The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘Gianfranco’ was all Humphrey had said; before laughing: ‘Oh, good heavens, Alice, I don’t know if you’ll like him. I met him at a party last week and I thought he was frightful.’

  He had if anything heightened her conviction as to the nature of Jim’s relationship with his Italian friend, and had made her expect some uncouth waiter whom Jim had picked up somewhere, or a Roman streetboy. When Jim had arrived, however, he had introduced her to a companion who was neither uncouth nor a Roman streetboy. On the contrary, Gianfranco was an immensely polished, immensely pleased with himself, Neapolitan lawyer of around forty, who was almost, but not quite, overweight, whose suit was so smart as to be almost, but not quite, vulgar and on whose shapely pink lips, beneath his perfectly trimmed little moustache, a smile of contentment for being Gianfranco Lavinelli was never absent for more than a second.

  Alice was enormously fond of Humphrey, whose wife, a thin, wire-haired and very fierce translator of Russian verse, had introduced them many years ago, and very rarely accompanied him when he went out in the evening. She was also fond of Jim, despite the fact that he was so nervous and twitchy he tended to make her twitchy; and that even as he laughed with one and was charming to one, he watched one as carefully as a snake might watch a mouse—and with very much the same intentions as a snake, Alice always felt. Fond as she was of both, though, and as preposterous as he was unexpected though she found Gianfranco, it was the lawyer who was chiefly responsible for her high spirits. And it was entirely the lawyer who was responsible for her spirits being coloured, and raised higher still, by a feeling of disquiet.

  Gianfranco delighted her because he was so fat-cat pleased with himself. Gianfranco delighted her because he was so obviously trying to delight her. Gianfranco delighted her because though his perfectly cut, black hair was thinning and in another couple of years he would have an uncontainable paunch, she found him, as he did everything to make her find him, extremely attractive. And Gianfranco unsettled her, and made her feel she was losing her balance—made her feel, once or twice, that she had really slipped over the border into lunacy—because from the moment he arrived and kissed her hand, smiling up at her with a certain complacent irony, she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that Gianfranco, though he didn’t in any way match the portrait she had been gazing at thus far, was Him. It was as if something had gone wrong with time, and she had started having an affair with him before she had ever met him. Or as if, still more alarmingly, she had imagined him with such intensity that she had actually made him exist. Was it possible, she wondered, as she served the drinks, took the dried-up steak and kidney pie from the oven, opened the bottle of wine Humphrey had brought, the bottle of wine Jim had brought and the two bottles of wine that Gianfranco had brought (along with some hand-made chocolates), that if one really thought hard enough about something or someone, one could bring them to life? Very much as if God, profoundly bored with the emptiness of space, had dreamed of stars, planets, oxygen, water, fishes, monkeys and men with such intensity, and at such length, that finally the dream had come true? No, of course it wasn’t, she told herself as she quickly drank another glass of wine. That way was genuine madness. If God had merely dreamed of the universe and everything in it, the universe and everything in it, including herself and Gianfranco, were still just dreams. And if she had merely dreamed of Him, invented Him so that people shouldn’t feel sorry for her, then Him was still a dream. And that was that, and there was nothing more to be said. Yet tell herself what she did and be as rational as she could, she wasn’t quite able to convince herself. In the back of her mind—in just a small corner of it, lurking like an intruder somewhere in the darkness of a many-roomed house—she did have the feeling that Gianfranco was Him. Moreover, not only did the suspicion that had slowly surfaced in her mind during dinner do nothing to spoil her evening; it did nothing to dislodge this intruder, or to make her feel that the intrusion was unwelcome.

  The suspicion was that Humphrey, exhausted by his discretion, had let slip to Jim—at that party where Jim had introduced him to Gianfranco perhaps—that ‘You know, I suddenly realised poor Alice is absolutely broke, and goes round looking like an orphan of the storm most of the time because she is an orphan of the storm.’ After which Jim, snake-eyed, snake-natured Jim, had put two and two together, had looked behind Humphrey’s revelation and concluded that not only was Alice’s well-heeled-American-in-London act just that, an act, but that Alice’s great love story with the unknown Him was also a fabrication. Whereupon, being a novelist and poet, and having Gianfranco on hand, he had thought to wield his art and had brought Gianfranco along, just so the Italian could, with luck, fulfil, if only for a little while, the role of Him.

  Why this suspicion did nothing to spoil her evening, nor dislodge that idea that had sneaked into her mind, was because if it was justified, Alice told herself, all it meant was that she had a fellow conspirator—a conspirator who didn’t find her in the least pathetic, but rather thought of her as someone with whom he could indulge his own fantasies—and that Gianfranco was, as it were, a joint effort; or the result, though no payment had been made, of a commission. ‘I want Him,’ her whole story had clearly said to Jim. ‘Very well,’ Jim had replied. ‘I will provide you with Him.’

  And why, she concluded, as she felt her head spinning and nearly fell over as she accompanied Humphrey to the door, she even felt her pleasure had been enhanced was because if this was what had happened, the impossibility of Gianfranco’s having been created was somehow removed, and she was able to think that if he were an invention he wasn’t her invention but Jim’s; of that Jim who was, at the end of the day, in the business of inventing people. So perhaps she wasn’t mad, she told herself, even if Gianfranco didn’t exist. It was just Jim at work. And really, wasn’t that why she had always preferred to live in Bohemia, rather than in America, or France, or any other real country on the map? In Bohemia, anything could happen.

  Bohemia! Gianfranco not existing! Really Alice, what are you talking about? she asked herself as she walked back into the living room, swinging her black taffeta skirt and making one final effort to pull herself together. Okay, maybe Jim did bring his friend round on purpose, in the hope that the two of us would hit it off, as they say. But if he did, that’s the end of the story. Him! For God’s sake, get a grip on yourself woman. It is Him that doesn’t exist. Him is a lie, a fantasy. Whereas Gianfranco is a Neapolitan lawyer who is in London on business, who if things go well for him may buy a flat of his own here. And if he isn’t a lover of Jim’s whose nature impels him to flirt with every woman he meets, in order to disguise the truth even from those who don’t give a damn, he is undoubtedly married. He has two children, and is the owner of a large and almost, but not quite, vulgarly furnished apartment overlooking the bay of his native city. Now sit down, don’t have anything more to drink and try to behave.

  She was fighting a losing battle, however. Because when she did sit down and caught Gianfranco either smiling at her or still, at this stage of the evening, smiling at himself, Alice realised that she no longer cared whether she was mad or sane. She could be a successful goddess, a collaborator in a story that was being written, or just a lonely woman throwing herself at the first attractive man who invited her to do so. It no longer seemed the slightest bit important. All that concerned her now, she told herself, was that Jim too should say he was tired and going home, and that Gianfranco should say he would stay on and have one more drink if that was all right with her. And that when she had closed the door behind Jim, and gone back to the living room, she should find herself, very shortly after, putting her arms round Him.

  *

  In fact, it didn’t work out quite that way, since Gianfranco went home with Jim, murmuring that he was sleepy. Also, when Jim phoned next day to thank her for the evening and she made one or two reasonably discreet enquiries about Gianfranco, she learned that he did indeed have a wife and two children back in Naples; and, what was more, that their apart
ment overlooked the famous bay. All the same, it worked out reasonably satisfactorily, because when Gianfranco himself called to thank her, around five o’clock that afternoon, he asked if she would have dinner with him the following night. And when, at the end of a ludicrously expensive, disappointingly small-portioned meal, Alice asked him if he would like to come back to her place, where she had, with a combination of extravagance, foresight and optimism, left the heating on, he agreed; and thus she was able to put her arms round him, and to establish him in her life, if only for a while, as Him.

  It would be only for a while; she knew that. They really had nothing in common except an admiration, however involuntary on her part, for Gianfranco Lavinelli. Not even their sex was all that good, since Gianfranco accepted just a little too easily and a little too often, her apologies for being so thin, so pale and so very much (five whole years!) older than him; and made her just a little too conscious of the favour he was doing her by submitting to her embraces. Nevertheless, if it pleased Gianfranco to go slumming in Bohemia and to allow a tiny, undernourished, albeit—hell yes, thought Alice, as she looked in her mirror—still quite attractive waif to share her bed with him, it pleased Alice to go slumming in Naples and to allow her well-fed lawyer to think that two or three minutes lying on top of her grunting ‘Amore, amore’ was one of the more satisfactory performances she had encountered in a man. And when it did end, well, she wouldn’t have lost anything, she told herself, certainly not her head, or her heart, or any other figurative part of her body; and at the very least, she would have had one or two moments of pleasure, and have seen and reminded herself how the other half lived; and been reassured that for herself, if no one else, her way was better. Poor Gianfranco, she found herself thinking more and more often, he is all show and no substance. Poor Gianfranco, she found herself thinking: he is really too absurd.

  It was probably because both of them, with part of themselves, involuntarily pitied the other, while both rejected utterly the pity of the other—He pity me? How unthinkable! She pity me? How preposterous!—that, despite Alice’s certainty that the affair wouldn’t last, somehow, for all that lack of common ground on which to meet, it did. Gianfranco went back to Italy after a month and to his family, and phoned a week later to say he was returning in two days time and was going to be buying a flat in London as he had hoped. Alice continued to see her friends and do all her various jobs, and told Gianfranco that she really wouldn’t be able to see him when he was in London more than a couple of days—or say three—a week. And both of them accepted that the world, and London in particular, was full of women younger and more desirable than Alice Allom, who would be grateful to receive the attentions of, and the occasional invitations to dinner from, a successful Neapolitan lawyer. Not only younger and more desirable women, was the unspoken rider to this understanding; but women who did not consider success in the real world somehow false, nor believe that integrity was found only in art, and poverty, and self-denial. Yet when Gianfranco came back to London they saw each other generally four and sometimes five times a week; and when he returned to Naples again he got into the habit of phoning Alice every day, if only to tell her how he was.

  She liked him, Alice realised at the end of six months; because despite his vanity and shallowness, he was good-hearted and was actually grateful, in a curious way, to have her pity; however much he rejected the grounds for that pity. In the same way, she supposed, he must like her, if only because she, despite herself, was grateful to receive his pity. All the same, she did no more than like him—they did no more than like each other—and it remained true that if their affair had come to an end tomorrow, it wouldn’t have worried her very much. Certainly, she would have missed the physical warmth of a body sleeping next to her and missed, too, Gianfranco’s desire to be approved of and listened to as he took her out to fancy restaurants, lectured her about art and literature, and told her that he had bought two seats in the front row of the Grand Tier at Covent Garden next week, and while she probably couldn’t really appreciate or understand Verdi, he hoped she would enjoy herself nevertheless. (As, a week later, she did, even if Gianfranco either slept through most of the performance, or distracted her by continually glancing at her to make sure she was trying to understand the finer points and whispering in her ear when he was certain that some subtlety had escaped her.) Apart from that, though, she would have carried on as before, would probably sooner or later have started a relationship with someone else, and would have used the occasion of Gianfranco’s departure to announce to all her friends that her affair with Him was over. For none of them knew about Gianfranco (not even, according to Gianfranco, Jim himself; though, probably the novelist at least suspected that his guest had phoned Alice after her dinner party and that it had been with Alice that he had spent many of the following nights), and as far as they were concerned the affair with Him had been continuing all this time. As in a way, Alice reflected, it had.

  After nine months had passed, however, and then it got closer to a year, Alice realised that she was more deeply attached to Gianfranco than she cared, most days, to admit. It was partly because when she was with him she remembered how lonely she had been before she met him, despite her friends; and partly because the more time Gianfranco spent in her flat (and he always came to her—he showed her once the flat he had bought and never thereafter invited her back) the more she perceived that not only was he grateful in a touching, little-boy way for her pity, but that even he, for all his immense self-satisfaction, wasn’t entirely convinced of the reality of the appearances by which he set such store. In the main, though, she realised, as she patted down his hair after he had so far forgotten himself while they were making love as to mess it up slightly, it was precisely because he had become Him that had made her start to view the idea of losing him with a certain alarm. By becoming Him, Gianfranco had saved her from the risk of exposure; and by becoming Him, Gianfranco had saved her from any charges, including her own, that might have been made against her: charges of being mad, sad, or really just a little too pathetic.

  Yet perversely, it was the very fact that Gianfranco had become Him that also made Alice, as the first anniversary of their meeting approached, decide that she should end the affair. Or, if not that, the fact that had he not become Him, she would never have taken up with him in the first place, however lonely she might have been, and however much she had come to believe that even he was not absolutely convinced of the solidity of the earth’s crust. He had been her way of covering her deception, her way of avoiding discovery, humiliation and defeat. And it was wrong, in her book, to have an affair with someone just to hide past sins.

  Besides, she told herself, after Gianfranco had phoned to say he was flying over just for the evening of their anniversary and they would go somewhere special, if she did continue with Gianfranco for much longer, she might find herself questioning all the rules she lived by. Going through all those old debates she had had with herself, and with others, when young—commerce versus art, action versus reflection, the pursuit of money versus the pursuit of truth—debates she had hoped were decided upon and put aside for good. It was too late for that; she was too tired now, if not too old, suddenly to decide that she was on the wrong road and to start hacking her way across country until she got to the right road. That wasn’t, in any case, the right road, she told herself with a note of desperation as she began to wonder what she would tell Gianfranco at their celebratory, and farewell, meal. It wasn’t. Moreover, attached as she had become to Gianfranco and much though she would miss him when she had said goodbye, he did stand on the side of ugliness, untruth and the Devil—as she had always told herself, before she met him, Him stood. He did stand on the side of chaos, folly and illusion. He did stand on the side of everything she had fought against all her life. Didn’t he? Oh yes, she almost cried, as she admitted that it hardly mattered what speech she made Gianfranco, since the second he caught the slightest whiff of defection he would announce that he was le
aving her and would probably manage to convince her that indeed the decision had been his. Yes, yes, he did.

  Ugliness, untruth and the Devil. Ugliness, untruth and the Devil.

  *

  By ‘somewhere special’ Gianfranco in fact meant that he wanted to celebrate their first anniversary at the same overpriced restaurant where they had eaten the year before.

  ‘I have booked a table,’ he said when he called the day before he was due to arrive, not only to confirm that he was arriving, but to tell Alice that his elder daughter had a cold, his wife had a bad back and his mother was getting on his nerves. ‘I liked it there.’

  Alice, however, who was determined to avoid the possibility of a scene in a public place, put her foot down and held out for eating at home.

  ‘We don’t have to have a steak and kidney pie,’ she told him. ‘If you like I’ll get something readymade. But I really don’t want to go back there. Besides,’ she added, trying not to sound sickly, ‘it was here that we met, wasn’t it? And it would be nicer if … well, you know.’

  ‘You’re not going to ask Jim or that other friend Humphrey, are you?’ Gianfranco asked.

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ Alice said, never having been certain whether Gianfranco’s desire to keep their affair a secret was because he was ashamed of being thought to associate with someone like her, or for some other more obscure reason that concerned, possibly, Jim. Some things, though, she thought it better not to ask about, especially Gianfranco, since he wouldn’t have told her the truth, however simple it may have been. ‘It’ll just be the two of us.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Gianfranco said, sounding slightly peeved. Either because he didn’t like being deprived of the opportunity of spending money, or because he wasn’t used to Alice taking a stand. ‘Whatever you prefer. But please, do me a favour. Make sure the place is warm, won’t you? I remember last year—Jesus, I almost froze.’