The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘Your colleagues won’t find anything,’ she told him, as if speaking to him from a great height. ‘My sons have been in Mexico for the past six months, and they’ve been off drugs for seven.’

  *

  It would have been easy for her to change her mind the following day; she knew that. And if what had happened had happened to anyone else, she knew that it was more than likely that he or she would have. Since, though, she had, if only vaguely, been searching for an excuse to leave England practically from the day she had arrived, sixteen years before, she did not. Moreover, after the police had left, having piled all her books on the floor, she had proceeded in a sort of delirium of fury to demolish her living room so completely it would have cost hundreds of pounds to make it habitable again. With the result that when she came downstairs at midday and surveyed the wreckage, the thought of not going didn’t really enter her head for more than a second. Of course I’m going to go, she told herself, as she picked up the cushions she had torn apart last night and then threw them down again. Of course I’m going to go, she told herself, as she contemplated sweeping up the pieces of broken ashtrays, broken vases and broken lamps; and then shrugged and thought: why? And: how could I change my mind? she asked herself when she looked out of her grey, dirty windows at the neat, clean houses opposite, with their largely young, well-off owners piling out of their front doors in order to go and eat their Sunday lunch in some fashionable restaurant, or in order to clean their Volvos and Saabs, or in order simply to chat to their largely well-off, young neighbours, and demonstrate to the world and to themselves that they were young, well-off and successful. Rhetoric apart, I don’t belong here, never have, and even if it weren’t for myself, I should leave for the sake of all these people who are living around me and have moved into the neighbourhood over the past few years. They don’t want some tiresome, patronising woman in her early fifties looking askance at their success, or casting a beady eye on their Swedish cars. They don’t want a woman who doesn’t keep her house as painted and clean as theirs, and therefore threatens to drag down the prices in the street. And they certainly don’t want a woman who not only has two sons who are drug addicts and have been arrested innumerable times for possession of and suspected dealing in heroin, but whose house gets raided in the middle of the night even when those sons aren’t there.

  It was actually possible, Gloria reflected as she looked at the dusty old rubber tree she had uprooted last night and felt tears of remorse come into her eyes, that one of those nice, respectable young neighbours had called the police and said something was going on at number fourteen, just to get them to raid the place again and encourage its owner to leave.

  Well, she concluded, as she turned away from the window, if that is the case, you have succeeded. Indeed, you have succeeded if it isn’t the case. For though I was hysterical when I told myself this last night, it remains true: I cannot take any more. And now, just as soon as I possibly can, I’m off.

  She wondered, as she went back upstairs to get dressed, what the boys and Paul would say, when she told them.

  *

  This was something she thought about a great deal over the next three weeks. As she resigned her post in the Department of Social Security; put her house on the market and found a buyer for it virtually within hours (almost warming to her successful young neighbours when she discovered what their presence enabled her to ask and get for her own shabby dwelling); and consulted lawyers and accountants. She wanted to know about her tax situation, and about how to invest both the money she received for the house, and the not very large sum she had managed to save over the years, so as to have an income of some kind in whatever country she did fetch up in. And if Paul’s reaction when she finally got round to explaining why she had hardly seen him recently was both predictable and faintly alarming (he looked at her as if he felt she was doing it simply to get away from him and told her that he didn’t care where she went—one country was as good as another to him and he’d come with her in any case), the likely reaction of the boys troubled her so much that she couldn’t bring herself to tell them at all. She knew that sooner or later she’d have to and she knew that for one reason or another they wouldn’t approve. How strongly they would disapprove, though, and how strongly they would express their disapproval she didn’t know; and the idea that it might be very strongly indeed almost made her think that maybe, after all, she should change her mind. She didn’t; if only because by the time she really thought she might it was too late; the house was already sold. But it was a close thing; and she spent hour after hour, once she had told him, discussing with Paul what their likely objections would be and how best she could counter them.

  ‘Just tell them,’ Paul shrugged initially, clearly irritated by her concern. Clearly unaware, too, that his response was only making her feel still more alarmed at the prospect of his accompanying her wherever she went. Could her relationship, or whatever it was, with this pale, morose young man for whom she felt normally only pity, continue indefinitely?

  When he did become aware of it, however, he was a little more forthcoming. He suggested that she should write them a nice letter, saying what she had to say and not giving them a chance to express either their approval or disapproval. She could tell them that she had never been happy in England, and that now they had moved away she saw no reason for her to stay on and keep up a house that they would probably never return to.

  And when he saw that not even this would do, and that if he wasn’t careful he would be told he wasn’t coming anywhere with her (cause him though it might to do what he had vowed, having done it once, he would never do again, namely, raise his hand to his mistress), he entered properly into the spirit of things; and though he remained irritated, not only allowed Gloria more or less to think out loud, but actively encouraged her to do so.

  ‘I mean, you can’t allow them to dominate your life forever, can you?’ he fed her, as he reminded her that David was twenty-three now and Michael twenty-two. ‘After all, you do have a right to lead your own life, and sooner or later …’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re right of course,’ Gloria agreed, swallowing the bait gratefully, and proceeding to swim up and down the near empty living room attached to that particular line. ‘But I do feel responsible for them and I do feel that if they have now finally kicked the habit—and I’m sure they have, they never lie to me—I should at least stay here for a little while longer. Just to make them feel they have got some sort of base, just to make them feel there is something solid in the world, even if it isn’t the solidity they might have wished for. And certainly isn’t,’ she allowed herself to smile mournfully, ‘the solidity that I would have wished for.’

  Then he threw her this fish: that the more she allowed them to feel that she was still responsible for them, the more they would be tempted to backslide. ‘I mean, I know what’ll happen,’ he said. ‘After another few months in Mexico they’ll get bored. Then they’ll think “Oh well, Mummy’s still got the house in London, let’s go there.” And they’ll drift back, call all their old friends and before you know it …’ Paul made the gesture of injecting something into his arm and shrugged. ‘They’ll blame you for it, too. No, really, you mustn’t do it.’ A fish that allowed her to indulge her sense of guilt and tell him, for perhaps the twentieth time, that if they blamed her for their addiction they were, in a sense, right, because she had always given them a facile idea of what freedom was. She had always made them think that freedom was simply a matter of eating with their hands in a restaurant if they felt like it, of dressing precisely as they pleased and of experimenting with drugs if it amused them to experiment with drugs. ‘But I never made them understand that—well, though it makes me sound like some sanctimonious politician, or some television pundit, freedom is responsibility, is commitment and is not simply, really to sound like a politician, licence. I mean, it was all very well for me to tell myself that the people back home who objected to their eating with their hands were the
people who equated civilisation with suppressing the political rights of four fifths of their fellow countrymen. For me to tell them that when they were small, though, just confused them and made them think that everything about the adult world was suspect. It condemned them to a sort of permanent infancy, and made them feel terribly sorry for themselves when people stopped treating them like unruly infants and began to treat them like adults themselves. So to assuage that sorrow they felt for themselves …’

  And finally, by throwing her another fish (in the form, this time, of a question as to whether, if she did feel so doubtful, it wouldn’t be best if she flew out to Mexico herself and told the boys in person) he allowed her to sing a passionate, tragic aria—it was her favourite—that touched on how much she loved them and how she thought they were essentially good. That soared with the theme of how frantic she became when she wondered what would happen to them and how she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how they were going to be able to continue to be good and survive in this world (‘Oh, I know, you’ll tell me I’m equating goodness with childishness. But I’m not, truly, I swear it. We do live in a hateful world and unless one is prepared to get blood on one’s hands or have others get blood on their hands for one, one won’t survive.’) And that concluded with the declaration that despite all her doubts and fears, she nevertheless believed that somehow they would find a way, they would survive, and by surviving and finding a way might yet show her how to live, fifty-three years old and sick of the whole business though she was. ‘Because I can’t help feeling there is a way; I’ve never been able to help thinking that, and I can’t help feeling there must be more to life than … than this’, (sweeping a hand round the room), ‘than a newly fashionable street in West London, than aspirations to a Volvo or a Saab, than … than … calmness, decency, order—and dullness, smugness and underneath, an appalling, withering arrogance. It must be possible to find the sort of splendour one used to find back home, without having to live under the sort of government under which we lived there. And I’m sure it is. It’s just a matter of finding how, how, how, and I can’t help feeling that the boys are going to find how. They must at least try,’ she added as a sort of coda, ‘or die in the attempt. Otherwise’—she looked around again, tall, auburn-haired, thrilling-voiced and with tears in her eyes—‘this is the long and the short of it. And that’s too terrible to contemplate.’

  Yet though Paul encouraged her in this fashion and thus ensured his inclusion in her travel plans, whatever suggestion he made she rejected, in the end, as being unsuitable. Letters, she said, were too definitive, and however subtle and Jamesian one tried to be, there were always nuances that escaped one. There was always the possibility that by not saying precisely what one meant, or not saying everything one meant, or not anticipating every objection that might be raised and answering it, one could give the wrong impression. Which in this case, might cause the boys to see her flight from her own moral confusion and from the climate, physical as well as moral, of England, as no more than a veiled abandonment of them. The telephone, she said, was unsatisfactory, because one never knew when one telephoned someone in quite what mood they were. The danger being that if—always assuming she could actually find them on the telephone in the monastery or commune or whatever it was they were staying in—she happened to catch them on a bad day, or at a bad time, well, there again she might only hurt them and make them think she was fleeing from them, rather than herself. And the idea of going to see them, she said, as Paul’s irritation became so visible now that she began to think it might be he who would say he wasn’t coming away with her, a thought that also, paradoxically, made her feel faintly alarmed, was excluded not because it was too brutal or because she couldn’t pick the best moment to break the news, but for a more prosaic and practical reason. To wit: that although she had got a very good price for the house, even that sum, when invested, wasn’t going to bring in a huge income; and she simply couldn’t now be swanning off around the world spending money on planes and trains and hotels and who knows what, in order to …

  ‘Unless you decided to settle in Mexico yourself,’ Paul interrupted and added, adjusting his pronouns somewhat, ‘if they allowed us to stay.’

  Thus it was that, unsatisfactory though it seemed to Gloria in many ways, this third alternative was picked upon as the least injurious way of doing what had to be done. ‘I mean, I’m sure the boys aren’t going to like me suddenly turning up in their haven, disturbing their peace,’ Gloria murmured. ‘And I’m sure they won’t be too pleased having me even reasonably close at hand, even if I assure them we’re not going to settle anywhere near them. But it is true that if I’m actually with them, I can make them understand. I can tell them exactly what happened the other night with the police, for instance, and I suppose it’s also true that if I am at least in the same country it’s better for all of us. After all,’ she said, looking down at Paul and wondering whether this somehow most English of plants would be able to flourish in foreign soil, ‘they didn’t leave England to get away from me, did they?’

  It was a question she did not expect Paul to answer; and one that, since she knew what she would say, she had no intention of answering herself.

  *

  She knew what she would say. Yet probably for the very reason that she refused to answer it, it was a question that she asked herself as often over the following three weeks as she had wondered about David and Michael’s reaction in the preceding three. She asked it still more often after she had completed her tasks in England, had bought two one-way air tickets and set herself and Paul up in an inexpensive hotel in Mexico City. Where she made first the necessary arrangements for her trip down to San Cristóbal, near which town the boys were staying, and then the necessary arrangements for her and Paul’s subsequent transferral to the state and city of Vera Cruz, where they had decided to instal themselves for an initial six months. And when, one morning at the end of March, Paul accompanied her to Mexico City airport, repeated his offer of making the journey with her and waved goodbye as she answered a call for a flight to Tuxtla Gutíerrez (where she would hire a car and drive the rest of the way to San Cristóbal) she found herself asking it with such insistence that, sitting on the plane and looking down at the crumpled landscape below, she couldn’t help but think that she should answer it; and answer it, reluctantly, with a yes. In a sense, it had been to get away from her that the boys had left England.

  To get away from her constant if generally unspoken insistence that Western culture, Western civilisation was fundamentally flawed, fundamentally wicked and should be, so far as was possible, rejected. To get away from the suggestion, occasionally imparted she knew, that it wasn’t to avoid prison, but for their sakes that she had left the country that she couldn’t help, despite everything, loving, and come to England. A country which, though she could appreciate its virtues and see its beauties, she couldn’t help not loving and frequently, though she knew it was ungrateful and unfair of her, loathed. (Prison back there, she was aware she sometimes inferred, would have been better than liberty here.) And to get away from her unceasing if involuntary efforts to undermine their feelings when they, who had after all arrived in England at the ages of six and seven, seemed to be showing signs of loving their adopted country themselves. Loving it and thinking of it, however much she was unable to, as home.

  Of course those efforts had been involuntary, she assured herself. She had been forever telling the boys that love, real love (though she had never gone into that ‘real’) was by its nature positive and good. ‘Love’s the only thing that can keep us going, can, however temporarily, save us,’ she remembered instructing them one day, amidst the sagging bookshelves, stained carpets and piled-up records of her living room. One could claim, she had gone on to say, that it didn’t grant just temporary salvation, but permanent salvation, in the sense that if one loved, one affirmed not merely one’s own life, but the whole of life. So that as long as life lasted—any life, anywhere—one al
so lasted oneself.

  Nevertheless, she suspected that what she had irradiated from her subconscious had had a more profound effect than anything she had been able to tell them, and that they had been more aware of that effect than she had. Being aware, they had resented it, and possibly, to a certain extent, hated her for it. And since they hadn’t wanted to hate the one person in the world whom they nevertheless loved—the person who had exposed the sham of Western culture to them and sacrificed herself for them—they had made the only move they could. A move they had, no doubt, expected her to respect; and one that by following them she was now rendering superfluous.

  Oh God, Gloria thought, as the aircraft suddenly lurched, and the ‘Fasten Seatbelt’ sign came on, what have I, what have I done?

  *

  Contrition and a desire to be blamed were with Gloria often, for one reason or another; and once with her, they tended to stay for a while. So, having come to the conclusion that it was to escape her that the boys had left England and not, as they had told her when they announced their departure, to escape their friends and the temptations that London offered, she expected them to stay with her now. Hovering about at least until she had talked to the boys; received, as she was sure she would, their assurance that she wasn’t to blame; and convinced them that in any case she and Paul would be almost as out of contact with them in Vera Cruz as they had been back in London. Yet as she sat behind the wheel of her big American hire-car (she had asked, both out of a sense of economy and a sense of what became her, for a Volkswagen, but this was all that had been available), cruising along with her lips pursed and her head tilted back at what she hoped was a suitably tragic angle, and rehearsing the scene she would have with David and Michael, she slowly became aware that, for all the pose she had adopted, she didn’t in fact feel contrite any longer. Or if she did, she was feeling less and less so with every kilometre that passed. She tried to. She reminded herself again and again that it was because of her that her sons had sought refuge in the commune or whatever it was towards which she was now heading. As it had been her insistence on their nonconformity and her constant whittling away at any moral straw they tried to cling to that had helped send them to prison and brought them near to death. Somehow, though, it didn’t work. And by the time she was half way to San Cristóbal, climbing up and up through spectacular mountains and passing brightly clad Indian women who made her feel that but for the car and the road nothing much had changed here for the past thousand or so years, although she did everything she could to keep her lips pursed, as if the boys were hurling imprecations at her that honesty didn’t allow her to reply to however much they hurt her, she realised that they were breaking into a sort of smile. It was, perhaps, a bitter sweet smile—she could, for the moment, still manage that. A smile, too, she hoped, that suggested all manner of sufferings past. Nevertheless, a smile it was. And the further she drove and the higher she climbed, the more certain she became as to why she was smiling it. For the first time in years, for the first time since—she couldn’t remember when, but certainly since she had arrived in England and probably since she’d been a child—she felt free. She had served her term in hell, she told herself, even if she knew that that was putting it a little strongly; she had done, as she saw it, her duty. Now, now she was alone at last; and having recovered from her jetlag was spinning along a practically deserted road through scenery so magnificent that at times it literally took her breath away. She had, moreover, if she was careful and lived frugally, enough money to live on for the rest of her life. I have come through, she wanted to shout out to the wooded mountains and the Indian women. I have, however hackneyed the word has become, survived. And not only do I feel free for the first time in years; for the first time in longer still I feel happy. Yes, she almost cried, wondering if the altitude were making her light-headed: guiltless, free and happy!