The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘And I know that people say that happiness is not the goal of human life,’ Charlie said, adding a brief wistful coda to his aria. ‘But it seems to me it must be. Because to me, happiness is almost synonomous with goodness. And if you do not try to be the one, you can never hope to be the other. Which is why,’ he concluded, ‘I have always loved Egyptian art, my art,’ he shrugged, ‘so much and have always thought that the ancient Egyptians must have known in reality what the English know in my imagination. For those statues, those paintings, seem to me supremely graceful, supremely consoling and seem to me to be the expression of a culture that, more than any other, equated the good with the happy. What was it that Chekhov wrote in The Three Sisters? “We aren’t happy and we can’t be happy, we only want happiness.” It’s a beautiful line. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it passionately. We can be happy. Just as long as we try, however hopelessly, to be good. Of course, I suppose we should say what we mean by “good”. But I think maybe, really, we all know that, don’t we? Or, at any rate, we can talk about it some other night.’

  So, at last, Charlie came to a halt; and, at last, he felt he had said something, said everything, he had been wanting to say for years. Moreover, though he had claimed, once or twice, that he was talking nonsense, that had just been good manners passing as self-deprecation. He didn’t believe for a moment that he had been talking nonsense and stood totally behind every word he had uttered. He did love England and the English of his dreams for the reasons he had given. He did believe that the only culture that was still more full of grace, still more consoling than the English, and thus still more aware of the blood that had been shed in order to create it and still more representative of human achievement, human civilisation at its highest, was that of ancient Egypt. And he would have continued to believe it even if someone had proved him wrong, or convinced him that he was a fool. For his love of both was essential to his life; and without his love he would have been only what he appeared to be, or worse; not just ugly; but yes, unhappy and, if only in his own estimation, bad.

  He was so drunk on his own words, so relieved finally to have said more or less completely what he had been wanting to say for ages and so happy that he had allowed that Englishman to drag out of him what he had always wanted to reveal, that although he was aware that by thus revealing himself he had made himself loathsome in Isabella’s eyes and lost her, it wasn’t until the morning after—having once again stayed up on deck till four, and slept no more than three hours—that what he had done really sank in, and with part of himself he started to regret that he had allowed himself to be so played upon, so encouraged to display what he thought of as his soul. Once it had sank in it sank in deeply, however; and that part of him that was regretful became almost the equal of that part of him that was glad. Not because Isabella scarcely said good morning to him when he went down to the dining room for breakfast, and wouldn’t have said good morning at all had she not known that to be so overtly rude would have drawn the attention of her father, whose dark little eyes never missed a trick. Rather because, as she gave him a quick resentful glance, muttered ‘Morning’ in reply to his own beamed, tender, but he already knew doomed greeting, and went straight back to her coffee, he saw why, in her mind, it had become necessary for her to be suddenly so cold, to look at and upon him with such an air of hurt and scorn. For while the truth was that he had lost her by revealing himself not to be a monster, Isabella had come up with another reason for cutting him off so abruptly. Namely: by exposing himself morally, it was as if he had exposed himself physically, and she was forced to admit what she must have known all along. That this beastly toad whom she had pitied and been kind to loved her. And maybe not only loved her, but lusted after her and wanted to take her slim, dark, sixteen-year-old body in his foul, sweating hands, to kiss her mouth with his wide, wet, slobbering lips and cover her with his bloated, misshapen flesh. You must be mad, her expression told Charlie as he watched her eating her breakfast. You should be taken away and locked up somewhere. After all the goodness I’ve shown you, after all my friendliness, to be treated thus! To have you, you horror, show yourself to me. How could you? How could you? And if you ever so much as touch my hand again, I swear I’ll tell my father you tried to rape me. Oh Charlie, Charlie, pretending to be talking to that man last night. I know whom you were really talking to. I know what you were really doing, you obscene, vile pervert, you ungrateful, repulsive… freak.

  What could he say to defend himself? How could he apologise, or take her aside and say ‘No, Isabella, it wasn’t like that, it isn’t like that. You’re fooling yourself, lying to yourself because, for whatever reason, you can only care for what is ugly. And having listened to me last night, you can no longer help admitting what you half suspected before: that I am not entirely the monstrosity you saw me as previously and that even in me there is some trace, some possibility, of beauty.’

  He couldn’t, he told himself, however idiotically he beamed and sloped around the ship, however grotesque he tried to make himself. First, because having lost her, he knew that Isabella wouldn’t listen to a further word of his, whether he spoke rationally or whether he simply blurted out ‘You must realise I didn’t actually “expose” myself to you last night and you really shouldn’t blame me or make me suffer just because you have some psychological hang-up that makes it impossible for you to like what is beautiful apart from clothes and jewels.’ And second—and this is what clinched the matter, and made him sit down at the table and start to eat his breakfast in a manner that even he found disgusting—because seeing that scorn, that shocked revulsion on Isabella’s face, he became aware that he too suffered from what he would have termed a psychological hang-up.

  From the moment he had seen Isabella crying in the minibus on her way in from the airport, Charlie had thought her the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and had been in love with her. He had thought her perfect, tender, innocent and exquisite, and made only more so by the various little flaws he had discerned in her that in others he would have found irritating, if not unacceptable. For to have those flaws—that were, in any case, just the scars left on her by other people’s wickedness or stupidity—and still be perfect, didn’t that, mustn’t that make her more perfect, and more innocent and more beautiful yet? Yes, he had told himself, oh yes. But though he had loved her, or because he had loved her in the way that he had, seeing her as an ideal being who was hardly touched by reality, he had never really thought of his love as having any consequence. It had in itself been an ideal love and the idea of him, who felt lovely when Isabella gazed at him with those deep, black eyes, and heard again and again that heartbreaking fragment of music ‘E io t’ amavo per la tua pietà,’ actually doing anything to express that love—other than grovel at her feet and play Quasimodo to her Esmeralda—had been so out of the question as never to enter his head. Isabella was there to be worshipped, cherished, protected, blessed; adored, dreamed of and revered, But not, but never, to be the object of his—or, in his imagination, anyone else’s—lust. Such a thought would have struck him as genuinely obscene.

  Yet now, dipping his buttered, honeyed roll in his coffee, and dripping honey over his hands and chin, and coffee over the table cloth and down his shirt, and dropping half the roll in the coffee where it floated like a rotten and disintegrating grey fish, he realised that all that had suddenly changed. Pitied, he could love an ideal, disembodied Isabella. Despised, he did indeed lust after the girl, feeling such a desire to get up, go round the table and slip his hands under her white blouse, and touch her small, warm breasts, and press his mouth to them and run his lips over her smooth, dark stomach, and open her legs and kiss her and slip his tongue into her and unbutton himself and Oh, Isabella, Isabella, slide, glide, ever so gently, into her—that he didn’t hear what Mr Rizzuto was saying to him. He became conscious of a sort of veil of flames passing over his eyes, and of something hot and solid blocking his throat, and thought that if he couldn’t get that
image out of his head he would either pass out or, more probably, ejaculate right here at the breakfast table.

  You are a freak, he told himself, as, with his mouth full, he mumbled an apology to Mr Rizzuto and said he had been miles away, and what was it he had asked him? You are a pervert. And Isabella in a way was right to back away from you in horror and tell herself that you had exposed yourself to her physically. Only in a way, of course, because you didn’t and it was just her backing away that aroused you, or put the idea into your head in the first place. All the same, she only expressed her horror a few hours too early; and had her horror and your lust coincided precisely, you’d have had to admit that she was absolutely right to back away from you. You’re a monster who can only desire those who loathe you for your monstrosity, just as Isabella is a poor, confused child who can only pity—only in her way love—those who are entirely monstrous.

  I don’t know which of us is more in need of help, Charlie told himself, as the part of him that was regretful now tried, but failed, to oust altogether that part of him that was glad he had spoken last night. God knows how I am going to get through my remaining days with you. Perhaps I really will become ‘beastly’ and break into your cabin one night, and hurl myself on you and, as beasts are wont to do to maidens, ravish you. Perhaps I will find the experience unendurable, and will ditch you and your family and friends, and fly back to Cairo by myself. Or perhaps I will merely become sullen, brooding and stupid, and now no longer act Quasimodo, but whether I want to or not, become Quasimodo. A hunchback obsessed by, in this version, an at last utterly pitiless Esmeralda.

  Oh Isabella, Charlie muttered silently down the table—saying, at the same time, to Mr Rizzuto, that if he were him he’d wait till they got to Aswan before changing any more money—I don’t know if I can bear it.

  Yet, ‘of course’ Charlie told himself when it was over, bear it and not too badly all things considered, he did. Naturally, he had moments when he thought he wouldn’t. When he became so dizzy, so sick with longing that one night, five minutes after Isabella had announced that she was going to sleep, he couldn’t resist slipping away from his friends and walking as quietly as possible along the deck outside Isabella’s cabin … pausing as he passed it … glancing through the windows, that weren’t completely covered inside by curtains … and catching just the quickest, stealthiest glimpse of Isabella in her brassiere and pants … When he lay on his bed in his cabin crying for two hours, without a break, crying for the sorrows of the world, he told himself, but crying for himself, because he loved and was not loved, he knew. And when another night, as he stood staring up at the sky trying to find it beautiful but instead seeing only stars and hearing a voice muttering ‘Rents in a dark sheet, my foot!’ he felt so very much like the Hunchback of Notre Dame that it was all he could do to stop himself lolloping around the boat howling, a twisted, tortured abortion of a man for whom the Nile had become a river of pain running through him, splitting him in two as effectively as it did the desert. There were moments when he found himself thinking that if he didn’t have Isabella he would die, that she was his last chance in life and that no one from now on would ever love him; and that whatever the consequences he should go to her cabin right now, gag her and tie her up, and then do everything to her he had ever imagined doing to anyone. Even at his most miserable, however, he couldn’t silence the quietest, most hesitant of little whispers inside him that told him that love Isabella though he did and find the idea of life without her unendurable, in just a few more days now she would be gone from Egypt probably forever, and he would be glad and relieved when she was. He would be able to return to his old life, with his old friend pity by his side, and with any luck nothing would come along to disturb him for months, years, or decades—though maybe that was asking a bit too much.

  A whisper he suspected that Isabella knew he was hearing; the reason why she held back from declaring total war on him and contented herself with never looking at him, never speaking to him apart from muttering those unavoidable ‘good mornings’ or ‘goodnights’, and always threatening him, but never actually doing it, with the possibility that she might go to her father and tell him, no doubt with tears and blushes, that Charlie, the loathsome Charlie, had, er … exposed himself to her.

  Had she not heard it, he had a feeling that she might just have taken this last step, wicked though it would have been. And had she taken it, he was almost certain that he wouldn’t, except perhaps to the Englishman, have denied it.

  Only five days to go. Only four days to go. Only three days to go …

  Then, finally, it was the last day. And because Charlie hadn’t silenced that little voice inside him—on the contrary, had at times strained his ear to make out its message more clearly—and because, too, he was feeling proud of himself for having got through his week of misery as well, on the whole, as he had, on that last day he felt able to take a couple of risks. One of them consisted of his telling the Rizzutos and company, when they arrived in Cairo on an early morning flight from Aswan, that he was going to take them to this father’s flat for a second breakfast, and was going to leave them there for a couple of hours while he went off and attended to some business. Some business that involved his going to the bank, withdrawing a great deal of money, and then taking a taxi to the Bazaar; where he went to a jeweller’s shop in front of which Isabella had paused two weeks before; chose what seemed to him the most beautiful necklace in the place; and paid almost what the jeweller asked for it, having neither the time nor the inclination to haggle. And the second risk, later that day, consisted of his offering to take Isabella out in a boat on the lake at El Fayoum; an oasis in the desert west of Cairo, where he had taken his friends for a final lunch. That is: Isabella said to her father, as they stood looking out over the glittering, utterly still lake, that she would like to go rowing on it. Whereupon Giorgio Orsini said that was fine by him, as long as he didn’t expect her to go with him; her brother and step-brother said more or less the same thing; her step-mother didn’t even bother to comment on what she clearly saw as a foolish whim; and the Rizzutos and Isabella’s step-sister were some distance away, talking amongst themselves. Thus Charlie was more or less obliged to shuffle forward, look as hang-dog as possible, and mutter that if Isabella liked, he’d row her out into the lake. It was a risk, all the same; for he realised that by so putting himself forward he had laid himself open to the danger, even at this late date, of being denounced by Isabella; or anyway having her disgust at the idea made so plain that her father would have said ‘Isabella!’; an explanation for such rudeness would have been demanded; and once again the truth—or Isabella’s version of it—would have been hauled out. As, he told himself, as he sweated still more profusely than normal, might have happened; had not the Englishman, within a second of his making his offer, stepped forward and said that if they were going out on the lake, would they mind if he joined them. He should, Charlie reflected—as he burbled no, of course not—have been furious at this intervention that deprived him of his only chance of spending twenty minutes or half an hour alone in the company of his beloved. In fact, however, it simply made him feel relieved, since it took the wind out of Isabella’s sails, and made it both impossible for her to express her disgust, and slightly more likely that she would actually accept his offer; as she never would have if it had seemed there were only to be the two of them. The principal motive, Charlie suspected, as he said he would go off and find a boat and pick them up at the water’s edge where they stood, for the Englishman’s intervention. He was undoubtedly aware of the tension between the sixteen-year-old girl and the ungainly guide; probably had a good idea why that tension existed; and knew as well as Charlie that Isabella would not go out unchaperoned.