The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  “Good thing I haven’t any, then,” said Robert, setting his hands on her shoulders and looking benevolently down at her. “I can stand you some rather nice pearls that belonged to my mother. And I believe there’s a rather dusty tiara locked away in a vault. I might once have offered you a slightly dyspeptic whippet, but he perished of old age not long before I left for New York.”

  “So long as you don’t mistake a wife for a whippet,” said Tess.

  “Don’t be silly. That’s a whippet.” He pointed to a dog that was watching them from the side of the road, a skinny creature that seemed to be all legs and a very small head. “Hullo, there. Who do you belong to, then?”

  The whippet ignored Robert and went straight to Tess, butting the top of his head against her hand.

  “He likes you,” said Robert.

  “He likes what I had for breakfast,” retorted Tess, but there was something rather sweet about the way the dog was licking her fingers. “He looks hungry. And I don’t see a collar. Do you think someone abandoned him?”

  “Another survivor,” said Robert. “Shall we find a meal for him?”

  “If you feed him,” said Tess, “you might never get rid of him.”

  “We have a tradition of whippets at Langford House.”

  “I never had a dog before. We never stayed in one place long enough.” Tentatively, Tess ran a hand over the dog’s back, marveling at the feel of the muscles beneath the skin, the way he arched closer to her touch. “He’s the color of walnuts.”

  “Walnut,” said Robert. “It’s a good name for a whippet.”

  The dog sat back on his haunches and gave a short bark of approval.

  Tess looked from the dog to Robert. She’d never had a dog before, or a real home. There was something solid-sounding about Langford House. And about Walnut.

  “Walnut the Whippet,” Tess said, and smiled up at Robert over the whippet’s tail, dog and man blurring together in the sunlight and a sudden mist of tears. “Shall we bring him home with us?”

  Epilogue

  Sarah

  Cobh, Ireland

  May 2015

  On the slim, shingled beach below the cliffs, about a mile to the east, a man is walking a dog. At least, I assume it’s a man; at this distance, and in this weather, it’s hard to tell. The dog is athletic and boisterous, probably still young, and though the wind blows in angry, wet gusts, he frolics heedlessly among the rocks, while his master marches in his peaked woolen cap and Wellington boots. The sight of them together, man and dog, makes my ribs ache.

  I turn my head back to the sea, shrouded in gray. To my right, the Old Head of Kinsale stretches its neck bravely into the squall, and it seems to me, as I stand on that cliff, looking out past the shelter of the harbor and across the Irish Sea, that it’s looking for something.

  But of course that’s just my imagination. My imagination, shaped by what a therapist would probably call projection. Because we’re all looking for something, aren’t we? Every last one of us looking in vain, looking with futile, unassailable hope for something we’ve lost.

  * * *

  Walking back into town, I’m struck by how little Cobh—formerly known as Queenstown—has changed in the hundred years since Caroline Hochstetter and Robert Langford came ashore here, along with the other 765 survivors of the Lusitania’s last voyage, including the unknown woman who eventually became Robert’s wife. At every corner, my breath sticks in my throat at some familiar landmark, some identical sign or building from a long-ago photograph, brought back to colorful, three-dimensional life. All the trials and storms of the twentieth century have left little trace on these streets and houses. Perhaps they were just too sturdily built, here on the edge of the Irish Sea, where storms and shipwrecks occur at regular intervals, are endured and then consigned to memory.

  It shakes me, though. Like now, as I climb the twisting streets and look up to find myself outside the Imperial Hotel, where Caroline Hochstetter spent her last night before returning with her husband’s body to New York. An uncanny sensation overtakes me, a collapse of time and space, and I might almost be standing next to her. Might almost hear the sound of clopping hooves and wheels rattling over cobblestones, smell the coal smoke and the manure amid the tang of the sea air, bear the weight of incalculable sorrow on my shoulders. Underneath my feet, the cobbles seem to have absorbed the memory of that terrible day and preserved it somehow, cold and hard and unbreakable.

  And something else happens, in those moments, inside this architectural landscape that brings England back to my mind. England, which I haven’t seen in two years, not since I packed my suitcase under R2-D2’s impassive LED gaze and called an Uber to take me to the station in Totnes, and then traveled by train to Heathrow.

  I think of John. John Langford, whom I also haven’t seen in two years.

  * * *

  Three hours later, as I stand at the front of a packed lecture hall in the middle of Cobh—the old Cunard offices, now converted to a Lusitania museum—delivering animated sentences into the ears of a fascinated crowd, nobody would imagine me capable of standing in melancholy on a rain-dashed cliff overlooking the sea, or before the façade of an antique hotel. I consider my lectures like performances, in which I assume the role of Enthusiastic Professor, bounding about the stage like an intoxicated deer, in order to communicate my passion for the subject with such conviction that you—the reading public—are practically compelled to buy the book afterward. Inscribed with a flourish, of course. A signed book should be a work of art, I think.

  As always, I accompany my talk with illustrations, transmitted from an elegant silver MacBook Air to the screen behind me. A portrait of Caroline Hochstetter Talmadge illuminates said screen just now, and the audience gasps at her beauty. They always do. It’s a particularly flattering likeness, of course, painted two years after she married her first husband, but there’s no such thing as an unflattering picture of Caroline. (Believe me, I’ve seen them all.) In another age, she might have been a model. She has that kind of beauty, the kind that photographs perfectly from any angle. You might almost hate her for it, except that she didn’t seem to care much about that beauty. She never exploited it. She devoted her life not to personal vanity but to music.

  “I know, right?” I say, after a brief pause, in order to allow Caroline’s image to properly sink in. “She’s absolutely gorgeous. She’s a young bride in this one, but she’s still got a certain dignity about her. You can see why people—and men in particular—found her so fascinating. According to contemporary accounts, she had a long list of male admirers, but there’s no hint she admired any of them back. She remained devoted to Hamilton Talmadge throughout their marriage, as she was to Gilbert Hochstetter before him. With one exception.”

  I flash to the next slide.

  “This fellow. Handsome devil, isn’t he? They made a good pair, side by side. And if he looks a little familiar, it’s probably because you like to read old spy novels. Anybody know who this is?” I scan the crowd, but I’m presenting from a small stage, and the lighting makes it difficult to distinguish any faces. “Anybody? It’s Robert Langford.”

  Sighs of revelation crisscross the auditorium. I smile and wait for the whispers to die down. Pick up my water glass at the edge of the podium and take a small sip.

  “Scion of a prominent English family and, of course, writer of—in my humble opinion, anyway—some of the best espionage fiction in the universe. If you haven’t read any of his books, I highly recommend them. Night Train to Berlin is a doozy. Spies and lovers, fathers hiding unspeakable secrets. You’ve probably seen the film, directed by the legendary Carroll Goring.”

  I pause again and turn my head to take in Robert’s image. The resemblance to John sends a shock along my nerves, as it always does. Funny, I never noticed it back in England, when Robert’s portrait stared down at me daily from the wall of the folly, and Robert’s photograph stared up from the jackets of his books, and John himself was constantly nea
rby for comparison. Only afterward did the sight of Robert cause my breath to stop in my lungs. Only afterward did I notice how the shape of the eyes, the slant of the eyebrows, the curve of the mouth, were exactly John’s.

  By then, of course, I had nothing with which to compare them, except my memory.

  I turn back to the crowd and smile.

  “Of course, we don’t know exactly what went on between these two aboard the Lusitania in the days before her sinking. We have only a letter from one Prunella Schuyler, posted right here in Cobh—what was then Queenstown—on the ninth of May 1915 to her stepson in New York, in which she assures him of her safety and makes a reference to Hochstetter’s death, in such a way that suggests both his widow and Robert Langford will be pleased at this convenient turn of events. Now, that, my friends, is what we in the business call hearsay, and it proves exactly nothing. This, on the other hand . . .”

  I flash to the next slide, a photograph of Mary Talmadge, and the image, arriving directly after that of Robert Langford, causes another wave of gasps to seethe about the room.

  “Mary Talmadge,” I say. “Caroline’s only child. Born in Savannah, Georgia, on the tenth of February 1916, nine months almost to the day after the Lusitania went down. As we know, a year later Caroline remarried her childhood friend Hamilton Talmadge, who shared her Southern background and her love of music, and gave her all the love and security she needed after the trauma she’d endured. Not a passionate marriage, you might say, but a stable and happy one, based on mutual interests and genuine friendship. He adopted her daughter and was, to little Mary, the father she’d never known. And when Mary first showed signs of her prodigious musical talent, Caroline—with Hamilton’s support—founded the renowned musical conservatory that bears their name.”

  I glance back at Mary’s photograph, the same one that appeared in the program for the piano concert at the Carnegie, but only for an instant. I’m building up to something important, and I don’t want to lose my momentum.

  “We’re all gathered here in Cobh this week to commemorate the sinking of the RMS Lusitania one hundred years ago, and you’ll be hearing a lot about the voyage, and the cargo of munitions it may or may not have been carrying, and the historical significance of this event in the context of the First World War. But we have to remember the human scale, too. The individual lives that changed course as a result of the disaster. Caroline Hochstetter Talmadge was one of those lives, and the Talmadge Conservatory and all it represents came out of that transformation, and she’s the reason I’m here, speaking to you this afternoon. Caroline Talmadge, who emerged from tragedy to reinvent herself as perhaps the greatest arts philanthropist of the twentieth century. Caroline Talmadge, the subject of my new biography, Caroline’s Music: Birth and Rebirth in the Wake of the Lusitania.”

  * * *

  I like to leave plenty of time for audience questions, and this crowd has many of them. When I launched the book in Savannah a week ago, readers wanted to know about Caroline’s years in philanthropy, and the unusual methods of musical instruction she pioneered with Mary and then the conservatory as a whole. Here, of course, the focus is strictly Lusitania. Why were Caroline and her husband on the ship in the first place? Had I come across any evidence of a conspiracy? What about Robert Langford?

  Yes. What about Robert Langford?

  I answer that one carefully, as I always do, whenever it comes up. “He’s a fascinating man, obviously. But the focus of this book is Caroline, not Robert, and I deliberately left the question of his involvement in—or knowledge of—British intelligence operations for other biographers to answer. I will say this: I uncovered absolutely nothing in all my research to conclude that Robert Langford ever betrayed his country, or even considered the possibility. I would say that the evidence suggests the opposite, in fact. And I’m afraid that’s all the time we have—”

  “Wait.”

  The voice booms from the back of the room, the very last row of seats. A strong voice from a masculine chest, the kind of voice that makes everybody startle and turn in its direction.

  I shade my eyes against the sharp glare of the stage lights. Against the charge of adrenaline shooting through my veins, I can do nothing.

  “Sir? I’m afraid we’ve already run over our allotted time—”

  “Just one brief question, if you don’t mind.”

  The man has risen from his seat, and while I can’t see his face in the shadows, neither can I mistake the impressive size and shape of his figure.

  “I’m afraid it will have to be very brief,” I say.

  “It’s just this. I’m curious, Ms. Blake, how you came to interest yourself in the subject of Caroline Talmadge to begin with. Where that initial spark, if I may so call it, was ignited inside you.”

  I clear my throat and reach for the water glass. “Well. That’s a very interesting question, Mr. . . .?”

  “Langford,” he says. “John Langford.”

  A stir of voices. Somebody gasps.

  He disregards all this commotion and continues, almost without pause, “I expect a thoroughly interesting answer, Ms. Blake. And I do have a follow-up question, if you don’t mind.”

  He sits down slowly, lankily, like a man whose limbs are too long to fit in his allotted space, and for an instant I remember just how long those limbs are, and how heavy. Under the warm lights—of course it’s just the warm lights—my skin starts to flush.

  “The truth is,” I say, “I was initially drawn to the Langford family as I began my research. There was a previous connection. A very deep, old connection. My great-grandfather was a steward on that ship, and he died that day in May, and I was hoping to learn more about his fate and his connection to the Langfords. Sadly, however, I was unable to win the trust of certain members of the family, and my research took a new direction. But I believe, in the end, that change was for the best. I discovered something else. I discovered Caroline. And while it’s possible she may have made some untenable choices on board the Lusitania—following her heart, you might say, in a moment of weakness—she faced the consequences of those choices and overcame them, and became—I believe—a better person. They both did. The affair, while passionate, wasn’t meant to last. You might say they were better apart than together. They went on to marry other people and lead happy, productive lives.” I take a deep breath and another sip of water. “Have I answered the question to your satisfaction, Mr. Langford?”

  He rises again, and the room has grown so quiet, so expectant, I can hear the scrape of his shoes against the wooden floor.

  “To my satisfaction? I’m afraid not, Ms. Blake. In fact, I find your argument entirely unconvincing. But we’ll leave that aside for the moment, if you don’t mind addressing my follow-up question.”

  “Which is?”

  “Will you perhaps do me the great honor of having dinner with me tonight, and allow me to apologize for acting like a complete and utter ass two years ago?”

  * * *

  For the first six months or so after my return from England, I refused to think about John Langford at all. I wasn’t angry at him, not exactly. After all, I couldn’t really blame him for being upset, for jumping to conclusions, for storming off. We’re all human, aren’t we? We overreact, we assume, we see what—consciously or otherwise—we expect to see. And John Langford had been betrayed by pretty much everyone he’d ever loved in his life, the women especially. As for me, I’d been stupid to meet with Jared Holm in the first place, stupid and maybe even wrong. If I’d been sensible that day, I’d have followed John out that door and forced him to listen to me. I’d have apologized, I’d have explained everything, and he’d have run his hand through his hair and understood, and we’d have made it all up to each other, probably in bed, and to tremendous mutual satisfaction.

  But something stopped me. Pride, I told myself, but it wasn’t pride at all. Looking back, I think I was grateful John gave me a reason to bolt, back to my mother and my old life, my old worries and n
euroses, my old excuses. Where I depended on no one but myself. Where no man could touch me, betray me, leave me, and hurt me. Maybe I even met with Jared as an act of sabotage, knowing—at least unconsciously—what might happen. Whatever it was, this something inside me, it held me fast, and I filled my time instead with my research, with my writing, with my mother and her swift decline. I sent John no emails, no drunken texts, no social media messages to his official Parliamentary accounts.

  And yet. He was still there. I found him at Christmas, when my mother unwrapped the present I’d had made for her—a tiny, favorite photograph of the two of us, imprinted into a charm—and said, What the fuck is this? and threw it across the room. Naturally I held myself together, picked up the mess and put it in a drawer, tucked her in and gave her water, but then I went into the hallway and cried in huge, shuddering, lonely sobs. Nobody was there because it was Christmas, and even people who don’t celebrate Christmas will still take advantage of the holiday and stay home to eat turkey or Chinese takeout with their families. It was dark outside the window, and the hallway was cold and smelled of antiseptic, and I was alone. Just me and my shuddering, so hard and so body-wracking that something broke inside me, some barrier, and there stood John behind it. Large and quiet and reassuring. Stuck in my bones.

  Oh, go piss off, I told him. You’re too late.

  But he refused to go away, and eventually I got used to him. We made peace. There were times I couldn’t even remember why I’d pushed him away in the first place.

  * * *

  John’s waiting for me after the event is over, the real John, flesh and blood, sitting discreetly in the back of the room until the last book is signed, the last reader has departed. My publisher has assigned me a handler for this portion of the book tour, and she stands uncertainly near the signing table, glancing between the two of us.

  “That’s okay, Joanna,” I say. “I can find my own way back to the hotel.”

  She picks up her coat and bag and bolts toward the door, which John opens for her. I gather my things, my Sharpies and my iPhone, my bookmarks, and place them in my tote with my laptop. Stand slowly, holding the edge of the table with one hand, in case my legs wobble at the sight of him, arms crossed, leaning against the door.