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

undoubtedly, he told himself, emanations of the same spirit that had caused the vase to topple over in the cemetery, the bark to flake from the olive tree, and the rat to leap from the hawthorne, and were almost certainly the creatures of whoever it was (in other words practically everyone he knew) who was determined to make sure his story, his true story, that is, never saw the light of day. And try though he might to convince himself that they were just two local boys who were trying out some new motorcycle and wanted to impress this bald, plump, staring-eyed , little foreigner they had seen around, he wasn’t able to; becoming so frightened of going out that he went over to his landlady’s house, told her he wasn’t feeling well, and asked her if she would mind doing some shopping for him when next she went into the village herself.
    Oh, what, he asked himself, cold and shivering in his house, despite the now oppressive heat outside, oh, what am I going to do?
    A further five days later, after he had spoken to Dorothy on his landlady’s telephone and she had told him she had gone over to rue de Phalsbourg and, coming out of the building, had been followed by a very sinister-looking man—‘probably nothing to do with anything, he probably just wanted to pick me up or something’—he decided, and wrote to his publisher accordingly.
    ‘Dear Claude, I have been thinking over what you said, and see now that you are absolutely right.’
    *
    It took him just four weeks to rewrite his story; and only two more after that to get another telegram from Paris, saying this time: ‘Well done contract to follow all best Claude.’
    Nevertheless, that was long enough for him to be starting, by the time he held the telegram in his hand, to be suffering fromthe first symptoms of one of his half-yearly breakdowns; and long enough for him to be terrified in case it was too long and in the meantime something appalling had happened to Dorothy, and something appalling would happen to him if he so much, now, as stepped out of doors for a moment. This, therefore, he avoided doing, relying on his starting-to-be aggrieved landlady to do, at this stage, everything for him. To the extent of telephoning Dorothy herself, first to make sure that she was still all right, second to tell her that Alfred was fine but for the moment was laid up in bed and therefore couldn’t get to the ’phone, and third, to ask her to send him some money, both to pay the rent on the house that he had been obliged to take for longer than planned, and to pay her, his landlady, for all the extras she was providing him with. ‘That I really don’t have time for and didn’t bargain on,’ he was sure the woman told Dorothy, ‘and I really can’t go on providing indefinitely.’
    Once his breakdown had started in earnest, however, matters in a sense started to improve. If only because once he could no longer tell if his terrors were inside or out, imaginary or real, though those inside were horrible enough, they couldn’t, he assured himself while still in a state to reason at all, be any worse than those outside; and because, recognising his symptoms, he had the sense, having had his landlady make some enquiries, to admit himself to the nearest hospital that accepted cases such as his. A clinic whose address he didn’t even give to Dorothy; he simply asked his landlady to tell her not to worry, that he had gone away for a little while, and she wasn’t on any account to go near rue de Phalsbourg—and in which, even at his very worst moments, he was conscious of feeling safer than he would have had he not been in hospital. Yes, here, dressed in black and riding their motorcycles, they were coming to get him. And made him whimper and cower as they approached. There, though, they really would have come to get him; and with their coming, dragged him into a darkness which no light would ever have broken again.
    For six weeks—his usual time ‘away’—he was in