Every Man for Himself

CONTENTS

About the Author

Beryl Bainbridge
is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.

‘You find yourself holding your breath, racing over the words, physically gripping the book . . . She has never written better, with such passion, ease and skill, such control. When I had finished the book, I read it again immediately . . . The last few pages are beautiful, without a word too many or ill-chosen, and unbearably moving. Goodness, it is good!’

Susan Hill,
Literary Review

‘Bainbridge hits a tremendous pace as her story reaches its climax. In a remarkably concise book, shot through with laconic wit, she establishes complex characters who engage first the reader’s curiosity, then affection’

‘Excellent . . . the prose is always clean and immaculate, but rises with great moving effect to an account of the sinking’

‘The outstanding novel of 1996, elegiac, sharp and exquisitely written’

Elspeth Barker, ‘Books of the Year’,
Independent on Sunday

Also by Beryl Bainbridge

An Awfully Big Adventure

Another Part of the Wood

The Birthday Boys

The Bottle Factory Outing

Collected Stories

The Dressmaker

Filthy Lucre

Harriet Said

Injury Time

Mum and Mr Armitage

Northern Stories (ed., with David Pownall)

A Quiet Life

Sweet William

Watson’s Apology

A Weekend with Claude

Winter Garden

Young Adolf

English Journey, or, the road to Milton Keynes

Forever England; North and South

Something Happened Yesterday

Published by Hachette Digital 2010

First published in Great Britain by

Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd 1996

Published by Abacus 1997

Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge 1996

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eBook ISBN 978 0 748 12521 0

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Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Hachette Digital

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For August, Esme and Inigo

PROLOGUE

 

15th April 1912

He said, ‘Save yourself if you can,’ and I said firmly enough, though I was trembling and clutching at straws, ‘I intend to. Will you stand at my side?’ To which he replied, ‘Remember, Morgan, not the height, only the drop, is terrible.’ Then he walked away, gait unsteady, the cord of his robe trailing the deck.

I saw him once more, in those seconds which dragged by between my leap for the roof of the officers’ house and the onrush of water that bore me aloft. He was standing against the rail, one arm hooked through to steady himself, and at first I didn’t know him for he had taken off his spectacles; it was the velvet dressing gown I recognised.

He looked directly at me, all the time buffing his glasses on the hem of that plum-coloured robe, and I admit his occupation struck me as sensual. His hand, you see, was all but hidden beneath the material and I thought he was caressing himself. Death is such a lover’s pinch that a man can be excused for prising himself free. Behind him on the horizon glimmered something I mistakenly took to be starlight.

I fancy he was smiling, but I can’t be sure. Possibly I need to believe it ended that way, so that I can expel from my ears the ululation of grief which later pierced the glittering heavens.

The night was so still, the sea so calm, the moment so out of step with the catastrophe in progress that I made to join him, fluttered the fingers of my raised hand as though we were both guests at a social function and it was the most natural thing in the world to acknowledge the presence of a friend. My mouth even opened to shout some sort of greeting, though no words came.

I remember looking down at my right shoe, still inexplicably shiny with polish, as I prepared to take a stride towards that figure braced against the rail.

Then the water, first slithering, then tumbling, gushed us apart . . .

ONE

 

At half-past four on the afternoon of 8th April 1912 – the weather was mild and hyacinths bloomed in window boxes – a stranger chose to die in my arms.

He was hung upon the railings of one of those grand houses in Manchester Square, arms spread like a scarecrow, the cloth of his city coat taking the strain. With his very first words he made it plain he wasn’t overwhelmed by circumstances. ‘I know who I am,’ is what he clearly said. In the open window behind him a maid in a white cap stabbed flowers into a vase.

‘It’s as well to know oneself,’ I replied, and walked on. I had reached the end of the street when I heard a shout; looking back I saw the unfortunate had shrugged himself out of his coat and was stumbling in my direction. His colourless face had eyebrows arched like a clown and lips that were turning blue.

‘Please,’ I said, as he pitched forward and clutched me round the waist. We both fell to our knees. Over the road a crocodile of Girl Guides sashayed sing-song through the ornamental gates of the public gardens.

I tried to free myself, but the man was drowning. His face was so close that his two eyes merged into one. I had thought he was drunk, yet his breath smelled sweet.

‘Lay me down,’ he whispered, and a tear rolled out of that one terrible eye and broke on the swell of his lip.

A nursemaid came down the sidewalk wheeling a perambulator. The infant was shrieking. I called out for assistance as the woman pushed past; there was a scrap of brown paper caught on the sole of her boot.

I laid him down as best I could, his head on the sidewalk. I would have taken off my jacket to serve as a cushion if he hadn’t clung to my hands. His grip was fierce, as though someone unseen was dragging him in another direction. Then, arching a middle finger and foraging beneath the cuff of my shirt, he feather-dusted my beating pulse.

A sudden gust of wind shook the trees in the gardens and a prolonged sigh echoed along the street.

‘The finger stroke of love,’ he said, quite distinctly, and soon after, died.

Sometime during the minutes of his dying he had released his hold on me, and, fumbling in his vest pocket, brought forth a small square of cardboard which he pressed against my heart.

After leaving the barber’s shop, where the body had been carried by two constables, I found myself in possession of a snapshot of a Japanese woman peeping out from behind an embroidered fan. Retracing my steps I had every intention of giving it into the care of a constable, only to spy through the glass front of the shop the figure of the dead man seated in a barber’s chair, a white cloth tied about his neck. I supposed he had been placed there, until a conveyance arrived, so as not to deter potential customers. His eyes were open and they were looking at me.

I went immediately to Princes Gate, packed my overnight bag and, leaving open the leaded window of my room to shift the tobacco smoke, closed the door quietly behind me. I paused in the corridor, did what I intended to do – it took but a moment – brushed the square of dust away with my sleeve and went to the head of the stairs.

As fate would have it, Cousin Jack was coming up as I descended. There followed a conversation of sorts, though my heart beat so loud I scarcely heard it. The evening sun shone through the stained glass window on the landing and set his beard ablaze.

‘Ah,’ he said, peering. ‘It’s you.’

‘The very same,’ I replied, dazzled.

‘Are we well?’ he asked.

‘Pretty well.’

‘Excellent,’ he thundered, and stepped on past. One floor up the pet monkey hurled the length of its chain along the picture rail and leapt atop the banister.

Later I reproached myself for being so jumpy. Jack may have an eye for commerce but in most other respects he’s monumentally blinkered. He is, after all, about his father’s business. In all the weeks I’d stayed at that house in Princes Gate we had never once dined together, although it’s true that we should have met for breakfast the morning after my arrival. On that occasion the cable working the dumb-waiter snapped between basement and dining room and the resulting cacophony of breaking china so unnerved me I fled before Jack appeared. At no time since had we occupied anything more spacious than the threshold of a room, he generally being on his way out as I entered, or the other way around. Beyond a grunt, possibly in reference to the weather, he had never acknowledged the cuckoo in his nest. I wasn’t entirely sure he even knew who I was. But then, he was nearly thirty years my senior and I no more than twelve years of age when he had last set eyes on me in the library of his father’s brownstone on Madison Avenue.

I wouldn’t like to give the impression that I thought badly of Jack. Quite the reverse; it was he who told my aunt it was time she stopped feeding me moonshine in regard to my beginnings. Up until then I knew little of my parents, beyond they were both headstrong and dead, my father two months before I was born and my mother, half-sister-in-law to my Uncle Morgan, three years after. I wasn’t really bothered about the whys and wherefores, being well cared for by my aunt and my cousin Sissy, but often crazy images came into my head, either when I was on the point of dropping off to sleep or on the edge of waking, images of an old woman’s face lying next to me on a soiled pillow. And then I’d come fully awake and scream the house down, begging for the window to be opened to let out the stench of her breath. Sometimes, when the dream had been really bad, Sissy would push up the balcony window and hold me there in my night-gown, telling me to suck in the night air, and those times I stopped breathing altogether, for when I looked down at the gas-lit street it had sunk beneath the sluggish waters of a canal.