The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  As it happened she wouldn’t go out even with a chaperone. For by the time Charlie had stumbled over to the jetty where boats were rented and rowed round to the hotel garden where he had left the others, Isabella had disappeared. Not to reappear before Charlie, to the embarrassment of both, had helped the Englishman on board and had rowed him a couple of hundred yards out into the lake. She reappeared, however, only to stand on the parapet of the hotel garden and wave no, she didn’t want to come after all, and to signal that Charlie shouldn’t think, as he’d already started to, of rowing back to fetch her.

  Yet though he did take uselessly the risk of offering to go boating with Isabella, the twenty-five minutes he spent on the lake with the Englishman were not entirely wasted. Because while the first fifteen of those minutes were spent in almost complete silence, as both rowed and rower wished he were not where he was, the remaining ten were passed in talking about Isabella. And if she couldn’t be with them—well, Charlie thought, talking about her was the next best thing. Particularly as, when he was rowing in silence, he had been brooding about her and reminding himself of all the stupid, vacuous things she had said to him when she was still speaking to him. ‘Oh, Charlie’—walking through the streets of Cairo—‘you know I’m a very complex person. I think maybe I’m even a little schizophrenic. On the one hand I love crowds. And on the other, you know, I hate crowds.’ ‘Oh, Charlie’—looking at some children working in a rug factory, which she had insisted upon being taken to, though Charlie had told her he hated such places (with one or two exceptions they were just sweat shops, exploiting in the most cynical fashion children who should have been at school)—‘how can you be so beastly, saying they’re exploited? Look at all those happy little faces. The man in the other room assured me they only work half a day here and the rest of the time do go to school.’

  Silly, spoiled little brat, he had been telling himself; fatuous, false little Italian.

  It was just then, as he was saying this to himself, unable at the same time not to look round at his silly, spoiled beloved, that the Englishman, as if knowing now that this was what Charlie was thinking and wanting to say ‘Stop it’, suddenly murmured, ‘I feel terribly sorry for Isabella, you know. She’s a genuinely sweet and kind girl. But she’s so surrounded by people; not here, I mean at home, with her mother, and even more her mother’s friends, who have intellectual pretensions but hardly an original thought in their heads. Everything is taken from somewhere else, from intellectual fashion magazines, if you know what I mean and unless she’s very careful, or very lucky, she’s going to be corrupted. And it would be a real shame. Left to herself I think she’d be happy, because underneath she’s not only kind and sweet, but actually very honest. Whereas if all those people she has to live among—and I know them, I’ve met them; they’re the sort of people you just know from the tone of their voice are false—if all of them get at her, she’s going to be miserable. And she shouldn’t be. I mean, no one should be, obviously. But, well, you know what I mean, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Charlie wanted to tell him, yes. And thank you for pulling me up, for stopping me going down the road of resentment. Of course you’re right and of course it’s not her fault if she says silly, vacuous things. It will be, in a little while, when she knows what she’s saying and continues to say it. For the moment, though, yes, she is still innocent—innocent and sweet and kind—and until she ceases to be, I would be mad not to go on loving her. Mad and wrong and bad. For surely, if anything can save Isabella from the fate this man predicts for her, from the lies she’s been telling herself about me in the last week, it’s love, the love of her family and friends; and the love of monsters like me.

  Oh Isabella, Isabella, Charlie wanted to shout across the water, of course I don’t hate you. And until you really do denounce me, or renounce me, I promise you can count on me.

  To the Englishman he said: ‘Who are all these people she lives with, and why doesn’t she live with her father and step-mother?’; and, as the man told him, he rowed his way slowly back to the jetty.

  *

  If Charlie had stopped hating Isabella because of what the Englishman had said, it was also because of those words spoken on the lake that Charlie, that afternooon after he had taken his friends back to Cairo, decided to compound the first risk he had taken that day and give Isabella the necklace he had bought her himself. Till then, he had been planning on giving it to her father and asking him to hand it to her after the plane had left. When it would be too late for her to start telling lies about him, or he wouldn’t be around to hear if she did. Since she was so fundamentally kind and sweet and honest, however, (or if she was, Charlie couldn’t help telling himself) maybe, by giving her the necklace in person, he would be able to reassure her; hand her, at the same time, an unspoken and unwritten message that said more or less what he had wanted to shout from the lake.

  If she wasn’t kind and sweet and honest, and had already been corrupted, then of course that message would be ignored, or torn up and thrown in his face along with who knows what accusations. But that, Charlie thought, was all just part of the risk.

  He was feeling nervous; and he had gone over the presentation of the necklace ceremony about a hundred times in his head by the time the minibus had reached his father’s flat, his friends had picked up their bags and said goodbye to his father and mother, and he was accompanying them to the airport for the ten o’clock flight to Rome. He had imagined thrusting it into Isabella’s hands and running away. He had imagined taking the girl aside and saying ‘Isabella, please …’ And he had imagined creeping up behind her and without warning putting it round her neck. In fact, though, the traffic being still worse than usual and the airport still more crowded than his father had warned him it would be, by the time they got there Charlie hardly had a chance to think about ceremonies at all, or feel nervous about anything other than everyone missing their plane. He rushed around trying to find how and where to check in. He pushed, shoved, panted, sweated and lurched from counter to counter trying to save his friends from having to join long lines of German and Scandinavian tourists. Mr Rizzuto cornered him and made a long but well-meant speech about how grateful they all were for his help, and ‘this’—a little package placed in a hand—was from all of them. Giorgio Orsini gave him a sardonic little wink and a somehow ironic slap on the shoulder, as if to say ‘You and I know one or two things that they don’t know Charlie.’ His wife earnestly implored him to come and stay with them in Italy. Her children kissed him on the cheek. Isabella’s brother shook his hand. And the Englishman, also on the sardonic side, said, ‘Keep dreaming of England, Charlie, and thank you for everything.’ By which time, Charlie was in such a flap that he had not only practically forgotten he hadn’t said goodbye to the one person he really wanted to say goodbye to, but had also practically forgotten that she existed. Indeed, if he hadn’t seen her standing just a yard this side of the immigration control, waiting for her brother to join her, she might well, he told himself afterwards, have disappeared without trace from both his life and his memory. (Of course she wouldn’t really have, he also told himself. He would have been heartbroken and distraught if she had slipped through the barrier without his being able to say goodbye to her. He suspected, however, that he added this more out of a sense of duty than conviction, and just as with a part of himself he had been looking forward to Isabella leaving, so with a part of himself he would have been relieved if she had simply vanished.)

  But Isabella was standing just a yard this side of the barrier. She didn’t disappear without a trace and, seeing her there, Charlie felt once again both that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life, and that when she did go through immigration control and he lost touch with her undoubtedly forever, it would be as if she had hacked off some part of his body with a blunt knife and was taking it away with her. She would leave him still more deformed, more grotesque than ever and without, now, the slightest chance of his ever being w
hole, or unscarred again. She couldn’t go, he told himself as he stumbled towards her, the apotheosis of ugliness, gracelessness, disconnectedness. It would more than disfigure him if he never saw her again; it would kill him. And her beauty, her untainted beauty, her untouched beauty, was itself the blade that was thrusting into him and was causing him such agony he thought he was going to scream. Oh, her slim dark arms. Oh, her long wonderful legs. Oh, her small, round breasts. Oh, her thighs, her cheeks, her hair, her eyes; he couldn’t go on if he never saw her again. He couldn’t. Oh, why hadn’t she just gone through the barrier and disappeared? How could she torture him like this, standing there grave and perfect as his limbs were severed, his nails torn from his fingers, his eyes gouged out and his bowels burned with irons? Oh Isabella, go, go, he wanted to scream at her. ‘Oh Isabella, please, let me hold you, touch you, enfold you, envelop you. Oh Isabella, Isabella …’

  ‘Isabella.’ But that, as she turned and looked at him, no longer in horror, or pity, but just with the mild surprise of someone who has been dreaming and hasn’t realised she is being approached, was all he was capable of saying. And aware, out of the corner of his eye, that little Giorgio Orsini was moving in fast from the left to claim his daughter, and was looking more sardonic and beady-eyed than ever—indeed, was looking absolutely delighted about something; that something being almost certainly the torment he had seen that Charlie was going through—he just thrust out the packet he had been clutching in his hand, glanced at it with a feeling of sweating terror when it occurred to him he might have given her the packet that Mr Rizzuto had just given him and then, having seen he had handed over the right one, turned and fled.

  Keep going, Charlie, he shouted to himself as he crashed away, unconscious now of his foulness, of the abomination that he must have seemed as he careered into people, tripped, picked himself up and staggered on. Keep going, don’t stop, and don’t, whatever you do, look round. Don’t, don’t, Charlie commanded himself. Keep going, keep going, keep going. If Orpheus, though, who was a god, could not resist the temptation, how could Charlie Epps, who was a miscarried foetus that had survived? And while it seemed to him that he must have covered at least a hundred yards, when he did turn round he saw that he had gone no more than twenty. What was worse, by some horrible trick of fate, in the time it had taken him to walk those twenty yards, all the people who had a moment ago been crowding the space between him and Isabella had, for a second or two, moved aside. So not only was there no one to shield him from his beloved’s gaze, but there was no one to shield him from the gaze of Isabella’s father, Isabella’s step-mother, and brother and sister, in fact of the entire Rizzuto/Orsini party. If embarrassment had ever been distilled, all the self-consciousness of the world reduced and refined to an essence of quite appalling intensity, Charlie was certain it couldn’t have been more bitter, more agonising than the wave of whatever it was that washed over him in that instant. He felt, he told himself, as a butterfly must feel, when a pin is thrust through its heart. Or perhaps as a man must feel when about to be shot in the head. He was paralysed; he was stripped to the bone; he was more exposed than he had ever imagined it was possible to be exposed, and survive.

  The eyes looked at him. They turned to Isabella, who was staring down at her present, herself scarlet with embarrassment, and then back to him. They watched, some here, some there, and all flashing back and forth, as Isabella, made clumsy by the attention, stripped the paper from the little box. They watched as she opened the box and took from it a gold necklace inlaid with garnets that looked, from where Charlie was standing and in her hands, like the cheapest, most vulgar trinket that man had ever invented. And they watched—their owners, Charlie was certain, scarcely breathing now—as Isabella stared at the necklace, as she contemplated (and this was so obvious Charlie himself held his breath) either just dropping it on the floor, as if it were contaminated, or actually hurling it from her, as if it were white hot. And as she then, very slowly, clasped it in her hand and walked over towards Charlie.

  What was she going to do? Lash his face with it? Give it back to him without a word? Or content herself with hissing some obscenity at him, before marching off to show her passport to the waiting, watching officer?

  For it wasn’t just her friends and family who were watching now, Charlie felt. It was as if the whole airport and everyone in it had frozen, all waiting to see the outcome of this sudden little drama.

  Six yards … five yards … four yards …

  ‘Thank you, Charlie,’ Isabella murmured, still red in the face, as she leaned forward and kissed him gravely, but sweetly, on the cheek. She lowered her eyes. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been beastly to you this last week. But you made me cross, pretending to be so ugly. You’re not ugly at all. You’re …’ and with that she paused, almost added something else, and turned and walked quickly away.

  For a second, as the airport came to life again, the space between Charlie and the others was filled once more with tourists and officials, and he became conscious of the noise and the confusion around him, Charlie, though he was no longer paralysed, didn’t move. He simply stood there, watching Isabella rejoin her father and friends, and seeing those friends wave at him as they started to move away.

  Then, remembering he had promised the driver of the hired minibus that he would be back immediately, he gave a quick wave in return and made his way, briskly, towards the exit.

  She had told the truth, he nearly cried out as he dodged and weaved through the crowds. In the end, even if she could have gone further, could have said why his pretending to be ugly had made her cross, she had told the truth and hadn’t tried to hide behind some fable about his having exposed himself to her. That was what had made her cross. What was more, she had been quite right to be cross. It had gone on long enough, this nonsense; this self-mutilation that necessitated the constant attention of his companion, pity. Oh Isabella, Charlie nearly cried out, aware that he was getting carried away now, but not caring, oh Isabella, you’ve saved me. I shall never pretend again. In future, I shall admit to my passions, to my hatred of the false, to my wonder at the sky, to, to above all perhaps, my love of and dream of England. And if I do admit to them, if I am always faithful to my love, who knows if we won’t, one day, see each other again?

  Briefly, as Charlie reflected that there he was going too far and that not only would he never see Isabella again, but that it was very doubtful if, having had her moment of truth, Isabella would ever have another in her life, he felt a faint mist of melancholy obscuring the sun of his happiness.

  Then that mist cleared; and walking on and touching his cheek, Charlie told himself it was useless to speculate about what might be. All that mattered was: he had been kissed. And that, for a while at least, anyone looking at him would see not a fat, ugly twenty-three year old of uncertain origins, but a young man who bore a remarkable resemblance to an Egyptian statue. A young man of ineffable beauty; with far-seeing eyes; an enigmatic smile; and an expression of consolation and grace.

  Why Are You Wearing My Daughter’s Earrings?

  The headmaster had written in March that the school wasn’t entirely satisfied with Natalia.

  She’s a lovely girl, of course, and we’re all very fond of her. Moreover, and I say this without the slightest desire to flatter or use hyperbole, she is the most intelligent girl we have in the school at the moment. Indeed, she has the finest mind of any pupil we have ever had in the school. Nonetheless, for the last few months, it has seemed to my colleagues and I that Natalia is determined to dissipate her great natural gifts. I realise this may be just the rebellious phase that all teenagers worth their salt go through. But I am afraid, precisely because Natalia is so intelligent, that she might take her rebellion further than the average teenager. She might even take it too far, and hurt not only the school but herself. So I would be grateful if, during the Easter break, you could try to have a serious talk with your daughter, and while stressing how much we value her presence, remind h
er what a waste it would be if she were to squander her talents.

  The letter James Nelligan wrote in June, however, was of a different nature.

  It deeply grieves me to have to write this, [he started]. But I fear we are going to have to ask you to remove Natalia from the school with immediate effect. She has become not merely disruptive, but a positive danger to herself and others. A moral danger, in that she seems determined to spread dissension and discord, plant doubts in the minds of those less equipped than herself to confront them; a physical danger, in that we believe she is distributing drugs to her fellow pupils. We have no proof of this; her friends are fiercely loyal to her, or perhaps are frightened of her. Nevertheless, given that a number of pupils have been found in possession of drugs or under the influence of drugs, despite their refusal to say where they obtained them, we believe Natalia is the source of these substances. What is more, she seems determined that we should believe it. For one thing, all those who have been caught form what I might call the ‘Kalugina inner circle’. For another, when challenged, while Natalia herself refuses to confirm she is the supplier, she equally refuses to deny it.

  I really could not be more sorry; as I said in my letter of 6 March, Natalia is possibly the brightest student we have ever had at Battlement. But we cannot allow even the brightest star to dim, or threaten to snuff out, the planets that circle round her. For which reason, I would be grateful if, on receipt of this, you get in touch with me at your earliest convenience, so we can discuss the matter further, and Natalia’s future can be decided.