The Man Who Went Down With His Ship Read Online Free PDF

just the veiled, sublimated stand that he had always felt his poems and essays represented. And by coming out into the open with his account of the sinking of the Chateaubriand, relying not only on the police but on his rich and powerful friends to protect him from would-be murderers, and making it clear that having thought about it he was not just going to publish his story, but publish it with the greatest fanfare possible. The sort of fanfare that could only be laid on by people who had connections with newspaper publishers, the owners or controllers of television and radio stations, and politicians in the ruling parties of three or four nations; and the sort of fanfare that would cause not just a certain scandal, but an almighty scandal that would be reported all around the world.
    And though he was a nervous, portly man, given to periods of madness and, in his own mind, an inveterate and lifelong coward, he knew, by the time he had finished dressing, had put on his coat, and was preparing to set off to the police station, that however foolish it was of him, it was going to be this third, subversive voice he was going to listen to, and this last course of action, that might well cost him his life, that he was going to take.
    He had thought before that just by writing his account he might discover some island of sanity amidst the sea of madnessin which he had been flailing about for the past thirty-five years. Now, though, he saw that that was not enough. Like it or not he had at least to try to be a hero; and finally to put what his father would have seen as his betrayal to some good, some positive use.
    He wondered what Dorothy would say.
    *
    Perhaps inevitably, when he told her that night, she didn’t seem terribly interested to begin with, as if she thought that this was a form of his lunacy she hadn’t encountered before, wasn’t sure how to handle and was hoping, if she didn’t pay too much attention to it, might go away of its own accord. When however, after they had returned from Louise’s dinner party, and she had asked him why their hostess, usually the most profuse of all his friends in showering him with ‘Alfred darlings’, ‘Alfred sweets’, or plain ‘Alfredinos’, had been so extraordinarily chilly towards him on this of all nights—‘I mean, it is your birthday’—she began to take him seriously. And when, by three o’clock in the morning, he had finished telling her not only about the letter but, if only in the most general terms, about what had really happened that night, and what he was planning to write in his article or story, Dorothy not only believed him, but had gone as far as he had in concluding that the famous Louise’s chilliness had been due to his merely intimating to her what he was thinking of doing, and that he might have to enlist her husband’s aid in order to do it successfully.
    ‘I mean, you must realise,’ she said, lying back in bed, smoking, and stroking Alfred’s forehead, ‘none of those women actually like you. Oh, I know they adore you and they love you, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? And if you start being, as they’d put it, boring, or tiresome, they’ll drop you like a hot brick or a hot potato or whatever the expression is. It’s jejune in their book, getting indignant about something that happenedso long ago. It’s unnecessary. And worst of all, according to them, it’s ungrateful. Like kicking a gift horse in the mouth. Like kicking them in the mouth. Or anyway, like dragging some long-drowned corpse to one of their parties and expecting them to welcome it as a friend. Rich bitches,’ Dorothy sighed. ‘Fascist cows.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Alfred said, unable to keep a petulant note out of his voice at hearing his friends spoken of thus. Unable, too, not to protest that just because Louise had behaved like that, it didn’t mean to say that all his other friends would; nor to reflect that much as he loved