The Man Who Went Down With His Ship Read Free Page A

have been capable of going so relatively calmly into the hall as Dorothy was preparing to go out, standing there like a schoolboy who has been told to relay a message to the headmaster and isn’t certain how to put it, and getting that message out in such a, for him, bald and undramatic way.
    ‘Oh, thank you,’ he had said when Dorothy had wished him a happy birthday, and had gone on, when she had smiled at him, and asked ‘What are you looking like that for?’, to say ‘I just got an anonymous letter. Someone’s planning to kill me.’
    No, he understood her, he told himself as he stood and lookeddown at the letter again; but she should have taken him seriously, and she shouldn’t have been so smoothly, so very thoughtlessly dismissive. I mean, if she told me she’d just received an anonymous letter—but then she wouldn’t, would she? Either tell me, or get one.
    It was a very nasty letter.
    ‘To the Jew Alfred Albers. It’s a shame they didn’t kill you when they killed your father. Or that Hitler didn’t make it six million and one. But don’t worry. We’re going to remedy those mistakes. In the meantime if you know what’s good for you you won’t write another word. Otherwise—how would you like it if something happened to your beautiful Dorothy? Or to her beautiful daughter? It might you know. And it should. Damned Jew lovers. From: a Jew hater.’
    The trouble was: if he didn’t get Dorothy to believe him this evening, and wasn’t able to convince her that he hadn’t composed the beastly thing himself, it was more than likely that he would have a relapse; and that he would find the shutters being banged shut again, though they had only recently been reopened, and it was still mid-morning in the day of his sanity. And if that happened—well, naturally Dorothy would never believe him. He might even start to doubt himself, and wonder if perhaps, it was possible, he could have …
    No, he told himself firmly, and once more stuffed the letter back into the pocket of his old woollen dressing-gown. Someone—someone who clearly knew him and his circumstances rather well—had composed that filth and sent it to him, and he was not imagining things. And now what he must do, before he allowed himself to start dwelling on its contents, or allowed that cold, sick feeling in his stomach that opening it had caused to spread up through the rest of his body, was take a shower, have some breakfast, and get to work. To resume his account of ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’; and not reflect for a moment that it might be precisely this long-delayed, long-overdue account that had prompted someone to buy a newspaper or newspapers, and start searching for the words ‘To’, ‘the’, ‘Jew’; and for the individual letters that, pasted together, would spell the name ‘Alfred Albers’.
    Of course he would never permit his account to be published, he murmured silently as he made his way to the bathroom. Not in his lifetime, anyway. It was even possible that he would never be able to finish it entirely. All the same, he had to get as much of it down as he could. Because—well, because it was the truth; the truth about himself, and the truth of what happened that night. Because, too, if he did manage to tell the story, to his own satisfaction if not to anyone else’s—mightn’t he, albeit at this late stage, be able to salvage something from the wreck of his mind?
    Yes, he told himself now, still trying to be firm. He might. For as he had mentioned in that same newspaper interview in which he had alas let slip that he was engaged on writing about the wreck of the Chateaubriand —though had failed to say anything about not intending to publish it—all his mental problems had started that night.
    The night, as he liked to think of it, that all his dreams had gone down.
    *
    He had been twenty at the time; a shy, stuttering, portly young man with staring, short-sighted eyes and already thinning hair; and his