The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (26 page)

Yet now, dipping his buttered, honeyed roll in his coffee, and dripping honey over his hands and chin, and coffee over the table cloth and down his shirt, and dropping half the roll in the coffee where it floated like a rotten and disintegrating grey fish, he realised that all that had suddenly changed. Pitied, he could love an ideal, disembodied Isabella. Despised, he did indeed lust after the girl, feeling such a desire to get up, go round the table and slip his hands under her white blouse, and touch her small, warm breasts, and press his mouth to them and run his lips over her smooth, dark stomach, and open her legs and kiss her and slip his tongue into her and unbutton himself and Oh, Isabella, Isabella, slide, glide, ever so gently, into her—that he didn’t hear what Mr Rizzuto was saying to him. He became conscious of a sort of veil of flames passing over his eyes, and of something hot and solid blocking his throat, and thought that if he couldn’t get that image out of his head he would either pass out or, more probably, ejaculate right here at the breakfast table.

You
are
a freak, he told himself, as, with his mouth full, he mumbled an apology to Mr Rizzuto and said he had been miles
away, and what was it he had asked him? You are a pervert. And Isabella in a way was right to back away from you in horror and tell herself that you had exposed yourself to her physically. Only in a way, of course, because you didn’t and it was just her backing away that aroused you, or put the idea into your head in the first place. All the same, she only expressed her horror a few hours too early; and had her horror and your lust coincided precisely, you’d have had to admit that she was absolutely right to back away from you. You’re a monster who can only desire those who loathe you for your monstrosity, just as Isabella is a poor, confused child who can only pity—only in her way love—those who are entirely monstrous.

I don’t know which of us is more in need of help, Charlie told himself, as the part of him that was regretful now tried, but failed, to oust altogether that part of him that was glad he had spoken last night. God knows how I am going to get through my remaining days with you. Perhaps I really will become ‘beastly’ and break into your cabin one night, and hurl myself on you and, as beasts are wont to do to maidens, ravish you. Perhaps I will find the experience unendurable, and will ditch you and your family and friends, and fly back to Cairo by myself. Or perhaps I will merely become sullen, brooding and stupid, and now no longer act Quasimodo, but whether I want to or not, become Quasimodo. A hunchback obsessed by, in this version, an at last utterly pitiless Esmeralda.

Oh Isabella, Charlie muttered silently down the table—saying, at the same time, to Mr Rizzuto, that if he were him he’d wait till they got to Aswan before changing any more money—I don’t know if I can bear it.

Yet, ‘of course’ Charlie told himself when it was over, bear it and not too badly all things considered, he did. Naturally, he had moments when he thought he wouldn’t. When he became so dizzy, so sick with longing that one night, five minutes after Isabella had announced that she was going to sleep, he couldn’t resist slipping away from his friends and walking as quietly as
possible along the deck outside Isabella’s cabin … pausing as he passed it … glancing through the windows, that weren’t completely covered inside by curtains … and catching just the quickest, stealthiest glimpse of Isabella in her brassiere and pants … When he lay on his bed in his cabin crying for two hours, without a break, crying for the sorrows of the world, he told himself, but crying for himself, because he loved and was not loved, he knew. And when another night, as he stood staring up at the sky trying to find it beautiful but instead seeing only stars and hearing a voice muttering ‘Rents in a dark sheet, my foot!’ he felt so very much like the Hunchback of Notre Dame that it was all he could do to stop himself lolloping around the boat howling, a twisted, tortured abortion of a man for whom the Nile had become a river of pain running through him, splitting him in two as effectively as it did the desert. There were moments when he found himself thinking that if he didn’t have Isabella he would die, that she was his last chance in life and that no one from now on would ever love him; and that whatever the consequences he should go to her cabin right now, gag her and tie her up, and then do everything to her he had ever imagined doing to anyone. Even at his most miserable, however, he couldn’t silence the quietest, most hesitant of little whispers inside him that told him that love Isabella though he did and find the idea of life without her unendurable, in just a few more days now she would be gone from Egypt probably forever, and he would be glad and relieved when she was. He would be able to return to his old life, with his old friend pity by his side, and with any luck nothing would come along to disturb him for months, years, or decades—though maybe that was asking a bit too much.

A whisper he suspected that Isabella knew he was hearing; the reason why she held back from declaring total war on him and contented herself with never looking at him, never speaking to him apart from muttering those unavoidable ‘good mornings’ or ‘goodnights’, and always threatening him, but never actually
doing it, with the possibility that she might go to her father and tell him, no doubt with tears and blushes, that Charlie, the loathsome Charlie, had, er … exposed himself to her.

Had she not heard it, he had a feeling that she might just have taken this last step, wicked though it would have been. And had she taken it, he was almost certain that he wouldn’t, except perhaps to the Englishman, have denied it.

Only five days to go. Only four days to go. Only three days to go …

Then, finally, it was the last day. And because Charlie hadn’t silenced that little voice inside him—on the contrary, had at times strained his ear to make out its message more clearly—and because, too, he was feeling proud of himself for having got through his week of misery as well, on the whole, as he had, on that last day he felt able to take a couple of risks. One of them consisted of his telling the Rizzutos and company, when they arrived in Cairo on an early morning flight from Aswan, that he was going to take them to this father’s flat for a second breakfast, and was going to leave them there for a couple of hours while he went off and attended to some business. Some business that involved his going to the bank, withdrawing a great deal of money, and then taking a taxi to the Bazaar; where he went to a jeweller’s shop in front of which Isabella had paused two weeks before; chose what seemed to him the most beautiful necklace in the place; and paid almost what the jeweller asked for it, having neither the time nor the inclination to haggle. And the second risk, later that day, consisted of his offering to take Isabella out in a boat on the lake at El Fayoum; an oasis in the desert west of Cairo, where he had taken his friends for a final lunch. That is: Isabella said to her father, as they stood looking out over the glittering, utterly still lake, that she would like to go rowing on it. Whereupon Giorgio Orsini said that was fine by him, as long as he didn’t expect her to go with him; her brother and step-brother said more or less the same thing; her step-mother didn’t even bother to comment on what she
clearly saw as a foolish whim; and the Rizzutos and Isabella’s step-sister were some distance away, talking amongst themselves. Thus Charlie was more or less obliged to shuffle forward, look as hang-dog as possible, and mutter that if Isabella liked, he’d row her out into the lake. It was a risk, all the same; for he realised that by so putting himself forward he had laid himself open to the danger, even at this late date, of being denounced by Isabella; or anyway having her disgust at the idea made so plain that her father would have said ‘Isabella!’; an explanation for such rudeness would have been demanded; and once again the truth—or Isabella’s version of it—would have been hauled out. As, he told himself, as he sweated still more profusely than normal, might have happened; had not the
Englishman
, within a second of his making his offer, stepped forward and said that if they were going out on the lake, would they mind if he joined them. He should, Charlie reflected—as he burbled no, of course not—have been furious at this intervention that deprived him of his only chance of spending twenty minutes or half an hour alone in the company of his beloved. In fact, however, it simply made him feel relieved, since it took the wind out of Isabella’s sails, and made it both impossible for her to express her disgust, and slightly more likely that she would actually accept his offer; as she never would have if it had seemed there were only to be the two of them. The principal motive, Charlie suspected, as he said he would go off and find a boat and pick them up at the water’s edge where they stood, for the Englishman’s intervention. He was undoubtedly aware of the tension between the sixteen-year-old girl and the ungainly guide; probably had a good idea why that tension existed; and knew as well as Charlie that Isabella would not go out unchaperoned.

As it happened she wouldn’t go out even with a chaperone. For by the time Charlie had stumbled over to the jetty where boats were rented and rowed round to the hotel garden where he had left the others, Isabella had disappeared. Not to reappear before Charlie, to the embarrassment of both, had helped the
Englishman on board and had rowed him a couple of hundred yards out into the lake. She reappeared, however, only to stand on the parapet of the hotel garden and wave no, she didn’t want to come after all, and to signal that Charlie shouldn’t think, as he’d already started to, of rowing back to fetch her.

Yet though he did take uselessly the risk of offering to go boating with Isabella, the twenty-five minutes he spent on the lake with the Englishman were not entirely wasted. Because while the first fifteen of those minutes were spent in almost complete silence, as both rowed and rower wished he were not where he was, the remaining ten were passed in talking about Isabella. And if she couldn’t be with them—well, Charlie thought, talking about her was the next best thing. Particularly as, when he was rowing in silence, he had been brooding about her and reminding himself of all the stupid, vacuous things she had said to him when she was still speaking to him. ‘Oh, Charlie’—walking through the streets of Cairo—‘you know I’m a very complex person. I think maybe I’m even a little schizophrenic. On the one hand I love crowds. And on the other, you know, I hate crowds.’ ‘Oh, Charlie’—looking at some children working in a rug factory, which she had insisted upon being taken to, though Charlie had told her he hated such places (with one or two exceptions they were just sweat shops, exploiting in the most cynical fashion children who should have been at school)—‘how can you be so beastly, saying they’re exploited? Look at all those happy little faces. The man in the other room
assured
me they only work half a day here and the rest of the time
do
go to school.’

Silly, spoiled little brat, he had been telling himself; fatuous, false little
Italian.

It was just then, as he was saying this to himself, unable at the same time not to look round at his silly, spoiled beloved, that the Englishman, as if knowing now that this was what Charlie was thinking and wanting to say ‘Stop it’, suddenly murmured, ‘I feel terribly sorry for Isabella, you know. She’s a
genuinely sweet and kind girl. But she’s so surrounded by people; not here, I mean at home, with her mother, and even more her mother’s friends, who have intellectual pretensions but hardly an original thought in their heads. Everything is taken from somewhere else, from intellectual fashion magazines, if you know what I mean and unless she’s very careful, or very lucky, she’s going to be corrupted. And it would be a real shame. Left to herself I think she’d be happy, because underneath she’s not only kind and sweet, but actually very honest. Whereas if all those people she has to live among—and I know them, I’ve met them; they’re the sort of people you just know from the tone of their voice are false—if all of them get at her, she’s going to be miserable. And she shouldn’t be. I mean, no one should be, obviously. But, well, you know what I mean, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes,’ Charlie wanted to tell him,
yes.
And thank you for pulling me up, for stopping me going down the road of resentment. Of course you’re right and of course it’s not her fault if she says silly, vacuous things. It will be, in a little while, when she knows what she’s saying and continues to say it. For the moment, though, yes, she is still innocent—innocent and sweet and kind—and until she ceases to be, I would be mad not to go on loving her. Mad and wrong and
bad.
For surely, if anything can save Isabella from the fate this man predicts for her, from the lies she’s been telling herself about me in the last week, it’s love, the love of her family and friends; and the love of monsters like me.

Oh Isabella, Isabella, Charlie wanted to shout across the water, of course I don’t hate you. And until you really do denounce me, or renounce me, I promise you can count on me.

To the Englishman he said: ‘Who are all these people she lives with, and why doesn’t she live with her father and step-mother?’; and, as the man told him, he rowed his way slowly back to the jetty.

*

If Charlie had stopped hating Isabella because of what the Englishman had said, it was also because of those words spoken on the lake that Charlie, that afternooon after he had taken his friends back to Cairo, decided to compound the first risk he had taken that day and give Isabella the necklace he had bought her himself. Till then, he had been planning on giving it to her father and asking him to hand it to her after the plane had left. When it would be too late for her to start telling lies about him, or he wouldn’t be around to hear if she did. Since she was so fundamentally kind and sweet and honest, however, (or
if
she was, Charlie couldn’t help telling himself) maybe, by giving her the necklace in person, he would be able to reassure her; hand her, at the same time, an unspoken and unwritten message that said more or less what he had wanted to shout from the lake.