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completely get over his hysterical anger, and never was able to think about what happened rationally; and so—or at least, that was how he explained it—six months later he had his first mental breakdown; and so, in all the years that followed, he found himself unable to talk to a reporter or anyone else about the events of June 28, 1950.
    Just very occasionally, in all those years, did he tell himself that maybe it wasn’t some residue of anger boring away inside his brain, or it wasn’t his inability to think rationally about what happened on the Chateaubriand, that caused him to have his periodic attacks. Then, though, he would ask himself: but if not that, if not them, what? And he would let the matter rest.
    What else could it be but his anger; what else could it be but the madness that had come over him that night and made him behave in a manner that was so unlike the way he normally behaved that it had, in a sense, shattered, or anyway damaged irreparably, the vessel that contained his mind? A madness he had never, thereafter, been able to rid himself of.
    *
    What else indeed, Alfred asked himself again and again as he wrote and rewrote his story; and as he found that however often he rewrote it, and however hard he tried to make it dramatic, and frightening, and to infuse it with some of that anger of his, it was curiously lifeless and anti-climactic. Perhaps I’ve waited too long, he told himself as he started ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand ’for the fifth time; and realised he was writing almost word for word what he had written the first time. Maybe I should still let sleeping dogs lie; and admit that Louise and myother friends are right to be cool about this enterprise; realising it can do no more good to anyone after all these years and is frankly not very interesting. All right, so the captain and the crew behaved badly. So what? The important thing is that everyone who could have been saved was saved, and it really matters not one bit how they were saved, or by whom. What is more, the idea that I’ve always had in the back of my mind, that whereas the captain was not a hero, I in fact was, is probably erroneous. All right, I did get that sailor to radio for help, and I did lend a hand—if not do it quite all myself—in organising everyone who was left on board. Nevertheless, it’s just possible that someone else had radioed for help, or that the lifeboats from the tanker and the other ships were already on their way. As it’s possible that I really was as mad as everyone subsequently said I was, and people would have organised themselves or been organised by someone else, equally well, if not better, had I not been there.
    Oh, if only, Alfred told himself as he started his sixth draft and then his seventh, I could give this business up.
    But, and this he told Dorothy again and again as she stroked his head, and kissed him, and murmured ‘Why don’t you just put it aside for a while lovey?’ he couldn’t. Partly because he did feel this was his last chance of regaining some sort of foothold on the shore of sanity. Partly because he did feel a certain moral compunction, however priggish and possibly self-serving it might be, to tell, as he saw it, ‘the Truth’. And partly—principally, he admitted to himself, though would never have admitted to anyone else, above all not his bitter, beautiful Dorothy—because since the night of his birthday, when Louise had been so chilly, he had found himself being dropped by practically all his other friends. A state of affairs that was so unbearable to him that the only way he could take his mind off it was by continuing to write, for all that he knew that the more he wrote, the more he would be dropped.
    To think, he told himself, he had thought of enlisting theiraid! One might just as well have asked a Nazi for a contribution to a Jewish charity.
    What was really shameful about his distress at being dropped was that, as the invitations and the telephone