The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (3 page)

*

The general opinion was that Alfred had behaved badly. How badly, no one knew; though it was agreed it must have been pretty badly for him to be so severely traumatised that from then on, two or three times a year, in the words of some, he had a nervous breakdown, and in the words of others, went barking mad. ‘It must have been the contrast with his father,’ he knew people said of him. ‘You know, the father being a hero, and the son being—well, one doesn’t know quite what of course, but—a coward, I’ve heard, is putting it mildly. I mean, tossing women and children out of a lifeboat. Or wrapping a shawl round himself so he’d be mistaken for a woman. Or something like that.’

‘It was being so lionised by society,’ he knew that people said of him. ‘You know, he was nothing. Just some unappetising youth who’d published a volume of I’m told not very good poetry. Then, suddenly, because of his father, he was taken up by all these rich and famous people. Only when it came to it, he couldn’t behave properly. I mean I’ve heard—of course I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard …’

‘What do you expect?’ he knew that people said of him. ‘The
son of a socialist and a Jew. Okay, so the father was a great resistance hero, and was tortured to death. But I mean frankly, if you ask me, the Germans only did what we’d have had to do, sooner or later.’

‘Ugly little … yid.’

However if, particularly in the first few years after the disaster, this was what was said by those who hadn’t actually been on the ship, and possibly felt they didn’t quite belong to the inner circle of New York and Paris literary café society, not one of Alfred’s fellow passengers ever accused him of having behaved incorrectly.

They didn’t deny it when people said to them, ‘I hear he did this or that,’ and they smiled indulgently when others muttered that they thought that under the circumstances going mad a couple of times a year was the least Alfred could do. But they never added any wood to the fire—indeed, as far as possible, most of them avoided any mention of the events of that night, as if they were too awful to remember—and it never occurred to any of them, as some said they should, to ‘drop’ Alfred. On the contrary, from the moment he stepped off the rescue ship in New York, wearing only a blanket over the remains of his dinner jacket, and was whisked off to the promised duplex on Fifth Avenue, which he found crammed with clothes of every kind that his host had bought for him as soon as he had heard of the tragedy, he was more than ever taken up by society; and through his father’s friend, and through the friends he had made on the ship, he soon got to know and to be invited to the dinners and parties of every fashionable publisher, writer, composer, painter, and actor and actress in New York. Not to mention the dinners and parties of those wealthy women who collected writers, painters and composers, and helped to make them fashionable so that they themselves could be considered so.

For six months he kept it up; the fat, greedy boy let loose in the sweet shop. Until, one day, he found himself possessed of an urgent need to buy every available newspaper and scan them
for reports of terrorist attacks, bomb outrages and the still continuing trials of war criminals. Possessed of such a need that that evening, for the first time since he’d arrived in New York, he had to telephone his hostess and say he was terribly sorry but he wasn’t feeling very well.

He didn’t feel very well, and read the newspapers obsessively, for a week. Then, one morning, he woke up with the most agonising cramps in his stomach, and far from not feeling very well started to feel very ill; so ill that he telephoned his mother in Paris, and asked her to come over and take care of him. And a week after that he woke up in the middle of the night convinced that all those terrorists he had been reading about, and all those war criminals, were after him, were poisoning him, and were soon going to come and ‘get him’. He was whimpering and crying and backed himself into a corner of his bedroom; and when his mother and his father’s friend came to help him to the ambulance that was waiting downstairs to take him to a ‘
rest-home
’, he threw himself on the floor and begged them not to move him. He was screaming, squealing, choking with tears, and made his mother so afraid that he was going to fling himself out of the window that she sent for the male nurses who were in the ambulance, and had them come and take Alfred away by force.

He was in hospital for a month; by the time he came out weak, humiliated, and frightened, and started, almost immediately, doing the rounds of his rich and fashionable friends again, people—people who didn’t know him well, the hangers-on of his actor, composer and socialite friends—had begun to mutter that the breakdown he had suffered was undoubtedly due to his having behaved—‘How shall I put it?…
Badly’
—the night the
Chateaubriand
went down.

‘Oh, poor Alfred,’ his friends and fellow passengers would murmur with a smile, before going off to tell Alfred what such and such had said of him. ‘Poor little Alfred.’

*

So it went on as the years passed; with Alfred living between New York and Paris, producing the occasional volume of poetry and acquiring a degree of fame not only as a poet, but as an essayist and critic. He wrote in French and English, since his mother was half American and he had been brought up speaking both languages; and he wrote on every sort of subject. Literature, philosophy, art, politics, history, fashion, the difficulty of being the son of a famous father. In fact there was only one subject he did not write on; and that was, it was said, because everyone was too tactful ever to ask him to do so. That Alfred had his side of the story was beyond dispute. But frankly, isn’t it better to let sleeping dogs lie? Especially when they get up of their own accord every six months, and drive poor Alfred crazy with their howling. I mean, maybe one day, but for the moment; no, if we need something … What about the influence of Gertrude Stein on the Structuralists? Or an article on the rights and wrongs of war crime trials? Or—oh, I don’t know—a commentary on the changing shape of the Coca-Cola bottle.

And slowly, as those years passed, and Alfred married the daughter of one of his New York socialite friends, had two daughters with her, and then, after fifteen years of relatively happy life together, amicably and reasonably profitably
separated
from her, although a few people did still mutter when they met Alfred at parties that he had behaved badly, for the most part his association with the
Chateaubriand
was forgotten, and he was known only as a man with a certain literary
reputation
who had a name that thanks to his father was more famous than his published work warranted. A minor poet who still, after fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty years was one of the most assiduous partygoers around; and an essayist who was the darling, when he wasn’t in hospital, of innumerable rich women on both sides of the Atlantic. Hostesses who patronised him unmercifully, called him their dear little, sweet little Alfred, and merely cooed, and sighed, and went immediately to tell him when, ever more rarely, some guest at one of their parties
happened to mention that they had heard that funny little Alfred, who looked so like Donald Pleasance that people who had seen the actor in some film would stop and ask him for his autograph, had some sort of stain in his past.

Yet it was, possibly, just because his apparent infamy was largely forgotten that thirty-five years after the
Chateaubriand
went down, Alfred suddenly got the idea of writing about that night. Got it so suddenly, the words falling out of his mouth when the journalist who was interviewing him for the literary pages of a Sunday newspaper asked him what he was working on and what he was planning to work on, that he asked Dorothy, when she got in from work, if she had mentioned the ship to him recently.

‘No, lovey,’ Dorothy said, since she too had heard the rumours about what her lover had supposedly done or not done, and had always thought it kinder to steer clear of the subject. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it.’ ‘But come to think of it,’ she added a little later, somewhat cautiously, ‘it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you did, would it?’ Thereby, the implication was, setting the record straight one way or another. Or at any rate, getting whatever’s been on your chest all these years, off.

‘No,’ Alfred thought every evening, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. On the contrary, it might be a very good idea. Furthermore, if he knew quite well why he had never written of the sinking before—and not only not written of it, but put it out of his mind so thoroughly that to all intents and purposes what had happened had not happened to him—now it came to him that in a sense all his adult life he had been waiting for this moment, when the creature would spring out of the cover in which it had been hiding, and stand exposed in the light; and he had been preparing himself mentally, or morally, for it.

The years of hanging around are over, he told himself bravely. It is time to face the beast.

As he was still telling himself the following morning; when he received a letter that according to the postmark had been
mailed before the publication of his interview in the paper. A typewritten page from the son of the captain of the
Chateau
briand
:
informing him that he was planning to write a biography of his father, and saying he would be very grateful if Alfred, as one of the most distinguished passengers on board, would give him the benefit of his recollections.

A coincidence, or an omen? Alfred wasn’t certain, but he wrote back to the son saying he would certainly be willing to talk to him, though he might be interested to know that strangely he was planning to write, if not immediately publish, his
memories
of that night, ‘as you may have seen in the interview I did with Olivier Rosenthal that came out last Sunday. Of course,’ he added, ‘mine will be a strictly personal account, and won’t in anyway encroach on your territory.’

That the son might not, nevertheless, be entirely happy with his version of the facts, he thought it prudent not to mention for the moment.

*

Yet now, he reflected, as he stood under the shower and decided that on second thoughts the first thing to do was take the letter to the police, it seemed that the son, or someone else, already knew what he was likely to say, and was determined to prevent him saying it. Either because he knew that although Alfred had made it clear, in his letter at least, that he wasn’t going to publish his account, when it actually came to it he would probably be persuaded to, not least because it would cause a certain scandal and sell a few extra copies of the newspaper in which it appeared, or simply because he didn’t want the truth to be told to anyone, not even to Alfred himself; as if, once it were out, in however private a form, it would somehow escape, like a wild animal from a zoo, and cause irreparable damage.

That meant, therefore, that he had two choices. One was to announce publicly that he had given up the idea, and had decided
to continue to forget about that night all those years ago. The other was to go away somewhere in secret, with Dorothy and Matilda, and stay away until he had finished his task. By which time, with any luck, his persecutors would have forgotten about him; and anyway, he would have deposited copies of the story with a number of different people, with instructions that it was most definitely to be published should anything happen to him.

Unless, he seemed to hear a voice whispering to him, he followed a third course. Namely: at this rather late stage in the game, emulate his illustrious father. By taking at last a public, unequivocal stand against anti-semitism, injustice, the greedy, the cruel and the murderous, and not just the veiled, sublimated stand that he had always felt his poems and essays represented. And by coming out into the open with his account of the sinking of the
Chateaubriand,
relying not only on the police but on his rich and powerful friends to protect him from would-be murderers, and making it clear that having thought about it he was not just going to publish his story, but publish it with the greatest fanfare possible. The sort of fanfare that could only be laid on by people who had connections with newspaper publishers, the owners or controllers of television and radio stations, and politicians in the ruling parties of three or four nations; and the sort of fanfare that would cause not just a certain scandal, but an almighty scandal that would be reported all around the world.

And though he was a nervous, portly man, given to periods of madness and, in his own mind, an inveterate and lifelong coward, he knew, by the time he had finished dressing, had put on his coat, and was preparing to set off to the police station, that however foolish it was of him, it was going to be this third, subversive voice he was going to listen to, and this last course of action, that might well cost him his life, that he was going to take.

He had thought before that just by writing his account he might discover some island of sanity amidst the sea of madness
in which he had been flailing about for the past thirty-five years. Now, though, he saw that that was not enough. Like it or not he had at least to try to be a hero; and finally to put what his father would have seen as his betrayal to some good, some positive use.

He wondered what Dorothy would say.

*

Perhaps inevitably, when he told her that night, she didn’t seem terribly interested to begin with, as if she thought that this was a form of his lunacy she hadn’t encountered before, wasn’t sure how to handle and was hoping, if she didn’t pay too much attention to it, might go away of its own accord. When however, after they had returned from Louise’s dinner party, and she had asked him why their hostess, usually the most profuse of all his friends in showering him with ‘Alfred darlings’, ‘Alfred sweets’, or plain ‘Alfredinos’, had been so extraordinarily chilly towards him on this of all nights—‘I mean, it is your birthday’—she began to take him seriously. And when, by three o’clock in the morning, he had finished telling her not only about the letter but, if only in the most general terms, about what had really happened that night, and what he was planning to write in his article or story, Dorothy not only believed him, but had gone as far as he had in concluding that the famous Louise’s chilliness had been due to his merely intimating to her what he was thinking of doing, and that he might have to enlist her husband’s aid in order to do it successfully.