The Man Who Went Down With His Ship by Hugh Fleetwood

looked, when Dorothy last saw him, with his hair long and matted, his teeth stained, and his eyes red and oozing, not only madder than Alfred himself, but older; whereas he was in fact fifteen years younger. ‘You bitch,’ he had hissed at Dorothy when they had met in the street. ‘You fucking bitch. You’re our real madness, you cunt. You fucking, patronising, British bitch .’ Then tears, or the matter that was perpetually welling up in his eyes, started to run down his cheeks and he changed his tune. ‘Please come and have a coffee with me,’ he pleaded. ‘A drink. Or just—please,’ he crooned. ‘I love you so much. You’re the only woman who ever …’
    ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ Dorothy told Alfred she had told the man, whose name, confusingly to most people, but symbolically satisfying to him, was also Alfred. Then she had turned away and, crying herself, had run to the nearest Metro stop.)
    Before her years with the psychiatrist, she had lived in Issy with an architect, about whom Alfred knew nothing.
    Yet all the time she had continued to call this third-floor flat, with its framed prints of hunting scenes, its upright piano in the corner of the dining room, its once cream wallpaper that had faded to yellow and in patches brown, and its dusty plants in fake Chinese pots, home; and to say that the day she had to give it up would be the day she left Paris.
    ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said now, as she removed her coat, hung it on a gilded hook behind the front door, and began to look, for the first time since this business had started, genuinely worried. ‘I mean, if they’re watching you closely enough to know when you go out to look at your car …’ She shivered, and wrinkled her nose. ‘How horrid. What do you suppose they did? Went out and had a big meal, and then squatted over the seat? Yuk,’ she said, and shivered again. ‘It makes you feel sick.’
    ‘Though what I don’t understand, lovey,’ she told him much later that evening, as they were sitting eating; and she was still feeling shaky after a fight with Matilda, who had indeed objected so violently to living in what she termed ‘this squalid petit-bourgeois dump’ that she had swept all the crockery from the sideboard in the kitchen onto the floor, had done likewise to all Dorothy’s lotions and potions in the bathroom, and had stormed out saying she was going to move in with Patrice, the most snobbish and ‘best-born’ of all her boyfriends.
    ‘I’ll be fucked if I stay here and let myself be dragged down just because your friend’s going completely off his head,’ she had shrieked at her mother, who had snapped back with a calmness and a faint little smile that even the watching Alfredfound infuriating. ‘You’ll be fucked if you go to live with Patrice.’ To which Matilda had replied ‘Oh, ha ha ha ’, and Dorothy had added, with a still more superb—and exasperating —show of lofty disdain, ‘Oh, I don’t mean literally, you poor little thing.’
    ‘Though what I don’t understand, lovey, is why all your Louises and Marie-Christines’ (for they had left the subject of precisely who They were and had moved onto what Dorothy called his ‘real persecutors’, even if they weren’t, ‘if you follow me’) ‘care so much. I mean, it’s not as if any of them were on the damned boat. Or have the faintest idea what happened on it.’
    ‘No, I don’t either,’ he said, fearing that if he embarked on an explanation as to how all those rich and powerful people, whose darling he had been for so long, saw his article as an attempt to undermine the foundations of their world, it would have come out sounding portentous, pretentious and just plain silly. ‘But that’s their problem,’ he went on after a moment. ‘The only thing that matters now is to get the damned thing finished. That, and, of course,’ he smiled, ‘to make sure you’re safe.’
    ‘Oh I’ll be safe enough here,’ Dorothy said, as if