Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [0]
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
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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