The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (20 page)

And the more she thought of England as a haven, the more she too began to think of Mexico as a kind of hell, in which she would be tied forever to this thirty-seven-year-old baby. Whom, insofar as she did love, she loved just because he was so without faith, even in himself, and just because she could and did pity him. For being weak, for being hopeless and for having so thoroughly squandered the gifts of beauty and brains with which he had been born, the last remnants of which he had, as it were, laid at her feet when they met.

The third and real reason why Gloria found herself repeating ‘You were mad to come here and you’re madder still to stay,’ however, concerned the boys themselves. For if she could have settled into Mexican provincial life and accepted the occasional pang of nostalgia for the bright lights as the price to be paid for peace and serenity, she could probably also, in the long run, have persuaded Paul either to go back to London alone, or, despite his misgivings, to take some sort of part in the life of Vera Cruz himself. To play a role which, she suspected, had he only overcome his petulance and his ‘No I won’t join in’ mood, might have suited him still better than it suited her. Underneath his cross-little-boy act he was desperate to join in; and desperate, too, to go out into the sun, in the hope that even at this stage of his life and decline he might revive, and put forth the sort of flowers he had seemed likely to put forth when young.

What the boys did to make her come round to their way of thinking was first write her a letter care of Maria-Elena restating their opposition to what she was doing, and telling her again that her having abandoned the fight made them feel that she had abandoned them and rendered, as a consequence, their present position untenable. They then wrote her a second letter telling them that the following week they were setting off for England and that while she shouldn’t feel responsible if anything did happen to them there, she should remember that when she had come to San Cristóbal they had warned her. And finally, as Gloria fired off notes to the marginally more reliable of their friends in London, to the bearded Enrique at Las Frechas asking if he had a forwarding address, and even to the British Consulate in Mexico City to see if by chance anyone there knew anything, they twisted the knife in the wound, so to speak, by writing not another word.

To begin with, so angered had Gloria been by their second, ill-natured scrawl, she was almost glad not to hear from them. Besides, she was so taken up at the time with putting the house in order and making her first contacts in town that she didn’t have time to worry too much. And even throughout that first, hot summer as she and Paul travelled, and throughout the following autumn, she managed to put her mind at rest by telling herself that their very silence showed that they were alive and well (had they not been,
someone
would have been in touch) and was just another example of their spite. ‘Little sods,’ she said to Paul, who tended to agree with her explanation for the lack of any further news. ‘Mean, nasty, little prigs. That community of theirs filled them so full of high ideals that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives despising people who aren’t. If, that is,’ she had felt obliged to add, both worriedly and bitterly, ‘they haven’t already killed themselves just to prove what an unnatural mother I am.’

As the novelty of Vera Cruz did start to wear off however, and as Paul did become more and more difficult, so that silence,
that had lasted now for more than a year, began to eat into her and corrode everything around her. Of course she could tell herself that they were mean little sods and of course she could condemn them for the tone of their last letter; not to mention their whole attitude towards her ever since they had spoken at Las Frechas. But that didn’t alter the fact that they were her sons and she loved them; nor alter the fact that the thought that they might have killed themselves, or might now be in a
desperate
state, started to make her feel unhinged.

‘Vera Cruz, Paul—you’re mad,’ she told herself. ‘You’re absolutely mad.’

She was equipped for fighting moral battles, for waging, however privately, perpetual war. The boys, though, just because she had always been so bristling with arms, just because she had always insisted on standing up there and wielding the sword as if it were hers and hers alone by right, were utterly defenceless. So how could she have imagined that if she suddenly threw down those arms and marched off the field, they would survive? She should have had, she should still have, her head examined. It was obvious that being left alone without so much as a shield, they would be mown down. They would be mown down, moreover, not only by those forces she had opposed all her life, but by a combination of her cowardice and her
lifelong
insistence that they shouldn’t, as she hated anyone around her doing, learn how to fight themselves. It was obvious, obvious, and she was mad, mad, mad.

She was mad, Gloria told herself as she got drunk and burst into tears at Maria-Elena’s gallery one afternoon; crying to the tough, bright woman, of whom she had become very fond, ‘I feel as if I’ve cut myself off from my life-blood—as if I’ve severed my main artery.’ (A lament that provoked from Maria-Elena, who thought it was the distance from the theatres and
concert-halls
of London that really distressed her, the remark—under the circumstances not surprising—that for someone who prided herself on her unflagging opposition to imperialism, she seemed
mighty attached to the glitz and glitter of Empire.)

She was mad, Gloria repeated to herself, as she got drunk and burst into tears at home one afternoon; telling Paul that she was terribly sorry, and that she realised she had first disarmed him and then abused him for not fighting, and that he mustn’t worry: she would never abandon him as she had the boys. (Paul merely raised his eyebrows and said ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Gloria.’ But that evening, for the first time since they had arrived, he went into town by himself and stayed out till four in the morning. He returned, though he tried to disguise the fact by putting on his gloomiest face, looking more pleased with himself than Gloria could ever remember having seen him.) Yet however mad she told herself she was, and however unbearable she now started to find both Vera Cruz and Paul—whom she had to come to look on as her own
Vera
Cruz,
as she told him one night with a vague smile and absolute sincerity—there were two things that Gloria couldn’t do. One was leave the place; and the other was come to that understanding with Paul that she might have been able to come to, had she not been so frantic and felt so guilty about the boys.

‘What would I do if I left?’ she almost shrieked at her lover; who as she fell to pieces, not only seemed to be gaining the upper hand in some way, but seemed to be becoming more sanctimonious by the minute. ‘I haven’t got a job any longer, I haven’t got a house, I haven’t got anything.’ A question that Paul had answered with an irritated little shrug of the shoulders, as if he couldn’t imagine why she was bothering him, and a comment, ‘well, you could actually buy another house, you could actually get another job, you know,’ that was delivered in the tone of one who, having worked hard and had no problems all his life, couldn’t understand why other people didn’t stop snivelling, pull up their socks and get on with the job themselves.

‘Besides,’ she had added on another occasion, when she had asked Paul more or less the same question and he had given her more or less the same answer, ‘even if I did go back, how would
I go about looking for them? I mean, all their friends move house every few months, and in any case, are probably dead. If something had happened to them, the police might not have known their names and if I just wander around looking in rehabilitation centres—well, I suppose I might find them, but the chances are a million to one against.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up,’ Paul had shouted. ‘Why do you go on about those kids? If they’ve gone to hell, it’s their own bloody fault and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘I was mad,’ Gloria told herself. ‘I was absolutely mad.’

Then, one morning, a year and a half after she had left England and just when she was coming to the conclusion that whatever difficulties she would have to face, and however hard it might be to trace the boys, she would and should return to London, a letter arrived. It came in a clearly typed envelope, so Gloria wasn’t certain whom it was from before she opened it; and its message was so unexpected that though her initial reaction was and had to be, ‘thank God’, her subsequent reaction was altogether more mixed. It was, however, a letter; and it was a letter that at least didn’t cause her to mourn.

It was signed, this letter, by David; and what he—or a secretary, it occurred to Gloria—had so neatly typed was the following. That he hadn’t written before because he hadn’t wanted to concern her about real problems in the real world, since she had opted out of the real world and undoubtedly didn’t want to be bothered by it. That now, since, ‘insofar as real problems can ever be solved’, his and Michael’s for the moment had been, he had thought she might like to hear from them. And that to cut a long story short, they had come back to England armed with not only the admittedly still fragile
self-confidence
they had gained at Las Frechas, but with a number of letters of introduction to people who had been associated with the community in the past, or similar, affiliated
communities
. They had followed these letters up and met several people through them, ‘who without exception turned out to be most
helpful and kind’. And the result of that had been that he had found a job with a small ‘but dynamic’ advertising agency based in Manchester and had earned £17,000 in the past year—‘just imagine, £17,000!’—Michael was working for a tulip import company in Norwich who were paying him fourteen thousand plus, but had promised him a rise, and not only were they both buying their own houses, but Michael, ‘believe it or not’, was engaged to a Norfolk girl whom he planned to marry in three months’ time, ‘though we’ll let you know the exact date later.’

Startling developments indeed. Nevertheless, had David ended his letter there, ‘thank God’ would probably have
continued
to be Gloria’s reaction to it, despite those snide remarks about her opting out of the real world and her misgivings at sons of hers boasting about how much they were earning. But after a fairly chilly salute, ‘Hope you and Paul are well, let us know what you are doing, Love from us both, David,’ David had added a postscript. And that made it impossible for her to repeat any expression of relief with very much conviction. For in what Gloria couldn’t help feeling was the real body of the letter (all that business about introductions, jobs, money and houses had just been so much stuffing, designed no doubt to irritate her), David had gone on, still in a chilly, rather detached fashion, to say that he and Michael had spent a lot of time talking about her and their past lives when they saw each other. Moreover, they had come to the conclusion that while of course they didn’t in any way blame her for what they had gone through,—‘after all, you only did what you thought was right and no one can be blamed for that’ (he made it sound like an advertising slogan)—they had to confess that they were really quite pleased that she was living out of the country now. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to see her; they did and they hoped she might be able to come over for Michael’s wedding, ‘or at least for a week or two sometime next year’; but because ‘well, apart from the fact that we’ve always felt you’re happier living in hot countries surrounded by small brown people, (it
does allow you both to feel superior and to agonise over your feelings with a fair degree of comfort, doesn’t it?) you must confess, Ma’—and it was the first time he had ever used this word to her; she had always, to both of them, been Mummy from the day they learned to talk—‘that you do rather
monopolise
the moral stage, don’t you? You don’t allow an
awful
lot of room for those around you to stand in the lights and play a part. However insignificant or trivial that part may be, especially when compared to your altogether more meaty role. And we do feel that were you to come back to England again and live here, even without meaning to you might shove us off into the wings again and make us have to put up with simply watching you. I realise we are probably being terribly unfair and it’s just that we’re still not used to our independence, or grown-upness, or whatever you like to call it. If it came to the crunch we probably would be strong enough to keep on our feet and in the light. You never know, though, do you? Some relationships never lose their power, whether for good or ill. So do us a favour Mummy, please—don’t, now that you’ve heard from us, suddenly come rushing home.’

In a way of course, Gloria told herself as she read and reread this postscript—and, more particularly, as she walked down a shimmeringly hot street to the gallery, an hour later, and went through the whole letter again in her head—she should be feeling not just relieved, but delighted. For, in a way, everything had turned out for the best. The boys had become solid, respectable citizens, and she—she had her place in the sun. And the facts that she had never wanted her sons to become solid, respectable citizens and that now, notwithstanding David’s yes, unfair remarks, she no longer wanted her place in the sun were, surely, incidental. Weren’t they?

She couldn’t help herself, however, she thought; as she found herself answering her question with a no. She couldn’t help herself just because she was answering her question with a no. Oh, she supposed she could have grown accustomed to the idea
of the boys becoming useful members of society. After all, if that wasn’t the future she would have chosen for them, it was undoubtedly better than the future they looked like having not so long ago. But for their becoming useful members of society to depend on her staying out in her unwanted place in the sun: that was another matter entirely. I mean, she almost said out loud, as she began to feel dazed now, either by the heat or by the contents of the letter really starting to sink in, do I have to sacrifice myself in order for them to continue being useful members of society? Do I have to be a martyr to the cause of solidity and respectability? Oh no, no, that can’t be, isn’t right. And I won’t, damn it, do it.