The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘But why?’ she asked them again and again, after she had watched them take care of a class of four children, three of whom suffered from Down’s Syndrome, one of whom was autistic and all of whom had been entrusted to the care of the community; and as she watched them helping to cut rushes for the roof of one of the huts. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I mean, you might not approve of my plans; I can see that. And that’s your right, to disapprove. Disapprove as violently as you like. But why, however much you disapprove, should that affect your plans?—I mean, you’re happy here, they seem to like you here, you’re safe here, and all that mumbo jumbo about me being your conscience, your being willing victims, your being … it’s just nonsense. And if you’re going to leave here and go back to London just to punish me, well, I suppose I would be punished if you did, and if things don’t work out. But that’s grotesque. I mean, talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. That’d be cutting off your head to spite your neck. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous. It’s … I just don’t understand. I’m sorry. Explain it to me again.’

  As they did: telling her now that though they were of age in years, emotionally, as she must know for herself, they were still somewhat backward. Of course they were catching up fast here and, if they stayed another year or so, they hoped that, well, they would no longer be the second or third cousins of the autistic child she had seen them taking care of. Until they had caught up, however—‘and when we say emotionally I think what we really mean is morally’—they still needed a base on which to build. A base that, their father being dead, whether she liked it or not, whether they liked it or not, for the moment only she as their mother could provide. ‘I mean, we admire Enrique,’ David told her, frowning with sincerity as he referred to the community’s maybe unwilling but—Gloria had seen for herself—indisputable leader, ‘and we admire and like everyone else here.’ (‘Ugh,’ Gloria was tempted to say, but controlled herself. Not because she felt a small dose of flippancy would be inappropriate; just because she knew that the boys either wouldn’t understand such a comment, or would pretend not to and ignore it if they did.) ‘Still, for the moment, that’s not quite enough. We need to feel—we need to feel that you’re there, in the so-called real world.’ (‘And need to know I’m unhappy and detest that real world,’ Gloria almost snarled now.) ‘At least until we feel truly confident, inside ourselves, that that reality is only so-called, is only an illusion, and that real reality can only be found in …’

  ‘… God,’ Michael muttered.

  ‘But if you now, as you say you’re going to, turn your back on that so-called real world, we have no alternative but to go back into it and either find someone else on whom we can rely, or try to rely on ourselves in the hope that we will be strong enough to bear our own weight and eventually be able to return if not here, to somewhere like here. I mean, I know we’re being selfish, I know it must sound silly to you. But we do feel that, we always have, haven’t we, Mike?’

  ‘Yes,’ Michael murmured.

  ‘And we’ve often said that the only way we were able to embark on this let’s say spiritual journey was because we knew that you were at the same time making a physical journey and taking care of that part of our lives until we were capable of taking care of it ourselves. So you see, Mummy, we have no real choice, and although I’m sorry we shouted at you when you just turned up and broke the news like that, it wasn’t an hysterical, spur-of-the-moment reaction. It was just the reaction of two people who felt and feel that their spiritual survival has been put at risk. There. That’s all.’

  Spiritual survival. Spiritual journey. What clap-trap. What utter and absolute bullshit. What a load of infantile, pompous, posturing drivel was Gloria’s final if still unspoken comment upon her sons’ speech; a speech during the course of which, paradoxically, the real reason why the boys were threatening to take and undoubtedly would take this drastic and very possibly catastrophic step had come to her. It wasn’t anything to do with moral bases, and the need to rely on themselves and support their own weight, she told herself. It was simply that they couldn’t bear the idea of her being irresponsible, of her being for the first time in their life and in the sense that they had always understood the word, free. And if she would be, despite their protests, they would deliver themselves into captivity in her place and suffer, and if necessary die to stop them dwelling on the unacceptable fact. Emotionally, morally immature, my foot, Gloria wanted to say. Unstable though you may be, or might have been, you’re behaving just like every other male child, or every other male. You think you have the right to be free, you think you have the right to make spiritual journeys, while mother stays at home to keep the hearth warm. Only should you decide that after all spiritual journeys are not for you and that the old, unreal, gross and comfortable physical world is more your sort of thing, you expect to have a home in that physical world to go to.

  ‘Well, darlings,’ she actually did say then, ‘I’m very sorry. But if your spiritual survival has been put at risk, I got to the point in London of feeling that mine was more than at risk—it was in danger of being snuffed out from one moment to the next. And that being the case, I’m sorry, but it’s every man for himself.’

  ‘And every woman for hers,’ she let them take as read.

  ‘Still, assuming you’re not going to leave here immediately, as soon as Paul and I have found a place to live in Vera Cruz, I’ll send you the address. That way …’

  You can do whatever you like.

  But if, after all, pale, sad, little Michael might have come round to turning up in Vera Cruz and settling there with his mother—settling anywhere with his mother—his elder, darker and more assertive brother allowed himself, allowed them, no such escape route. And Gloria’s last memory of him, after he had kissed her goodbye, was of his standing in front of Michael (so she wouldn’t see any backsliding on his face, if backsliding there were?) shaking his head and saying, as she got quickly into the car to conceal the tears that were once again running down her cheeks, ‘Vera Cruz? Paul? Mummy, you’re mad, you’re absolutely mad.’

  *

  She was to remember those words because they were the last that David had spoken. More than a year, however, was to pass before she started to give them any real weight in her mind and to wonder whether he was right.

  The first months of that year passed almost without her noticing them, so taken up was she with finding a small white house for herself in one of the long, straight roads stretching back from the seafront in Vera Cruz, helping Paul paint it and make the repairs that were necessary, and, if barely to begin with, furnishing it; especially as, when she wasn’t engaged in any of these activities, she seemed to spend hours every day in various local offices, procuring documents, taking them across town to be notarised or checked or countersigned and then returning them to the clerk who had issued them so he could then issue others. The following months were hardly more of a burden, even if, as the summer reached its height, Paul suffered so much from the heat that it made him bad-tempered and homesick, and one night, after an argument, he lost his temper and knocked her over. However, this incident and Paul’s general moroseness apart, (he seemed to have carried his London with him and to dwell in it as thoroughly here as he had there) they spent their time sitting on the grubby beach and wishing they felt a little more enthusiastic about bathing in what looked like a grubby sea, starting (at least Gloria did, Paul tended to mutter something about bloody Mexicans and say he was staying home) to make friends, and principally, having decided that their budget ran to the purchase of a small, second-hand car, going off on trips. Down the coast to Merida and the Yucatan peninsula. Up the coast to Tampico and other shabby towns that Gloria hated but Paul declared were his sort of places. And more and more, as the heat began to make Gloria herself uncomfortable, inland and up into the mountains, to Xalapa and Fortín, where everything was lush and green and soft and cool, and where even Paul was forced to admit that maybe there was beauty on this
earth, for all the absence of truth.

  And the remainder of that first year was spent, again only by Gloria in the main, settling in, consolidating her friendships and deciding to work in an art gallery and crafts shop every afternoon. A gallery and shop owned by the one person in Mexico to whom she had had an introduction before she arrived, the person who had made her pick on Vera Cruz as the place to settle—just because she had an introduction to her—and the person who had introduced her to all those other people she had started to think of as friends.

  ‘You know,’ she said to this woman, an artist herself, as the first anniversary of her arrival approached, ‘I honestly think I’m happy here. Happier than I ever imagined I’d be.’ Moreover, she told herself, she was speaking the truth. She was happy here; away from her confusion, away from her doubts, away from, not the world (Vera Cruz was as much a part of that, she told herself defensively, as London, New York or Paris) but from her world and everything in her world that she had come to find unbearable. Of course, nothing had changed in that world, but it was no longer her concern. All that concerned her now was what the weather was going to be like tomorrow, and whether she and Paul should go away this weekend. Whether she should take up Maria-Elena’s offer of working full-time at the gallery and risk having a major falling-out with Paul as a result. And whether they should eat at home tonight, or in a restaurant. Normal problems, she told herself, real problems, none of those ‘My God, am I doing the right thing?’, ‘My God, what a mess the world is in’, ‘My God, I must make my stand against the forces of evil’ type problems. She didn’t regret the years she had spent worrying about such, she supposed, larger matters; she was just relieved that it was up to other people now to worry about them and that she had, at last, gone into a sort of moral retirement. She began to look forward to waking up in the morning, and to wondering how she and Maria-Elena would chose the work of six local artists for a forthcoming exhibition, when there were at least thirty-six who insisted on having their works shown. She began to look forward to her long, late lunches, generally eaten with Maria-Elena; when the two of them would sit around, and laugh, and talk. And she began to look forward to her walks home in the evening, when, even in the winter, she was warm just wearing a cotton shift. Oh the sun! she told herself every time she felt that heat on her back and wanted to raise her arms in praise. Oh the sky! Oh the light!

  This being so, why was it then that, after she had been in Mexico about fourteen months, Gloria did start to repeat to herself what David had told her that day she said goodbye, ‘You’re mad, you’re absolutely mad’? Well, she told herself one morning, when she realised that she was repeating it and found herself asking this question, there were a number of reasons. One—the least serious—was that however shortly she told herself it was her world she had fled from, she couldn’t suppress the feeling, once she had really settled in and got the hang of Vera Cruz, that it was the world she had meant. A feeling that wasn’t serious, she tried to convince herself, in that it was what every city-dweller who moves to the provinces experiences; but one that she would have preferred not to have, in that it seemed to her typical of the sort of person she didn’t want to be.

  A second reason for her growing discontent, and this one was serious—or anyway far more so than the other—was, as David had suggested it might be, Paul. It was bad enough that he carried a special sort of London seediness with him wherever he went, and that his dislike of the heat and apparently of all things Mexican caused his mood to be darker still than it had in England, and caused him not only to strike her that once, but threaten to often. And, that the more she started to make friends and involve herself in local life, the more morose, gloomy and ill-tempered he became, and the more he resented her efforts to put down roots, however shallow they might be. What was worse, though, was that when she therefore suggested, tentatively at first and then more forcefully, that if he was so unhappy here he might be better off (they both might be better off) if he returned to England, he made it clear that he would never go back to England alone, and since, just as she had with the boys, she had always done everything in her power to destroy him, she must now face the consequences, and if she did want him to leave, must come with him herself. ‘Otherwise,’ he told her one night, when they finally had it out, ‘I’m staying here, hell though it is, until you do say you’ll come. Or until one of us kills the other, which is quite likely,’ he spat out as an afterthought.

  Which threat, though Gloria tried to convince herself it wasn’t genuine, made her feel so depressed that she began to think of England as a sort of haven, where she would probably be able to unhitch herself from this weak, pitiable man with whom she had nevertheless in a sense fallen in love, or where he did at least have cronies with whom he went out drinking and seemed to prefer living by himself.

  And the more she thought of England as a haven, the more she too began to think of Mexico as a kind of hell, in which she would be tied forever to this thirty-seven-year-old baby. Whom, insofar as she did love, she loved just because he was so without faith, even in himself, and just because she could and did pity him. For being weak, for being hopeless and for having so thoroughly squandered the gifts of beauty and brains with which he had been born, the last remnants of which he had, as it were, laid at her feet when they met.

  The third and real reason why Gloria found herself repeating ‘You were mad to come here and you’re madder still to stay,’ however, concerned the boys themselves. For if she could have settled into Mexican provincial life and accepted the occasional pang of nostalgia for the bright lights as the price to be paid for peace and serenity, she could probably also, in the long run, have persuaded Paul either to go back to London alone, or, despite his misgivings, to take some sort of part in the life of Vera Cruz himself. To play a role which, she suspected, had he only overcome his petulance and his ‘No I won’t join in’ mood, might have suited him still better than it suited her. Underneath his cross-little-boy act he was desperate to join in; and desperate, too, to go out into the sun, in the hope that even at this stage of his life and decline he might revive, and put forth the sort of flowers he had seemed likely to put forth when young.

  What the boys did to make her come round to their way of thinking was first write her a letter care of Maria-Elena restating their opposition to what she was doing, and telling her again that her having abandoned the fight made them feel that she had abandoned them and rendered, as a consequence, their present position untenable. They then wrote her a second letter telling them that the following week they were setting off for England and that while she shouldn’t feel responsible if anything did happen to them there, she should remember that when she had come to San Cristóbal they had warned her. And finally, as Gloria fired off notes to the marginally more reliable of their friends in London, to the bearded Enrique at Las Frechas asking if he had a forwarding address, and even to the British Consulate in Mexico City to see if by chance anyone there knew anything, they twisted the knife in the wound, so to speak, by writing not another word.

  To begin with, so angered had Gloria been by their second, ill-natured scrawl, she was almost glad not to hear from them. Besides, she was so taken up at the time with putting the house in order and making her first contacts in town that she didn’t have time to worry too much. And even throughout that first, hot summer as she and Paul travelled, and throughout the following autumn, she managed to put her mind at rest by telling herself that their very silence showed that they were alive and well (had they not been, someone would have been in touch) and was just another example of their spite. ‘Little sods,’ she said to Paul, who tended to agree with her explanation for the lack of any further news. ‘Mean, nasty, little prigs. That community of theirs filled them so full of high ideals that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives despising people who aren’t. If, that is,’ she had felt obliged to add, both worriedly and bitterly, ‘they haven’t already killed themselves just to prove what an unnatural mother
I am.’

  As the novelty of Vera Cruz did start to wear off however, and as Paul did become more and more difficult, so that silence, that had lasted now for more than a year, began to eat into her and corrode everything around her. Of course she could tell herself that they were mean little sods and of course she could condemn them for the tone of their last letter; not to mention their whole attitude towards her ever since they had spoken at Las Frechas. But that didn’t alter the fact that they were her sons and she loved them; nor alter the fact that the thought that they might have killed themselves, or might now be in a desperate state, started to make her feel unhinged.

  ‘Vera Cruz, Paul—you’re mad,’ she told herself. ‘You’re absolutely mad.’

  She was equipped for fighting moral battles, for waging, however privately, perpetual war. The boys, though, just because she had always been so bristling with arms, just because she had always insisted on standing up there and wielding the sword as if it were hers and hers alone by right, were utterly defenceless. So how could she have imagined that if she suddenly threw down those arms and marched off the field, they would survive? She should have had, she should still have, her head examined. It was obvious that being left alone without so much as a shield, they would be mown down. They would be mown down, moreover, not only by those forces she had opposed all her life, but by a combination of her cowardice and her lifelong insistence that they shouldn’t, as she hated anyone around her doing, learn how to fight themselves. It was obvious, obvious, and she was mad, mad, mad.

  She was mad, Gloria told herself as she got drunk and burst into tears at Maria-Elena’s gallery one afternoon; crying to the tough, bright woman, of whom she had become very fond, ‘I feel as if I’ve cut myself off from my life-blood—as if I’ve severed my main artery.’ (A lament that provoked from Maria-Elena, who thought it was the distance from the theatres and concert-halls of London that really distressed her, the remark—under the circumstances not surprising—that for someone who prided herself on her unflagging opposition to imperialism, she seemed mighty attached to the glitz and glitter of Empire.)