The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (8 page)

For six weeks—his usual time ‘away’—he was in hospital; and when he came out he was feeling better than he had in a year, possibly, apart from those weeks in the spring when he had thought he was taking on the world and might win. All right, he hadn’t won, and it had been foolish to think that he could have. Nonetheless, he had done his best, he had got off his chest something that had been on his chest for years, and frankly, even if he hadn’t told the truth, he couldn’t help feeling quite proud of his effort all the same. Claude was right, he told himself in the taxi on his way back from the hospital to his home on the hill, where he was planning to pack up his things and return to Paris. It was good, what he had written, and maybe it was actually an improvement, in a way; to remove that implicitly priggish voice that insisted ‘I am the truth.’ Now it was just a bitter-sweet comic story about an unattractive youth whom everyone thought had behaved badly when he had in fact behaved well; a misapprehension that would guarantee his social success for the rest of his life, but would periodically cause him to go crazy.

And he felt still better—or anyway, couldn’t resist letting a wistful smile come to his lips—when he reached his little pink house, and found a number of letters waiting for him. One was from Claude, enclosing the promised contract. One was from Dorothy, hoping he was feeling all right now, and telling him she had seen no more sinister men and why didn’t he come home now. One was from Louise, who told him she had bumped into Dorothy who had told her he wasn’t well, and she did hope he’d be better soon because they had all missed him terribly, ‘though I must say you were working up to this last attack for some time, weren’t you darling? You have
not
been easy
recently
.’ And the fourth was from a woman he knew only slightly, who said she had heard he was renting a little house very near where she and her husband had taken a villa for the autumn, and they would like it if, when he had a moment, he came over and saw them. So, he told himself: they were going to be
magnanimous in victory. But what had he expected? And to look on the bright side, didn’t this mean that the news of his defeat had spread so widely by now that he was no longer in danger, the dogs had been called off, and he could go back to Paris and resume his former life at any time he liked?

Yes, he nodded; it did. Furthermore, he couldn’t help
admitting
that he felt a great relief that it was so. All right, he had probably condemned himself to having his six-monthly breakdowns for the rest of his life, something inside him cracking under the strain of—what? Loving perhaps a little too much a civilisation that was a little too stained with blood? Or just pretending to be a truthteller to people who wanted anything from him but that, and were prepared to make him their darling so long as he did keep quiet? But that wasn’t such a terrible fate, surely? After all, he was used to his breakdowns by now. And God knows, most people in the world had worse to put up with than that.

At least, to his own satisfaction, he knew the truth. At least he had seen the blood.

He was feeling so much better, in fact, that he decided the following day—since he was leaving the day after that—he would take up his scarcely remembered friend on her offer to come and visit her. And having looked at a map and seen that the villa was only a couple of miles away, and could be reached, according to his landlady, by climbing this hill here, going down that track there, and then climbing another hill, he further decided that rather than try and get a taxi from the village, he would walk there.

As, setting off around four, when the October afternoon was at its most glorious, he proceeded to do; putting a hat on his head, taking a stick from the umbrella stand just inside his front door, and feeling, by now, almost jaunty. You old failure, he told himself cheerfully. You weak, mad, old fraud.

A refrain he was still quietly humming half an hour later; any idea that the news of his defeat had not spread widely enough
yet, that the dogs had not been called off yet, so far from his mind that for a moment he couldn’t think what that noise was when he first heard the sound of a motorcycle coming up the dusty track behind him. When he did identify it, however, and turned, and saw the two young men dressed in black speeding, so far as they could, over the stoney ground towards him, all traces of jauntiness left him, and he was conscious only of the terror he had felt in those weeks before sending the manuscript back to Paris.

Magnanimous in victory indeed, he told himself; as, at the same time, he realised that the imaginary had at last become real; that
They
, at last, had come to get him. They simply wanted to lure me from the safety of my home, up onto this deserted hillside where no one would see what happened to me.

And though he tried to add ‘Oh well, it isn’t really a tragedy, because in a sense I died thirty five years ago,’ he couldn’t quite form the words in his head. For he was too conscious of his heart beating, and of the fact that he had lost control of his bowels.

He stood there, a sweating, frightened, overweight man; while all around him, in the woods, crickets chirped.

It was six-thirty on the morning of Good Friday; and as he did around six-thirty every Friday morning, Good or no, Giuseppe Bellettini looked at his wife, working in the kitchen, and said ‘I don’t understand why you’re making those cakes.’

For fifteen years now he had been saying it, ever since the autumn of the year their daughter got married. And for fifteen years now, ever since the day she had stared at him as if he were going mad, when she heard him, Maria found herself having to suppress the urge to throw something at him, pummel him with her fists, or anyway snap ‘You told me that last week.’ After which she would force herself to explain, as reasonably as she could, ‘It’s just in case someone drops in over the weekend. I’ve got to have something to offer them.’

From then on, the scenario was not so invariable. Sometimes Giuseppe nodded, before going off to sit in the front room. Sometimes he shook his head and murmured, ‘No one’s ever dropped in. Why do you think they will now?’ And sometimes, as this morning, he gazed at the mixture Maria was stirring on the kitchen table and said, with an air of wonder, ‘If people drop by they don’t expect to be served cakes and biscuits.’ A comment to which Maria had a number of replies, but which today provoked just this response: that since this weekend was Easter weekend, she had thought she had better make the effort. ‘You know, just in case. I mean, how would it look if a visitor did come and we didn’t have anything on hand?’

‘I suppose,’ Giuseppe nodded, though he didn’t sound
convinced
.
‘I suppose. But it does seem to me an awful waste of almonds.’

In a way of course it was comic, Maria told herself as her husband, impeccably dressed in his white shirt and tie, in his fawn trousers and cardigan, and in his soft leather slippers, shuffled off to take up his position in the front room. A position from which he wouldn’t move until eleven o’clock, when he would join her in the kitchen for a coffee, and in which, apart from the odd break for meals or to go to the bathroom, he would stay until, at nine-thirty or ten this evening, he went to bed. It was comic, and almost sweet. And she sometimes
suspected
that his unchanging routine was merely an attempt to amuse her, or, very gently, to mock her; and that he knew quite well what he was doing. In another way, however, it wasn’t comic at all, and try as she might to convince herself that he was just pulling her leg, every Friday, when he shuffled off to the front room, though her urge to hit him had passed, she felt so nervous that it was all she could do to stop herself following him and telling him the real reason why, every Friday, winter or summer, she baked biscuits and cakes, which she would then set out on a silver dish on the table just inside the front door.

It was the effort of forcing herself to give him a rational reply that made her so nervous. Or, if it was a game he was playing, the effort to go along with it, and not lose her temper and shout ‘Stop it! That’s enough! Fifteen years it’s been going on and it isn’t funny any more!’

What would he do if she did tell him the truth? she wondered, as she tried to calm herself by lighting the gas in the oven, giving her mixture a final stir, and considering whom she would meet in town this morning, what the weather would be like over the holiday weekend and whether, since Easter was so early this year, there’d be as many tourists as there were normally. Would he give her one of his blank stares, as if he hadn’t heard her, and turn back to his magazine, or the television? Would he simply shrug, as if to say, ‘We all keep our balance in our own
way and if that’s your way, so be it’? Or would he nod his head a few times, look at her accusingly and then tell her very quietly that it wasn’t his fault he had to stay in all day, and couldn’t work and didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for anything? He hadn’t chosen to get sick, you know, to be in considerable pain most of the time and to have nothing to look forward to except further years of inactivity, sickness and pain. And frankly, he found what she said unfair, unkind and uncalled-for. She didn’t know; and she would never find out because she knew that whatever happened, however nervous she became or strongly tempted she might be, she never would follow him and tell him the truth. Just because it would be unfair, unkind and
uncalled-for
. Oh, she thought, but how she’d love to! And what wouldn’t she have given to have been able to! To stand over him as he sat there neat, disfigured and slowly, slowly, more slowly perhaps than even she, dying, and say to him ‘Shall I tell you why I bake those cakes every Friday? Because ridiculous though it may sound, I feel they’re my only link with the outside world. With reality, sanity, health, happiness, with light, and youth, and hope. Of course I know we’re never going to have visitors. Who wants to come here, with the shutters always closed, with the place perpetually dark, with this air of … of death? I mean, if anyone has anything to say to me they say it in town when I’m shopping, or they telephone. And when Elisabetta and the children come to stay it could hardly be said that they drop in because we know weeks in advance when they’re coming. Nevertheless, I have to feel that someone might, that someone could, and if that if they did I’d be ready to welcome them. Those cakes are my hands stretched out towards life, if you like. They’re my only possibility of contact with life, except when I see Elisabetta and the boys. What do you want me to do? Not stretch out my hands? Not be ready to welcome life should it, by any miracle, suddenly decide to stop by? I’d be mad if I did that. I’d go mad if I did that, and anyway, what would happen to us if we both just hung around here all day, if we both just
… sat on our hands? How long do you think we’d last? How long could we stand it? We’d go crazy, we’d fall to pieces, we’d—oh, I’m sorry Giuseppe, I’m sorry. Really, though, it’s not very extravagant, when you think of it. I mean, I know it’s a waste to bake cakes week after week, month after month, year after year, that never get eaten. But under the circumstances, I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay, is it? For, as I say, sanity, hope, life. What’s more, you must admit, apart from that one extravagance, or eccentricity, if you like, I’ve always been very careful, haven’t I? I’ve never wanted lots of clothes, or anything. I’ve never asked for new furniture. It wasn’t me who wanted a colour television set. That was you, wasn’t it? You said you didn’t like the black and white. So please, please, don’t begrudge me my cakes. Because without them, I don’t think I could go on.

‘I mean, I know these last fifteen years, haven’t been easy for you. But they haven’t been easy for me, either.’

Sickness, silence and darkness. Sickness, silence and
darkness
…

No, of course she’d never tell him any of this, she thought as she began to scoop out handfuls of her cake mixture and pat them into shape. Not only would it have been unfair and unkind, but also, though the truth, it wasn’t perhaps the whole truth. Nevertheless, she was glad to have made her speech, if only in her head. For now, having unburdened herself, she felt not just calm again, but her normal, quietly cheerful self again. A self who would probably be able to get through the week ahead without a single recurrence of her bad temper. And a self who might even be able to get through more than that, as long as nothing untoward happened. Or as long as Giuseppe didn’t come into the kitchen next Friday morning, gaze at her, and say, with a puzzled air, ‘I don’t understand.’

*

Maria baked her cakes to keep a hold on life and sanity and reality, or at least to stretch out a hand towards them. The reason why, however, had she told Giuseppe this, it would not have been the whole truth, concerned the form that life, sanity and reality took in her mind; and the precise nature of the visitors (or, to be absolutely honest, the visitor) whom she knew wouldn’t, but hoped might, drop in one day. For it wasn’t just any old passer-by she maintained her perpetual welcome for, though had by chance someone unexpected rung the doorbell, she would have been only too glad to offer the fruits of her Friday morning labour to him or her, and to have crowed to Giuseppe afterwards, ‘You see.’

And the form that life, sanity and reality took in her mind, and the precise nature of the person she was, in the final analysis, baking her cakes for, concerned, as most things in her life seemed to, the events of that summer fifteen years ago, when Elisabetta had married. When Elisabetta had left them; when Giuseppe’s sickness had first manifested itself; and when, without wishing to be too dramatic, her world had started to fall apart.

Oh, that summer, Maria would tell herself every day, carrying the subject round with her like a child who never changed, but who remained a constant source of interest and provided her with all the company she needed, wanted, or was ever likely to need or want. Oh, that summer, that summer, that summer.

She had been working with her aunt at the time, in her uncle’s tobacconist and newsagent’s; supplementing her income by taking cleaning jobs in the houses and apartments that had been let for the season to tourists. Meanwhile Giuseppe, who didn’t approve of this second job—he said she wasn’t strong enough and anyway didn’t like the idea of her being a cleaning woman—was employed by the local water authority, supplementing
his
income by working as an odd-job man and freelance plumber.

In which capacity he was called one Sunday morning towards the end of April to ‘The Villa’, as it was known locally. One of
the few houses that hadn’t been built in the last thirty years. It was a large, not particularly attractive turn-of-the-century building that belonged to some industrialist or businessman who lived most of the year in Milan and spent only the occasional weekend in Sardinia. A tube had become blocked and someone had mentioned Guiseppe’s name as a person who could be called upon in an emergency …

It was not a particularly remarkable occurrence, as local people were always mentioning Giuseppe’s name as someone who could be called upon, at any time of day or night, in an emergency. He never complained; he never made a fuss; he just turned up, did what had to be done, charged a reasonable amount for his work and disappeared. And that was how it went today. He got the phone call at nine-fifteen; by ten-thirty he was home again. What was remarkable—or anyway curious, or amusing, or a coincidence—was that in the hour and a quarter he had been absent, Maria, who didn’t do either of her jobs on a Sunday, had stopped by the tobacconist’s on her way to Mass, just to say hello, and while there had overheard a thin, drawn, but apparently pleasant woman asking her aunt if by any chance she knew someone who would be prepared to come and do some cleaning for an hour or two a day. ‘We have that old villa up behind the Hotel Roma,’ the woman said. ‘And we’re going to be here all summer this year. So I wondered—do forgive me for asking you,
signora,
but I thought maybe … You being here in the centre of town, you probably know everything that’s going on, and …’

‘Well,’
zia
Clara said with a laugh, waving her hand across the shop, ‘you could ask my niece Maria. Sometimes she—Maria, do you want a job?’

‘The poor woman,’ Maria told Giuseppe when she got home, smiling at this coincidence of both of them being approached by members of the same family at more or less the same time. ‘She looked so embarrassed. She started wringing her hands and apologising, and saying how sorry she was … I’m not sure
why. There was no need to be embarrassed. I mean she only asked …’

‘What did you say?’ interrupted Giuseppe, who seemed to find nothing amusing about this story.

‘I told her, yes, of course. I’m going to do two hours a day, three days a week for a start, and maybe later, if they have a lot of guests, I’ll go in every day. But she’s offering almost twice what I get at the Franceschini’s, she said it won’t be hard, and—she thought it was funny too, when I told her my husband had just gone off to mend one of her pipes. Or fairly funny. She seemed embarrassed about that as well. She said “Oh, we’ll soon be employing your whole family,” and laughed, and then seemed ashamed of laughing and really, I thought she was very nice. Unhappy, perhaps. But nice.’

As she continued to find Amelia Cavalieri when she started working for her, and found her still more so when she started not only going in every day, but when the tormented
industrialists’s
wife really did end up employing the whole of the Bellettini family. That is, she asked Giuseppe if he could come in a few evenings a week to try to do something about the ‘garden’ surrounding The Villa; a stretch of land that had hardly been touched in years, and was overgrown and dismal. Then, after she had discovered that Elisabetta, who was getting married in mid-September, was a maths and physics teacher in the local school, she had asked her if she could come in for five or six hours a week and give some lessons to her thirteen-year-old son, whose maths exam had gone badly at school; he was going to have to repeat it in October.

Indeed, she became so fond of her, and so sorry for her, that by the middle of July she felt she had known her for years. She didn’t even mind too much, couldn’t, for all that she thought she should, mind too much, when she realised that Giuseppe, in his quiet, undemonstrative way, was, well, ‘falling in love’ with her, absurd though it sounded when she said it to herself. She didn’t and couldn’t mind because Amelia did absolutely
nothing to encourage Giuseppe, and was almost certainly unaware of his feelings. Moreover, Amelia was so nice and so unhappy she deserved to be loved by someone; she clearly wasn’t by her husband, who only rarely made an appearance at the villa. Indeed, Maria couldn’t help feeling that temperamentally Amelia was rather like Giuseppe or Giuseppe rather like Amelia. Both were withdrawn and tended to see the serious side of things. Both were, or appeared, troubled, though for no
discernible
reason. And both bore whatever troubled them with a reserved, slightly formal grace, never waved their problems in other people’s faces, and went through life made gentler and kinder by the doubts that assailed them, rather than harsher and more aggressive. Naturally, there were differences: Amelia did have a certain sense of humour and sometimes seemed about to confess what it was that disturbed her; whereas Giuseppe’s tendency to look on the dark side almost never left him, and he was so stoical that one knew he would never break down. Also Amelia, for all her air of fragility, had that underlying assurance and sense of power that an upbringing based on solid economic foundations generally confers; whereas Giuseppe, for all the apparent firmness of his stance, had that underlying lack of assurance and sense of helplessness that an upbringing based on the most precarious of economic foundations generally confers. Still, they were alike enough for Maria to think, when she saw them together, that they were two offshoots of the same plant; and to feel confident that even if Amelia were to become aware of what Giuseppe felt for her and even if, extraordinarily, she reciprocated his feelings, neither would do anything about it. Amelia because she wouldn’t want to hurt her children and possibly her new-found friend Maria, and would know that however passionately she loved Giueseppe, those differences between them would be sufficient to keep them apart. And Giuseppe because he too wouldn’t want to hurt his Maria, and he too would realise that ridiculous and sinful though it might be to allow oneself to be constrained by the past, neither he nor
Amelia would ever have the strength not to be. His sense that ultimately his place was with the dispossessed and disinherited of this earth was too strongly and intricately bound around him ever to be uprooted, or disentangled. And her sense of belonging, however much she blushed for it, in the officers’ quarters on the ship of life was as deeply etched into her as her feeling that, for all their sins, officers were necessary if that ship was to keep moving forward, be there ever so many casualties below decks, be there ever so many people lost overboard and drowned in the process.