The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (22 page)

Oh yes, she told herself as she walked along, thinking that she would write and congratulate Michael as soon as she arrived at the gallery, and feeling more cheerful than she had in ages: civilisation needs blood. Or at least, as I believe I actually put
it: one must be prepared to get blood on one’s hands if one wants to survive in this world. Or have others get blood on their hands for one.

After that, things started to look up.

For a moment he thought she must be sick, or that her father, sitting next to her, had said something to upset her. Then, following the direction of her gaze—a gaze that never faltered even as the tears ran down her cheeks—he realised what she was crying about. And as he realised, first he found a phrase from Shakespeare’s
Othello
coming to him, ‘and I loved you that you did pity them’, and second, as that phrase, perhaps because she was Italian, set itself to music and became a phrase from Verdi’s
Otello,
‘e
io
t
’amavo
per
la
tua
pietà’,
it struck him that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life. Partly on account of her hair, that, tied back in a pony-tail, was so dark and shining it made one want to reach out and stroke it; partly on account of her skin, that was so perfect it conjured up images of velvety wild roses growing in the shadows of a summer wood; and partly on account of her eyes, that were so black and deep they called to mind pictures of Mexican
cenotes,
the great ceremonial wells where the Mayans used to drown their victims. But beautiful more on account of the total
innocence
with which she sat there crying, and of her utter absence of guile, affectation and, as he thought of it,
self.
Of course she was only sixteen and, coming from a well-off Milanese family, had probably never before been exposed to the sight of children, small children, and children of her own age, scrabbling around on great piles of garbage, looking for something they could sell, or eat. All the same, he had seen other sixteen year olds from prosperous European families catch their first glimpse of what
they no doubt termed ‘Third Wordlism’ and none had ever reacted like this before. In fact, most had reacted exactly like their parents; staring out of the window of their taxi, or hired car, or coach, with looks of dismay, of horror, of shame, of embarrassment and an undisguised fascination that bordered on glee. ‘Wow, look—it’s just like you see on TV. They do, actually,
do
it. Jesus, isn’t that terrible?’ She was so beautiful that Charlie himself felt moved, as much by her distress as by what was causing it, though that too he felt he was seeing, through her eyes, for the first time. And she was so beautiful and he wanted so much to protect that beauty, that innocence, that selflessness, that he did what he had never done before and never would have done for anyone else. He fished in the pocket of his jacket, took out the perfectly clean and ironed Irish linen handkerchief that his Italian mother had given him, with a kiss, as he was leaving the house this morning, and, leaning over the back of his seat in the minibus, held it out.

‘
Signorina
,’ he said, trying to make his voice as gentle as her expression, ‘have this.’

The girl looked and saw what he was offering her; for the briefest of instants there was a flicker of revulsion on her flawless face, though whether for what was being held out, or for who was holding it out, Charlie couldn’t tell. Then she murmured, with a sweetness that made his effort at gentleness sound as boorish and crude as a croak, ‘Thank you, but I’ve got one.’ ‘But thank you,’ she repeated after a moment, in a voice still more exquisitely tender; as she stretched out and just touched him on the back of his hand, so he would forgive her for that flicker of revulsion which she knew he had caught, gave him a smile that didn’t so much remind him of Shakespeare now as Mozart at his most desperately sad and lovely, and cast on him the full depth of that gaze that had formerly been reserved for the children on the garbage heap. ‘And please,’ she said, wanting him, he told himself, to forgive her now for her very compassion, ‘call me Isabella.’

‘Yes,’ he mumbled, and said something about her calling him Charlie. Then, wiping his sweating hands—or paws, as he thought of them—with his handkerchief, he resisted the
temptation
to let Isabella know with a glance, a smile, or a word of his own that of course he forgave her, and beamed mournfully round at the other passengers in the mini-bus. He told them he was very sorry for the state of the traffic and indeed for the state of his country, which as they saw was going through rather a bad time. And he assured them, trying not to sound ironical or bitter, and wishing even as he spoke that he had kept his mouth shut, that they wouldn’t be exposed to too much of this sort of thing, waving his hand at the squalor and misery outside. From tomorrow they would be seeing ‘the real Egypt’.

He wished he had kept his mouth shut because he knew what the reaction to his statement would be. ‘But no,
this
is the real Egypt.’ And he had heard it once too often. It was such a glib, fatuous response—as fatuous and glib as his own remark—and it was a response that on every level, according to him, was false. The ‘real’ Egypt that these people had come to see
was
the Egypt of the Pyramids, the Nile, Luxor and Abu Simbel—and to a lesser extent, of the mosques of Cairo, the Khan-el-Khalili Bazaar and the High Dam at Aswan—just as the ‘real’ Egypt that he himself believed in was the Egypt of the Pyramids, the Nile, Luxor and Abu Simbel. That was the Egypt that everything else, everything that followed, was based on; and in the same way as Italy would not have been Italy had it been deprived at a stroke of all the works of the Etruscans, the Romans and the masters of the Renaissance, and England would not have been England without Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, so Egypt without its past, without its cultural foundations, would not any longer have been Egypt. It would have been a mere name on the map, a mere geographical entity, without interest, without, possibly, life and without, precisely, ‘reality’.

‘This is
not
the real Egypt,’ he wanted to shout at his passengers,
‘any more than the slums of Liverpool are the real England, or the lower depths of Naples are the real Italy. They are the flaws in the reality, if you like, and the people who live in them are the victims of reality. But they are not the reality itself. And it is cant and sentimental nonsense to say they are. So now please, shut up, read your guidebooks, or let me tell you what we will be doing tomorrow. Reality indeed. Huh! Pah! What
crap
!’

It goes without saying that Charlie did not shout any of this to his charges—never had, to any of the people his father had persuaded him to accompany on their Egyptian holidays in the past—and simply waited until his moment of bad temper had passed. As it did, today—after all, only two members of his party actually coming out with the dreaded words—quite quickly. He would have liked to, however, he told himself and one day, if he was really pushed to it, he would.

But rather than do that, he reflected, it would be better to tell his father that he was sorry but he couldn’t undertake any more of these trips. Even if that hurt his business. And even if that meant, from then on, that he would have lost the opportunity of meeting people like Isabella Orsini.

Whose beauty, in his eyes, had not been diminished by the fact that of the two people on board who had trotted out the ‘But this is the real Egypt’ line, one of them had been her. If anything, he told himself as he glanced in the side mirror, hoping to see her reflection, it had been enhanced by it. For the girl had said it so naturally, so spontaneously, that she had sounded as if she believed it; and had made him wonder if what really angered him when he heard those words was not so much that people said them and they were false, but that they said them while knowing them to be false.

It had largely been because Isabella had been one of the two people who had given the stock response to his cliché that Charlie’s ill temper had passed as quickly as it had; and he forgave not only himself for having tossed that trite ball into
court in the first place, but the other person who had batted it back in such a facile fashion. To wit: the person for whom his father had laid on this trip—or anyway, to whom he had offered the services of his son as guide—was a short, stocky, bearded and balding industrialist called Rizzuto from somewhere in the north of Italy. It was also largely because Isabella had this power to make him see as virtues in her what would have appeared as vices in others, that though he had begged his father not to send him off for two weeks—‘You know how much I hate it,’ he had said, trying to make himself as ungainly and ugly as possible, so his father might feel sorry for him and stop asking this favour of him—by the time the minibus had left the worst of the slums and was heading down town towards the Hilton, he was feeling glad that he had finally agreed. Glad and relieved that his father had not said ‘All right Charlie, if you really don’t want to …’ and ruffled up his hair, and turned aside so his son shouldn’t see how deeply he loved him.

After all, he told himself, it’s years since I took a boat up to Aswan. And even though no one in Mr Rizzuto’s party seems to know quite how to treat me—as a guide, as friend, as an almost business acquaintance—they all seem quite amiable. And just as long as I can look at Isabella every so often, and sometimes talk to her … Turning round again now, to explain something else to the ten people whom his father had entrusted to his care, once more Charlie caught a look of the sweetest, most unaffected compassion in Isabella’s eyes as she, like all but one of the other passengers, gazed at him, wanting to hear what he had to tell them.

And as he saw it, he once more heard, within his head, that phrase from Verdi’s
Otello.

‘E
to
t’amavo
per
la
tua
pietà.’

*

Pity, in one form or another, had been with Charlie all his life.
He had grown up with it, like a brother or sister. He had gone to school with it, having it sitting next to him at his desk, and keeping him company as he watched his schoolfriends play football and tennis. And it had joined him in the little office his father had put at his disposal when, at the age of seventeen, he had said no, he didn’t want to go to university, nor take a year off travelling in Europe, nor even—nor above all—go and stay with distant relatives in England, but wanted to start work immediately in the family firm. Yet it was not he, he hoped and was almost certain, who had demanded this companion. Indeed, he liked to think he could have done very well without it. It was rather others who had always been determined to saddle him with it, to thrust it upon him, and to say, with their every gesture, ‘Oh, do take it with you when you go out Charlie, otherwise you’ll be lonely.’ ‘Oh, do let it come with you when you go on holiday Charlie, otherwise you won’t have anyone to talk to.’ ‘Oh, do just let it sit with you Charlie, in a corner of the room, and keep you company.’

If he thought that he could very well have done without this friend whom everyone insisted he go about with, however, he was well aware why his parents, relations and fellow workers in the office did so insist, and wasn’t in the least upset that they did. On the contrary, he was very grateful. For they didn’t do so meaning, ‘That way we don’t have to bother about you.’ Instead, he felt, they did it because they cared for him and honestly believed he would be happier if he had their pity—as well as themselves—to go around with. How could he not be grateful, he would sometimes ask himself, when people showed such concern for him? In fact, he sometimes felt that he was the most loved—and therefore happiest?—person in the world and the gods had only made him physically ill-favoured so he wouldn’t be too heaped with blessings; so heaped that he invoked the jealousy of mortals, who would see it as their task to destroy him. He could never have been as happy as he was had he been born good looking, or even attractive; and he was
fairly sure that he would never have been so loved. This was why he never, not even in his heart of hearts, he told himself, wished that he could be transformed from the toad he was into the handsomest of princes; and why, too, grateful though he was for everyone’s insistence that he never go anywhere without his good friend pity, he himself would have been quite content without him. He never found himself calling for him, sulkily insisting on his presence, or arrogantly demanding his constant attention. Oh, sure, he did at times overdo his ugly toad act, make himself more graceless, awkward, unlovely and
misbegotten
than he actually was, just so those close to him would press his companion on him with particular attention, just so he would be given an extra dollop of love. But there was a difference between feeling sorry for oneself and wanting to indulge one’s craving for sweets, wasn’t there? Especially when one happened to be, as all people were at times, depressed. In the same way, as there was a difference between being aware of one’s own shortcomings, and accepting them with a possibly bitter sweet smile and the occasional curse, and hating oneself so much for what one could do nothing about that one wasted one’s life longing to be someone else. And truly, Charlie often told himself—and told himself with something approaching smugness on the afternoon of December 29, 1987, after he had said goodbye to Isabella Orsini and her party, promising to see them bright and early the following morning in order to start their sightseeing—he didn’t want to be anyone else. For who but a toad would be gazed at as he had been by that gorgeous, that breathtaking child? Who else but a toad would have been able to contemplate spending two whole weeks in her company, without the slightest risk of rejection?

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.’