The Man Who Went Down With His Ship by Hugh Fleetwood Read Free Book Online

passer-by and ask him or her to help him. But naturally he couldn’t; so he simply stood there for a while, a plump, bald and not very tall man, who looked like Donald Pleasance, and made no effort to stop tears first coming into his eyes, and then running down his cheeks.
    ‘Oh, Mummy please,’ he heard himself pleading silently, suddenly four or five years old again. ‘Oh, Mummy please, please, do something.’
    But his mother had been dead for some twenty years now, his dark, solemn, unhappy mother who had been born in Baltimore , and had only just been able to summon up the energy to save herself and her son during the war, as if she had been worn out before she was born, and her husband’s enthusiasm, idealism and, she sometimes told Alfred, determination to die a martyr’s death had only made her feel wearier yet. ‘And cheated, too, in a sense,’ she had muttered to her son once, with the same soft, smiling bitterness, he reflected now as he stood on the street corner and recalled her voice, that his fair English mistress had. ‘Because it was as if he knew I … well, wasn’t too keen on life, let’s say, and didn’t want me to pinch the—how shall I put it?—emotional spotlight from him by ‘doing something stupid’ before he had had the chance to do something heroic. I can tell you one thing, though, if I had done something stupid, he would never have had the courage or the desire to do what he ultimately did. He was a sort of dandy, who couldn’t bear to be seen wearing the clothes that someone else had already been seen in, if you follow me. Just as I, after he’d done what he’d done—or put himself in a position where it would be done to him—couldn’t do something stupid. First, I had to take care of you, obviously. And secondly …’—her voice trailing away into a fog—‘because, well, I know this is a terrible thing to say about the great hero, but I couldn’t help feeling he’d done what hehad partly—only in part, but in significant part—just to spite me. And I felt I had to try to rise above such personal matters and behave as if … as if … What I mean is, I was a dandy too, or an egoist, and having lost the race to be first, didn’t want to come in second. Especially when I could never have made my gesture with the flare, the glamour, and above all the sense of purpose with which he had made his. My death would have passed absolutely unnoticed, achieving nothing and only causing a certain amount of inconvenience to those around me. Whereas his—well, I don’t suppose it changed the course of history. Any more, or any less, than anyone’s life changes the course of history. But it did provide inspiration in a time that had need of inspiration, and it was a picture, or an outline, that could, afterwards, be filled in and coloured by others to extraordinary effect.
    ‘He was posing for a portrait of the Frenchman, and the socialist, and the Jew, if you wanted to see it as such—as hero. And it was that portrait that touched people’s’—she paused—‘hearts.’
    ‘Oh, no,’ Alfred repeated to himself, turning back to look at his wrecked car, and still hearing that soft, bitter voice in his ear. Neither his mother nor anyone else could do anything. He and he alone had to deal with this horror; and he had to deal with it now that the person or persons who had perpetrated it had, as they said on the telephone, proved that they meant business, quickly. He could no longer pretend, as the police had told him, and he had been lulled into believing by the fact that there had been no more anonymous letters after that first one, that someone was merely trying to scare him. They, whoever they were, were dangerous; and he, without a moment’s delay, must take evasive action.
    He started by calling a garage from a bar on the corner, asking them to come and tow his car away, and telling them that as the driver’s seat had been ‘soiled’—he didn’t specify how—they