The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  Oh, if only, Alfred told himself as he started his sixth draft and then his seventh, I could give this business up.

  But, and this he told Dorothy again and again as she stroked his head, and kissed him, and murmured ‘Why don’t you just put it aside for a while lovey?’ he couldn’t. Partly because he did feel this was his last chance of regaining some sort of foothold on the shore of sanity. Partly because he did feel a certain moral compunction, however priggish and possibly self-serving it might be, to tell, as he saw it, ‘the Truth’. And partly—principally, he admitted to himself, though would never have admitted to anyone else, above all not his bitter, beautiful Dorothy—because since the night of his birthday, when Louise had been so chilly, he had found himself being dropped by practically all his other friends. A state of affairs that was so unbearable to him that the only way he could take his mind off it was by continuing to write, for all that he knew that the more he wrote, the more he would be dropped.

  To think, he told himself, he had thought of enlisting their aid! One might just as well have asked a Nazi for a contribution to a Jewish charity.

  What was really shameful about his distress at being dropped was that, as the invitations and the telephone calls became fewer and fewer, until the former flood had become less a trickle than an occasional and no doubt mistaken drip, he realised that just as Dorothy had said that all his ‘friends’ didn’t really like him, so he didn’t really like them. He didn’t even ‘love’ them or ‘adore’ them, as Dorothy claimed they loved and adored him. What he did like, though—what he had always liked, and it was this that really hurt him as he found it being blown away—was the sort of golden mist that enveloped him whenever he was in their company. A golden mist that seemed to emanate from their houses, their paintings, their jewels, their clothes, their porcelain, their silver, their arrogance, their carelessness, their thoughtless, charming, generous brutality; and a golden mist he had first become aware of at that party they had given for him on board ship, the night the Chateaubriand went down. It was the mist, he told himself, of western civilisation; of Mozart and Shakespeare, of Schubert and Dante, of Velasquez, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Vermeer. And it was the mist that was thrown up by the sun when it shone upon an earth drenched with the blood of all the millions who had died in the name of western civilisation; the victims of the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the two World Wars and the Holocaust; not to mention all the other greater and lesser wars, battles, pogroms and massacres throughout history.

  He, a Jewish poet, had stood in that mist for years and declared it, in the final analysis, to be good. The reason why those most responsible for creating its golden swirls had taken him up. For here was someone who, while potentially perhaps a member of the opposition, and by no means a fool—indeed someone who was fully aware of the horrors that the gods of civilisation fed on and needed to survive—had nevertheless lent his support to those gods. Now, though, by being so determined to write that foolish, unnecessary and not very interesting article of his, he was, in however feeble a fashion, declaring that mist, and thus by implication its principal manufacturers and distributors, to be bad. He had withdrawn his support for their gods. Well, good, they would withdraw their support for him: ugly, ungrateful little you-know-what.

  At any rate, Alfred supposed that this must be their reasoning. He could think of no other explanation for their behaviour. Moreover, he went on, they were quite right to reason thus. Withdrawing his support he was, in a way. In another way, however: Oh God, he thought, that golden mist, that terrible golden mist that some would dismiss him as a turncoat, a toadie and a lackey for wanting to stand in, was, and he suspected always would be, the greatest love of his life. A love still stronger than his love of ‘the Truth’. That wasn’t, in any case, so much of a love; more, at this stage, a matter of necessity.

  *

  Two days after Alfred had started his eighth draft his car was stolen. He told the police, went for a walk to try and calm himself, and to convince himself that this little incident had nothing to do with the larger drama in which he was involved, and returned home to find the telephone ringing and be told that it certainly was.

  ‘If you want your car,’ a muffled voice told him, ‘go to the corner of boulevard Malesherbes and rue Viète. And let this be a warning to you. We’re not joking. Stick to writing articles about books and music and politics. Otherwise …’

  Feeling faint, and half suspecting what he might find, Alfred walked the five hundred metres from his flat in rue de Phalsbourg and exactly where the voice had told him, saw his car. The paintwork was all scratched. Inside, the upholstery had been ripped, apparently with a razor. And on the driver’s seat, amidst the ribbons of shredded cloth, there was a pile of human excrement.

  Feeling fainter, Alfred turned away, uncertain what to do, and wanted to stop some passer-by and ask him or her to help him. But naturally he couldn’t; so he simply stood there for a while, a plump, bald and not very tall man, who looked like Donald Pleasance, and made no effort to stop tears first coming into his eyes, and then running down his cheeks.

  ‘Oh, Mummy please,’ he heard himself pleading silently, suddenly four or five years old again. ‘Oh, Mummy please, please, do something.’

  But his mother had been dead for some twenty years now, his dark, solemn, unhappy mother who had been born in Baltimore, and had only just been able to summon up the energy to save herself and her son during the war, as if she had been worn out before she was born, and her husband’s enthusiasm, idealism and, she sometimes told Alfred, determination to die a martyr’s death had only made her feel wearier yet. ‘And cheated, too, in a sense,’ she had muttered to her son once, with the same soft, smiling bitterness, he reflected now as he stood on the street corner and recalled her voice, that his fair English mistress had. ‘Because it was as if he knew I … well, wasn’t too keen on life, let’s say, and didn’t want me to pinch the—how shall I put it?—emotional spotlight from him by ‘doing something stupid’ before he had had the chance to do something heroic. I can tell you one thing, though, if I had done something stupid, he would never have had the courage or the desire to do what he ultimately did. He was a sort of dandy, who couldn’t bear to be seen wearing the clothes that someone else had already been seen in, if you follow me. Just as I, after he’d done what he’d done—or put himself in a position where it would be done to him—couldn’t do something stupid. First, I had to take care of you, obviously. And secondly …’—her voice trailing away into a fog—‘because, well, I know this is a terrible thing to say about the great hero, but I couldn’t help feeling he’d done what he had partly—only in part, but in significant part—just to spite me. And I felt I had to try to rise above such personal matters and behave as if … as if … What I mean is, I was a dandy too, or an egoist, and having lost the race to be first, didn’t want to come in second. Especially when I could never have made my gesture with the flare, the glamour, and above all the sense of purpose with which he had made his. My death would have passed absolutely unnoticed, achieving nothing and only causing a certain amount of inconvenience to those around me. Whereas his—well, I don’t suppose it changed the course of history. Any more, or any less, than anyone’s life changes the course of history. But it did provide inspiration in a time that had need of inspiration, and it was a picture, or an outline, that could, afterwards, be filled in and coloured by others to extraordinary effect.

  ‘He was posing for a portrait of the Frenchman, and the socialist, and the Jew, if you wanted to see it as such—as hero. And it was that portrait that touched people’s’—she paused—‘hearts.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Alfred repeated to himself, turning back to look at his wrecked car, and still hearing that soft, bitter voice in his ear. Neither his mother nor anyone else could do anything. He and he alone had to deal with this horror; and he had to deal with it now that the person or persons who had perpetrated it had, as they said on the telephon
e, proved that they meant business, quickly. He could no longer pretend, as the police had told him, and he had been lulled into believing by the fact that there had been no more anonymous letters after that first one, that someone was merely trying to scare him. They, whoever they were, were dangerous; and he, without a moment’s delay, must take evasive action.

  He started by calling a garage from a bar on the corner, asking them to come and tow his car away, and telling them that as the driver’s seat had been ‘soiled’—he didn’t specify how—they should remove the whole thing and replace it with a new one. The other seats could simply be re-covered, he muttered, and the paintwork sprayed. He went on by hurrying back to the large, dark apartment he had inherited from his mother (and she had inherited from her French mother) to telephone Dorothy in her office and tell her that he was very sorry but for the forseeable future she and Matilda were going to have to return to the small and rather shabby apartment that she had always kept in Auteuil; which Dorothy, he knew, wouldn’t mind doing, but to which Matilda would object violently, since she had led all three of her somewhat snobbish boyfriends to believe that the large dark place on the rue de Phalsbourg, filled with dusty, decrepit but nonetheless valuable antiques, was something to do with her grandparents. (Though how this could be she never, so far as Alfred could tell, explained to those boys of so-called ‘good’ families; since in the next breath, for motives Alfred preferred not to dwell upon, she would be making it clear that Alfred was not her father, and telling them in fact she had been born in Venice, where her mother, who had spent her early life in Kenya, had been living with an ‘aristocratic’ Italian. A man whom Dorothy had left—foolishly, Matilda implied—because his politics were too far to the right, and who had subsequently gone off to live in Africa and die an absurd death by drowning in a bathtub in a hotel in Johannesburg.) And he concluded this increasingly frenetic burst of activity by gathering up Dorothy and Matilda’s most essential belongings, cramming them into as many suitcases as he could find, and having piled them into a taxi along with the various drafts of his story and a few of his own things, taking them over to the flat in Auteuil himself, glancing out of the back of the cab the whole time to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  The reason for such almost excessive haste and fearfulness, even given his determination to take immediate action, was that when he had opened the door of his flat, on the first floor of the imposing gloomy building in which it was situated, he found that in the time it had taken him to respond to his anonymous telephone call, walk down to the corner to inspect the damage to his car, and contact the garage, someone had managed to get in through the street door, climb the stairs, squirt what smelled like lighter fuel under his front door, and set fire to it. An attempt at arson that, thanks to the fact that the door was thick and well fitting, that it had draught excluders on it, and that luckily there were no carpets nearby (for even given the tightness of the fit some of the fluid had got in), had caused no more damage than extensive scorching of the exterior woodwork, and a scarcely perceptible marking of the parquet of the hallway.

  They were watching him, Alfred told himself, trembling in the back of his taxi, and feeling not so much faint at this stage as so weak that at any moment he thought he might have a total collapse, or just dissolve into a wet, quivering jelly. Right now eyes were probably on him, watching him sitting here in his cab. And the sensation of being followed, being got at, being in imminent danger of being abducted, tortured and killed that had always been so terrifying in his imagination, and had led him to press himself into a corner weeping and flailing and whimpering ‘No, no,’ until Dorothy or someone else helped him to his feet, led him downstairs to an ambulance, and took him off somewhere white and warm and safe, now that it was happening in real life was, if anything, still more terrifying. Not least because now he knew that there was no safety anywhere, and that however much he wept and whimpered no doctor would come to sit by his bedside and say in a soothing, professional voice, ‘All right Alfred, what seems to be the problem today?’ Nor give him an injection, or some pills that would, for an hour or two, calm and reassure him. ‘What seems to be the problem …?’

  Nothing seems any longer, Alfred wanted to blub to the driver, who, remarkably, appeared quite unaware of the state his fare was in. (Unless, Alfred muttered to himself, he too is ‘one of them’—even though it was the concierge who went down to the corner and found him for me.) Now everything is; and henceforth, until this matter is resolved one way or another, everything will continue to be. From now on the word ‘seems’ will no longer exist; and from now on, however frightening the situation becomes, you will never be able to escape into the luxury of a breakdown. You, who, for the last thirty-five years, have found reality unbearable will now have to bear it. Unless, that is, he muttered to himself again, in a small, pathetic voice, you want to renounce it forever. For you do have that choice. The choice of endless, permanent drowning.

  Just because, however, he knew that if he slipped back into the sea now he would never again be able to stand on dry land, Alfred ignored that small pathetic voice, and concentrated on trying not to let the middle-aged, indifferent man driving him (and no, he was not one of them) have any reason for ceasing to be indifferent; and on worrying, as he always worried when he was in a taxi, about whether he would, when he arrived at his destination, give the right tip. It was the reason why he had, all his life, been loath to take cabs. In case, when the moment came, he got confused, couldn’t work out his percentages and either gave the driver far too much—so much that he would think him mad—or so little that he would start to insult him, and maybe even attack him physically. ‘You ugly, stupid, mean little Jew …’ It had never happened yet, and he didn’t know anyone it had ever happened to. All the same, there was always the possibility. And unless he was prepared …

  It was already forty-three francs. That meant that if they arrived now—fifteen per cent of forty-three … But they hadn’t arrived, they were perhaps no more than three-quarters of the way there; which meant that the final fare might be …

  Then there was all that luggage to be taken into account. Did one pay extra for that? Or had that already been calculated by the driver, and was now included in the figure on the meter? He didn’t know, and thought that maybe he should ask. If he did that, though …

  Say it was seventy francs, the final fare. That would make … fifteen per cent of ten is one-fifty. Fifteen per cent of twenty is three. Fifteen per cent …

  So somehow, Alfred got to Autueil; and so somehow, he stopped worrying about whether he was being followed.

  ‘No, of course I wasn’t,’ he told Dorothy that evening, when she let herself in and asked him if he had been; looking around with something like pleasure at the shabby, cheerless place she had taken, furnished as it had been in the nineteen thirties, seventeen years ago, when she had arrived in Paris, and kept ever since. For the last five years she had been living in the rue de Phalsbourg. Before that she had been living in Montparnasse with the American psychiatrist who had treated Alfred for ten years and who had, one evening at a party, introduced his patient to his mistress. (When the doctor had discovered that the two of them were having an affair, he had tried to be understanding, telling Alfred that he was simply venting his feelings of hostility towards his father-figure. When Dorothy announced that she was leaving him for Alfred, he threatened to shoot himself and her, and told Alfred that he was a fat, ugly, mad, little freak whom he hoped would go so crazy living with Dorothy he would end up in a straitjacket. After which he started taking so much cocaine every day, in an effort to cheer himself up and make Dorothy feel sorry for him, that he was quite soon deeply in debt, totally addicted to the drug that he continued to insist was non-addictive, and looked, when Dorothy last saw him, with his hair long and matted, his teeth stained, and his eyes red and oozing, not only madder than Alfred himself, but older; whereas he was in fact fifteen years younger. ‘You bitch,’ he had hissed at Dorothy when
they had met in the street. ‘You fucking bitch. You’re our real madness, you cunt. You fucking, patronising, British bitch.’ Then tears, or the matter that was perpetually welling up in his eyes, started to run down his cheeks and he changed his tune. ‘Please come and have a coffee with me,’ he pleaded. ‘A drink. Or just—please,’ he crooned. ‘I love you so much. You’re the only woman who ever …’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ Dorothy told Alfred she had told the man, whose name, confusingly to most people, but symbolically satisfying to him, was also Alfred. Then she had turned away and, crying herself, had run to the nearest Metro stop.)

  Before her years with the psychiatrist, she had lived in Issy with an architect, about whom Alfred knew nothing.