The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (24 page)

The other reason he felt somewhat nervous when the man was around was just because he was English and the English, in all their different varieties, had always made Charlie nervous. The ‘typically’ English, as to Charlie’s way of thinking this one was, in his tall, slim, fading, fair-haired fashion; the crabby, mean-voiced Englishman or woman one came across only too often; the booming, barking, military—or more often
would-be
military-type; or—Charlie’s favourite sort—the shy, awkward, somehow mottled sort, who wore funny clothes, went scarlet in the sun and had something profoundly gentle and kind about them. The sort who looked as if they had been terribly crushed by the weight of their country’s history and had emerged from their ordeal bruised, uncertain of where they stood in the world, or if they could stand at all, but sweeter than they might have been if they had not been so injured and maimed.

Yet though they made Charlie nervous, he also tended to like the English—apart from the crabby ones and the barking,
arrogant, disagreeable ones—more than any other people he had ever come into contact with. Just as he loved England—and this unreservedly; for he thought of those hateful English as changelings, outcasts who had no right in and could claim no part of their native land—more than any other country that he knew of.

And it was this liking for the English, and this love of England, that undid him. That, and the beauty, the sheer, extraordinary splendour of the upper-Egyptian night.

One of the reasons Charlie had finally agreed to his father’s request to accompany the Rizzuto party on their Egyptian holiday (‘Please Charlie,’ the very tall, very thin, grey-haired man had said, giving his son a look that meant, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t go alone, we’ll send your friend pity with you’) was that he remembered what the sky had been like on his previous trip down south, when he’d been fifteen. Indeed, it was the thing he remembered most clearly. Somehow Karnak and the Valley of the Kings had always been with him, and were, in reality, only slightly more magnificent than he had always imagined. Whereas the sky he had never spared a thought for before he went, and would have said, had he been asked, that he couldn’t believe it would be any different from the sky in Cairo or Alexandria; the only two places in the world that he knew at the age of fifteen. But when he looked up, the night the ship left Luxor, he saw above him an immense, smooth, blue-black sheet of darkness, with innumerable tiny rents in it through which shone lights of various colours more dazzling, more welcoming, more enticing than he would ever have thought possible.
Extraordinary
hues, that suggested that behind that vast, dark, yet strangely comforting sheet there was a brilliant kind world in which, had one only been able to burst through the skin of this suffocating, tormented bubble in which one was trapped, one would have been able to live and play and be happy. A world in which one would never come up against those tight, judgmental words that here on earth were constantly binding one and
forcing one to be only, and for the whole of one’s life, oneself: words such as ugly, fat, ungainly, sly, greedy, selfish and of course worst of all, pitiful. And when he looked up and saw all that, he became quite dizzy with wonder; and became certain that should he live to be a hundred, he would never see anything even half so glorious again.

Naturally, he had told himself in the years since then, impressive though that sky had been and stick though it had in his memory, the effect it had had on him had had as much to do with himself and the fact that he was at a particularly sensitive age as it had to do with any absolute, intrinsic beauty—if indeed there was any such thing. After all, it was just then that he was really starting to run up against those limitations that he was soon to realise would be with him till he died. Before then he had imagined that the bubble in which he felt both cocooned and trapped was only the bubble of his childhood. Nevertheless, he would one day like to return, to see to what extent the night and the stars south of Luxor were different from the other nights and stars he knew—which remained those of Cairo and Alexandria—and to what extent he had merely perceived them as different. So maybe if at some future date his father had some client, as he occasionally did, to whom he wished to do a favour by making the arrangements for his holiday in Egypt and providing him with a guide, well, if his father didn’t wish to go himself, maybe he’d allow himself to be persuaded to. He wasn’t sure. But maybe …

‘Please Charlie. They’re very nice. I mean, I don’t know what their friends are like. But the Rizzutos themselves, I’m sure you’ll like them. I met them last year, and they’re very
kind
.’

‘Oh, all right then. You’re not paying for them all, are you?’

‘No, of course not. I’ve just made sure that the Rizzutos get the best cabin on the boat, and I just said I’d try to get someone to go with them. To take care of … oh, you know, all the little things that could go wrong, or might need taking care of. And I know you like to think you’re no good at that sort of thing
and that you prefer to stay shut up here in the office all day. But I’ve seen you in action, and actually you’re not half so inept as you like to make out. In fact, underneath I suspect you have the makings of a very good businessman. And it’ll do you good to get away for a bit. I’d go myself if I could, but they’re doing the whole thing and I really can’t take two weeks off at this time of year.’

‘I said,’ Charlie had muttered, unable not to sound a little petulant, ‘I’d go.’

‘Well, try and sound a little more cheerful about it. After all, it’ll be a holiday. You won’t have to run around them the whole time. They’re all more or less adults, apart from the Rizzuto’s son. And you’ve always said you wanted to go back some time. Do you remember on the way to Aswan? You spent the whole of one night up on the deck, just staring at the stars.’

‘Ah,’ Charlie had smiled, without a trace of petulance now, ‘I was just going through a romantic phase then.’

As, he told himself a month after this conversation with his father, he supposed he must again be doing. For he had spent practically the whole of the first night of this trip, after they had left Luxor, lying in a deck chair staring up at the stars. Finding, moreover, not just that his memory hadn’t lied to him, and given a gloss to what had undoubtedly been fairly spectacular, but that if anything it had cast the faintest mist of scepticism over the scene, and dimmed the splendour of the reality. Indeed, eight years later, that splendour made him feel he was dissolving in it, being rendered invisible by it. So much so that it literally brought tears to his eyes, as he lay up there at two-thirty in the morning, hearing only the sound of the water hissing gently by, and the slow heartlike throb of the engines as they moved the ship forward, so smoothly that the lightest sleeping passenger wouldn’t be woken. Tears to his eyes, and a lump to his throat. Look, he wanted to cry to someone—to, he told himself, Isabella, who was at this moment no doubt sleeping in her cabin—isn’t it the most extraordinarily beautiful sight you’ve
ever seen? And isn’t that the sign of true beauty? When it so captures you that it makes nothing of you, it totally eliminates you and all your petty fears and hatreds—and your loves and your sense of duty and honour, too—and so makes you become it that through it you become part of the entire universe, a part that can never be cancelled even if you drop dead right now? For this, insofar as we can understand eternity, will go on forever. And if you give yourself to it, or allow yourself to be taken by it, you yourself will go on forever. Oh look, he wanted to cry to Isabella. Look my darling. Look at the colours. Look at the light. Feel it—oh, feel it drape itself around you. The magic cloak that gives everyone who puts it on immortality. The intoxicating, unutterably lovely sky; stretching over the river where civilisation first started, and man, shedding blood, first started to cut himself off from the sky. Oh, look my darling.
Look
!

And he would, he told himself, have gone down to her cabin, woken her and, dragging her up on deck, cried just this to her; if he hadn’t known that Isabella would have gazed up at the sky with the same lack of interest with which she had regarded the Pyramids at Giza; and would have gazed at him, made mad by his rapture, made invisible by his rapture, yet at the same time made beautiful by his rapture, with horror.

He knew this. He
knew
it. And yet, less than twenty-four hours later, he had done it. Not to the extent of going down to her cabin and waking her, of course; had he allowed himself to get that carried away Isabella would no doubt have started screaming and insisted he be removed from the ship. Nor even by singing his, in the event much abbreviated and watered down, hymn of praise directly to her. (Though as with his speech about the tourists it was aimed at her and she realised it.) Nevertheless, cry out to her he had; and with enough insistence, enough passion to make her then turn her gaze on him with a revulsion that was not followed by any apologetic touch of the hand, or any compensating smile of pity. And having cried out to her,
instead of trying somehow to make amends, he had both
panicked
at the damage he had already done—launching into another hymn out of desperation and thereby compounding the damage—and at the same time become defiant; thinking ‘Oh well, my darling, since I’ve already made myself ugly in your eyes, I don’t see any point in stopping now, and while we’re about it you might just as well get the whole portrait and really be revolted.’

That damned, damned Englishman, Charlie found himself thinking afterwards; for it had been to him, standing on the top deck with Isabella at eleven o’clock on the second night of the journey from Luxor to Aswan that he had, at least ostensibly, chanted his paean to the sky. As it had been the Englishman who had started the whole ball rolling, so to speak, by murmuring, in his quiet, encouraging voice, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Oh yes,’ Charlie had blurted out. ‘In fact, I spent just about the whole of last night up here on deck looking at the stars. I think this is the most extraordinary sight in the world. Or at least,’ he had added apologetically, ‘the most extraordinary sight I’ve ever seen.’

Oh why, he asked himself afterwards, hadn’t that man kept quiet, or addressed his remark to Isabella? And why, having heard that brief lovesong from a creature he had hitherto taken to be a slug—an agreeable slug maybe, but a slug nevertheless—hadn’t he left it at that, told himself, ‘So you see, slugs too have souls,’ and either retired to his cabin or suggested to Isabella that they go to the bar for a nightcap? Instead of allowing his almost but not quite supercilious face to soften at the discovery that the slug had a soul and then gently, sadly even, and without the slightest trace of malice, starting to wheedle further snatches of that melody out of him; or if not that one, which the slug seemed unwilling to come out with at any length, some other, sweet song.

He supposed, though, it hadn’t really been the man’s fault. It had just been his misfortune to come across a music lover, and an Englishman, when Isabella was present.

It had gone, the remainder of that unfortunate encounter, like this.

After Charlie had confessed to spending most of the previous night up on deck, the Englishman had asked him if he often made this trip. And when Charlie said no, in fact this was only the second time in his life as far as he remembered, though his parents told him they had taken him to Aswan when he was very small, whether by train, car, boat or plane he wasn’t sure, and he had often flown to Aswan with other clients of his father’s, where he had put them on their cruise ships before returning to Cairo by plane, the Englishman had said that this was the second time that he had made the trip too, though he would like to make it every year. ‘Not so much for the
monuments
and temples and things,’ he murmured, his voice as attuned to the sound of the river as the ship’s engines had seemed the night before, ‘as for the Nile itself.’ He smiled. ‘You know, for the whole idea that this is where everything started and that in a way this river is the source of all art, all religion, all politics, all economics, all culture, all history.’

Then, when Charlie, glancing apprehensively but with a smile of his own at Isabella, had only taken him up on these remarks to the extent of muttering, almost incomprehensibly, that he had been thinking just the same thing last night and that it was true; and that he’d always had an image of the Nile as the principal artery in the body of civilisation (a very sheepish smile after that) and that in a way, in a sense, in his opinion, ‘I mean, it’s probably stupid, but … all art, all civilisation possibly, though we don’t really know too much about the precise
day-to
-day working of those days, started at the top in ancient Egypt and has been in constant decline ever since. Because no art has ever equalled the purity, the sophistication, the sublimity of Egyptian art …’ and after hitting that particular high note, had lapsed into a gloomy, embarrassed silence in which he tried to look, as he leant on the railings, more baboonlike than ever, the Englishman had gracefully—but understandingly?—changed
the subject. He had asked exactly what Charlie did. ‘I mean, in Cairo, though without wishing to be rude I’m not exactly sure what you’re doing here with us now, other than keep us company—which is very reassuring I must say. No, no, honestly, I’m not being sarcastic. It really is.’ He had nodded when Charlie had muttered something about supposing his father was the classic Levantine businessman, ‘You know, in the export/import business as they call it. I work for him, though in fact he isn’t really Levantine, my father …’ And he had taken a step back, as if he were genuinely sorry to be so intrusive, before asking Charlie (‘if it isn’t a rude question’) how come he was called Charlie. ‘I mean, it’s not what one normally thinks of as an Egyptian or an Arab name.’ To which Charlie, giving one of his most tragic grins and looking down at the deck, and wriggling his shoulders uncomfortably, had replied that the reason was, he wasn’t an Egyptian himself, nor even an Arab, ‘though I was born here and my parents were born here’. In fact—and oh how he writhed now, as if trying to turn himself inside out—he … he … he was English, he was an Englishman, himself.