The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  A handsome prince would have been dismissed out of hand, he told himself as he waddled happily home, pretending to be Charles Laughton in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Even someone just reasonable looking would not, he suspected, have found such favour in the cenote black eyes—and in the heart?—of the tender, flawless Isabella. Whereas he—oh, his only rivals were those desperate children rooting amongst the garbage. And if he could help it, she wasn’t going to be seeing any more of them.

  *

  Nor, in the four days that Isabella spent in Cairo—with her brother and father, her father’s second wife with her two children from a previous marriage, an Englishman and Mr and Mrs Rizzuto and son—did she. She would have liked to, he knew; for she was unimpressed by the Pyramids and the Sphinx, though her heart bled for the poor camels who had to give tourists rides all day. ‘Poor things,’ she sighed to Charlie, ‘they must hate it. With all this dust. And with all these people.’ She had to be led—by the hand! (‘Oh, thank you Charlie, you’re so sweet, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’)—out of the museum in Memphis that housed the fallen Statue of Ramses II, because it was too crowded. And she looked, his woodland rose, as if she might wilt for good when he insisted on taking her all round and telling her the history of the step pyramid of Saquaara. In fact, the only things that almost made her enthusiastic were the treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb and the jewellery shops in the Great Bazaar. These, Charlie saw, she would happily have spent her entire time in Cairo looking at, if she hadn’t been aware that to do so, or just to have expressed the desire to do so, would have denoted a superficial soul: not an attribute she had any intention of possessing. ‘Oh Charlie,’ she murmured, keeping close to him as he guided her down narrow streets and alleys that she found, he saw, disappointingly clean despite the occasional puddle and rotting cauliflower. ‘You know I feel terribly ashamed of being here. I mean here I am, sixteen years old, in my cashmere jacket and English shoes, with a nice clean hotel to go back to and money in my pocket, whereas most of these people’—nodding nervously in the direction of shopkeepers, passers-by and children of various ages—‘look as if they haven’t got anything, or not very much, except their dignity of course … and … if I were in their place I think I’d spit at me.’ A pause. ‘I mean, do you know how much this jacket cost? And it isn’t even one hundred per cent cashmere. Though you wouldn’t know it to feel it, would you. Go on. Feel it.’

  If Isabella would not admit to what she most wanted to do, however, Charlie had no intention of allowing her to do the thing she next most wanted to do—the only other thing she wanted to do in the city—and steered her away from the subject, when she looked like approaching it, by saying that certain areas of town were not safe to go walking in. He added, trying not to sound as if he were addressing her in particular, but were rather making a general remark at most aimed at Mr Rizzuto, who would also have liked to make a tour of the lower depths, that he found it grotesque when tourists came here, or went to any other poor country, he tossed in quickly, and got some sort of pleasure in looking at or taking photographs of those who were immeasurably worse off than they. ‘I mean, really, I find it disgusting,’ he said, getting worked up despite himself, and thereby letting Isabella know that even if she had confessed to being interested primarily in jewels and trinkets he wouldn’t have granted her other wish; he more than ever wouldn’t have granted it. ‘When people come here and start making television films or writing articles about conditions in “The Third World”. Because ninety nine times out of a hundred, though they might mean to instruct, they really just entertain. If they were genuinely interested in the fundamental causes of the misery they see they’d devote most of their films or articles to London or New York or Tokyo or Zurich. Because that’s where’—he suddenly felt himself running out of steam, or having an accident if he didn’t apply the brakes violently—‘well, I don’t want to start being contentious, or sounding like some tinpot radical, but that’s where the root of the problem lies. Or lay, in the past,’ he murmured, attempting now to slip into reverse, or at least come to a complete stop. ‘I mean, what you see here is just a symptom, isn’t it? The disease lies elsewhere. And has been in the body for so long now that … but really, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get carried away. And I know that lots of people say that theory’s nonsense. It’s just that …’

  ‘No, no,’ the chorus went up, with Mr Rizzuto himself leading it, as Charlie should have guessed he would. ‘You’re absolutely right, Charlie, we may call you Charlie mayn’t we? It is disgusting. Disgusting and grotesque. I mean, people don’t go round hospitals to look at the sick and the dying, do they? So why should they go round the slums? Unless they want to show the people who live there how much better off they are. Or unless they want to congratulate themselves on being rich and healthy, and able to fly away somewhere at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘Or unless,’ Isabella breathed wistfully, ‘they want to remind themselves that this could happen to them, and that they should try and do something to help those less fortunate than themselves.’

  ‘Oh Isabella, Isabella, my darling,’ Charlie told himself, as her brother, father and step-mother all weighed in with remarks such as: ‘Like what?’ ‘Oh Bella, don’t be so fatuous.’ ‘What do you mean, “do something to help them”? Give them a sandwich every time they allow themselves to be photographed standing on a rubbish tip?’ ‘Oh Isabella, Isabella, my darling, you’re so incredibly, wonderfully …’ he paused, nearly said ‘naive’ and concluded with the less ambiguous ‘innocent’. ‘And so incredibly, wonderfully tenderhearted. But I’m sorry, my darling’—trying to make himself more toadlike than ever and thus convince her that his outburst hadn’t been directed at her—‘if you are determined to find a subject worthy of your compassion here in Egypt, then I am determined to be it. And if you must cry for someone, then insofar as it is in my power to make you do so, it is me and me alone you will cry for. Oh Isabella,’ Charlie pleaded silently, ‘look at me. Look how hideous I am.’ A message that, for all that it was unspoken, Isabella seemed to receive; for from then on she not only never gave the faintest sign of wanting to see anything other than what Charlie decided to show her, but seemed determined to spend as much time as she could in the company of her monstrous guide. In this she was not alone, for more and more, and particularly after his tirade on their last day in Cairo, all the other members of her party—or his party, as Charlie supposed it was—gathered about him, or came to look at him as the centre of their circle. He was not just their guide but their leader, their adviser and their confidant. But whereas when Mr and Mrs Rizzuto or Mr and Mrs Orsini sought him out, or tried to take him aside and talk to him, and make him his or her particular friend, while he allowed himself to be wooed and was happy to be contended for there was always a part of him that stood back and held itself in reserve, when Isabella took him aside—oh, then there was no standing back and he entirely forgot that he had other people in his care.

  Yet, as they embarked on their cruise ship and sailed down to Luxor where they stayed for a further four days, though Isabella did seem keen on spending as much time as possible in his company and though she did seem to have received that message he had sent her in Cairo, Charlie couldn’t help feeling that his outburst that day had affected the way she thought about him. For try as he had to convince her it wasn’t her he was talking to, of course more than anyone it had been; and she had realised it. With the result that for all her lavishing her undivided compassion on him and a great deal of her undivided attention, she was, underneath, very slightly frightened of him. He had made her suspect that he wasn’t just the flabby, wet-lipped, loping clown he made himself out to be, but that somewhere beneath that disagreeable exterior there was a man of passion, a man of intelligence even; and a man who was, therefore, capable of transcending himself and achieving a sort of beauty. And if poverty, misery and utter wretchedness both attracted Isabella and made her cry, passion, intelligence and above al
l beauty made her wary. Why, he had no idea, and anyway, the reasons didn’t really interest him. All that mattered was that it was so; and that since it was so, he would have to do everything in his power to reassure her that he was not a threat and that he was indeed quite as repulsive as he looked.

  As for the best part of a week, at any rate until they had left Luxor and were making their way slowly down to Aswan, he believed he succeeded in doing. He slobbered and slavered. He let his shirt flop out from inside his trousers and he let his stomach flop out behind his shirt. He dragged his right foot behind him when he walked and if he didn’t exactly not shave he shaved irregularly, so there were tufts and patches of hair on his round, somehow unformed face. And while it was beyond him not to shower and to allow himself to stink—as he did when he didn’t shower and as he perhaps should have allowed himself to: it would have been the finishing touch—he did force himself, though it caused him almost as much pain as not showering, not to wash his hair every day, nor clean his teeth. So that his brownish wavy locks, already tinged with grey despite his mere twenty-three years, flopped greasily over his perpetually sweating forehead; and his teeth, after no more than twenty-four hours, were furry and coated with whatever it was that was deposited on teeth when one ate, as he did, too many sweet and sugary things. At times, as he grinned tragically, smiled pathetically, or lost his temper in a shrill, undignified fashion with money changers, carriage drivers, or stallkeepers who dared to importune any of his charges (who didn’t at all mind being importuned) and particularly his beloved Isabella (who actually enjoyed it) he thought he was overdoing it. He was giving too barefaced an imitation of his namesake Laughton as the Hunchback. At any moment he expected one or other of the group—above all Isabella’s father, a tiny, birdlike, sardonic man who looked with an amused and beady eye at everything Charlie pointed out to him, and made Charlie feel he didn’t take anything quite seriously—to say ‘Oh, come off it, Charlie,’ or ‘All right, we’ve guessed and you do it very well, but enough’s enough.’ Yet not only did no one say anything, but the broader, the cruder the caricature, the greater seemed everyone’s desire to look on him as a figure of authority. Each wanted to be the one who stood closest to him as he talked about this or that temple or tomb, and the one who accompanied him as he dragged his lame way from monument to monument and seemed barely able to clamber up and down the gangway of the ship. Even little Girogio Orsini, who so gave the impression of seeing through him, appeared able to accept this part of his act; and only really began to view him as an imposter when he stopped putting on a show, and forgot himself in his stories of Ramses, Amenophis IV and Hatshepsut.

  Perhaps I really do look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Charlie told himself at times; and no one objects to or notices my performance because it’s indistinguishable from the way I act normally. He didn’t think he did; after all, the Hunchback was actually deformed, whereas he was just, let’s say, badly finished. Maybe, however, he had been fooling himself all these years; maybe the fact that he had always been so loved had tended to obscure his vision, cast a layer, a thick layer, of gauze over his eyes; so that what he saw in the mirror was but a distant, softened and highly flattering version of the truth.

  Unfortunately he wasn’t quite able to transform himself from man into beast. For along with his inability not to take a shower every morning and his habit of losing himself whenever he got onto the subject of the ancient Egyptians—about whom he knew far more, he realised, than any of the actual tourist guides he heard lecturing their charges—he couldn’t quite disguise the fact that beside being well-read in Egyptian history, he had a far wider knowledge of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Hardy, James, Isherwood, Waugh and Greene, and of Verdi, Donizetti, Dante, Leopardi, Pirandello, Pavese and Calvino, certainly than his darling Isabella and probably than any of the other members of his party. What do you expect though? he wanted to bleat whenever he did inadvertently give them a glimpse of all the knowledge he had stacked away in the larder of his mind. A glimpse for which he tried to apologise, or make them think they’d been imagining things, by behaving for the next hour or so afterwards in a manner still more grotesque than normal. More grotesque, indeed, he told himself, than any half-way discerning audience would have found acceptable even in the most notorious ham. ‘I mean, while all of you have been, or are, out keeping slim on life, on experience, on marriages and love affairs, on travel here and work there, on meals in restaurants and holidays with friends all over Europe, I’ve been stuck in Cairo, in my parents’ apartment, with nothing to do but stuff myself with culture and squirrel things away for a winter that will probably never come. Is it any wonder that I’m bloated and that that larder is full to bursting?’

  All the same, betray himself though he did now and then, on the whole his impersonation of some creature that hadn’t quite made it out of the primaeval slime was, however overdone, convincing; and if it hadn’t been for the person whom he thought of as the tenth member of the group and certainly the odd man out, he was fairly sure he would have been able to keep it up until the day he said goodbye to Isabella at Cairo airport. Shook her hand, and saw her, as he had no doubt he would, not just become damp-eyed, but dissolve into a storm of tears. Weeping, as she tried to assure him with her final backward glance that she would never forget him and that as always happened in the best fairy tales—and in the best Jacobean tragedies, Charlie reflected—Beauty had fallen in love with the Beast.

  One night up on deck, however, Charlie had had one of his ‘moments’; had been so softened, so weakened, so, in a sense, made up to and seduced, that he hadn’t been able to resist not just flinging open his larder door and displaying all the goodies he had laid up there, but of opening the special cupboard within his larder, in which he kept his most precious, his rarest preserves, and bringing those out into the light of day. A gesture that, though it had possibly won him a friend, or anyway given him some real contact with another human being, perhaps for the first time outside his immediate family in his life, had lost him Isabella for good. For she was present at the opening, or a good part of it. And afterwards, she both realised that the toad was not a toad at all but, if not a handsome prince either, just an ordinary mortal, and half saw, or half suspected, why this ordinary mortal had pretended to be a toad in the first place. And that she couldn’t forgive. Ah, she had been right to feel a little afraid of him after his lecture about tourists in the slums; and paradoxically, though he had now revealed himself not to be a monster, in a sense he had revealed himself to be a worse one. Only not, any longer, the sort of monster she liked. How could she feel sorry for, or weep for, someone who was so cynical, so false, so—in his soul—ugly?

  Isabella’s father, the beady eyed Giorgio, was a partner in one of Mr Rizzuto’s many companies. ‘And a friend, and a friend!’ the bearded industrialist chirped, as he put his arm around the little man’s shoulders, and Giorgio himself practically winked at Charlie as if to say, ‘Don’t believe a word of it.’ Her step-mother, a slim, attractive, make-up-less woman of forty-nine (Charlie had seen her passport) with a worried expression and an urgent, intense manner, worked in some local government office in Florence. Her seventeen-year-old brother was still at school, while her step-brother and sister, twenty and twenty-two respectively, were both at university, the one studying medicine and the other architecture. Mr Rizzuto’s wife, a tiny, also attractive, but Charlie suspected unhappy woman, was a teacher. And the Rizzuto son, a curiously lopsided, shy child of ten, was simply—a child of ten, albeit an appealing one. So much had Charlie learned in the first week or so he had been shepherding ‘Mr Rizzuto and friends’ around. Who their English acquaintance was, though, and what he did, he not only hadn’t discovered, but had the feeling he never would discover unless he asked the man point blank. A step he couldn’t take. Partly because he rarely asked anyone anything point blank, preferring either to pick information up as best he could, or to have it volunteered by those he spoke to; and partly
because just as Isabella felt slightly frightened of him, so he felt slightly frightened of the Englishman. What was more, at least to a certain degree, he felt slightly frightened of him for the same reasons that Isabella felt slightly frightened of him. That is, he suspected that behind the man’s mask of a reserved, faintly haughty, unfailingly well-mannered Englishman in his early forties, there lay if not a larder full of unsuspected goodies, at any rate a library full of unsuspected volumes—or possibly, Charlie found himself thinking, a zoo full of unsuspected animals. So that when he spoke to the man, he couldn’t help wondering both why he wore a mask at all—none of the others did; they were all, transparently, what they were—and, more to the point, if he mightn’t suddenly and unexpectedly haul out one of his hidden volumes; release one of his captive animals.