The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘I’ve done it,’ Alfred told himself every morning; and wrote on a postcard to Dorothy (though to her, in case his boasting incurred the anger of the gods, he prefixed his phrase with the words ‘I think’). ‘I’ve done it,’ he told himself every evening, as he sat back, tired but content after his day’s work, and drank a glass of wine. And ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it,’ he practically shouted to his mirror when, after eight weeks up in his little house, he wrote after the last sentence of his hundred and twenty page account of ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’, ‘The End’.

  So he had. It had taken him longer to write, he scribbled on another postcard to Dorothy, than it had Stendhal to write La Chartreuse de Parme. He was also afraid that his little effort wasn’t quite as much fun, nor would prove so popular, as that particular masterpiece. Nevertheless, he had done it; and now all that remained, once he had typed it out and made copies of it, was ‘if I can’ to find a publisher for it.

  ‘Which may well be,’ he told Dorothy on the ’phone, ‘the most difficult part of all.’

  In this, though, he was being unduly pessimistic. Indeed, within a week of his sending off the manuscript to the editor who had been responsible for publishing most of his collections of essays, and all of his poetry, he received a telegram saying ‘Wonderful congratulations letter to follow’; that made him so excited he put out of his mind any misgivings he had been feeling over the last few days at having, at last, revealed his whereabouts to someone other than Dorothy. Of course Claude was a person of the utmost rectitude and discretion, and Alfred both liked him as a man, and had the greatest respect for him as an editor. Since he hadn’t liked to forbid him to reveal his address to anyone—it would have sounded, he felt, melodramatic and a little mad to do so—he was afraid that while Claude himself might not go round saying ‘I’ve finally discovered where Alfred’s been hiding and what he’s been doing,’ someone else in his office might.

  ‘He likes it!’ he shouted down the line to Dorothy as, at the same time, it occurred to him that just as soon as he had signed some sort of contract and was sure that there were enough copies in existence to prevent even the most fervent defender of the late captain’s name from destroying them all, he would return to Paris. The countryside, and Italy, were glorious, but home was home; and for all his weeks of romantic ecstasy, he was still, in the final analysis, an urban creature.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Claude wrote in his promised letter, ‘how much.’

  If Alfred had been unduly pessimistic in thinking he would never find a publisher for his tale, however, he was unduly optimistic in thinking that however much that publisher liked it—‘and I do, I do, I promise you; it is quite admirable’—he liked it enough to publish it as it was.

  ‘You see,’ his letter went on, as Alfred started to feel giddy and as if he was in for one of his attacks, ‘I don’t know whether your story is precisely true, whether it’s “faction”, or whether it is fiction.

  ‘But I do know that the laws of libel being what they are, I couldn’t possibly let this come out as it stands. Because though one cannot defame the dead, and the captain himself could not sue you, a great many of the people you mention are still alive, and could indeed take action against you. And against—more to the point from my point of view as a publisher—me.

  So Alfred, what I must ask you to do is this. Not change your story. I would never ask you to do that, as, I must repeat yet again, it is too good to be changed. But change just the superficial accessories, if you will, of the story: the names of the people, the name of the ship, maybe even the nationality of the ship (couldn’t it be English, “The Shelley”, or Italian, “The Dante” or “The Leopardi”?). And make just the tiniest adjustments to timing, so the actual date of the sinking can’t be identified. That way—true or not!—I think we could bring the story out as a novel without too much fear of having its publication blocked by the courts; and, from your point of view now, without the danger of you being branded as, not to put too fine a point on it, a mythomaniac or a liar.

  ‘I do hope you will not be offended by this, Alfred; and yet again I must assure you of my admiration. But I must also assure you that if you do not make certain changes, not only cannot we publish it, but you will never find a publisher for it. Neither here in Paris, nor anywhere else. Therefore, my dear Alfred, think over what I have told you, and tell me you’ll do what I ask. For really, this is so good, it must be published.’

  So, Alfred thought, sitting down heavily on the grass of his little garden (whereupon an ant promptly ran up his leg and nipped him, announcing thereby that his truce with nature was over?) they have won. Or, to be precise, they will win. Because now he had just two alternatives. Doing what he was asked, having his story made, as Claude had requested, into a work of fiction, and waiting for the success that his book would have, among his friends if not with the public at large—‘Oh, Alfred darling, it’s wonderful! All that time you were twittering on about that boat we had no idea you were just planning a novel. Oh, darling, you are clever, and it’s so marvellous to have you back!’—or reverting to his former idea of not having the book published at all in his lifetime. A decision which, now that word was presumably out that Alfred had actually written his ‘boat story’ might not be enough to save his life. Oh God, he thought, realising that the sun was burning his bald head, that it was summer now rather than spring, and that not only was it starting to be uncomfortably hot but there were fewer flowers now amidst the beginning-to-be-parched grass than there had been a couple of weeks ago: what am I going to do?

  This was a question he asked himself several times over the next few days, as he sat in his house listening no longer to the singing of birds, but to the chirping of crickets; a sound that had always conjured up visions of dryness, sterility and death in his mind. And a question that he asked himself with particular emphasis five days after he received his letter when, walking dejectedly down into the village to do some shopping, he was overtaken on the little country lane by two young men on a large motorcycle. Two young men dressed in black leather and wearing black helmets; two young men who turned to look at him as they raced past, then having sped round the corner, changed direction and drove back past him more slowly, staring at him quite deliberately now, as if they wished to note his features for future reference; and two young men who were undoubtedly, he told himself, emanations of the same spirit that had caused the vase to topple over in the cemetery, the bark to flake from the olive tree, and the rat to leap from the hawthorne, and were almost certainly the creatures of whoever it was (in other words practically everyone he knew) who was determined to make sure his story, his true story, that is, never saw the light of day. And try though he might to convince himself that they were just two local boys who were trying out some new motorcycle and wanted to impress this bald, plump, staring-eyed, little foreigner they had seen around, he wasn’t able to; becoming so frightened of going out that he went over to his landlady’s house, told her he wasn’t feeling well, and asked her if she would mind doing some shopping for him when next she went into the village herself.

  Oh, what, he asked himself, cold and shivering in his house, despite the now oppressive heat outside, oh, what am I going to do?

  A further five days later, after he had spoken to Dorothy on his landlady’s telephone and she had told him she had gone over to rue de Phalsbourg and, coming out of the building, had been followed by a very sinister-looking man—‘probably nothing to do with anything, he probably just wanted to pick me up or something’—he decided, and wrote to his publisher accordingly.

  ‘Dear Claude, I have been thinking over what you said, and see now that you are absolutely right.’

  *

  It took him just four weeks to rewrite his story; and only two more after that to get another telegram from Paris, saying this time: ‘Well done contract to follow all best Claude.’

  Nevertheless, that was long enough for him to be starting
, by the time he held the telegram in his hand, to be suffering from the first symptoms of one of his half-yearly breakdowns; and long enough for him to be terrified in case it was too long and in the meantime something appalling had happened to Dorothy, and something appalling would happen to him if he so much, now, as stepped out of doors for a moment. This, therefore, he avoided doing, relying on his starting-to-be aggrieved landlady to do, at this stage, everything for him. To the extent of telephoning Dorothy herself, first to make sure that she was still all right, second to tell her that Alfred was fine but for the moment was laid up in bed and therefore couldn’t get to the ’phone, and third, to ask her to send him some money, both to pay the rent on the house that he had been obliged to take for longer than planned, and to pay her, his landlady, for all the extras she was providing him with. ‘That I really don’t have time for and didn’t bargain on,’ he was sure the woman told Dorothy, ‘and I really can’t go on providing indefinitely.’

  Once his breakdown had started in earnest, however, matters in a sense started to improve. If only because once he could no longer tell if his terrors were inside or out, imaginary or real, though those inside were horrible enough, they couldn’t, he assured himself while still in a state to reason at all, be any worse than those outside; and because, recognising his symptoms, he had the sense, having had his landlady make some enquiries, to admit himself to the nearest hospital that accepted cases such as his. A clinic whose address he didn’t even give to Dorothy; he simply asked his landlady to tell her not to worry, that he had gone away for a little while, and she wasn’t on any account to go near rue de Phalsbourg—and in which, even at his very worst moments, he was conscious of feeling safer than he would have had he not been in hospital. Yes, here, dressed in black and riding their motorcycles, they were coming to get him. And made him whimper and cower as they approached. There, though, they really would have come to get him; and with their coming, dragged him into a darkness which no light would ever have broken again.

  For six weeks—his usual time ‘away’—he was in hospital; and when he came out he was feeling better than he had in a year, possibly, apart from those weeks in the spring when he had thought he was taking on the world and might win. All right, he hadn’t won, and it had been foolish to think that he could have. Nonetheless, he had done his best, he had got off his chest something that had been on his chest for years, and frankly, even if he hadn’t told the truth, he couldn’t help feeling quite proud of his effort all the same. Claude was right, he told himself in the taxi on his way back from the hospital to his home on the hill, where he was planning to pack up his things and return to Paris. It was good, what he had written, and maybe it was actually an improvement, in a way; to remove that implicitly priggish voice that insisted ‘I am the truth.’ Now it was just a bitter-sweet comic story about an unattractive youth whom everyone thought had behaved badly when he had in fact behaved well; a misapprehension that would guarantee his social success for the rest of his life, but would periodically cause him to go crazy.

  And he felt still better—or anyway, couldn’t resist letting a wistful smile come to his lips—when he reached his little pink house, and found a number of letters waiting for him. One was from Claude, enclosing the promised contract. One was from Dorothy, hoping he was feeling all right now, and telling him she had seen no more sinister men and why didn’t he come home now. One was from Louise, who told him she had bumped into Dorothy who had told her he wasn’t well, and she did hope he’d be better soon because they had all missed him terribly, ‘though I must say you were working up to this last attack for some time, weren’t you darling? You have not been easy recently.’ And the fourth was from a woman he knew only slightly, who said she had heard he was renting a little house very near where she and her husband had taken a villa for the autumn, and they would like it if, when he had a moment, he came over and saw them. So, he told himself: they were going to be magnanimous in victory. But what had he expected? And to look on the bright side, didn’t this mean that the news of his defeat had spread so widely by now that he was no longer in danger, the dogs had been called off, and he could go back to Paris and resume his former life at any time he liked?

  Yes, he nodded; it did. Furthermore, he couldn’t help admitting that he felt a great relief that it was so. All right, he had probably condemned himself to having his six-monthly breakdowns for the rest of his life, something inside him cracking under the strain of—what? Loving perhaps a little too much a civilisation that was a little too stained with blood? Or just pretending to be a truthteller to people who wanted anything from him but that, and were prepared to make him their darling so long as he did keep quiet? But that wasn’t such a terrible fate, surely? After all, he was used to his breakdowns by now. And God knows, most people in the world had worse to put up with than that.

  At least, to his own satisfaction, he knew the truth. At least he had seen the blood.

  He was feeling so much better, in fact, that he decided the following day—since he was leaving the day after that—he would take up his scarcely remembered friend on her offer to come and visit her. And having looked at a map and seen that the villa was only a couple of miles away, and could be reached, according to his landlady, by climbing this hill here, going down that track there, and then climbing another hill, he further decided that rather than try and get a taxi from the village, he would walk there.

  As, setting off around four, when the October afternoon was at its most glorious, he proceeded to do; putting a hat on his head, taking a stick from the umbrella stand just inside his front door, and feeling, by now, almost jaunty. You old failure, he told himself cheerfully. You weak, mad, old fraud.

  A refrain he was still quietly humming half an hour later; any idea that the news of his defeat had not spread widely enough yet, that the dogs had not been called off yet, so far from his mind that for a moment he couldn’t think what that noise was when he first heard the sound of a motorcycle coming up the dusty track behind him. When he did identify it, however, and turned, and saw the two young men dressed in black speeding, so far as they could, over the stoney ground towards him, all traces of jauntiness left him, and he was conscious only of the terror he had felt in those weeks before sending the manuscript back to Paris.

  Magnanimous in victory indeed, he told himself; as, at the same time, he realised that the imaginary had at last become real; that They, at last, had come to get him. They simply wanted to lure me from the safety of my home, up onto this deserted hillside where no one would see what happened to me.

  And though he tried to add ‘Oh well, it isn’t really a tragedy, because in a sense I died thirty five years ago,’ he couldn’t quite form the words in his head. For he was too conscious of his heart beating, and of the fact that he had lost control of his bowels.

  He stood there, a sweating, frightened, overweight man; while all around him, in the woods, crickets chirped.

  THE NATURE OF ANGELS

  It was six-thirty on the morning of Good Friday; and as he did around six-thirty every Friday morning, Good or no, Giuseppe Bellettini looked at his wife, working in the kitchen, and said ‘I don’t understand why you’re making those cakes.’

  For fifteen years now he had been saying it, ever since the autumn of the year their daughter got married. And for fifteen years now, ever since the day she had stared at him as if he were going mad, when she heard him, Maria found herself having to suppress the urge to throw something at him, pummel him with her fists, or anyway snap ‘You told me that last week.’ After which she would force herself to explain, as reasonably as she could, ‘It’s just in case someone drops in over the weekend. I’ve got to have something to offer them.’

  From then on, the scenario was not so invariable. Sometimes Giuseppe nodded, before going off to sit in the front room. Sometimes he shook his head and murmured, ‘No one’s ever dropped in. Why do you think they will now?’ And sometimes, as this morning, he gazed at the mixture Maria wa
s stirring on the kitchen table and said, with an air of wonder, ‘If people drop by they don’t expect to be served cakes and biscuits.’ A comment to which Maria had a number of replies, but which today provoked just this response: that since this weekend was Easter weekend, she had thought she had better make the effort. ‘You know, just in case. I mean, how would it look if a visitor did come and we didn’t have anything on hand?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Giuseppe nodded, though he didn’t sound convinced. ‘I suppose. But it does seem to me an awful waste of almonds.’

  In a way of course it was comic, Maria told herself as her husband, impeccably dressed in his white shirt and tie, in his fawn trousers and cardigan, and in his soft leather slippers, shuffled off to take up his position in the front room. A position from which he wouldn’t move until eleven o’clock, when he would join her in the kitchen for a coffee, and in which, apart from the odd break for meals or to go to the bathroom, he would stay until, at nine-thirty or ten this evening, he went to bed. It was comic, and almost sweet. And she sometimes suspected that his unchanging routine was merely an attempt to amuse her, or, very gently, to mock her; and that he knew quite well what he was doing. In another way, however, it wasn’t comic at all, and try as she might to convince herself that he was just pulling her leg, every Friday, when he shuffled off to the front room, though her urge to hit him had passed, she felt so nervous that it was all she could do to stop herself following him and telling him the real reason why, every Friday, winter or summer, she baked biscuits and cakes, which she would then set out on a silver dish on the table just inside the front door.