Every Man for Himself

by Beryl Bainbridge

  The figure in the shawl turned and, circling the dancers, came to the metal gate barring the way to the second class area. She stood leaning against it, peering upwards, and with the light full on her face I recognised who she was. I was astonished. It was hardly likely that anyone travelling first or second class would choose to visit the lower decks and it was strictly against the rules for steerage passengers to move upwards, and yet I had seen her twice in first class, once in the company of Scurra when we left Southampton and again when she had appeared on the Grand Staircase and called out to him.

  Presently a fellow with a handkerchief knotted about his throat approached. He spoke to the woman but she shrugged her shoulders dismissively and fixed her gaze on the heavens. Save for the mast lights sailing against the darkness the sky was empty of stars.

  Puzzled, I strolled back the way I had come and reaching the gymnasium doors stood for some minutes leaning over the rail. The ship was lit up from bow to stern, the reflections leaping in silver streamers across the black waters below. I could feel the coldness of the rail striking through the cloth of my jacket, and as I shifted my arm an image of the corridor at Princes Gate flashed into my head; I clearly saw my elbow bobbing upward to wipe away that square of dust on the wall. My heart leapt in my breast and I found it difficult to breathe. It was only a matter of time, I reasoned, before Jack or one of the servants noticed the empty space.

  It wasn’t being found out that bothered me – my uncle was three-quarters buccaneer himself – more that my aunt had dinned into me that wrong-doing is invariably punished, and though my adult self regarded this as mere superstition the child in me quaked. I exaggerate, of course. There was definitely something pleasurable in my moment of fear. I decided I would write to my uncle, confessing what I had done. I might even offer to pay for the painting – my allowance was generous enough.

  When I passed through the gymnasium there were some fellows fooling about on the apparatus. The instructor, poor chap, was trying to close up for the night. I nearly stopped to assist him – the revellers were distinctly the worse for drink – but decided against it. I suspected I might well be in the same condition in the nights that followed.

  I rang for the steward on reaching my stateroom. I wanted a hot drink. He came in at once, carrying the day suit I had worn when boarding. He said it had been sponged and pressed. The contents of the pockets were on the dressing table if I cared to check.

  ‘Is there a Jew called Rosenfelder on this deck?’ I asked.

  ‘Not on this one, sir. He’s on B deck. He’s the gentleman I mentioned who was to have travelled second class and took over a cancellation.’

  ‘And what of a man called Scurra?’

  ‘That name I don’t recollect, sir. Possibly he’s travelling under an assumed name. You’d be surprised how many of them do that.’

  ‘Like Mr and Mrs Morgan,’ I suggested, and he knew immediately who I meant. He had served them for years on the Atlantic run and found his Lordship a very affable man. He didn’t lean much towards her Ladyship, whom he found strident. ‘Of course, she’s an American,’ he said, ‘and they’re never backward in coming forward.’ He had met her sort before, when he was young and employed as a ballroom dancer at the Savoy. In those days two dances were included in the price of the tea, for the benefit of the unaccompanied ladies. Though he wasn’t one to blow his own trumpet he had been a great favourite with those leaving the glades of youth.

  ‘One in particular,’ he boasted, ‘took a fancy to me. She used to collect me in her carriage and we’d spank along to the Park and take a wee drop of gin under the trees. Mind, I never took advantage . . . I left that to her.’

  Her Ladyship’s sister went under the name of Elinor Glyn. She wrote novels, of the steamy sort so he’d heard, and was, or had been, the mistress of Lord Curzon. I didn’t rebuke him for gossiping, thinking he might be useful later.

  Giving him his tip I suddenly remembered the seaman who had taken Melchett and myself down to the engine rooms. Putting a half-crown piece in an envelope, I addressed it to Riley. I told the steward to make sure the right man received it. ‘He’s no bigger than a boy,’ I said. ‘And he talks like a foreigner with a cold.’

  My billfold, matches, the keys to Princes Gate and the snapshot foisted on me by the dying man lay on the dressing table. I stuffed them back into the pocket of the jacket and began my letter. My dear Uncle, I am bringing back with me the small painting of my mother, dated 1888, which hung on the first floor corridor at Princes Gate. I did not have time to tell Jack what—.

  I had got no further when my cocoa arrived. Laying the letter aside I prepared for bed. It was a relief to switch off the light because the girl on the wall now seemed to be watching me.

  TWO

  Thursday, 11th April

  At seven o’clock the next morning I had the salt water baths to myself and had swum eight lengths in less than five minutes without pausing for rest. On my ninth turn, a corpulent figure emerged from the cubicles and padded towards the side. I was put off my stroke; it was none other than Rosenfelder, dressed in a costume of green and brown stripes, his calves white and shapely as a girl’s. He sat for some minutes on the edge of the pool struggling to thrust his curls into a rubber cap before flopping walrus-fashion into the water. Though disconcerted I was damned if I was going to quit on his account and continued to plough back and forth, until, having blindly thrashed into my path, his arm flailed downwards and struck me on the shoulder.

  We both trod water and faced each other, he spluttering apologies, myself gasping for breath from lack of fitness. I was about to respond impatiently when his bathing cap, which was already absurdly balanced like some deflating balloon on the very top of his head, suddenly rose in the air and plopped down between us. The sight was so comical I bellowed with laughter. He stared at me a second, eyes popping, and then he too began to squeal. We both clung to one another for support and were not much better composed when we climbed out, for the floor was slippery from our splashings and we were forced to walk on mincing tip-toe to avoid falling, which set us off again, our guffaws bouncing back at us from the tiled walls as we pranced to the changing boxes. We continued to behave in this cockamamie fashion while dressing, he giving vent to falsetto giggles, myself letting out staccato hoots as I towelled myself dry.

  He suggested we breakfasted together, which was fine by me. I found him amusing. By the time I had tucked into my eggs, bacon and kidneys and he into his kedgeree, we were the best of friends.

  After the politenesses had been rushed through, the weather, the size of the ship, the excellence of the food, he was eager to talk about himself. At some point in his unstoppable narrative Thomas Andrews and four of his design team entered the restaurant. They each carried drawing pads and Andrews had a pencil stuck behind his ear. He didn’t notice me.

  Rosenfelder’s story was commonplace enough for one of his race and class. He had left Germany as a boy and come to England to be apprenticed to a tailor, an elderly cousin on his father’s side. They had lived first in Liverpool and then Manchester.

  ‘They were not good times,’ he confided. ‘My cousin was a hard man . . . life had made him so. Blows in the shop, blows in the home . . . never enough to eat, bugs crawling out of the skirting boards and always the rain coming down.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said. And I could. I rubbed my arm to relieve an itch.

  ‘Bit by bit the business began to prosper. My cousin had the customers and I had the skill at cutting. We make money. Then, when my cousin popped his clogs . . . you understand the expression?’ – I nodded – ‘he left me five sewing machines, a quantity of cloth and a year’s rent on the premises of the top floor of a warehouse in Hood Street beside the canal. Modest, you understand, but the roof didn’t leak.’

  ‘It’s a river,’ I interrupted. ‘The Irwell.’

  ‘I’d been frugal,’ he continued, ‘and in another year I’d saved enough to take a lease on a shop in
a better part of town. Twelve months later, after a courtship of fifteen years, I marry the daughter of a Russian pastry cook employed in the Midland Hotel. She’s a good woman, thrifty, a regular baleboosteh. When we have our first child she loses her teeth. Now, when she moves her mouth to speak to me, which is fortunately not often, I am regretfully reminded of a goldfish.’ He had bought her dentures, of course, the best that money could buy, but she refused to wear them.

  Lest I should think the tailoring business lacked poetry he dazzled me with a recitation of fabrics – bombazine, brocade, calico, dimity, duck, flannelette, fustian, muslin, sateen, velveteen. He was going to America to see Mr Macy and show him an extraordinary dress which would, God willing, go on display in the windows of that famous store and eventually make him his fortune. ‘I will be,’ he declared, ‘no longer a bespoke tailor but a couturier.’

  ‘Mr Macy,’ I told him, ‘is on board. Or rather the present owner of the store. His name is Isador Straus.’

  ‘Here? On this ship?’ He fairly gawped at me.

  ‘He’s an elderly gentleman with a beard, travelling with his wife.’

  ‘You think I should speak to him?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘If you choose your moment. He’s a good man, a philanthropist. Like you, he started with nothing.’

  And then, because I was curious, though indeed he had accused me only the night before of not being old enough, I mentioned the tall woman in the South Western Hotel. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing the way you looked at her.’

  ‘Ah,’ he breathed, and crumbled the toast on his plate. For once, he was at a loss for words.

  ‘It was my impression,’ I prompted, ‘that you were sweet on her.’

  ‘I had never set eyes on her before in my life,’ he said, and launched into an explanation concerning the contents of the oblong box I had seen him so zealously guarding, namely a garment which, on account of it being designed for a window display, had been cut larger than life and doomed merely to drape the celluloid contours of a shop dummy. That is, until the woman in the hotel got up to leave.

  ‘She rose like a tree,’ he cried. ‘An English oak. It could have been made for her.’

  I said, ‘I thought it was desire you felt.’

  ‘And so it was,’ he insisted. ‘The desire to see my dress on a creature of flesh and blood.’

  I brought up Scurra’s name. In Rosenfelder’s opinion he was an educated man with a near spiritual grasp of human nature. ‘Do you know what he told me? Listen – one day the world will recognise the tailor as the hierophant and hierarch, even its God. I look in the dictionary, you understand, to make him out.’

  ‘One would need to,’ I said. ‘I take it you know him well?’

  ‘Not at all. I observed him talking to the tall goddess and I think to myself, here is a man to confide in.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘But, of course. He advises me not to approach her until after we have left Queenstown. She was to have met a gentleman friend at Southampton. He did not show up. He is her protector, if you follow me. Nor did he appear at Cherbourg, at which she becomes so distraught she threatens to throw herself overboard. Scurra has persuaded her to wait until we reach Queenstown. Her friend may yet turn up. She has left London with her ticket, the clothes she stands up in, a small suitcase and two pounds in her purse.’

  ‘How very unfortunate,’ I said.

  ‘For her, yes. For me, who knows what will be the advantage?’

  ‘Has Scurra known her long?’

  ‘That’s for him to say.’

  I would quite happily have passed the morning with him if he hadn’t had an appointment with the barber; there was a miracle lotion advertised, guaranteed to straighten ringlets.

  I spent two hours in the library, wrestling to compose another letter to my uncle. I had first tried the writing room – it had a stock of paper embossed with the White Star crest – but found it full of women, including Molly Dodge. She said I’d been a disappointment to her last night, sloping off like that. I didn’t have to lie to Molly so I confided I’d felt blue.

  ‘You missed the fun,’ she said.

  ‘I’m tired of fun.’

  ‘If I didn’t know you better,’ she replied, ‘I’d think you were playing a part.’

  I got no further with my letter than I had the night before. It now struck me as unnecessary to tell my uncle about my mother’s picture. Beyond suggesting I might have told Jack what I’d done, I doubted he’d give a button. After all, he had enough paintings to fill the Louvre and though irascible was neither grasping nor censorious. He hadn’t the need. Unlike his millionaire associates on Wall Street he’d inherited wealth, not clawed his way up from poverty. It was power that motivated him rather than money, and a belief that he alone could set America straight.

  I reckon I was, still am, ambivalent towards my uncle. It would have helped my cause if he had been more of a rogue. True, he was a hypocrite, not least in his shenanigans with women – he had once put a stop to a production of Salomé at the Metropolitan Opera House, on the grounds that the reasons for chopping off the Baptist’s head were downright salacious – but then, he knew he was. A cynic, he was fond of quoting the maxim that a man has two reasons for the things he does, a good one and the real one.

  What was more urgent, I realised, as I lolled yawning over the library table, was to figure out a way to tell him what I intended to do with my future. Since I was nineteen my uncle had been trying to fix me up with employment. How often had I heard him thunder that it was the duty of the wealthy to work? A poor man without a job, he held, was less despicable than a rich man who remained idle.

  Under pressure I had undergone six months in a merchant bank in Paris, a miserable three weeks in a backwater branch of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, a year in the library run by his one-time secretary and mistress, Bella da Costa Greene, and a further year in the offices of Harland and Wolff. That last momentous year had propelled me towards the crossroads of my life and shown me the path I must take. Unfortunately for my uncle, it led more towards destruction than construction and had nothing whatever to do with draughtsmanship or naval architecture.

  It wasn’t the financing of my plans that bothered me. Even if my uncle stopped my allowance, which wasn’t likely, my aunt had money of her own and would chuck me the moon if I asked. It was my conscience that niggled, for I’d been treated with great generosity by one who owed me nothing. We were linked by events, not blood, and he viewed me as if through a microscope, the infusoria of his long-gone past wriggling before his magnified gaze.

  I was about to doze off when Hopper and Melchett swept in and dragged me away to the gymnasium. Colonel Astor was there, morose as ever, sitting in the row-boat machine, clad in a white singlet. The boxing gloves were missing but we took turns, bare-knuckled, at the punch-bag. Hopper was terrific at it, taking almighty swings and ending up scarcely puffed. Every time Melchett made a hit he cried out ‘Ouch’ and ran about with his hand tucked under his armpit. Astor never looked up.

  Just after noon we tumbled out on deck. The sun shone so brilliantly that a small boy standing only five yards distant dissolved into whiteness, the top he was whipping gyrating at the toes of his all but invisible boots.

  Slowly we approached Queenstown, the green fields spreading back from the cliffs. In time I could make out the glint of windows beyond the harbour wall, the white moon of a municipal clock. On Spy Hill a church spire speared the mild sky. Tethered to the quay, bobbing like apples, two squat tugs rode the water. Presently, the screws churning up brown sand, we stopped engines and waited for the pilot to come out.

  I thought of the day, three months after my arrival in Belfast, when I’d met Tuohy on my way to the draughtsmen’s huts. It was raining and I’d taken a short cut through the alleyway on Harland Road. It was springtime and the pussy-willows were coming into bud. Ahead of me strode a working man with his tucker box under his arm.
All of a sudden he staggered and fell down. Men were often laid off because they’d taken alcohol before the dawn shift, and I thought he was drunk. I would have side-stepped him if his box hadn’t burst open, spilling two slices of bread into my path. I couldn’t bring myself to tread them into the puddles. Looking down I saw the man was white as milk and there was froth bubbling at the corner of his bloodless lips. Kneeling, I shook him and after a moment he recovered and struggled upright. He said he’d had a fit, which was not uncommon to him, and asked me not to tell his foreman. He didn’t beg me to keep silent or wheedle in any way; indeed, he spoke to me as if we were equals. ‘My name is Tuohy,’ he said and shook my hand. Taken aback by his authoritative manner, and as he remained the colour of chalk and none too steady on his feet, I offered him my arm. I remember fretting about his dinner bread soaking up the wet. Three weeks later I attended my first meeting. The following month I visited his home.

  That first time I had been foolish enough to think it would be me who would put his family at their ease. I took his mother flowers; she received them without a word, but her eyes flashed contempt. She wore a man’s cap on her head and men’s boots on her feet.

  At half-past twelve two tenders ploughed towards the Titanic, bringing out mail and passengers. Bearing in mind Rosenfelder’s woman, I was about to walk astern to look down on the steerage space when a commotion broke out further along the deck. Following the crowd who were now flowing in that direction and coming within view of the dummy funnel which served as a ventilation outlet, I saw a black face emerging from the top. It was only a stoker who had climbed up as some sort of practical joke, or possibly for a bet, but several silly women, including Mrs Brown of Denver, taking it for an apparition shot up from the very flames of hell, screamed in alarm and declared it an omen.