A green fountain pen protruded at the ready from his shirt pocket, which also pointed to energy, a range of set tasks to be tackled. “Let me see,” Elisabeth, of the von Schalla family, said, and began flipping through the pages. “The human face is the most interesting area on earth” – one of his favourites. He had forgotten where he’d come across that one. “Thinking remains thanking.” Somewhere else he’d picked up a description of a rubber-band “the colour of a nun’s belly”, which he had immediately written down, even though it didn’t give any advice at all. It was enough for Elisabeth to tilt her chin, as if she were resting on her elbows on a beach, and give a small laugh, not entirely unaffected, for it revealed to Delage the pale curve of her Austrian throat. Elisabeth was in her mid-thirties. Good of her to drop everything to show him, a stranger, around Vienna. Obviously she had the means, and plenty of time on her hands, she could do whatever she wanted. Every time he glanced at her or asked a question she was looking away. He had filled many notebooks. Such a need to retain the thoughts of others suggested Frank Delage was undecided about himself, that he was composed of little more than the thoughts and opinions of others. On one subject he had clear and confident thoughts, where he knew what should and could be done, and whenever he talked about it he never borrowed the words of more articulate, stronger people. On this subject, Delage, the manufacturer, could be tenacious, sarcastic, indignant, intent on demolishing, or at least reducing, the opposing forces. It was a remarkable product, his, in every way an example of New World ingenuity. For many years it had consumed his energy and money earned or borrowed, mostly borrowed, leaving little or no time or money to be directed elsewhere. At forty-six, still with plenty of dark hair, Delage lived alone, as his sister needlessly pointed out, although he was not necessarily lonely, he had become a diffident, distracted sort of man.

“Have you noticed,” she said on the third or fourth day, “the motion of the ship draws words out of us. Words that I, for one, would not normally say?” He was conscious of the linen sleeve on the rail, almost touching his.

All around were hills and valleys, about waist high. The sea was busy mimicking land. It was all charcoal, desolation, everywhere. To the woman the lines of foam kept dissolving into trails of lace. I could look at this all day. It was the sea, said to be soothing. And from a depth far below, as if in a mine, the power of the great long engine came up through the plates of the ship, trembling the rail and numbing most of her toes, her feet in sandals appeared unusually soft and irrelevant on the metal deck, the sandals gold with a narrow raised heel, dainty, inappropriate, although bought specially, the ship, despite its name, having no decoration of any kind, let alone softness, everything cut or cast from steel and oversize, nuts, bolts, levers, hatches, chains, rivets the size of dinner plates, an all-steel masculine complexity. What an engine: no stopping, day or night. Delage generally took an interest in, or rather was alert to, mechanical surroundings. If asked, he could probably explain most of the parts, although the window on the bridge sloping in at an angle left him baffled. The superstructure and rails were white, everything else the ship’s owners had painted a lurid matt orange. “Imagine what their lounge rooms in Hamburg must be like.” If Delage had said something like that to the woman standing beside him, a woman of taste, inappropriate gold sandals notwithstanding, she would have rewarded him with a woman’s laugh, which had its conspiratorial aspects. There is the constant male instinct for slipping into humorous or even clownish mode to please or divert a woman’s thoughts. At any moment it will happen; it was one of Elisabeth’s expectations, acquired early on. With little trouble her father could make her laugh, never her mother. Of course it can lead to embarrassing awkwardnesses, faux pas, and “lead balloons”, as they are called, of the most inept kind, quips or puns that miss the mark, make no sense, are too obvious, or are repeated once too often, while irony hardly ever works; and still there is the need in men to continue – clowning for women, pulling faces, being plain silly, often falling flat, it doesn’t matter. A certain carelessness is allowed. For the woman, it lightens the endurance required in dealing with the heavy, persistent presence of men. Delage here said nothing, the woman turned from the sea, and smiled anyway. She was out on the ocean, in safe hands, a warm breeze touching her cheeks, seabirds coming from somewhere, swooping over the ship. “Don’t say ‘boat’. It’s what the Americans say. This is a ship.” In Vienna, she went about with the casual authority of the resident, while on the ship heading for Sydney she was in the hands of others, “all at sea?” Delage suggested, though not seriously, where every part was a mystery, hard, thickly painted, moving forward, slightly unstable.

By detaching the three tapering legs of the company’s demonstration model, and having it quilted and professionally crated, Delage could carry it on board as accompanied baggage, his small manufacturing company on the outskirts of Sydney, consisting of eleven uncomplaining employees, craftsmen most of them, always looking for ways to save money. It was the bookkeeper who had spotted the luggage loophole. She was Slovakian, an exceptionally neat, unsmiling woman, in her forties, stranded after her no-hoper husband had gone back. At the job interview, she had offered to work for nothing, or just the basic wage, “because, you must understand, I believe in music.” Delage had to be careful here. Many of those who choose a career in medicine, because they believe in doing good, turn out to be the worst doctors imaginable; and politicians who have the good of the people at heart are invariably ineffective – just as people who love art too much have no idea what is a good or bad painting, and end up with a motley collection of too many paintings, none of them worthwhile. But the Slovakian bookkeeper had quickly attained complete mastery of the job, simplifying the systems and so on, finding savings in the most unlikely places, and managed to put the impatient banks back where they belonged. She was called in and out of board meetings to clarify figures, until it became her habit not to wait outside but to sit on a stool against the wall inside, smoothing her short skirt with short nervy hand movements, ready to pipe up with answers to any questions. Delage wasn’t the only one to wonder how they had managed without her, although, as he told Elisabeth, of course no one person is indispensable. When he described her tantrums, including ultimatums, hands over her ears and pencil-breaking, which more or less tracked the sauntering amateurism in the office and factory, Elisabeth wanted to know more. She was interested in another woman’s hysteria? At the same time, she didn’t appear to think her behaviour so unusual or extreme. They were on the Romance, standing together on the small deck, facing a breeze over and above the movement of the ship. From the moment the bookkeeper took her place in the office, Delage went on, and established herself as the first to arrive and the last to leave, it was assumed she had no life outside work, until one morning, after she had been looking unwell and rushed into the bathroom, i. . .