The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (16 page)

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.’

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.

‘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.’