The Man Who Went Down With His Ship
Page 3
And slowly, as those years passed, and Alfred married the daughter of one of his New York socialite friends, had two daughters with her, and then, after fifteen years of relatively happy life together, amicably and reasonably profitably separated from her, although a few people did still mutter when they met Alfred at parties that he had behaved badly, for the most part his association with the Chateaubriand was forgotten, and he was known only as a man with a certain literary reputation who had a name that thanks to his father was more famous than his published work warranted. A minor poet who still, after fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years was one of the most assiduous partygoers around; and an essayist who was the darling, when he wasn’t in hospital, of innumerable rich women on both sides of the Atlantic. Hostesses who patronised him unmercifully, called him their dear little, sweet little Alfred, and merely cooed, and sighed, and went immediately to tell him when, ever more rarely, some guest at one of their parties happened to mention that they had heard that funny little Alfred, who looked so like Donald Pleasance that people who had seen the actor in some film would stop and ask him for his autograph, had some sort of stain in his past.
Yet it was, possibly, just because his apparent infamy was largely forgotten that thirty-five years after the Chateaubriand went down, Alfred suddenly got the idea of writing about that night. Got it so suddenly, the words falling out of his mouth when the journalist who was interviewing him for the literary pages of a Sunday newspaper asked him what he was working on and what he was planning to work on, that he asked Dorothy, when she got in from work, if she had mentioned the ship to him recently.
‘No, lovey,’ Dorothy said, since she too had heard the rumours about what her lover had supposedly done or not done, and had always thought it kinder to steer clear of the subject. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it.’ ‘But come to think of it,’ she added a little later, somewhat cautiously, ‘it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you did, would it?’ Thereby, the implication was, setting the record straight one way or another. Or at any rate, getting whatever’s been on your chest all these years, off.
‘No,’ Alfred thought every evening, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. On the contrary, it might be a very good idea. Furthermore, if he knew quite well why he had never written of the sinking before—and not only not written of it, but put it out of his mind so thoroughly that to all intents and purposes what had happened had not happened to him—now it came to him that in a sense all his adult life he had been waiting for this moment, when the creature would spring out of the cover in which it had been hiding, and stand exposed in the light; and he had been preparing himself mentally, or morally, for it.
The years of hanging around are over, he told himself bravely. It is time to face the beast.
As he was still telling himself the following morning; when he received a letter that according to the postmark had been mailed before the publication of his interview in the paper. A typewritten page from the son of the captain of the Chateaubriand: informing him that he was planning to write a biography of his father, and saying he would be very grateful if Alfred, as one of the most distinguished passengers on board, would give him the benefit of his recollections.
A coincidence, or an omen? Alfred wasn’t certain, but he wrote back to the son saying he would certainly be willing to talk to him, though he might be interested to know that strangely he was planning to write, if not immediately publish, his memories of that night, ‘as you may have seen in the interview I did with Olivier Rosenthal that came out last Sunday. Of course,’ he added, ‘mine will be a strictly personal account, and won’t in anyway encroach on your territory.’
That the son might not, nevertheless, be entirely happy with his version of the facts, he thought it prudent not to mention for the moment.
*
Yet now, he reflected, as he stood under the shower and decided that on second thoughts the first thing to do was take the letter to the police, it seemed that the son, or someone else, already knew what he was likely to say, and was determined to prevent him saying it. Either because he knew that although Alfred had made it clear, in his letter at least, that he wasn’t going to publish his account, when it actually came to it he would probably be persuaded to, not least because it would cause a certain scandal and sell a few extra copies of the newspaper in which it appeared, or simply because he didn’t want the truth to be told to anyone, not even to Alfred himself; as if, once it were out, in however private a form, it would somehow escape, like a wild animal from a zoo, and cause irreparable damage.
That meant, therefore, that he had two choices. One was to announce publicly that he had given up the idea, and had decided to continue to forget about that night all those years ago. The other was to go away somewhere in secret, with Dorothy and Matilda, and stay away until he had finished his task. By which time, with any luck, his persecutors would have forgotten about him; and anyway, he would have deposited copies of the story with a number of different people, with instructions that it was most definitely to be published should anything happen to him.
Unless, he seemed to hear a voice whispering to him, he followed a third course. Namely: at this rather late stage in the game, emulate his illustrious father. By taking at last a public, unequivocal stand against anti-semitism, injustice, the greedy, the cruel and the murderous, and not just the veiled, sublimated stand that he had always felt his poems and essays represented. And by coming out into the open with his account of the sinking of the Chateaubriand, relying not only on the police but on his rich and powerful friends to protect him from would-be murderers, and making it clear that having thought about it he was not just going to publish his story, but publish it with the greatest fanfare possible. The sort of fanfare that could only be laid on by people who had connections with newspaper publishers, the owners or controllers of television and radio stations, and politicians in the ruling parties of three or four nations; and the sort of fanfare that would cause not just a certain scandal, but an almighty scandal that would be reported all around the world.
And though he was a nervous, portly man, given to periods of madness and, in his own mind, an inveterate and lifelong coward, he knew, by the time he had finished dressing, had put on his coat, and was preparing to set off to the police station, that however foolish it was of him, it was going to be this third, subversive voice he was going to listen to, and this last course of action, that might well cost him his life, that he was going to take.
He had thought before that just by writing his account he might discover some island of sanity amidst the sea of madness in which he had been flailing about for the past thirty-five years. Now, though, he saw that that was not enough. Like it or not he had at least to try to be a hero; and finally to put what his father would have seen as his betrayal to some good, some positive use.
He wondered what Dorothy would say.
*
Perhaps inevitably, when he told her that night, she didn’t seem terribly interested to begin with, as if she thought that this was a form of his lunacy she hadn’t encountered before, wasn’t sure how to handle and was hoping, if she didn’t pay too much attention to it, might go away of its own accord. When however, after they had returned from Louise’s dinner party, and she had asked him why their hostess, usually the most profuse of all his friends in showering him with ‘Alfred darlings’, ‘Alfred sweets’, or plain ‘Alfredinos’, had been so extraordinarily chilly towards him on this of all nights—‘I mean, it is your birthday’—she began to take him seriously. And when, by three o’clock in the morning, he had finished telling her not only about the letter but, if only in the most general terms, about what had really happened that night, and what he was planning to write in his article or story, Dorothy not only believed him, but had gone as far as he had in concluding that the famous Louise’s chilliness had been due to his merely intimating to her what he was thinking of doing, and that he might have to enlist her husband’s aid in order to do it successfully.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Alfred said, unable to keep a petulant note out of his voice at hearing his friends spoken of thus. Unable, too, not to protest that just because Louise had behaved like that, it didn’t mean to say that all his other friends would; nor to reflect that much as he loved Dorothy, and beautiful as she undoubtedly was—tall and blonde with a low, soft voice—there was something bitter and resentful about her. She didn’t so much object to the wealth and power of his society friends, as not see why she, who was better looking and more intelligent than almost every one of them, didn’t have such wealth and power herself. Deep down, too, she didn’t see why she, with all her advantages, should at the age of thirty-nine have a bald fifty-five year old and half-crazy poet as a lover, instead of some smooth, good-looking, probably crass industralist whom she might loathe but who at least allowed her to forget that by birth, upbringing and intellectual, if not emotional inclination, she was on the side of the ugly, the persecuted and the sick. Of course he was being unfair thinking such things of her; and even if there was an element of resentment in her feelings towards his friends she was perfectly justified in objecting to Louise’s behaviour. Nevertheless, he did wish she wouldn’t use such crude, debased jargon like ‘rich bitches’ and ‘fascist cows’; and he did wish she would see that the more immediate question was not how his friends were going to behave, but what was to be done about her and Matilda. It was all very well his deciding to be a hero. Should, though, the writer of that letter be serious and do something to either of them, he’d never forgive himself.
A point he put to Dorothy when he had finished sulking, and when he had added, after perhaps half a minute, that ‘just because Louise is like that, it doesn’t mean that everyone else will be. Besides, maybe she was just feeling out of sorts this evening.’
‘Out of sorts, my arse,’ Dorothy snarled, and blew the smoke of her Gauloise in his face. ‘I bet she’s already been on the phone telling all her friends that you’ve finally gone too potty and you’re really going to have to be ditched.’
If the thought of Louise and her like had called forth scorn, however, the suggestion that he would never be able to forgive himself if she and Matilda were kidnapped, or had acid thrown in their face, or were murdered, provoked only a smile from Dorothy. ‘I don’t suppose I’d ever forgive you either, lovey,’ she said, and gave him a kiss. ‘But I’m sure they weren’t serious. What did the police say?’
Alfred shrugged. ‘They said they weren’t serious. They said that people who write anonymous letters rarely are. But you can’t be sure, can you? And frankly …’
‘Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t just disappear. I’ve got to work. And I don’t see Tilda giving up her horses, or her boys, just because someone’s threatening to kill her.’
‘No, I guess not. I just thought—oh, I don’t know.’ Alfred sighed. ‘Maybe I am jejune, and tiresome, and boring. And in a way, you know, I liked everyone to think I had behaved badly. But I really didn’t, you know,’ he muttered, once again sounding petulant; or like a baby who is sure he’ll never be believed. ‘In fact, I mean I know it sounds terribly immodest or unmodest. But I was practically the only person who didn’t.’
*
A statement which, Alfred admitted to himself over the days and weeks ahead, as he settled down to his task, wasn’t strictly true. What would have been more accurate, though it might have sounded still less modest, was that while some people had behaved very badly indeed and he, he had to say, had behaved very well, most people had behaved neither badly nor well. They had simply—behaved. Had done what they had been told to do by whoever had the presence of mind to give them an order, of it hardly mattered what nature. Had not done what they had not been told to do, even if under normal circumstances they would have done it like a shot. And had, by and large, closed their minds to the evidence of their senses, and neither seen nor heard what, also under normal circumstances, would have appalled them. Such as: the fact that while within five minutes of the collision most of the lifeboats were safely down in the water, they were occupied almost exclusively by the crew, who having received the command ‘abandon ship’ had done so instantly, following their Captain’s example, without bothering to make it clear to the vast majority of the passengers that they should do likewise. Such as: the fact that within ten minutes of the collision those few lifeboats that hadn’t been appropriated by the crew were also safely down in the water; occupied now, under admittedly somewhat cramped conditions, by ninety-five per cent of the first-class passengers, and those members of the crew who, not having got away with their colleagues, had thought it politic, or found it unavoidable, to order into the boats and save those people on board who would have created the most fuss or would have had the most fuss created about them, had they not been saved. And such as: the fact that but for the action of a portly, shy, young poet who, seeing what was going on, had become so hysterical with anger he had lost control of himself, the loss of life—thirty-five people in the final count—would have been immeasurably greater; amounting perhaps to some eight or nine hundred men, women and children. For it was Alfred who refused to obey when one of the last remaining officers had, without too much conviction, ordered him into a boat. (The officer had shrugged, as if to say: suit yourself.) It was Alfred who had almost physically forced a sailor he had found who, thank God, knew how to use the radio, to call the tanker that had sliced the liner in two and tell someone to send their boats over immediately. And it was Alfred who had run around screaming orders like a madman (so much so that afterwards people would say he was a madman, even though they had done what he had said), and practically single-handed organised everyone left on board. So that when the boats from the tanker did arrive, as well as those from another couple of ships that had been nearby, and had steamed full speed to the rescue when they had heard the tanker’s, if not the Chateaubriand’s, SOS, the evacuation of the liner could be completed with the minimum of confusion, and the maximum of speed. With such little confusion, and at such a speed, that when, an hour and a half after the collision the Chateaubriand sank, the only people who went down with her were those who had been killed when the tanker crashed into her, or those who were trapped in their cabins and couldn’t be cut free in time.
It was because there was such a relatively small loss of life—and because in the pandemonium that followed the accident very few people were aware of the exact sequence of events, and because the accident itself was entirely due to the negligence of the tanker’s captain—that in the enquiry that followed the captain of the Chateaubriand was praised for the part that he and his crew played in the rescue, and for his courage and coolness and presence of mind; and was elevated by the French press, and to a certain extent by the American press, who found some of the reports just a little too contradictory to be unreservedly enthusiastic, to the status of hero. And it was again because of the relatively minor loss of life that once Alfred, one of the last people off the liner, and one of the very few to fall in the water as they clambered into their lifeboat, had reached New York, and had been swept off to his duplex, and received all sorts of messages from his former fellow passengers in first class inviting him here there and everywhere, that he had thought ‘Oh hell, what�
��s done is done,’ and had refused to speak to reporters about the events of that night. Maybe later, he had told himself, when I’ve recovered from the shock. Maybe later, when I’ve completely gotten over my hysterical anger, and can think about things—rationally.
Only Alfred never did completely get over his hysterical anger, and never was able to think about what happened rationally; and so—or at least, that was how he explained it—six months later he had his first mental breakdown; and so, in all the years that followed, he found himself unable to talk to a reporter or anyone else about the events of June 28, 1950.
Just very occasionally, in all those years, did he tell himself that maybe it wasn’t some residue of anger boring away inside his brain, or it wasn’t his inability to think rationally about what happened on the Chateaubriand, that caused him to have his periodic attacks. Then, though, he would ask himself: but if not that, if not them, what? And he would let the matter rest.
What else could it be but his anger; what else could it be but the madness that had come over him that night and made him behave in a manner that was so unlike the way he normally behaved that it had, in a sense, shattered, or anyway damaged irreparably, the vessel that contained his mind? A madness he had never, thereafter, been able to rid himself of.
*
What else indeed, Alfred asked himself again and again as he wrote and rewrote his story; and as he found that however often he rewrote it, and however hard he tried to make it dramatic, and frightening, and to infuse it with some of that anger of his, it was curiously lifeless and anti-climactic. Perhaps I’ve waited too long, he told himself as he started ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’ for the fifth time; and realised he was writing almost word for word what he had written the first time. Maybe I should still let sleeping dogs lie; and admit that Louise and my other friends are right to be cool about this enterprise; realising it can do no more good to anyone after all these years and is frankly not very interesting. All right, so the captain and the crew behaved badly. So what? The important thing is that everyone who could have been saved was saved, and it really matters not one bit how they were saved, or by whom. What is more, the idea that I’ve always had in the back of my mind, that whereas the captain was not a hero, I in fact was, is probably erroneous. All right, I did get that sailor to radio for help, and I did lend a hand—if not do it quite all myself—in organising everyone who was left on board. Nevertheless, it’s just possible that someone else had radioed for help, or that the lifeboats from the tanker and the other ships were already on their way. As it’s possible that I really was as mad as everyone subsequently said I was, and people would have organised themselves or been organised by someone else, equally well, if not better, had I not been there.