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

hospital; and when he came out he was feeling better than he had in a year, possibly, apart from those weeks in the spring when he had thought he was taking on the world and might win. All right, he hadn’t won, and it had been foolish to think that he could have. Nonetheless, he had done his best, he had got off his chest something that had been on his chest for years, and frankly, even if he hadn’t told the truth, he couldn’t help feeling quite proud of his effort all the same. Claude was right, he told himself in the taxi on his way back from the hospital to his home on the hill, where he was planning to pack up his things and return to Paris. It was good, what he had written, and maybe it was actually an improvement, in a way; to remove that implicitly priggish voice that insisted ‘I am the truth.’ Now it was just a bitter-sweet comic story about an unattractive youth whom everyone thought had behaved badly when he had in fact behaved well; a misapprehension that would guarantee his social success for the rest of his life, but would periodically cause him to go crazy.
    And he felt still better—or anyway, couldn’t resist letting a wistful smile come to his lips—when he reached his little pink house, and found a number of letters waiting for him. One was from Claude, enclosing the promised contract. One was from Dorothy, hoping he was feeling all right now, and telling him she had seen no more sinister men and why didn’t he come home now. One was from Louise, who told him she had bumped into Dorothy who had told her he wasn’t well, and she did hope he’d be better soon because they had all missed him terribly, ‘though I must say you were working up to this last attack for some time, weren’t you darling? You have not been easy recently .’ And the fourth was from a woman he knew only slightly, who said she had heard he was renting a little house very near where she and her husband had taken a villa for the autumn, and they would like it if, when he had a moment, he came over and saw them. So, he told himself: they were going to bemagnanimous in victory. But what had he expected? And to look on the bright side, didn’t this mean that the news of his defeat had spread so widely by now that he was no longer in danger, the dogs had been called off, and he could go back to Paris and resume his former life at any time he liked?
    Yes, he nodded; it did. Furthermore, he couldn’t help admitting that he felt a great relief that it was so. All right, he had probably condemned himself to having his six-monthly breakdowns for the rest of his life, something inside him cracking under the strain of—what? Loving perhaps a little too much a civilisation that was a little too stained with blood? Or just pretending to be a truthteller to people who wanted anything from him but that, and were prepared to make him their darling so long as he did keep quiet? But that wasn’t such a terrible fate, surely? After all, he was used to his breakdowns by now. And God knows, most people in the world had worse to put up with than that.
    At least, to his own satisfaction, he knew the truth. At least he had seen the blood.
    He was feeling so much better, in fact, that he decided the following day—since he was leaving the day after that—he would take up his scarcely remembered friend on her offer to come and visit her. And having looked at a map and seen that the villa was only a couple of miles away, and could be reached, according to his landlady, by climbing this hill here, going down that track there, and then climbing another hill, he further decided that rather than try and get a taxi from the village, he would walk there.
    As, setting off around four, when the October afternoon was at its most glorious, he proceeded to do; putting a hat on his head, taking a stick from the umbrella stand just inside his front door, and feeling, by now, almost jaunty. You old failure, he told himself cheerfully. You weak, mad, old