The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘Mmm,’ Giuseppe nodded, and then turned back to his newspaper. ‘Though I have a feeling,’ he added, with just the faintest air of resentment, ‘that it’s you he really’—he paused—‘admires.’

  Yes, there had been other factors involved, and all of them, though especially the last, had contributed to her ‘falling in love’. Nevertheless, had it not been for the discovery of the poetry, she, or her feelings, wouldn’t have taken that decisive last step into an area that was no longer quite that of mere liking. His polite seriousness would have been simply admirable; his good looks simply a pleasure for the eyes. And as for his apparent infatuation with the Bellettinis in general and her in particular, that would have been just something to smile about; as one prepared oneself for the eventual and inevitable hurt when he either decided to drop one altogether, or started to treat one with a feigned and condescending affection. To smile about or to feel guilty about, for feeling gratified, while Dario was showing impatience for the mother who had been so good to one and of whom one was so fond. The poetry, though, transformed everything and touched everything with magic. So what had been admirable became wonderful. What a pleasure, joy. And what had been a matter for smiles, guilt and eventual disappointment, became a source of happiness, faith in the future, and yes, why not admit it, a certain cruel satisfaction that one had, for all one’s apparent disadvantages, triumphed over a rival whom one would have thought held all the cards in her hand. Honestly, she did like Amelia, Maria told herself: very much. And if the woman was unhappy, she had reasons to be so, none of which her wealth and her three healthy children in any way discredited. All the same, for Dario to prefer her, Maria Bellettini, to such a well-bred, finely-tuned creature couldn’t help but make her want to do a tiny, private dance, and to say, in the direction of The Villa, ‘Ha ha ha, see what I’ve got.’

  A temptation that made her wonder if her feelings for Dario were simply maternal, and if she saw in him the son she had never had but always longed for. (Giuseppe, perhaps strangely, hadn’t; which was why, she was convinced, after the birth of their first child, a daughter, he hadn’t wanted any more children. In case he wasn’t so lucky next time.) She didn’t think they were however; any more (thank God! she told herself) than they were ‘simply’ the feelings she might have had if, grotesque though the idea was to her, she had wanted Dario as a lover. No, she told herself, she had ‘fallen in love’ with Dario, became stupidly attached to the boy and come to think of him as some sort of knight in shining armour. Yet her feelings were not those of an over-possessive mother, any more than they were those of a sexually frustrated, middle-aged woman. Really, it was just her seeing his poetry as a declaration of faith, a message of hope, that had made her feel as she did. It was also because she saw him as a bearer of faith and an embodiment of hope that she didn’t try to struggle against her feelings but saw them, in themselves, as declarations of faith and hope.

  How can such feelings be wrong, she would ask herself, when without them I’m not sure I could cope with all that’s happened? Of course I have my religion and nothing will ever make me lose it. But somehow, just at the moment, wrong though I know it is, that isn’t quite enough.

  These, then, were the events of that summer fifteen years ago. And it was hardly surprising, Maria often repeated to herself as she went through them in her head, that she hadn’t immediately seen them as being associated with Amelia’s offer of a house and a job, and her and Giuseppe’s acceptance of that offer. Indeed, amidst all the distress of Giuseppe’s illness, the promise of the house (and the promise from Amelia that went with it: ‘You must never worry, whatever happens, you’ll always have a home, both of you’) had seemed liked a nest of safety being held out to two exhausted birds. Moreover, they had all, those events, formed such a complete, interlinked block among themselves, that she would have defied anyone to see them as justifying her sense of foreboding. Giuseppe’s increasing quietness had been caused by his depression at the idea of Elisabetta’s marriage and the onset of his disease. The intensity of his depression regarding Elisabetta had also been due to the onset of the disease, though one could have looked at that the other way round and put the onset of the disease down to the intensity of his depression regarding Elisabetta. The loss of faith had been a natural result of the actual diagnosis of the disease. And her own strange, to her unsettling, attachment had come about because she too was suffering from Elisabetta’s departure from the family circle. In the gloom that had suddenly settled over the Bellettini household, the poetry-writing schoolboy had seemed like some sort of beacon to her; and all her life she had needed a beacon. That, surely, was all.

  Well, Maria told herself: until they actually moved into the house, in the February of the following year, that was all. Then, little by little, she had started to see.

  It was the shutters that gave her her clue.

  The Villa was built at the top of a hill to the north of Santa Teresa; and against the disadvantage of the wind that blew twelve months of the year, driving dust and sand into every corner, and stunting the growth of the garden, had to be set the advantage of its position. From one side one could look down over the town; from the other one had a view of cliffs, headlands, the sea and, over the straits of Bonifaccio, Corsica. A view so magnificent, especially from the upper floors, that once Maria had started to work at The Villa, she told Amelia that though she had lived in Santa Teresa all her life and thought she knew all its vantage points, she had never found anywhere that even came near to giving one a picture like this, and had never imagined that such a place existed. ‘There was always a hill in the way, a bit missing, or the cliffs were at the wrong angle,’ she murmured. ‘Even from just down there, in the car park. But here, it almost makes you feel as if you’re drunk.’

  It was to give Maria and Giuseppe a chance of sharing most, if not all of this view that Amelia had proposed that her friends should have the top house in the row of houses her husband was rebuilding across the way; and that in the front room there should be a window facing north. ‘So you can sit there and feel drunk the whole time,’ she had said, smiling anxiously. As seven months later, when the rebuilding was completed, a window there was. With a frame solid enough to withstand the constant wind, and fittings of brass that would not be corroded by the salt.

  Yet, built though this window was and have though it did a view nearly as splendid as that to be seen from the lower floors of The Villa, Maria was not able to sit in front of it and feel drunk. Any more than she was able to sit in front of it and feel simply grateful to her employer for having provided it. It was not because she had suddenly gone off the view, or was afraid of suffering from some kind of visual hangover; nor because she, as she suspected Giuseppe did, felt, however slightly, resentful of the fact that though what she could see from here was splendid, it wasn’t quite as splendid as what they could see from there. It was rather because literally after the first few minutes that they had occupied their new and beautiful home, Giuseppe had half-implored her and half-ordered her to close the shutters, and hide the view; and she, feeling sorry for him and not being used to receiving so much as half-orders from this normally most considerate of men, had done as he had asked, or commanded. And after that, the shutters were never reopened.

  Giuseppe’s explanation for his—he admitted it himself—irrational and, as far as Maria was concerned, unfair behaviour was that his jaw was particularly sensitive to draughts and, while the window was solidly constructed, just the sound of that endless north wind blowing against the glass made him think he could feel some almost imperceptible current, or imagine he could even if he couldn’t. That in itself gave him twinges.

  ‘Besides,’ he said quietly, sitting with his hands in his lap and staring at his knees, ‘as the doctor said, quite soon I’m going to be—well, you’ll be able to see quite clearly what’s happening to me. And frankly I’d rather … I mean, for your sake, as much as my own.’ He raised his head and gazed towards the other window in the
room, that overlooked the dusty lane and the side entrance to The Villa. ‘And maybe, if we put some light cotton curtains over that …’

  An explanation that Maria never questioned. Any more than she ever attempted to bring light not only into what should have been that brightest and sunniest of rooms, but into any of the rooms of the house (except the kitchen, which she insisted must remain unshuttered). She simply turned on a lamp if she wanted to read, or sew, or write a letter to Elisabetta and, for the rest, grew used to living in obscurity.

  Yet, though she never questioned him and the pity she felt for him was genuine, Maria never, either, believed Giuseppe. What he had said could have been true: it sounded true enough. Moreoever, if he hadn’t said it in the way he had, she might have been able to go along with it. Only there had been a peevishness, a petulance in his tone that had somehow given the lie to what he said; and a fawning, faintly servile set to his shoulders that had almost shouted at her, ‘You mustn’t believe this nonsense.’ No, she told herself, that’s not the explanation at all. What is the explanation, is that that view, and the light and the space and the sense of exhilaration that that light and space induce, remind him of his lost faith and seem to him a mockery of his present, unbelieving state. And while he can bear his pain, and even the knowledge that he has an incurable disease that will, eventually, if only after much suffering, kill him, that—that memory of the width, the scope and the brightness that he once had—he cannot bear. It would be like a blind man being reminded of his sight.

  Such was Maria’s first step along the path to understanding. If this step had been taken without too much effort, however, and within days of moving into the new house, another two years were to pass before she took the next step and reached her destination. Even then, she sometimes suspected, she wouldn’t have taken it if Elisabetta hadn’t given her a shove …

  They were walking, the mother and her three-month pregnant daughter, along the clifftop, on what was proving to be the first decent weekend of a hitherto wretched year. The wind had dropped to scarcely more than a breeze. The sky was blue and the clouds were white. And although it was still only March, the sun had real warmth in it. So much so that whereas just three days ago there hadn’t been a flower in sight, now, as the two women made their way carefully along the muddy little track, the whole clifftop seemed to be blooming. Cyclamens, wild orchids, violets, dandelions—everywere amidst the coarse green undergrowth there were splashes of colour. Scarlet, blue, purple, yellow …

  It was beautiful; and both Maria and Elisabetta, already excited about the baby, felt as if they had been reborn themselves; and that, as Maria had been on the top floor of The Villa, they were intoxicated. The choppy sea was green and sparkling; the air was so clear it looked as though it had just been washed; and over the straits, in Corsica, the snowy mountain tops gleamed as if lit from within.

  ‘Oh, Mamma,’ Elisabetta said, taking her mother’s hand and squeezing it, ‘isn’t it wonderful?’

  And ‘Oh, Mamma,’ she added a few moments later. ‘How can you bear to live in that darkness all the time? In a way, it would have been better if you’d never moved.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maria said, without thinking, ‘I know.’

  And that did it.

  Maria stood there, gazing out on the splendour and feeling now, as befits one who has just been reborn, that she was seeing the world for the first time. For all these months, she told herself, she had been thinking of Giuseppe’s loss of faith as coming towards the end of that dreadful summer, as a result of his sickness and to a certain extent of Elisabetta’s marriage. But, she suddenly saw, she was wrong: it had come right at the beginning, and she had only recognised it towards the end. It was Giuseppe’s loss of faith that had caused him to be so downcast at the prospect of his daughter’s wedding. It was Giuseppe’s loss of faith that had contributed towards, if it hadn’t precisely caused, the spread of his disease. Naturally, he might have become sick anyway, loss of faith or no. She was a great believer in the power of the minds, however, and a great believer in the power of faith; and though he might have become sick, she liked to think that he wouldn’t have. Yes, she told herself, standing amidst the flowers, with the cries of the gulls mingling with the sound of the surf. It was Giuseppe’s loss of faith that had undone him; Giuseppe’s loss of faith that lay at the heart of everything.

  And what had caused this loss of faith?

  Ah, but that, she told herself, feeling now that for a second she was the wisest, most far-seeing woman on earth, was easy. It was because Giuseppe, her good, honest husband who believed that the world was moving slowly towards a time when all men would be free and equal, had fallen in love with someone who was, to his way of thinking, the enemy. He had fallen in love with her. He had, rightly or wrongly, interpreted her particular brand of hand-wringing and her particular form of unhappiness as a voice calling, from up on the officers’ deck where she stood, ‘Oh, if only you could see the emptiness that I see. Oh, if only you could see …’ And he had come to think that her view was somehow better or truer than his own.

  A betrayal of which the final proof was: his acceptance of Amelia’s offer of a house that almost shared the outlook of The Villa …

  So, at last, she got there.

  Of course, Maria rushed on as soon as she reached this conclusion, it was possible that she was talking nonsense. Equally, it was possible that she was imagining things and getting over-excited, partly as a result of Elisabetta’s pregnancy and partly because the strain of living for two years in the half-light with a man she no longer really loved was beginning to tell on her. She could well be, she knew, particularly as there was one further factor to be taken into account that might have affected her reasoning. She didn’t think she was, though. Truly, she told herself, that was how things had gone, however unlikely it might sound. Giuseppe’s loss of faith was at the root of everything: of his depression, of his disease and of her looking to Dario for, as she liked to think of it, an alternative source of light. And Giuseppe’s loss of faith had been a direct result of his attachment to, and his being corrupted by, Amelia Cavalieri.

  She was absolutely convinced.

  The further factor that Maria had to take into account, as regards her conclusion, was that since the day she had left Santa Teresa, some two and a half years earlier, Amelia Cavalieri had neither returned to The Villa, nor had any contact whatsoever with her friends and employees, the Bellettinis. Her husband had occasionally flown in for a day or two to give Giuseppe and Maria the keys of the house, or to see how the building work was progressing; and for a fortnight the previous year the two daughters had come with an aunt. From and of Amelia herself, however, there had been neither a word, nor a trace. And while Maria told herself there was nothing unusual in this—after all, the Cavalieris had never been regular in their visits to the island, to say the least—she couldn’t help but feel hurt by the way she and Giuseppe had been so taken up and then apparently dropped, and certain that though it was possible that Amelia would return that year, or the year after, in fact she would never see her again.

  Amelia, she told herself, is a bird, a strange, unhappy and maybe terrible bird. Who flies into town for a couple of months; takes people under her wing; and then flies away. And once she has flown away, she never, ever comes back. Either because she can’t bear to see the destruction she wrought on her previous visit; or because, a bird of prey, she sees no sense in going back to bones she knows, by now, are dry.

  Hadn’t she picked them clean herself?

  Maria might have been wrong about Giuseppe’s loss of faith. About Amelia, though, she was not wrong. The woman never did return to Santa Teresa. And by the time another twelve years had passed, her certainty that she never would was as fixed in her mind as her religion, particularly as for the last five and a half years not even Mr Cavalieri had been in touch. A cheque arrived every month from a lawyer in Milan to cover her and Giuseppe’s—or in fact, now, one of her cousin’s son’s—w
ages. (Though small and though she did give Luca half of it for doing what Giuseppe had formerly done in and around The Villa, the cheque was regularly adjusted to keep pace with inflation and enabled them, since they were not paying any rent, to live with a fair degree of comfort.) A letter, from that same lawyer, arrived every six months, to ask if they had had any unforeseen expenses; and if they were both well. And once a year, around Christmas, a case of wine was delivered; with the best wishes of ‘Cavalieri & Co’. But apart from that, silence; and at times Maria had the impression that she would never have any direct contact with any member of the family again. She would just go on here, year after year, cleaning and washing and baking her cakes, until first Giuseppe died and then she died, and someone from Cavalieri & Co turned up to hire a new resident housekeeper for The Villa. Or, as was possibly more likely, The Villa—and the holiday apartments (and her house?)—were sold and she either started working for the new owners, or found herself having to pay rent, or fight an eviction order in the courts. At times …

  Normally, however, it was only when she was feeling particularly depressed that this feeling came to Maria. For the most part, she did expect some further contact with the Cavalieri family, or at least with one member of it. It was silly of her, she knew. If only she had been able to throw open those shutters and let some light into her clean, neat house, her fantasy would have flown out the door and reality would have won the day. The reality that told her, no, indeed she would not have any further contact with the Cavalieri family. Since she couldn’t open them, though, she couldn’t prevent her fantasy from swelling like a fungus in the dark, nor prevent herself from thinking that at this stage of her life it was this fungus alone that provided her with nourishment. Oh, she loved Elisabetta and her grandchildren; but somehow she doubted, had she had only them, if she could have put up with the gloom in which she lived. (‘Of course you could,’ a tiny voice sometimes muttered to her, ‘Stop being so melodramatic. You could put up with anything.’ Generally, however, she ignored this voice when she heard it, and even when she didn’t, gave it no more than a small smile and a shrug, and the sighed admission, ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’) As it was, her fantasy kept her alive, kept her going and made her feel that as long as she preserved it she would be able to put up with anything on earth.