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

should remove the whole thing and replace it with a new one.The other seats could simply be re-covered, he muttered, and the paintwork sprayed. He went on by hurrying back to the large, dark apartment he had inherited from his mother (and she had inherited from her French mother) to telephone Dorothy in her office and tell her that he was very sorry but for the forseeable future she and Matilda were going to have to return to the small and rather shabby apartment that she had always kept in Auteuil; which Dorothy, he knew, wouldn’t mind doing, but to which Matilda would object violently, since she had led all three of her somewhat snobbish boyfriends to believe that the large dark place on the rue de Phalsbourg, filled with dusty, decrepit but nonetheless valuable antiques, was something to do with her grandparents. (Though how this could be she never, so far as Alfred could tell, explained to those boys of so-called ‘good’ families; since in the next breath, for motives Alfred preferred not to dwell upon, she would be making it clear that Alfred was not her father, and telling them in fact she had been born in Venice, where her mother, who had spent her early life in Kenya, had been living with an ‘aristocratic’ Italian. A man whom Dorothy had left—foolishly, Matilda implied—because his politics were too far to the right, and who had subsequently gone off to live in Africa and die an absurd death by drowning in a bathtub in a hotel in Johannesburg.) And he concluded this increasingly frenetic burst of activity by gathering up Dorothy and Matilda’s most essential belongings, cramming them into as many suitcases as he could find, and having piled them into a taxi along with the various drafts of his story and a few of his own things, taking them over to the flat in Auteuil himself, glancing out of the back of the cab the whole time to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
    The reason for such almost excessive haste and fearfulness, even given his determination to take immediate action, was that when he had opened the door of his flat, on the first floor of the imposing gloomy building in which it was situated, he found that in the time it had taken him to respond to his anonymoustelephone call, walk down to the corner to inspect the damage to his car, and contact the garage, someone had managed to get in through the street door, climb the stairs, squirt what smelled like lighter fuel under his front door, and set fire to it. An attempt at arson that, thanks to the fact that the door was thick and well fitting, that it had draught excluders on it, and that luckily there were no carpets nearby (for even given the tightness of the fit some of the fluid had got in), had caused no more damage than extensive scorching of the exterior woodwork, and a scarcely perceptible marking of the parquet of the hallway.
    They were watching him, Alfred told himself, trembling in the back of his taxi, and feeling not so much faint at this stage as so weak that at any moment he thought he might have a total collapse, or just dissolve into a wet, quivering jelly. Right now eyes were probably on him, watching him sitting here in his cab. And the sensation of being followed, being got at, being in imminent danger of being abducted, tortured and killed that had always been so terrifying in his imagination, and had led him to press himself into a corner weeping and flailing and whimpering ‘No, no,’ until Dorothy or someone else helped him to his feet, led him downstairs to an ambulance, and took him off somewhere white and warm and safe, now that it was happening in real life was, if anything, still more terrifying. Not least because now he knew that there was no safety anywhere, and that however much he wept and whimpered no doctor would come to sit by his bedside and say in a soothing, professional voice, ‘All right Alfred, what seems to be the problem today?’ Nor give him an injection, or some pills that would, for an hour or