The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (4 page)

‘I mean, you must realise,’ she said, lying back in bed, smoking, and stroking Alfred’s forehead, ‘none of those women actually
like
you. Oh, I know they
adore
you and they
love
you, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? And if you start being, as they’d put it, boring, or tiresome, they’ll drop you like a hot brick or a hot potato or whatever the expression is. It’s jejune in their book, getting indignant about something that happened
so long ago. It’s unnecessary. And worst of all, according to them, it’s
ungrateful.
Like kicking a gift horse in the mouth. Like kicking
them
in the mouth. Or anyway, like dragging some long-drowned corpse to one of their parties and expecting them to welcome it as a friend. Rich bitches,’ Dorothy sighed. ‘Fascist cows.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Alfred said, unable to keep a petulant note out of his voice at hearing his friends spoken of thus. Unable, too, not to protest that just because Louise had behaved like that, it didn’t mean to say that all his other friends would; nor to reflect that much as he loved Dorothy, and beautiful as she undoubtedly was—tall and blonde with a low, soft voice—there was something bitter and resentful about her. She didn’t so much object to the wealth and power of his society friends, as not see why she, who was better looking and more intelligent than almost every one of them, didn’t have such wealth and power herself. Deep down, too, she didn’t see why she, with all her advantages, should at the age of thirty-nine have a bald fifty-five year old and half-crazy poet as a lover, instead of some smooth, good-looking, probably crass
industralist
whom she might loathe but who at least allowed her to forget that by birth, upbringing and intellectual, if not emotional inclination, she was on the side of the ugly, the persecuted and the sick. Of course he was being unfair thinking such things of her; and even if there was an element of resentment in her feelings towards his friends she was perfectly justified in objecting to Louise’s behaviour. Nevertheless, he did wish she wouldn’t use such crude, debased jargon like ‘rich bitches’ and ‘fascist cows’; and he did wish she would see that the more immediate question was not how his friends were going to behave, but what was to be done about her and Matilda. It was all very well his deciding to be a hero. Should, though, the writer of that letter be serious and do something to either of them, he’d never forgive himself.

A point he put to Dorothy when he had finished sulking, and
when he had added, after perhaps half a minute, that ‘just because Louise is like that, it doesn’t mean that everyone else will be. Besides, maybe she was just feeling out of sorts this evening.’

‘Out of sorts, my arse,’ Dorothy snarled, and blew the smoke of her Gauloise in his face. ‘I bet she’s already been on the phone telling all her friends that you’ve finally gone too potty and you’re really going to have to be ditched.’

If the thought of Louise and her like had called forth scorn, however, the suggestion that he would never be able to forgive himself if she and Matilda were kidnapped, or had acid thrown in their face, or were murdered, provoked only a smile from Dorothy. ‘I don’t suppose I’d ever forgive you either, lovey,’ she said, and gave him a kiss. ‘But I’m sure they weren’t serious. What did the police say?’

Alfred shrugged. ‘They said they weren’t serious. They said that people who write anonymous letters rarely are. But you can’t be sure, can you? And frankly …’

‘Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t just disappear. I’ve got to work. And I don’t see Tilda giving up her horses, or her boys, just because someone’s threatening to kill her.’

‘No, I guess not. I just thought—oh, I don’t know.’ Alfred sighed. ‘Maybe I am jejune, and tiresome, and boring. And in a way, you know, I
liked
everyone to think I had behaved badly. But I really didn’t, you know,’ he muttered, once again sounding petulant; or like a baby who is sure he’ll never be believed. ‘In fact, I mean I know it sounds terribly immodest or unmodest. But I was practically the only person who didn’t.’

*

A statement which, Alfred admitted to himself over the days and weeks ahead, as he settled down to his task, wasn’t strictly true. What would have been more accurate, though it might
have sounded still less modest, was that while some people had behaved very badly indeed and he, he had to say, had behaved very well, most people had behaved neither badly nor well. They had simply—behaved. Had done what they had been told to do by whoever had the presence of mind to give them an order, of it hardly mattered what nature. Had not done what they had not been told to do, even if under normal circumstances they would have done it like a shot. And had, by and large, closed their minds to the evidence of their senses, and neither seen nor heard what, also under normal circumstances, would have appalled them. Such as: the fact that while within five minutes of the collision most of the lifeboats were safely down in the water, they were occupied almost exclusively by the crew, who having received the command ‘abandon ship’ had done so instantly, following their Captain’s example, without bothering to make it clear to the vast majority of the passengers that they should do likewise. Such as: the fact that within ten minutes of the collision those few lifeboats that hadn’t been appropriated by the crew were also safely down in the water; occupied now, under admittedly somewhat cramped conditions, by ninety-five per cent of the first-class passengers, and those members of the crew who, not having got away with their colleagues, had thought it politic, or found it unavoidable, to order into the boats and save those people on board who would have created the most fuss or would have had the most fuss created about them, had they not been saved. And such as: the fact that but for the action of a portly, shy, young poet who, seeing what was going on, had become so hysterical with anger he had lost control of himself, the loss of life—thirty-five people in the final count—would have been immeasurably greater; amounting perhaps to some eight or nine hundred men, women and
children
. For it was Alfred who refused to obey when one of the last remaining officers had, without too much conviction, ordered him into a boat. (The officer had shrugged, as if to say: suit yourself.) It was Alfred who had almost physically forced a
sailor he had found who, thank God, knew how to use the radio, to call the tanker that had sliced the liner in two and tell someone to send their boats over immediately. And it was Alfred who had run around screaming orders like a madman (so much so that afterwards people would say he was a madman, even though they had done what he had said), and practically
single-handed
organised everyone left on board. So that when the boats from the tanker did arrive, as well as those from another couple of ships that had been nearby, and had steamed full speed to the rescue when they had heard the tanker’s, if not the
Chateaubriand
’s, SOS, the evacuation of the liner could be completed with the minimum of confusion, and the maximum of speed. With such little confusion, and at such a speed, that when, an hour and a half after the collision the
Chateaubriand
sank, the only people who went down with her were those who had been killed when the tanker crashed into her, or those who were trapped in their cabins and couldn’t be cut free in time.

It was because there was such a relatively small loss of life—and because in the pandemonium that followed the accident very few people were aware of the exact sequence of events, and because the accident itself was entirely due to the negligence of the tanker’s captain—that in the enquiry that followed the captain of the
Chateaubriand
was praised for the part that he and his crew played in the rescue, and for his courage and coolness and presence of mind; and was elevated by the French press, and to a certain extent by the American press, who found some of the reports just a little too contradictory to be unreservedly enthusiastic, to the status of hero. And it was again because of the relatively minor loss of life that once Alfred, one of the last people off the liner, and one of the very few to fall in the water as they clambered into their lifeboat, had reached New York, and had been swept off to his duplex, and received all sorts of messages from his former fellow passengers in first class inviting him here there and everywhere, that he had thought ‘Oh hell, what’s done is done,’ and had refused to speak to
reporters about the events of that night. Maybe later, he had told himself, when I’ve recovered from the shock. Maybe later, when I’ve completely gotten over my hysterical anger, and can think about things—rationally.

Only Alfred never did completely get over his hysterical anger, and never was able to think about what happened rationally; and so—or at least, that was how he explained it—six months later he had his first mental breakdown; and so, in all the years that followed, he found himself unable to talk to a reporter or anyone else about the events of June 28, 1950.

Just very occasionally, in all those years, did he tell himself that maybe it wasn’t some residue of anger boring away inside his brain, or it wasn’t his inability to think rationally about what happened on the
Chateaubriand,
that caused him to have his periodic attacks. Then, though, he would ask himself: but if not that, if not them, what? And he would let the matter rest.

What else could it be but his anger; what else could it be but the madness that had come over him that night and made him behave in a manner that was so unlike the way he normally behaved that it had, in a sense, shattered, or
anyway
damaged irreparably, the vessel that contained his mind? A madness he had never, thereafter, been able to rid himself of.

*

What else indeed, Alfred asked himself again and again as he wrote and rewrote his story; and as he found that however often he rewrote it, and however hard he tried to make it dramatic, and frightening, and to infuse it with some of that anger of his, it was curiously lifeless and anti-climactic. Perhaps I’ve waited too long, he told himself as he started ‘The Wreck of the
Chateaubriand
’
for the fifth time; and realised he was writing almost word for word what he had written the first time. Maybe I should still let sleeping dogs lie; and admit that Louise and my
other friends are right to be cool about this enterprise; realising it can do no more good to anyone after all these years and is frankly not very interesting. All right, so the captain and the crew behaved badly. So what? The important thing is that everyone who could have been saved was saved, and it really matters not one bit how they were saved, or by whom. What is more, the idea that I’ve always had in the back of my mind, that whereas the captain was not a hero, I in fact was, is probably erroneous. All right, I did get that sailor to radio for help, and I did lend a hand—if not do it quite all myself—in organising everyone who was left on board. Nevertheless, it’s just possible that someone else had radioed for help, or that the lifeboats from the tanker and the other ships were already on their way. As it’s possible that I really was as mad as everyone subsequently said I was, and people would have organised themselves or been organised by someone else, equally well, if not better, had I not been there.

Oh, if only, Alfred told himself as he started his sixth draft and then his seventh, I could give this business up.

But, and this he told Dorothy again and again as she stroked his head, and kissed him, and murmured ‘Why don’t you just put it aside for a while lovey?’ he couldn’t. Partly because he did feel this was his last chance of regaining some sort of foothold on the shore of sanity. Partly because he did feel a certain moral compunction, however priggish and possibly
self-serving
it might be, to tell, as he saw it, ‘the Truth’. And partly—principally, he admitted to himself, though would never have admitted to anyone else, above all not his bitter, beautiful Dorothy—because since the night of his birthday, when Louise had been so chilly, he had found himself being dropped by practically all his other friends. A state of affairs that was so unbearable to him that the only way he could take his mind off it was by continuing to write, for all that he knew that the more he wrote, the more he would be dropped.

To think, he told himself, he had thought of enlisting their
aid! One might just as well have asked a Nazi for a contribution to a Jewish charity.

What was really shameful about his distress at being dropped was that, as the invitations and the telephone calls became fewer and fewer, until the former flood had become less a trickle than an occasional and no doubt mistaken drip, he realised that just as Dorothy had said that all his ‘friends’ didn’t really like him, so he didn’t really like them. He didn’t even ‘love’ them or ‘adore’ them, as Dorothy claimed they loved and adored him. What he did like, though—what he had always liked, and it was this that really hurt him as he found it being blown away—was the sort of golden mist that enveloped him whenever he was in their company. A golden mist that seemed to emanate from their houses, their paintings, their jewels, their clothes, their porcelain, their silver, their arrogance, their carelessness, their thoughtless, charming, generous brutality; and a golden mist he had first become aware of at that party they had given for him on board ship, the night the
Chateaubriand
went down. It was the mist, he told himself, of western civilisation; of Mozart and Shakespeare, of Schubert and Dante, of Velasquez,
Michelangelo
, Leonardo and Vermeer. And it was the mist that was thrown up by the sun when it shone upon an earth drenched with the blood of all the millions who had died in the name of western civilisation; the victims of the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the two World Wars and the Holocaust; not to mention all the other greater and lesser wars, battles, pogroms and massacres throughout history.

He, a Jewish poet, had stood in that mist for years and declared it, in the final analysis, to be good. The reason why those most responsible for creating its golden swirls had taken him up. For here was someone who, while potentially perhaps a member of the opposition, and by no means a fool—indeed someone who was fully aware of the horrors that the gods of civilisation fed on and needed to survive—had nevertheless lent
his support to those gods. Now, though, by being so determined to write that foolish, unnecessary and not very interesting article of his, he was, in however feeble a fashion, declaring that mist, and thus by implication its principal manufacturers and distributors, to be bad. He had withdrawn his support for their gods. Well, good, they would withdraw their support for him: ugly, ungrateful little you-know-what.