The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘Yes, of course I will,’ Alice sniffed, wanting to tell him that as she remembered it the place had been beautifully warm by the time he and Jim had come; as warm as it had always been every time he had come since on a cold night, despite her having to run up debts in order to pay the gas bill. If she had told him any such thing, however, she might have lost control and, when she was almost rid of him, have told him far too much. No, she thought, just simper on for a few more days and tell him what he wants to hear. After that you won’t have to pretend any more. Poor Gianfranco, what would he do if he knew I was forced to live as I do, rather than choosing to? Would he be so horrified at what he would call my foolishness that he would drop me instantly? Or would his unconscious pity for me become conscious pity, that would be impossible to feel grateful for and would oblige me to drop him instantly? The latter, probably, though both might happen simultaneously. Not that it matters, of course, because I am going to drop him anyway tomorrow. Still, I would prefer our parting to be amicable; and, if possible, I would prefer him never to know the truth. Almost froze, indeed! This year I’ll turn the heating on at seven if it’s cold, and if it’s very cold, it can even go on at six.

  As it turned out, the following day was very cold; very, very cold. And that, Alice was to reflect later, was her undoing. It had snowed all morning and she had had a lot to do; and what with waiting in the slush for buses that didn’t come, running for buses that she had just missed, slipping on the ice and hurting herself, and having to wait everywhere she did go for her stockings to dry sufficiently for her to be able to go out and get them wet again, it was already past seven when she arrived home. Still, she wasn’t worried, and as she closed the door behind her she told herself she only had three things to do. The first, obviously, was to see about the heat. The second was to have a drink. And the third was to get into a hot bath and soak for half an hour. Gianfranco wouldn’t mind if he had to wait for his half avocado and his Fisherman’s Pie. In any case, it only took a second to prepare the one and half an hour to heat the other in the oven. There was no rush, no need to fret. And if she turned the gas rings on as well as the boiler—well, the place might not be tropical by the time Gianfranco showed up, but it certainly wouldn’t be as bitter as it now was. Especially if she turned the thermostat to maximum and really, on this last of their evenings together, splurged.

  She was so chilled, however, and so bruised that even as she was telling herself this, and even as she was going into the kitchen to do what she had to do, Alice couldn’t resist reversing the order of the proceedings slightly, and as she passed the bottle of whisky Gianfranco had brought last time he had flown in, opening it and taking a quick swig from it. Very much, it occurred to her, as she had the year before, before the others had arrived. Though last year she had put it into a glass … And either because she was thus sidetracked into thinking about the events of the previous year and wondering again whether she was doing the right thing, or because, not having eaten all day, the alcohol went to her head and made her feel she was about to pass out, she also couldn’t resist (just for a second, she told herself) sitting down. And next thing she knew it was eight o’clock, she was shivering uncontrollably, and if the temperature in the flat when she had come in had been around freezing, it felt now as if it were ten degrees below.

  She couldn’t believe it, she told herself as, instantly awake, she rushed to hit the boiler switch. It wasn’t possible. Not tonight of all nights. Not after Gianfranco had specifically asked her to put the heating on early. Not when she wanted integrity at least to seem comfortable, as it turned its back on temptation. Oh God, Alice thought, running to the bathroom to take a shower, I hope he doesn’t come early.

  He didn’t. He came at exactly eight-twenty, bearing flowers, champagne and his favourite hand-made chocolates. He came too early, though, for anything other than the bitterness to have been taken out of the air; and he came too early for him, as he stepped inside, held out his gifts and shuddered, to think about removing his coat.

  Any other man, Alice was also to reflect later, would have exploded at this point and either become patronising in his fury, telling her about infantile aggression and subconscious desires for revenge, or become petulant and started moaning about thoughtlessness, stupidity and selfishness. What was more, she would have sympathised with him if he had. Gianfranco however, whose self-absorption was such that he didn’t care what threatened his wellbeing, as long as the threat was eliminated and basta, was not like other men. For although, when he came in, he did shudder and say ‘Oh, Alicia’, and make a great show about refusing to take his coat off, he was also, Alice saw, obscurely pleased that his instructions had not been obeyed. And having been prepared, had the flat been warm, to be as peevish as he had been yesterday on the phone, as soon as he discovered that it wasn’t, he became instantly prepared to be in the best of tempers all evening.

  For a moment, as she apologised, begged him to close the door and thanked him for his gifts, Alice couldn’t understand this perversity and felt thrown off balance by it. Surely, she thought, he must be angry. She was, God knows, herself. Then, after that moment, the explanation came to her. It wasn’t, she told herself, that Gianfranco got a kick out of having his requests apparently wilfully ignored; nor that he enjoyed seeing her discomfited. No. It was just that he liked to be reminded of how lucky he was to live in Naples and only have to take sidetrips to Bohemia when he felt like it. That this way he could be more nostalgic than ever at the thought of Bohemia; and thus make himself more attractive than ever to his Bohemian mistress. And that this way he could insist on their going out to eat after all; and she, damp, half-dressed and totally unprepared, was no longer in a position to refuse.

  He really was a monster, she thought as she went to get herself ready; a smiling, charming monster.

  She could hardly stop herself laughing at the idea of Gianfranco’s complacency. Moreover, Gianfranco proved to be magnanimous in victory and didn’t hold out for going to the same restaurant as last year. Nevertheless, by the time Alice had sunk into a red, velvet chair in the pompous, beflowered and overheated place that he did chose, her good humour had left her; and been replaced by a feeling of panic. It was not only, she told herself, because her head was spinning with the champagne that she and Gianfranco had drunk before leaving home; nor even because, however hard she tried not to, she did indeed find Gianfranco more attractive than ever tonight—so attractive that she was afraid that unless she were very strong, she would never be able to make her farewell speech or simply say goodbye. But above all, because joking apart, she couldn’t help recalling that Gianfranco was a monster, a monster called Him, whom she had had a hand in creating, and feeling that if she didn’t manage to break with him he would, as monsters do their creators, take her over. He would do so with kindness, gifts and pity; but he would take her over, all the same, and destroy her.

  She had to find the strength, she told herself, as her panic rose within her; and, threatening to make her vomit, it paradoxically almost pushed her into making her speech immediately, to avoid the indignity of vomiting. She had to. Otherwise …

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a vision of herself as a little female Frankenstein, being pursued by a Neapolitan lawyer with a neat moustache and a smirk of self-satisfaction; and once again, for all that she fought against it, she found herself wanting to laugh.

  Gianfranco is ugliness, falsehood and the Devil, she told herself; as her panic started to subside and she murmured yes, she was feeling fine.

  Gianfranco’s way is not the true way, Gianfranco’s way is not the right way, Gianfranco’s way is not the good way, she told herself as she sipped yet another glass of champagne, and listened to Gianfranco tell her about his wife and daughter’s ailments.

  ‘Oh, Gianfranco, I’m sorry,’ she told herself, and wanted to tell him, as she looked at the menu and ordered. ‘But really, our worlds are too different.’

  And for all that she was feeling so w
eak when she arrived in the restaurant, the last thing that Alice was to reflect later was that she might actually have got the last of these phrases out before the evening was over. If, three-quarters of the way through the meal, something so disturbing, yet so inevitable hadn’t happened that she was knocked totally off balance, and left lying as helpless as she had been two or three times earlier that day, on the icy paving stones of Bloomsbury and Chelsea. For by the time she had got some food inside her she was feeling sober enough, and strong enough, to ditch someone she loved. And attached as she had become to Gianfranco and as attractive as she found him tonight, she certainly didn’t love him.

  What happened to leave her once more lying, so to speak, on her back, and this time unable to get up—at any rate for two or three weeks; because there would come a time when she’d fight back, Alice swore to herself, there would be a time when she’d win—was this. As some sticky, flaming dessert arrived at the table, presided over by a studious and intense young waiter, Gianfranco told her that tomorrow he wasn’t returning to Naples after all, but was going to take a two-week holiday. He went on to say that whether she liked it or not she was going to come with him—he didn’t care what she had to do, she needed a break and by God she was going to have one. And he concluded by informing her that they would be leaving at midday tomorrow for Mexico City, en route to a resort in Yucatan she probably hadn’t heard of but which he had been to a couple of times and was called, strange name, Can-Cun.

  Even as she keeled over Alice felt a second and now colossal wave of panic hit her; a wave so great she thought for a moment it might bob her up again and really lift her to where she wanted to be. It didn’t, though; it just dropped her and moved on; and after that all was stillness, calmness and peace.

  The Devil, she told herself as she lay there prostrate, had won. Lies, treachery and deceit had prevailed. Her monster had taken over.

  It really would be only for two or three weeks, she thought smiling at Gianfranco, and taking his hand and squeezing it. As soon as she had come back she would make her stand. She had to, hadn’t she, she reasoned; if not, she’d be lost forever. One couldn’t turn away from the truth and hope to survive. After all, what had her friends said last year, when she had first mentioned going to Can-Cun with Him?

  Lifting Gianfranco’s hand to her mouth, Alice kissed it and murmured ‘Hell’.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Gianfranco said, loooking delighted at the extent of his triumph. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was just wondering what my friends will say when they find out,’ Alice smiled. ‘And thinking they can go to hell.’

  SACRIFICE

  It was the night the policeman pushed her that Gloria decided to leave.

  She had been taking part in a demonstration all day, and she returned home cold, tired and depressed. Cold, because it was January and an east wind had been blowing. Tired, because she had been on her feet for ten hours without a break, and the mere effort of trying to keep warm had exhausted her. And depressed, because though her opposition to the government against which she had been demonstrating was sincere, she suspected that her attitude towards what that government stood for was a little more ambiguous than she would ever have admitted to her fellow demonstrators and liked to admit to herself.

  Didn’t she pride herself on her ‘civilisedness’? Yes, she did. Wasn’t her ‘civilisedness’ a very European affair? Yes, it was. And wasn’t that government an upholder of European standards? Well, yes, in a way, in a contradictory, possibly perverted way, it was. Therefore … of course, she tried to tell herself, tolerance, a love of justice, and a belief in democracy and the equal rights of all human beings were also a legacy of European civilisation. But, first she wasn’t sure if she was on very firm ground in telling herself this, and secondly, even if tolerance, justice and democracy were the legacy, she couldn’t help feeling that the fortune from which that legacy descended had been acquired in the name of quite other precepts; specifically, those of intolerance, injustice and tyranny. And if that were the case—Oh, it was all so complicated and perhaps the best thing to do was not think at all, but simply do what one believed was right. Even if one did have doubts, even if one had been born and raised in that very country whose rulers one found so abhorrent and despite everything, with a part of oneself one wished one were back there, still there, now. Under the sun, amidst the flowers and away from this England in which one felt a stranger, in which one lived, for all that one had a goodish job and a reasonable income, in a squalor that was no less squalid for being self-induced and in which one’s children, for who knows what reason, had come near to being destroyed.

  It was because she was feeling so cold, tired and depressed, Gloria told herself later, that instead of having a long, hot bath and a large glass of watered whisky when she got in, and then calling Paul to see if he wanted to come over, she sat on her bed without even taking her coat off and swigged scotch straight from the bottle. And it was because she had thus fallen asleep, still cold and still wearing her coat, that she felt so very awful when, she wasn’t sure how much later, she was woken by the doorbell ringing and ringing. That she felt so very awful, and that her reaction to what happened when she groped her way downstairs was so extreme. Naturally it would have been fairly extreme at the best of times: her anger was such she would have had to do something. But, she suspected, had the circumstances been different, that something would have been something good, something constructive. Something that would have made her redouble her efforts against what she considered the forces of evil and helped to silence any questions she might have been asking herself as to which side, ultimately, she was on. It might also have been something, she occasionally admitted, that allowed her after a while to laugh, albeit bitterly, at the very irony, the very grotesqueness of what happened. As it was, she was led to do something harmful and destructive, something she was aware was wrong even at the time. And something that she knew, far from silencing them, was only likely to swell disturbing voices in her mind. Not to mention make it impossible for her so much as to smile at the memory of that evening.

  What did happen when she opened the door was this.

  The five youngish men who had identified themselves through the letterbox as policemen rushed forward and muttered something about David and Michael Bernstein. When Gloria pulled herself up to her full five foot ten, stood arms spread out in the middle of the narrow hallway, and managed to ask in her grandest manner if she could see a search warrant, one of them, who as luck would have it was black, looked at her as if she were insane, said ‘Get out the way, lady,’ and gave her a shove that sent her flying. And when she had picked herself up, had suppressed the temptation to go racing down the stairs to the basement after them shrieking ‘How dare you treat me like that!’ and contented herself with looking as disdainful and, she hoped, as transcendentally indignant as possible, the last of the policemen who had burst in, a pasty-faced, thickset man who was now standing by the front door to make sure no one tried to leave, looked her up and down, gave her a sort of nodding smile and said,

  ‘What is it? You don’t like the nignogs? Well, don’t worry; neither do I.’

  Then, for a moment, Gloria thought she really would shriek; shriek, and wail, and scream, ‘You fool, don’t you know who I am, don’t you know what I’ve spent my life, not to mention the whole of today, fighting for? How dare you talk to me like that! How dare you!’ After that second, however, and feeling now too confused to know what to say, she merely opened the door to the living room, on the left of the hallway, walked in and started taking books off the shelves. A policeman—an agent to the powers that, for all the lip-service they paid to the opposition, supported the government of her native land—had used violence towards her, had pushed her over. That policeman had been black. And his colleague, another agent of those powers that, in the final analysis, believed in the superiority of white men to all others, had attempted to ally himself with her by appealing to her sense of a
shared European (i.e. white) past. It was beyond her. She couldn’t work it out. A black policeman. ‘Out the way lady … You don’t like the nignogs …’ No, she once again wanted to scream, it isn’t possible. I cannot cope with this any more. I will not cope with this any more. Me, me! Who has spent all her life fighting. Me, to try to appeal to me. Me, being pushed over by … no, no, no, no. That’s it. I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more. All right, I know that one must go on fighting, or die. I know that one shouldn’t, one cannot allow one stupid, one grotesque incident to change the course of one’s life. As I know that what one violent policeman does to me is not really important in the long term. But I don’t care. I cannot, I will not put up with this squalor, this wretchedness, this misery any more. I hate this country. I do not belong in this country. And although of course I also cannot and will not return to the one country I would in a way love to return to, I am going to move to some other country, similar in climate if nothing else, and I am going to retire from the world. I am abandoning civilisation. I am turning my back on civilisation, be it the civilisation of economic and cultural dominance, the civilisation that worships, above all others, a white god, or the civilisation that promotes justice and freedom and love for one’s fellow men, and rejects, as much as it dares, the very god which in its heart it worships. I am going to do it, moreover, just as soon as I possibly can; within a week if it is feasible, within a month whatever happens. I have fought and fought and fought. Now other people can take up the sword. Dear God, dear God, how dare he? How dare he, how dare he, how dare he? Me. In my own house. How dare he?

  Uncertain as to which of the two ‘he’s’ she was referring to, Gloria left her task for a moment and looked round at her pasty-faced, would-be conspirator, who was looking at her.