The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (7 page)

And with that, everything fell into place; and now without a hitch, without the slightest hesitation, Alfred found his story practically writing itself. In fact, it came to him so easily that he felt like a magician whose tricks had taken him over, and merely had to stand back and watch the rabbit jump out of his hat, the scarves endlessly pull themselves from his jacket, and various assistants appear and disappear, saw themselves in half, and put themselves together again. Only in his case the rabbits were all the little details of life on board the S. S.
Chateaubriand
in the days preceding its sinking, the scarves were a liner and a tanker steaming towards each other, and the appearing and disappearing assistants, sailors, passengers, and everyone with whom he had come into contact in those days. Oh, how it all came back to him, as cleanly and completely as clothes that had been kept in careful storage for years, and then unpacked and found to be as good as new. There was nothing he couldn’t
recall, nothing he couldn’t recapture. The muffled sound of the engines, thudding through the ship; the colour of the cover on his bed. Not only what was served, but the taste of every dish he ate at every meal on board; not only the dresses and suits his new-found friends wore, but the scent the women used, the smell of shaving cream and soap that certain men emitted; while others, impeccably groomed though they were, always had about them the faintest odour of sweat, or of a not quite concealed halitosis. He saw the way people walked, he saw the way they leaned on the railings and gazed out over the perfectly flat Atlantic. He heard their laughter, their complaints; the way their shoes squeaked on the deck, the way one or two of them creaked as if corsetted in girders; the way they burped and farted, and either looked embarrassed, giggled, or with patrician indifference went right on talking without a break. It was as if he were back there, the plump, ungainly twenty year old being taken up, patronised, flattered, listened to, gazed at with dewey eyes, despised and made—though whether we actually care for you matters not one bit!—‘one of us’. And finally, finally, he came to that night; or that night came to him. The night that started with him putting on his dinner jacket; that went on with that party—the brightest, the best party he had ever been to in his life, that celebration of all that was civilised, all that was finished and perfect—and ended with those looks of panic, with those cries, with those meaningless orders being barked out by men who were incoherent with fear, and with that running around, that screaming on the part of some, that extraordinary calmness on the part of others, and with the lowering of lifeboats, the realisation of just who was in those lifeboats, the organisation of people, the shouting, the calling on the radio, the rushing hither and thither, the saying with an authority one had never possessed before and was never to possess again, ‘Do this, do that, go here, go there’, the helping, the soothing, the feeling of disgust, the whispering, the exhorting, the feeling of disgust, the feeling of disgust, the feeling of disgust … and that
undignified tumble into the cold sea, the being hauled out and then being lugged on board the tanker like an awkward, stupid child who couldn’t even be relied on to be rescued properly, but who would be forgiven as long as he went straight back to the dance, followed all the steps, and never, ever had the bad taste to refer to what had, so briefly, interrupted the glittering ball.

For four hours, five hours, sometimes up to eight hours a day he kept at it, as the bees buzzed around him, the finches twittered in cypress and pine, and cuckoos cuckooed so incessantly it sounded to Alfred as if the needle had got stuck in a recording of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

My God, he thought, as his pen raced across the page, and as he walked down into the village and saw the daisies and the bluebells, the little wildflowers whose names he didn’t know, and the poppies more scarlet than any scarlet he had ever seen: I’m happy here. I’m happy! And Wordsworth, philosophical old Wordsworth, was wrong; something can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass. Bring it back, and make it more splendid than ever. It was as if he was returning to his youth and, instead of setting sail on the
Chateaubriand
, moving off in quite another direction. I am healed, Alfred told himself—conscious, as he did, that he was becoming a little hysterical now—I am one again. And now there isn’t just glory in the flower; there is glory in the sun, in the sky, in the tree, in the bird, in the air, in the stream, in me.

‘I’ve done it,’ Alfred told himself every morning; and wrote on a postcard to Dorothy (though to her, in case his boasting incurred the anger of the gods, he prefixed his phrase with the words ‘I think’). ‘I’ve done it,’ he told himself every evening, as he sat back, tired but content after his day’s work, and drank a glass of wine. And ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it,’ he practically shouted to his mirror when, after eight weeks up in his little house, he wrote after the last sentence of his hundred and twenty page account of ‘The Wreck of the
Chateaubriand
’, ‘The End’.

So he had. It had taken him longer to write, he scribbled on another postcard to Dorothy, than it had Stendhal to write
La
Chartreuse
de
P
arme.
He was also afraid that his little effort wasn’t quite as much fun, nor would prove so popular, as that particular masterpiece. Nevertheless, he had done it; and now all that remained, once he had typed it out and made copies of it, was ‘if I can’ to find a publisher for it.

‘Which may well be,’ he told Dorothy on the ’phone, ‘the most difficult part of all.’

In this, though, he was being unduly pessimistic. Indeed, within a week of his sending off the manuscript to the editor who had been responsible for publishing most of his collections of essays, and all of his poetry, he received a telegram saying ‘Wonderful congratulations letter to follow’; that made him so excited he put out of his mind any misgivings he had been feeling over the last few days at having, at last, revealed his whereabouts to someone other than Dorothy. Of course Claude was a person of the utmost rectitude and discretion, and Alfred both liked him as a man, and had the greatest respect for him as an editor. Since he hadn’t liked to forbid him to reveal his address to anyone—it would have sounded, he felt, melodramatic and a little mad to do so—he was afraid that while Claude himself might not go round saying ‘I’ve finally discovered where Alfred’s been hiding and what he’s been doing,’ someone else in his office might.

‘He likes it!’ he shouted down the line to Dorothy as, at the same time, it occurred to him that just as soon as he had signed some sort of contract and was sure that there were enough copies in existence to prevent even the most fervent defender of the late captain’s name from destroying them all, he would return to Paris. The countryside, and Italy, were glorious, but home was home; and for all his weeks of romantic ecstasy, he was still, in the final analysis, an urban creature.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Claude wrote in his promised letter, ‘how much.’

If Alfred had been unduly pessimistic in thinking he would never find a publisher for his tale, however, he was unduly optimistic in thinking that however much that publisher liked it—‘and I do, I do, I promise you; it is quite admirable’—he liked it enough to publish it as it was.

‘You see,’ his letter went on, as Alfred started to feel giddy and as if he was in for one of his attacks, ‘I don’t know whether your story is precisely true, whether it’s “faction”, or whether it is fiction.

‘But I do know that the laws of libel being what they are, I couldn’t possibly let this come out as it stands. Because though one cannot defame the dead, and the captain himself could not sue you, a great many of the people you mention are still alive, and could indeed take action against you. And against—more to the point from my point of view as a publisher—me.

So Alfred, what I must ask you to do is this. Not
change
your story. I would never ask you to do that, as, I must repeat yet again, it is too good to be changed. But change just the superficial accessories, if you will, of the story: the names of the people, the name of the ship, maybe even the nationality of the ship (couldn’t it be English, “The Shelley”, or Italian, “The Dante” or “The Leopardi”?). And make just the tiniest adjustments to timing, so the actual date of the sinking can’t be identified. That way—true or not!—I think we could bring the story out as a novel without too much fear of having its publication blocked by the courts; and, from your point of view now, without the danger of you being branded as, not to put too fine a point on it, a mythomaniac or a liar.

‘I do hope you will not be offended by this, Alfred; and yet again I must assure you of my admiration. But I must also assure you that if you do not make certain changes, not only cannot we publish it, but you will never find a publisher for it. Neither
here in Paris, nor anywhere else. Therefore, my dear Alfred, think over what I have told you, and tell me you’ll do what I ask. For really, this is so good, it
must
be published.’

So, Alfred thought, sitting down heavily on the grass of his little garden (whereupon an ant promptly ran up his leg and nipped him, announcing thereby that his truce with nature was over?) they have won. Or, to be precise, they will win. Because now he had just two alternatives. Doing what he was asked, having his story made, as Claude had requested, into a work of fiction, and waiting for the success that his book would have, among his friends if not with the public at large—‘Oh, Alfred darling, it’s
wonderful
! All that time you were twittering on about that boat we had no idea you were just planning a
novel
. Oh, darling, you
are
clever, and it’s so
marvellous
to have you back!’—or reverting to his former idea of not having the book published at all in his lifetime. A decision which, now that word was presumably out that Alfred had actually written his ‘boat story’ might not be enough to save his life. Oh God, he thought, realising that the sun was burning his bald head, that it was summer now rather than spring, and that not only was it starting to be uncomfortably hot but there were fewer flowers now amidst the beginning-to-be-parched grass than there had been a couple of weeks ago: what am I going to do?

This was a question he asked himself several times over the next few days, as he sat in his house listening no longer to the singing of birds, but to the chirping of crickets; a sound that had always conjured up visions of dryness, sterility and death in his mind. And a question that he asked himself with particular emphasis five days after he received his letter when, walking dejectedly down into the village to do some shopping, he was overtaken on the little country lane by two young men on a large motorcycle. Two young men dressed in black leather and wearing black helmets; two young men who turned to look at him as they raced past, then having sped round the corner, changed direction and drove back past him more slowly, staring
at him quite deliberately now, as if they wished to note his features for future reference; and two young men who were undoubtedly, he told himself, emanations of the same spirit that had caused the vase to topple over in the cemetery, the bark to flake from the olive tree, and the rat to leap from the hawthorne, and were almost certainly the creatures of whoever it was (in other words practically everyone he knew) who was determined to make sure his story, his true story, that is, never saw the light of day. And try though he might to convince himself that they were just two local boys who were trying out some new motorcycle and wanted to impress this bald, plump,
staring-eyed
, little foreigner they had seen around, he wasn’t able to; becoming so frightened of going out that he went over to his landlady’s house, told her he wasn’t feeling well, and asked her if she would mind doing some shopping for him when next she went into the village herself.

Oh, what, he asked himself, cold and shivering in his house, despite the now oppressive heat outside, oh, what am I going to do?

A further five days later, after he had spoken to Dorothy on his landlady’s telephone and she had told him she had gone over to rue de Phalsbourg and, coming out of the building, had been followed by a very sinister-looking man—‘probably nothing to do with anything, he probably just wanted to pick me up or something’—he decided, and wrote to his publisher accordingly.

‘Dear Claude, I have been thinking over what you said, and see now that you are absolutely right.’

*

It took him just four weeks to rewrite his story; and only two more after that to get another telegram from Paris, saying this time: ‘Well done contract to follow all best Claude.’

Nevertheless, that was long enough for him to be starting, by the time he held the telegram in his hand, to be suffering from
the first symptoms of one of his half-yearly breakdowns; and long enough for him to be terrified in case it was too long and in the meantime something appalling had happened to Dorothy, and something appalling would happen to him if he so much, now, as stepped out of doors for a moment. This, therefore, he avoided doing, relying on his starting-to-be aggrieved landlady to do, at this stage, everything for him. To the extent of
telephoning
Dorothy herself, first to make sure that she was still all right, second to tell her that Alfred was fine but for the moment was laid up in bed and therefore couldn’t get to the ’phone, and third, to ask her to send him some money, both to pay the rent on the house that he had been obliged to take for longer than planned, and to pay her, his landlady, for all the extras she was providing him with. ‘That I really don’t have time for and didn’t bargain on,’ he was sure the woman told Dorothy, ‘and I really can’t go on providing indefinitely.’

Once his breakdown had started in earnest, however, matters in a sense started to improve. If only because once he could no longer tell if his terrors were inside or out, imaginary or real, though those inside were horrible enough, they couldn’t, he assured himself while still in a state to reason at all, be any worse than those outside; and because, recognising his symptoms, he had the sense, having had his landlady make some enquiries, to admit himself to the nearest hospital that accepted cases such as his. A clinic whose address he didn’t even give to Dorothy; he simply asked his landlady to tell her not to worry, that he had gone away for a little while, and she wasn’t
on
any
account
to go near rue de Phalsbourg—and in which, even at his very worst moments, he was conscious of feeling safer than he would have had he not been in hospital. Yes, here, dressed in black and riding their motorcycles, they were coming to get him. And made him whimper and cower as they approached. There, though, they really would have come to get him; and with their coming, dragged him into a darkness which no light would ever have broken again.