The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (21 page)

Except that now that you’ve heard from boys and you know they’re all right, she seemed to hear a voice whispering, your dislike of Vera Cruz and your hatred of Paul will evaporate—as you were always sure they would if you heard that the boys were all right. Now you really will be able to settle in here, now you really will be able to work something out with Paul; and in six months’ time you’ll be so relieved that you’re here and not back in wet, smug, shabby old England that you’ll even admit that unfair though David’s remarks were, he was only telling you things you’ve told yourself in the past. So go on, that voice whispered to her, relax. Everything
has
turned out for the best. For the very best possible, and for a best far better than any you ever imagined. Why are you fighting it? Go on. Relax. Smile. Be
happy.

Yet though she heard this voice and acknowledged that there was something in what it said, Gloria still couldn’t relax; nor be happy. It was partly because the good if extraordinary news from England had come too late, when Vera Cruz was already lying in ruins round her and her relations with Paul had reached the stage that though she was constantly reminding herself that he had once been beautiful and was still attractive in a pale, depressing sort of way, whenever she looked at him she thought him the ugliest person she had ever seen; a person so
monstrously, obscenely ugly that she outraged her eyes by raising them towards him. More, though, she couldn’t obey that voice’s instructions because now that she thought about it, she suddenly felt sure that David knew exactly what she was going through here. He knew; and his wishing her to stay, and his making his own and Michael’s continued survival dependant on her staying, were not only, not really, because he was afraid of being pushed off the moral stage should she return to England, but because he actually wanted her to be pushed off stage herself and wanted her to suffer, even die, as a result. David and Michael didn’t just want her to be a passive, relatively happy sacrifice, she told herself. Oh no. That wouldn’t do at all. They wanted her to be an active, profoundly unhappy sacrifice; and unless she were prepared to be one, she suspected they were trying to tell her, then by God they were still prepared to go back to their drugs to punish her. A game she couldn’t and wouldn’t play. Why the hell should I, she asked herself. Why the hell should I?

Because you actively sacrificed them and condemned them to unhappiness so you could stand centre-stage, she tried to tell herself in the month that followed the arrival of David’s letter, and she tried to write an answer to that letter and send it. She didn’t convince herself, however, as she tore up sheet after sheet of paper and began to wonder whether she’d ever manage to communicate with her children again. If David and Michael had been sacrificed—and she denied it absolutely—their sacrifice had been entirely unintentional; a tragic by-product of her determination, as David had so glibly put it, ‘to do what she thought was right’. And her determination to do what she thought was right had in no way been dependent on their being sacrificed. Of course it hadn’t, she told herself as she tossed away yet another sheet. The idea was ludicrous! As if she hadn’t been fighting the fight since she’d been sixteen—years and years before they were so much as conceived, let alone started sticking needles into their arms. How could she even think such a thing? she asked herself, more and more angrily, as that month went
by. How could she? And she’d be damned if she’d put up with the boys’ threats. She’d be damned if … She may very well be damned, she reflected, whatever she did.

In which state of mind she was eventually able to complete a letter to her sons. One that said just two things. The first was that she was very happy to hear from them after all this time and happier still that everything had turned out so well. And the second was that while she understood what they said about her not returning to England, even if she was a little hurt by it, or by the manner in which it had been said, she was curious about something. Namely, as to whether what they were really saying was that their integration into society was dependent upon her exclusion from it. Even if that exclusion should cause her, as it now had (and as they had rightly predicted that it would) to feel she were going mad, had been cast out into hell and would either put an end to herself if it wasn’t terminated fairly quickly, or would kill or be killed by Paul. ‘I mean, I love Mexico,’ she wrote, ‘and I’m sure if I had come here when I was younger or in different circumstances I could have involved myself in Mexican life and in Mexican problems. As it is, I have realised that either because of my age, or because of Paul—whom I have come to think of as a ball and chain which keeps me attached to England and English problems—I can never now be a part of Mexican society. Moreover, if I do stay on here I am bound to live as an outcast, who will be ever further cast out with every day she stays.’

She supposed, she murmured to herself as she took the letter to the post office and mailed it, that she had better make sure she was not imagining things before she started getting too worked up.

She only had to wait another three weeks to find out that no, she was not.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mummy,’ David wrote back (and now she might have preferred a ‘Ma’), ‘stop being so melodramatic. Living in hell. Being killed by Paul. What a lot of rubbish. You
know quite well that if we had written telling you that we were living under a bridge stealing and selling ourselves in order to buy drugs you would have written telling us you were blissfully happy and that Paul had bloomed in the sun. Instead, just because I write and tell you that we’re now happy, or look as if we have a chance of being so, you start clutching your head and moaning that you want to come home. Well, no, Mummy, I’m sorry—to be perfectly frank, we don’t want you. If you’re an outcast in Mexico, you’re an outcast here. We, however, belong here now and we don’t want you, intentionally or
unintentionally
, making outcasts of us again. Of course, we can’t precisely forbid you to return, or prohibit your entry into England if you are determined to. But I promise you one thing; I’ll never speak to you again if you do. And when you do manage, nevertheless, as I know you will if you return, somehow to worm your way back into our lives and undermine us, I’ll make sure that when we collapse it’ll be on you whom we fall.

‘Oh Mummy, I’m so sorry to write like this, because you know we love you and always will. We really would never have had another mother. I mean, we both feel that with you we’ve really been through it, whatever ‘it’ is, and come out the other side. With the result that we’ve not only seen far more of the world, or of life, than most people, but that we’re in a position to appreciate it more than most people. However, perhaps what it really boils down to is this. The world needs martyrs if it is to continue, and the cause of let’s say decency, honesty and morality—civilisation?—is to prevail. For years—and I repeat, I’m sure without your intending us to be so—we were the martyrs, while you took up the cause. And I’m sure before us you found other people to sacrifice. Daddy, for one. Or all those friends you told us about you’ve lost contact with. Now, though, we’ve taken up the cause, Mummy, and you’re the martyr. Perhaps what I’m saying is nonsense. Perhaps the cause doesn’t need martyrs, only willing conscripts. But I can’t help feeling I am not talking nonsense. After all, you did always teach us that
civilisation requires blood, didn’t you? Well, for years that blood was ours. Now, Mummy, I’m afraid, though I’m still convinced you were exaggerating in your letter and that you’re actually quite happy there, if blood there must be, it’s going to have to be yours. I don’t want to be selfish, but I do feel that Mike and I have given enough; and if we give even another drop, we’ll die.

‘Honestly Mummy, please believe me: we do love you very, very much. But please, too, believe this: that if you love us, you will stay away from England; and you’ll never, whatever happens, try to come back.

‘In the end, all we are asking you to do is retire.’

The trouble was, by the time Gloria did get this confirmation of her worst fears, she had stopped feeling angry about the boys’ previous letter and about the fate they had reserved for her. And her anger wasn’t even revived when she came to the sentence in which David seemed to be equating honesty, decency and
morality
with working in an advertisting agency, or importing tulips. Perhaps he was right, she told herself wretchedly; and perhaps she was, as usual, being priggish to feel that she should be angry. Yes, she was in hell here, in hell for the very reason that she had retired here, and had come to the conclusion that one couldn’t retire, not from the fight in which she had been engaged, and go on living. Moreover, she really didn’t think that she was being melodramatic when she told herself that she would end up either killing or being killed by Paul. But somehow, for some reason, she no longer cared. And though she had told herself earlier that she’d be damned if she stayed, as well as damned if she didn’t, now she told herself she didn’t mind if she were damned; and that whatever happened to her here, no, she would not go back to England.

Was it because, somewhere inside herself, she believed that the boys were right? Because some latent masochism made her want, after years, as if were, of handing out the punishment, to be that martyr that David said was necessary? Or simply because
this country that she had come to love—and she had not been lying to David—had in a sense corrupted her; corrupted her with its sun and sea, corrupted her with its beauty and flowers, corrupted her with its poverty and its air of a place that had lost its past without ever having found a present in which it felt comfortable?

She really didn’t know and she fought against the sudden inertia that had come over her. An inertia, she had the feeling, that having come over her would never now go away. But however hard she fought, she couldn’t dispel it.

So she settled down to her retirement. To her days of working in the gallery; which as a result of several initiatives of hers, was becoming unexpectedly profitable and was providing her with an income superior to that which she received from her
investments
in England. To her further attempts to integrate herself into Mexican society; attempts that were, despite what she had told the boys, on a drinks and dinner party level, fairly
successful
. (Even if on a political level, the only level that counted according to her, she continued to feel, wrong of her though she knew it was, that Mexican problems were not her problems, and that the main arteries of world thought, world opinion and world culture did not run through, or even near, Vera Cruz.) And to her evenings spent with Paul arguing, fighting, crying—and now violence, on both their parts, became the norm rather than the exception—and wondering for how much longer she, or both of them, could endure this nightmare. A nightmare that made her dread going home, dread the weekends, wear a curious little smile whenever she walked out of the house to disguise the fact from any watching neighbours that everything inside her four walls was even worse than they must have imagined it was; and made her think that it was hardly surprising if the world’s and Mexico’s problems didn’t seem very relevant to her, when her own problems excluded any thought save how she was going to get through to bedtime without having Paul punch her, without her throwing a bottle or an ashtray at him, and without
both of them ending up lying on the stained and dirty carpet drunk, crying and telling each other, ‘Please stop it, please stop it, oh, please, please stop it.’

And so, probably, it would have gone on in a kind of
never-ending
and profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion to a story that had started, in Gloria’s mind, one night in her house in London, when a policeman had pushed her over. A never-ending ending that didn’t even achieve tragedy, due to the utter lack of resistance she had offered when she’d been faced with it. She was the sacrifice necessary for her sons’ continuing to live and prosper in the world? All right, so be it. She had renounced what was, in the final analysis, her life, in order that David could become an advertising executive and Michael an importer of tulips? Yes, she had and so what? She was, as David had said, the living proof that what she had always claimed and taught them was true: that civilisation needed blood to survive? Yes, yes she was, and frankly, what did it matter? After all, she did love the boys, at least it was hot here and the scenery was splendid, and she had a reasonably interesting, relatively well-paid job as well as her income from England. I mean, things could be worse, she told herself, there are hundreds of millions of people far more worthy of pity than me in the world and anyway my fate simply isn’t the stuff that tragedies are made of. Tragedies are like symphonies that end in some great dark resolution of all that has gone before. Whereas my life is just going to string itself out in a series of unresolved notes, until someday, for some reason, there will be silence. And that, without any ado
whatsoever
, will be that. No tragedy. No fight. No nothing.

And so, probably, it would have gone on … if six months after David’s last letter she hadn’t received another little note from him telling her that Michael was now married (‘sorry we didn’t let you know before, but it was a very small affair and anyway as I hadn’t heard from you …’). And if she hadn’t, after a particularly awful battle with Paul, found herself repeating and repeating that phrase of hers about civilisation needing
blood to survive, as she walked to work wearing a pair of dark glasses to hide a bruised eye. Found herself repeating it and found herself wondering whether that blood necessarily had to be hers. For not only had she not been melodramatic when she had told the boys that she would end up killing or being killed by Paul, but she was beginning to think that that killing wouldn’t be delayed much longer. However, she thought, if it was she who did, rather than she who was done-to, and if she didn’t actually wait till the night when she couldn’t control herself any longer and grabbed a carving knife and stuck it into him, but took a somewhat more calculated attitude towards what was inevitable anyway, mightn’t she be able to edge her way, however cautiously at first, back into the swim of things? All right, maybe she wouldn’t return to England; that much she could continue to do for the boys. And maybe she wouldn’t ever become fully a member of Mexican society. With Paul out of the way, however, she might become a good deal more a member of it than she was at present; even to the extent of becoming, yes, politically involved again. Further, with Paul out of the way she might feel she was that much nearer to the heart of world affairs, had her hand a little more firmly on the pulse of reality, and had the time, the energy and above all the will, to
care
. Of course, she went on, she didn’t have to do the thing itself; but she had no doubt that if she made one or two discreet enquiries, and paid sufficiently well, she would find someone who would help her to make it look as if Paul had decided that enough was enough and had got on a plane, or taken a train, and left. And as long as it was done moderately carefully, she saw no reason why anyone should ever suspect anything, let alone discover the truth. After all, apart from her, Paul didn’t have a friend in the world.