The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  Yet all the time she had continued to call this third-floor flat, with its framed prints of hunting scenes, its upright piano in the corner of the dining room, its once cream wallpaper that had faded to yellow and in patches brown, and its dusty plants in fake Chinese pots, home; and to say that the day she had to give it up would be the day she left Paris.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said now, as she removed her coat, hung it on a gilded hook behind the front door, and began to look, for the first time since this business had started, genuinely worried. ‘I mean, if they’re watching you closely enough to know when you go out to look at your car …’ She shivered, and wrinkled her nose. ‘How horrid. What do you suppose they did? Went out and had a big meal, and then squatted over the seat? Yuk,’ she said, and shivered again. ‘It makes you feel sick.’

  ‘Though what I don’t understand, lovey,’ she told him much later that evening, as they were sitting eating; and she was still feeling shaky after a fight with Matilda, who had indeed objected so violently to living in what she termed ‘this squalid petit-bourgeois dump’ that she had swept all the crockery from the sideboard in the kitchen onto the floor, had done likewise to all Dorothy’s lotions and potions in the bathroom, and had stormed out saying she was going to move in with Patrice, the most snobbish and ‘best-born’ of all her boyfriends.

  ‘I’ll be fucked if I stay here and let myself be dragged down just because your friend’s going completely off his head,’ she had shrieked at her mother, who had snapped back with a calmness and a faint little smile that even the watching Alfred found infuriating. ‘You’ll be fucked if you go to live with Patrice.’ To which Matilda had replied ‘Oh, ha ha ha’, and Dorothy had added, with a still more superb—and exasperating—show of lofty disdain, ‘Oh, I don’t mean literally, you poor little thing.’

  ‘Though what I don’t understand, lovey, is why all your Louises and Marie-Christines’ (for they had left the subject of precisely who They were and had moved onto what Dorothy called his ‘real persecutors’, even if they weren’t, ‘if you follow me’) ‘care so much. I mean, it’s not as if any of them were on the damned boat. Or have the faintest idea what happened on it.’

  ‘No, I don’t either,’ he said, fearing that if he embarked on an explanation as to how all those rich and powerful people, whose darling he had been for so long, saw his article as an attempt to undermine the foundations of their world, it would have come out sounding portentous, pretentious and just plain silly. ‘But that’s their problem,’ he went on after a moment. ‘The only thing that matters now is to get the damned thing finished. That, and, of course,’ he smiled, ‘to make sure you’re safe.’

  ‘Oh I’ll be safe enough here,’ Dorothy said, as if she had always known that one day she would need this place as a refuge, and had always kept it for that reason. ‘None of your ladies are going to send their killers out to a place like this.’

  *

  As was, Alfred reflected a week later, probably true. Somehow this whole affair concerned those who, for one reason or another, travelled first class, and the doings of those in steerage—or just the existence of those in steerage—interested them not one bit. The police, the church, the prejudices of their neighbours and above all the necessity of having to earn their daily bread kept them in order. It was treachery in their own ranks that they were concerned with; for it was the treachery of the strong—who played upon the anger, frustration and misery of the weak—that had been behind every successful revolution in history. Mere spontaneous uprisings of ‘the People’ had always been put down without too much effort. Obviously the times weren’t remotely propitious for any sort of revolution, of however limited a nature; and for the present, ‘the System’ was strong enough to withstand any sort of treachery. All the same, the body stayed strong only when it nipped any infections in the bud; only when it sent out antibodies to combat intruding germs at the first sign of trouble. When it relaxed its vigilance—oh, before one knew it even the healthiest of organisms could be laid low; and weaken, and sicken and die.

  Dorothy, alone amongst the dusty aspidistras of her flat in Auteuil, was neither a threat, nor could be threatened. Dorothy, living near the Parc Monceau as the companion of a fairly well-known poet and journalist and a frequenter of literary and social salons, was, and could be.

  At least, Alfred told himself, he hoped that was true. Just as he hoped that Matilda, by moving in with the awful Patrice and nailing her colours so ostentatiously to that particular mast, had made herself safe. It was possible that he was being as ridiculous here as he was in seeing the threats that were being made against him, and his sudden exclusion from the drawing rooms of his patrons and patronesses, as being connected, and as being the almost unconscious but nevertheless irresistible efforts of a society determined to defend itself against what it perceived as contagion and attack. Perhaps the letter and the destruction of his car and the lighter fuel under his door had all been the work of one man; in all probability the son of the late captain of the Chateaubriand, determined to preserve the reputation of a man he either knew, or suspected had behaved dishonorably. Perhaps too he had been dropped because without really realising it he had made such an issue of his bloody old boat story that he had ceased to be an asset in anyone’s drawing room, and had become a definite liability; a whining, self-righteous, sanctimonious prig. Moreover, when he had started badgering one’s husband or father or lover to take up arms on his behalf and begin boring the nation about what few remembered and fewer cared about—‘All right Alfred, the captain behaved like a louse, the first-class passengers got away first—and for God’s sake why shouldn’t they, they paid more didn’t they and don’t look so damned shocked either—and you were an even greater hero than your father. Now please—ça suffit, basta, that’s enough. In whatever language you like, just shut up, have another drink, or go away!’—then it was time to say goodbye. ‘We want to hear what you think of the latest books, the latest films, of what’s happening here in France now, or in America, about AIDS, and Star Wars, and relations with the Russians, or about the current difficulties of producing Wagner, doing something about the unemployed, or going somewhere in the world that hasn’t been trivialised by tourism. We do not want to hear about some silly ship. And henceforth when you mention the word Chateaubriand in our presence you will either be talking about a man, or a piece of meat. Otherwise, well, I’m sorry, but we’ll really have no alternative.’

  Yes, perhaps this was the truth. He didn’t think it was, however; he hoped it wasn’t, for if it was, it meant Dorothy might still be in danger, and Matilda too; and even if it was he didn’t see that it entirely invalidated his other theory as to what was going on. In fact, he told himself as he sat in the garden of the tiny house he had rented in the Tuscan countryside, twenty minute’s walk from the nearest shop and forty from the nearest village, he refused to allow it entirely to invalidate his other theory. For if there was no ostensible link between his persecution and his being dropped, at a deeper level there was a connection; and if he chose to see this affair as a clash between the rich and powerful and the forces of—well, whatever it was he represented—then that, until he was proved wrong, was what it was.

  All the same, he had to confess that the thought of just exactly what he did represent did give a moment’s pause. Because if he saw himself as ‘the Truth’, wasn’t he maybe making a little too large a claim on his own behalf? Committing what Catholics might have called the sin of pride? Yes, he told himself, he was.

  But if he didn’t see himself as such, then what, in God’s name, was he? Just a middle-aged, disturbed and lonely man biting the hand that had always fed him, out of pique at always having been fed, and never feeder?

  No, he wanted to shout out to the pine tree under which he sat, to the grass, the rose trellis, the olive trees, the green valley and the wooded hills over which he was looking. No, no, no!

  *

  Possibly because he had always been vaguel
y conscious of the fact that throughout much of their history Jews had been forbidden to own land in Europe, possibly because he felt (the evidence of the past not withstanding) that there was safety in numbers, and possibly just because he did enjoy frequenting literary salons and the drawing rooms of the mighty, Alfred had not only never thought of living in the country, or buying any property in the country, but he had, so far as he could remember, never spent more than two consecutive days in the country in the whole of his adult life. Even weekends in country houses with his friends had made him feel uncomfortable, and he had returned to Paris or New York or London with something like the relief of a small, hunted animal returning safely to its burrow. And the first few days after he had arrived at this pink, one-storey house amidst the Tuscan hills had been among the worst he had ever experienced. He was worried about Dorothy, safe though he had tried to convince himself she was now. He was worried about money, for having quickly spent the cash his wife had settled on him at the time of their divorce, he had always only just been able to make ends meet by turning out a constant stream of articles, essays and reviews, and now he had been forced to tell his various editors and publishers that he was going off to the country for a while, and until he had finished what he was working on, was uncontactable. And he was depressed about his situation in general, about his motives for doing what he was doing and, given that he had nothing else to think of, about the difficulty of the task he had set himself.

  What if I am wrong in my let’s say cosmic interpretation of events, he asked himself as he sat under his pine tree, and this is simply a rather crude attempt by some doubting son to protect his father’s memory? What if my friends, or whatever they are, or were, really were right to drop me? Maybe I really am boring and tiresome. And maybe my task is not only questionable as far as my motives are concerned, but utterly irrelevant and without interest.

  ‘I’m so fed up,’ he told Dorothy on the ’phone, having been soaked by a shower on his way into the village, and then having had to wait fifteen minutes while it seemed everyone in the village had to call his mother or her boyfriend, ‘I could die.’

  And though he managed to convey a sort of smile over the line as he said this, when he repeated it to himself that night, lying in bed unable to sleep, he smiled not at all, and told himself he was absolutely serious.

  The weather, since this was now May, was not only changeable, but unseasonably chilly; so that though he did sit under a pine tree to write, he did it only because inside the cottage it was still colder than it was out. His landlady, a friend of a colleague of Dorothy’s who lived nearby, was so determined to show that she respected his privacy and understood his need as a writer not to be disturbed that she left him totally alone, and made him so desperate for the sound of another human voice that he found himself walking into the village twice a day to call Dorothy in Paris. And, for all that he tried to tell himself this was absurd, everything about him seemed to recoil from his presence, and conspire to make him feel more alien in this setting than he knew himself to be. For instance, the first day he was there he went by the local cemetery, on his way into the village, and noticed that on almost every grave there were vases of fresh flowers; brought by the local women, who passed him on the narrow, overgrown lane, their arms laden with what looked to him like the entire contents of their gardens, or of the local flower shops. On his way back from the village, and seeing that it was near closing time for the cemetery, and that there were thus few people around to be disturbed by his awkward presence, he decided to walk round the place, to admire the astonishing show. Yet no sooner had he stepped through the gates—and the place was indeed deserted now—than there was a sudden, single gust of wind, and the vase nearest him, a tall, earthenware pot that looked as if it could have withstood a hurricane, toppled over and shattered at his feet. With a crash that made him feel he had committed an act of sacrilege, and that if anyone entered and saw him standing there amidst the wreckage of gladioli, irises, carnations and roses, he would be denounced for desecrating tombs. Then, two days later, walking round his landlady’s extensive property, he was standing admiring the bark of an olive tree when, without the slightest warning, and as far as he could see for not the slightest reason, a piece of that bark simply flaked off the tree and fell, accusingly, to the ground. And the day after that, he was once again on his way down into the village, and had just stopped to sniff—though he should have learned his lesson by now—at a hawthorne bush in flower, round the base of which some delicate white rock roses were growing, when out of the middle of the bush, for all the world like a demon from a nightmarish fairy story, leapt a rat. Which so shocked Alfred, and made him feel so very much as he had when he had looked into his slashed and defiled car, that for a moment he suspected that whoever had committed that obscenity in Paris was lurking in the hawthorne bush, and had been waiting for him to sniff the flowers, knowing that sooner or later he would, just so he could toss the rat out at him.

  Nonsense, he told himself, and reminded himself that while he could impose his interpretation of events on what had happened there, if he started doing it on what was happening here, he would soon be madder than he ever had been before. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. All the same …

  Then, however, after eight days in his hideaway, the weather settled down to a succession of brilliant spring days, so bright and clear the air seemed new, and made even alien Alfred feel intoxicated. Not only did everything he looked at in the countryside stop withering at his approach but, on the contrary, started to glow more thoroughly the more it was admired. And finally, far from being assailed by rats, he found himself receiving the attentions—and the friendly attentions!—of both his landlady and, rather more often, an army of local cats and dogs, who not only didn’t seem to find him out of place, but seemed actively pleased to have a new face to see, and new hands to feed them scraps and biscuits.

  And with that, everything fell into place; and now without a hitch, without the slightest hesitation, Alfred found his story practically writing itself. In fact, it came to him so easily that he felt like a magician whose tricks had taken him over, and merely had to stand back and watch the rabbit jump out of his hat, the scarves endlessly pull themselves from his jacket, and various assistants appear and disappear, saw themselves in half, and put themselves together again. Only in his case the rabbits were all the little details of life on board the S. S. Chateaubriand in the days preceding its sinking, the scarves were a liner and a tanker steaming towards each other, and the appearing and disappearing assistants, sailors, passengers, and everyone with whom he had come into contact in those days. Oh, how it all came back to him, as cleanly and completely as clothes that had been kept in careful storage for years, and then unpacked and found to be as good as new. There was nothing he couldn’t recall, nothing he couldn’t recapture. The muffled sound of the engines, thudding through the ship; the colour of the cover on his bed. Not only what was served, but the taste of every dish he ate at every meal on board; not only the dresses and suits his new-found friends wore, but the scent the women used, the smell of shaving cream and soap that certain men emitted; while others, impeccably groomed though they were, always had about them the faintest odour of sweat, or of a not quite concealed halitosis. He saw the way people walked, he saw the way they leaned on the railings and gazed out over the perfectly flat Atlantic. He heard their laughter, their complaints; the way their shoes squeaked on the deck, the way one or two of them creaked as if corsetted in girders; the way they burped and farted, and either looked embarrassed, giggled, or with patrician indifference went right on talking without a break. It was as if he were back there, the plump, ungainly twenty year old being taken up, patronised, flattered, listened to, gazed at with dewey eyes, despised and made—though whether we actually care for you matters not one bit!—‘one of us’. And finally, finally, he came to that night; or that night came to him. The night that started with him putting on his dinner jacket; that went on with that par
ty—the brightest, the best party he had ever been to in his life, that celebration of all that was civilised, all that was finished and perfect—and ended with those looks of panic, with those cries, with those meaningless orders being barked out by men who were incoherent with fear, and with that running around, that screaming on the part of some, that extraordinary calmness on the part of others, and with the lowering of lifeboats, the realisation of just who was in those lifeboats, the organisation of people, the shouting, the calling on the radio, the rushing hither and thither, the saying with an authority one had never possessed before and was never to possess again, ‘Do this, do that, go here, go there’, the helping, the soothing, the feeling of disgust, the whispering, the exhorting, the feeling of disgust, the feeling of disgust, the feeling of disgust … and that undignified tumble into the cold sea, the being hauled out and then being lugged on board the tanker like an awkward, stupid child who couldn’t even be relied on to be rescued properly, but who would be forgiven as long as he went straight back to the dance, followed all the steps, and never, ever had the bad taste to refer to what had, so briefly, interrupted the glittering ball.

  For four hours, five hours, sometimes up to eight hours a day he kept at it, as the bees buzzed around him, the finches twittered in cypress and pine, and cuckoos cuckooed so incessantly it sounded to Alfred as if the needle had got stuck in a recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

  My God, he thought, as his pen raced across the page, and as he walked down into the village and saw the daisies and the bluebells, the little wildflowers whose names he didn’t know, and the poppies more scarlet than any scarlet he had ever seen: I’m happy here. I’m happy! And Wordsworth, philosophical old Wordsworth, was wrong; something can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass. Bring it back, and make it more splendid than ever. It was as if he was returning to his youth and, instead of setting sail on the Chateaubriand, moving off in quite another direction. I am healed, Alfred told himself—conscious, as he did, that he was becoming a little hysterical now—I am one again. And now there isn’t just glory in the flower; there is glory in the sun, in the sky, in the tree, in the bird, in the air, in the stream, in me.