Every Man for Himself Read online

  CONTENTS

  Every Man for Himself

  About the Author

  Also by Beryl Bainbridge

  Every Man for Himself

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  About the Author

  Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.

  ‘You find yourself holding your breath, racing over the words, physically gripping the book . . . She has never written better, with such passion, ease and skill, such control. When I had finished the book, I read it again immediately . . . The last few pages are beautiful, without a word too many or ill-chosen, and unbearably moving. Goodness, it is good!’

  Susan Hill, Literary Review

  ‘Bainbridge hits a tremendous pace as her story reaches its climax. In a remarkably concise book, shot through with laconic wit, she establishes complex characters who engage first the reader’s curiosity, then affection’

  New Statesman

  ‘Excellent . . . the prose is always clean and immaculate, but rises with great moving effect to an account of the sinking’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘The outstanding novel of 1996, elegiac, sharp and exquisitely written’

  Elspeth Barker, ‘Books of the Year’, Independent on Sunday

  Also by Beryl Bainbridge

  Fiction

  An Awfully Big Adventure

  Another Part of the Wood

  The Birthday Boys

  The Bottle Factory Outing

  Collected Stories

  The Dressmaker

  Filthy Lucre

  Harriet Said

  Injury Time

  Mum and Mr Armitage

  Northern Stories (ed., with David Pownall)

  A Quiet Life

  Sweet William

  Watson’s Apology

  A Weekend with Claude

  Winter Garden

  Young Adolf

  Non-fiction

  English Journey, or, the road to Milton Keynes

  Forever England; North and South

  Something Happened Yesterday

  EVERY MAN

  FOR

  HIMSELF

  Beryl Bainbridge

  Hachette Digital

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  First published in Great Britain by

  Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd 1996

  Published by Abacus 1997

  Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge 1996

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 0 748 12521 0

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  www.hachettelivre.co.uk

  For August, Esme and Inigo

  PROLOGUE

  15th April 1912

  He said, ‘Save yourself if you can,’ and I said firmly enough, though I was trembling and clutching at straws, ‘I intend to. Will you stand at my side?’ To which he replied, ‘Remember, Morgan, not the height, only the drop, is terrible.’ Then he walked away, gait unsteady, the cord of his robe trailing the deck.

  I saw him once more, in those seconds which dragged by between my leap for the roof of the officers’ house and the onrush of water that bore me aloft. He was standing against the rail, one arm hooked through to steady himself, and at first I didn’t know him for he had taken off his spectacles; it was the velvet dressing gown I recognised.

  He looked directly at me, all the time buffing his glasses on the hem of that plum-coloured robe, and I admit his occupation struck me as sensual. His hand, you see, was all but hidden beneath the material and I thought he was caressing himself. Death is such a lover’s pinch that a man can be excused for prising himself free. Behind him on the horizon glimmered something I mistakenly took to be starlight.

  I fancy he was smiling, but I can’t be sure. Possibly I need to believe it ended that way, so that I can expel from my ears the ululation of grief which later pierced the glittering heavens.

  The night was so still, the sea so calm, the moment so out of step with the catastrophe in progress that I made to join him, fluttered the fingers of my raised hand as though we were both guests at a social function and it was the most natural thing in the world to acknowledge the presence of a friend. My mouth even opened to shout some sort of greeting, though no words came.

  I remember looking down at my right shoe, still inexplicably shiny with polish, as I prepared to take a stride towards that figure braced against the rail.

  Then the water, first slithering, then tumbling, gushed us apart . . .

  ONE

  At half-past four on the afternoon of 8th April 1912 – the weather was mild and hyacinths bloomed in window boxes – a stranger chose to die in my arms.

  He was hung upon the railings of one of those grand houses in Manchester Square, arms spread like a scarecrow, the cloth of his city coat taking the strain. With his very first words he made it plain he wasn’t overwhelmed by circumstances. ‘I know who I am,’ is what he clearly said. In the open window behind him a maid in a white cap stabbed flowers into a vase.

  ‘It’s as well to know oneself,’ I replied, and walked on. I had reached the end of the street when I heard a shout; looking back I saw the unfortunate had shrugged himself out of his coat and was stumbling in my direction. His colourless face had eyebrows arched like a clown and lips that were turning blue.

  ‘Please,’ I said, as he pitched forward and clutched me round the waist. We both fell to our knees. Over the road a crocodile of Girl Guides sashayed sing-song through the ornamental gates of the public gardens.

  I tried to free myself, but the man was drowning. His face was so close that his two eyes merged into one. I had thought he was drunk, yet his breath smelled sweet.

  ‘Lay me down,’ he whispered, and a tear rolled out of that one terrible eye and broke on the swell of his lip.

  A nursemaid came down the sidewalk wheeling a perambulator. The infant was shrieking. I called out for assistance as the woman pushed past; there was a scrap of brown paper caught on the sole of her boot.

  I laid him down as best I could, his head on the sidewalk. I would have taken off my jacket to serve as a cushion if he hadn’t clung to my hands. His grip was
fierce, as though someone unseen was dragging him in another direction. Then, arching a middle finger and foraging beneath the cuff of my shirt, he feather-dusted my beating pulse.

  A sudden gust of wind shook the trees in the gardens and a prolonged sigh echoed along the street.

  ‘The finger stroke of love,’ he said, quite distinctly, and soon after, died.

  Sometime during the minutes of his dying he had released his hold on me, and, fumbling in his vest pocket, brought forth a small square of cardboard which he pressed against my heart.

  After leaving the barber’s shop, where the body had been carried by two constables, I found myself in possession of a snapshot of a Japanese woman peeping out from behind an embroidered fan. Retracing my steps I had every intention of giving it into the care of a constable, only to spy through the glass front of the shop the figure of the dead man seated in a barber’s chair, a white cloth tied about his neck. I supposed he had been placed there, until a conveyance arrived, so as not to deter potential customers. His eyes were open and they were looking at me.

  I went immediately to Princes Gate, packed my overnight bag and, leaving open the leaded window of my room to shift the tobacco smoke, closed the door quietly behind me. I paused in the corridor, did what I intended to do – it took but a moment – brushed the square of dust away with my sleeve and went to the head of the stairs.

  As fate would have it, Cousin Jack was coming up as I descended. There followed a conversation of sorts, though my heart beat so loud I scarcely heard it. The evening sun shone through the stained glass window on the landing and set his beard ablaze.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, peering. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘The very same,’ I replied, dazzled.

  ‘Are we well?’ he asked.

  ‘Pretty well.’

  ‘Excellent,’ he thundered, and stepped on past. One floor up the pet monkey hurled the length of its chain along the picture rail and leapt atop the banister.

  Later I reproached myself for being so jumpy. Jack may have an eye for commerce but in most other respects he’s monumentally blinkered. He is, after all, about his father’s business. In all the weeks I’d stayed at that house in Princes Gate we had never once dined together, although it’s true that we should have met for breakfast the morning after my arrival. On that occasion the cable working the dumb-waiter snapped between basement and dining room and the resulting cacophony of breaking china so unnerved me I fled before Jack appeared. At no time since had we occupied anything more spacious than the threshold of a room, he generally being on his way out as I entered, or the other way around. Beyond a grunt, possibly in reference to the weather, he had never acknowledged the cuckoo in his nest. I wasn’t entirely sure he even knew who I was. But then, he was nearly thirty years my senior and I no more than twelve years of age when he had last set eyes on me in the library of his father’s brownstone on Madison Avenue.

  I wouldn’t like to give the impression that I thought badly of Jack. Quite the reverse; it was he who told my aunt it was time she stopped feeding me moonshine in regard to my beginnings. Up until then I knew little of my parents, beyond they were both headstrong and dead, my father two months before I was born and my mother, half-sister-in-law to my Uncle Morgan, three years after. I wasn’t really bothered about the whys and wherefores, being well cared for by my aunt and my cousin Sissy, but often crazy images came into my head, either when I was on the point of dropping off to sleep or on the edge of waking, images of an old woman’s face lying next to me on a soiled pillow. And then I’d come fully awake and scream the house down, begging for the window to be opened to let out the stench of her breath. Sometimes, when the dream had been really bad, Sissy would push up the balcony window and hold me there in my night-gown, telling me to suck in the night air, and those times I stopped breathing altogether, for when I looked down at the gas-lit street it had sunk beneath the sluggish waters of a canal.

  I didn’t find the truth all that upsetting, though Sissy wept for days. I was just thankful I hadn’t slithered into the world on the wrong side of the tracks. As for the other grotesque happenings concerning my infant self, which I read about in brittle newspaper cuttings handed me by Jack soon after my twelfth birthday, why, they merely confirmed a growing belief that I was special. I don’t care to be misunderstood; I’m not talking about intellect or being singled out for great honours, simply that I was destined to be a participant rather than a spectator of singular events.

  For instance, an hour before Amy Svenson hanged herself from the basement gate due to milk fever, I was marching my toy soldiers across the tiled lobby of the Madison Avenue house. Amy was scrubbing out the vestibule and when I started bawling – one of my tin Confederates had got caught in the castors of the hall table – she came in and sang me a lullaby. A bubble of soap burst in her hair as she took me on her knee. And when I was ten, staying down at the Van Hoppers’ place, I met a man who blew his head off. I’d woken early one morning and roamed off on my own to the creek below the cemetery and there was Israel Wold, the half-baked tenant of the shack beyond the pines, on all fours, digging out the earth like he was a wild cat. He called out, ‘Help me, pesky boy,’ and obediently I crouched opposite and scrabbled at the ground. When the hole was deep enough he poured gunpowder into it from a sack slung from his belt and he said, ‘Here I go and may the Lord go with me’ and then he lay down with his head over the hole. I ran off because I knew he was cracked, and the next instant there was a noise like thunder and when I looked back I saw his old straw hat tossed into the misty sky as though someone had brought good news. Which is why I took the dead man in Manchester Square in my stride, though not quite.

  That night I booked into a boarding house in Bloomsbury, and suffered accordingly. I suppose I could have gone down to Melchett’s folk in Dorset, except the company they kept was real dull and their sofas awash with dogs.

  Tuesday I’d gone with Laura Rothschild to a matinée of some play or other, let Melchett stand me dinner at the Carlton, staggered on with him to his club and then mislaid him at three o’clock in the morning outside the revolving doors of the Café Royal. In between I’d telegraphed my aunt, assuring her of my eagerness to see the family again, particularly Sissy who in my absence had produced a son and heir for her husband. It cost a few cents more but I also said I was in tip-top spirits. I wasn’t, although I was truly bucked about Sissy and her boy. I recollect buying her a bunch of violets with the notion they might last the voyage home, only I shed them somewhere.

  Melchett and I had planned to motor down to the ship together – his chauffeur had earlier taken charge of my luggage – but when I lost him at the Café Royal I was forced to catch the milk train from Waterloo, after which rattling journey through Woking, Winchester and Eastleigh I arrived at Southampton to spend a miserable hour perched on a coil of rope outside the Ocean Terminal, my only companion in the near darkness a boy endlessly sorting through the contents of a cardboard suitcase. I had plenty to think about; every time I hunched forward a corner of the picture frame inside my coat jabbed against my breastbone. Once, the boy called out to me, ‘What’s the time, mister?’ but I didn’t reply. He wore a white muffler about his throat and I thought of the dead man in the barber’s chair.

  Shortly after sunrise a straggling procession of men in uniform approached Gate 4 and crossed the railway tracks on to Ocean Road. It was then the doors of the South Western Hotel opened and I was able to order a breakfast of overdone kippers. At that hour there were only three other guests in the dining room, two of whom had their backs to me. Of these, one was a woman soberly dressed and the other a stoutly built fellow sitting alone in an alcove, one hand constantly hovering about the string of an oblong box lying beside his chair. The third occupant, middle-aged and wearing spectacles, sat opposite the woman. His face, otherwise fleshy and undistinguished, was remarkable for a mouth whose lower lip was scored through as though by a slash from a knife; split thus, it gave him a roguish appeara
nce. Leaning backwards in his chair, he talked in so distinctive a voice and with such authority that several times I caught the drift of what he said. I took him to be a lawyer, for he seemed to be conducting an interrogation rather than a conversation.

  ‘Are you sure that you have the will? . . . What makes you think you possess the strength? . . . What will you do with success when it comes?’ To which last question the woman replied barely above a whisper. I have the knack of concentration and although a waiter was poking the coals into flame and plates were clattering in the kitchens beyond the green baize door, I heard her plain. ‘Why, I shall be happy,’ is what she said.

  It was then her companion looked across and met my eye. He was smiling in such a jovial fashion, that, taken off guard, I pretended to be engrossed in the view from the window. By now the crimson dawn had torn to rags and the dull sky was all but blotted out by the giant funnels towering above the roofs of the shipping offices below. I guess there must have been a breeze for I remember watching the flutter of the signal flags.

  It struck me, even then, that the stranger with the scarred lip was someone I might usefully cultivate. There was a robustness about him, an arrogance that had nothing to do with money, and if I hadn’t felt so liverish I’d have responded to that first zestful overture. I’m not, or rather I wasn’t, the sort of fellow who sees the point in keeping his distance, particularly if it’s likely to lead to amusement.

  The man with the oblong package was the first to leave. He too looked at me and nodded as he passed by. His cool acknowledgement and the graceful manner in which he manoeuvred his way between the tables surprised me; one always expects fat men of a certain class to be both clumsy and lacking in confidence. In spite of myself, I nodded in return. At that instant the clock on the mantelpiece struck the hour and the woman rose from her chair. The stout man reached the door and half turned. The expression on his face was so open, his feelings of admiration, if not downright desire, so apparent, that I too looked at the woman. She was singularly tall for her sex, statuesque in build, and wore a tailored coat made of some dark material with a touch of cheap fur at throat and wrists. From her low-brimmed hat escaped a wave of bright hair. I have no early recollection of the beauty of her features, the Roman nose, the width between her pale eyes, only of the translucency of her skin. It would be true to say, if couched a shade poetically, that she had a complexion so luminous in its perfection that it was like gazing upon a pearl.