The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  I poured another shot into my coffee – a double – and blamed the world for making me do it.

  I was about to return to the inquiry when I noticed a small headline: LORD MERSEY HEADS ENGLAND’S INQUIRY. That a British inquiry would be held had not occurred to me. I suppose it ought to have: the Titanic was, after all, a British-registered ship. I read on. Lord Mersey, the article said, was a highly respected admiralty judge who would be helped by a panel of expert nautical assessors. England’s finest barristers would represent the interested parties. Together, these men would find the truth behind the disaster. The inquiry would be focused, diligent and thorough – in short, superior to the American inquiry in every way. And it would all begin, I read, in one week’s time.

  My father had once had dealings with London barristers, so I knew something of their ways. They were gentlemen, of course – unfailingly polite, speaking always in perfectly formed sentences – but their gentleness was all on the surface. Underneath they were all tricks and horror. Being questioned by a London barrister, my father said, was like drinking afternoon champagne from dainty glasses: very pleasant at first, but you soon become befuddled, and by the end of it all you feel decidedly ill.

  I was certain there would be no ‘convivial confab’ in London. Captain Lord would be kept on the stand until he explained once and for all why he had not gone to the aid of a ship in distress. He would be dragged up the mountain of truth to the clear, bright air of its summit.

  I sat back down, poured another shot and thought about things. I resolved not to stay to hear Evans; nor would I go to Halifax to see the bodies. Instead I would return at once to Boston, give my daughter a hug, then board a fast steamer for England. The Californian was leaving for Liverpool tomorrow morning. I wanted to be there when she arrived.

  CHAPTER 15

  During the voyage across, the weather was calm but cold. I settled myself in the ship’s library, organised my notes and papers, and started to write about Captain Lord. His admissions in Washington had, as I expected, made headlines – SAW ROCKETS AS TITANIC SANK, CAPTAIN ADMITS – but no paper attempted to explain why he didn’t respond to the rockets, or whether he truly believed they weren’t from the Titanic. They had not got down into his psyche, as Harriet would have put it; that was my task. I wandered the ship from keel to bridge, talking to sailors and learning the terminology; I scribbled notes and sketched diagrams. I tried to see things as Lord would see them. I began to work up a draft manuscript, but the more I wrote, the further the captain seemed to recede from me. He was like a pond covered with thick ice that I could not get beneath.

  In the faces of both Max Blanck, owner of the Shirtwaist factory, and Bruce Ismay, owner of the Titanic, I’d seen a secret knowledge: the knowledge that they had done wrong. Blanck had climbed a ladder to safety and left his girl-workers to burn; Ismay had got into a lifeboat. ‘There was a space in the lifeboat and I got into it,’ Ismay said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. But his face showed that he knew it wasn’t that simple. In Lord’s face I saw no such knowledge, no tormented conflict, no hints of a troubled conscience. I saw only a flatness, a polished, hard nothingness.

  I pushed my manuscript aside. Perhaps, I thought, when I died my daughter could throw it into my coffin with me, and I could finish it in heaven, or in hell.

  Then one night I asked the ship’s second officer to let me stand awhile with him on the open bridge during his watch. I braced myself against the cold and watched ships’ lights appear and disappear as they passed us by. I saw how deceptive they could be: a vessel that seemed small and close often turned out to be large and distant. I learned how vast and black the night was, how cold and hard starlight could be. I felt alone in space, sometimes drifting into strange reveries, imagining that the sea was bewitching me, trying to overwhelm my will, tempting me to jump in. When I shared my thoughts with the second officer he said, ‘Men do, you know, during this very watch. They slip into a sort of daze – and over they go.’

  The midnight watch: a time of loneliness, demons and trances. I was fascinated. So I took up my pen and paper once again. But this time I began to write not about Lord, but about Stone – the man who stood the watch. What would my story be, I wondered, if it left Lord in the shadows and lit up instead the shimmering, delicate mechanism of Herbert Stone?

  * * *

  When the ship was safely berthed in the River Mersey after our nine-day crossing, a letter was brought aboard for me by the ship’s agent. It was from Harriet, and must have come across on a faster steamer. As I read it, I could hear her breathless voice. My daughter never did have much use for punctuation.

  Dear Papa,

  I am so very pleased you have followed that captain to the ends of the earth to sort it all out but you really did miss the most wonderful suffrage parade in New York and after all you did sign a parade slip and you did promise you would march by my side but never mind I wore my pit brow pants and Mama dispensed with her corset cover although not the corset altogether because you know how vain she is. We were led along by women on horseback and one was dressed as Joan of Arc!

  But Papa I want to tell you the most important thing of all about the march and that is that at 9th Street all the industrial women joined us and there was a very special banner among them – all black with white letters saying ‘We Want the Vote for Protection’ – and it was carried by the mothers and sisters and friends of all the poor Triangle Shirtwaist girls who died. I called out three cheers to them and I thought of all you wrote about those young girls and how kind you were to them.

  Papa, speaking of sad things, all your belongings from your newspaper office have been delivered here – boxes and papers and books and your photograph of Mama and me – and although Mama says we ought just throw it all out I don’t think she really means it because she has stored everything very carefully in a room upstairs and hasn’t even told Vivienne about it. You know what Vivienne would say about keeping your things here. It is very sad that you are not working for that paper any more but I think what you are doing now is much better and don’t forget you will always have me to look after you. If you cable me your address as soon as you arrive I will write you a letter every single day because I know how much you like to hear from me.

  Your loving daughter,

  Harriet

  PS: I have included a newspaper clipping of the funeral of poor Mr Astor which took place on the same day as the parade. I think you knew they found his body, didn’t you?

  I put down the letter with tears in my eyes. It made me think again that this century would definitely belong to the women. And it reminded me, too, that in following the Californian to England I had given up more than the suffragettes’ parade, more than the Titanic bodies in Halifax, more than my job. For the time being, at least, I had given up my daughter.

  I walked down the gangway and hailed a cab to take me to Scotland Road, where I knew Liverpool had its cheapest hotels.

  * * *

  I was surprised, as I wandered around Liverpool on a grey Saturday morning, at just what a grand and sombre place it was. St George’s Hall was one of the largest buildings I’d ever seen. Its towering walls and columns seemed of a geological scale. The perfectly circular Picton Reading Room looked more like it might contain the city’s gas supply than books. The hall beneath, I was told, was carved out of solid rock. Next door stood the great William Brown Library with its facades of rectangles, squares and triangles. I had never seen so many geometrical shapes – not even in New York. This wasn’t London with its frivolous theatres and operas and tourists and its great folly of a bridge at the Tower. This was a city that manufactured things and shipped them out, that made its wealth from a thousand factories, mills and mines.

  It was a place of ships. The River Mersey ebbed and flowed with them; there was no other port like it in the world. Men built ships here, and White Star and Cunard had their headquarters here; this was the port of registration of the Mauretania, the L
usitania, the Olympic and the Titanic. So when I took a seat in the atrium of the Picton Reading Room and flicked through newspapers from the past weeks, I wasn’t surprised to find that the city had received a terrific wound. I traced the disaster from the early vague concerns about the vessel’s safety – CONSTERNATION IN LIVERPOOL – through to the anguished shock when the worst was known: DEATH ROLL OF OVER 1,500.There were photographs of the ship, poems, diagrams, reports, sermons, lists of survivors and messages of sympathy. Some local people were known to have survived, but many others were missing. It was noted that a hundred members of the crew were from Liverpool. As in my own country’s newspapers, much was said about the heroism of brave men – most notably that of Captain Smith and my old favourite, the craven-shooter Major Butt. The major’s brother, it turned out, was a citizen of Liverpool.

  In the interstices of this main story was another, small at first, but persistent. It was there from beginning to end: the early reports that the Californian had recovered bodies, the mystery ship seen from the Titanic, Captain Lord’s tragic tale of a wireless not working, of no signals being seen, and finally Ernie Gill’s affidavit about the rockets sighted and ignored. The papers reported Lord’s ‘sweeping denials’ with gusto, and seemed to believe him, but when he admitted in Washington that his ship did see rockets after all, their tone became muted and doubtful. I thought I detected a note of shame, too, because Lord was one of their own. And when they reported his assertion that the rockets were not the Titanic’s, they raised a question that my own country’s newspapers never had: but shouldn’t he have gone anyway?

  One article included a photograph, taken from an earlier, happier voyage, of the captain with his three officers on the deck of their ship. Stewart smiles beneath his enormous moustache, Groves gives a cheeky grin, and even Lord has half a smile. But Herbert Stone, the most handsome of the men, standing shoulder to shoulder with his captain, looks into the lens with troubled eyes, as if he can see the future. I perceived a delicate sensitivity and an extraordinary shyness. Why had this man ever gone to sea?

  But the most interesting information of all was tucked away towards the back of a local newspaper, in the Shipping Movements section. It was in the very smallest of type and easy to miss. It said the Californian had arrived in Liverpool the previous afternoon, berthing in the Huskisson Dock. It had been a long, slow voyage from Boston, but Captain Lord and his men were home at last.

  * * *

  Bootle was only a few miles north of the city centre, but I was told it never had been and never would be part of Liverpool. ‘It’s an independent sort of place,’ said the red-haired toothless landlady of my hotel as she served up stew and bread, ‘and you best be careful going up there – with your strange accent an’ all.’ My stew began to cool and congeal, but the landlady continued to stand opposite me, watching and talking. ‘There was Maggie Donoghue, brains bashed out by a fireman, and little Tommy Foy, chopped up at the age of six.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said, stabbing at a potato with my fork.

  ‘And those poor prostitutes – so many of ’em! Teapot Murders they was called, on account of the street where they happened being Lyons Street.’

  ‘Lyons?’

  ‘The tea. They call it the street which died o’ shame, and you probably best keep clear of it.’

  I arrived in Bootle in the late afternoon. An overcast sky threw a dull grey light onto things. There were soot-covered civic buildings made of stone, and rows of narrow, cramped terraces whose front steps opened directly onto the street. It was one of the most washed-out places I’d ever seen: there was no colour at all, no trees, no grass, no flowers, just black and grey stone. The mighty Mersey was close. I could hear its busy docks – the trundling of the elevated electric railway, the blowing of steam whistles and the clanging of metal. Black smoke belched from distant chimneys.

  I soon reached my destination: a small terrace house crammed between its neighbours on Wadham Road. I knocked on a glossy black door and waited.

  The young woman who opened it was perhaps in her early twenties, and quite beautiful. There was an eagerness about her, and a softness, that seemed at odds with her surroundings. Her hair, parted in the centre, swept down in two great side curls that sat just above her ears. She wore a white, collared blouse to which she had pinned a blue flower of some sort. It was the first bit of colour I’d seen that day.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  I had, of course, prepared a ruse – a lie designed to persuade her to let me in – but something about her made me drop it. I simply told her my name and said that I’d come from America, which, of course, was no explanation at all of why I stood at her door.

  Nonetheless she smiled. She seemed almost to be expecting me. ‘Mr Steadman from America? Then you must be here to see my husband.’ Her voice had a wonderful lilting music.

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  ‘He came back only last night.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘You’d better come through,’ she said. ‘We’re having tea outside.’ She led me down a narrow hall to an enclosed garden at the rear. A small table was laid with a teapot and cups, and seated at it, in a blue woollen sweater most probably knitted by his wife, was the man I had been trying so hard to speak to for so many weeks.

  He was naturally surprised to see me. He stood quickly, looking from me to his wife and back again. The whites of his eyes were washed with pink; I thought, perhaps, he had been crying. I extended my hand. He hesitated, but then shook it.

  ‘Hello, Mr Stone,’ I said.

  The last time I’d seen him was in the chartroom of his ship, in Boston, when he was defending his captain. Today he seemed tired: there were pouches of soft skin under his eyes and a tiny cluster of broken capillaries in the centre of one cheek. But he had still a strange beauty.

  When I asked if he remembered me, he said of course he did. ‘I’m not allowed to speak to pressmen,’ he said. ‘The captain has forbidden it. The company has forbidden it.’

  ‘But I’m not a pressman any more,’ I said. ‘My newspaper fired me.’

  ‘Then what are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Must I be something, other than a friend?’

  Mrs Stone had brought up a chair for me, but he did not yet invite me to sit. The three of us stood facing each other around the table. ‘The captain said, in Boston, that I must never speak to you – I mean, especially to you.’

  ‘But is he your captain while you’re here, in your own garden?’

  Stone looked to his wife again, as if asking her what to do. ‘Let’s sit,’ she said. ‘If Mr Steadman has come all the way from America, then we must at least give him tea.’

  But Stone did not sit. ‘Captain Lord says you were the one who printed Ernie Gill’s story.’

  ‘I am.’ I waited. Perhaps he expected me to apologise. ‘It was the right thing to do,’ I said. I hoped he remembered what I’d written on the card I gave him when we spoke outside his chartroom: ‘Not your fault.’

  At last we sat, but for some time no one spoke. The garden was a peaceful, private place – even in the weak grey light the flowers glowed, as if lit from within. Mrs Stone, to break the silence, began to give me their names. ‘Hyacinths,’ she said as I reached down to caress their unfamiliar blue petals. ‘And over there – tulips, daffodils and bluebells. We sit out here to catch the last of the light,’ she went on. ‘It’s only a small garden, but I do love it. All these little splashes of life. It gives me something to care for while Herbert’s away.’

  Yes, I thought, it would be lonely in this hard city without him.

  She held towards me a cup of tea. I would have preferred gin, which I’d been told the English drank from teacups, but I accepted the milky brown liquid. Mrs Stone laughed politely at me as I picked up the cup by its rim, rather than its dainty handle.

  She asked me about myself – about America, my voyage across, my impressions of England. Her disarming gentleness drew m
e out. I spoke of Boston, of my daughter, of the suffragettes’ parade in New York, of how times were changing. She nodded and smiled and said the vote must come eventually, although she did not approve of the window-smashing in London. That, she said, was a step too far.

  ‘Sometimes you need to be brave,’ I said. ‘It’s an extraordinary sort of courage.’

  ‘Perhaps. But that’s a sort I do not have, or want.’

  All the while I studied her face for any hint of shame. The Liverpool newspapers had, after all, over the past weeks been filled with stories of the Titanic’s rockets being seen and ignored by her husband. But I saw only solicitude and courtesy. The three of us, taking tea around the table in the garden, were like passengers in a little boat safely moored at the dock.

  I decided to push the boat out a bit. I told her how grief-stricken the American nation was about the Titanic. Mrs Stone did not flinch or hesitate at this first mention of the disaster. No cloud passed across her face; her brows did not furrow. She said, simply, that it was a very tragic thing, but that the ship’s captain should never have been going at that speed – at night, with ice about.

  Herbert Stone, tapping his teeth with his fingers, said nothing.

  I pushed the boat out a little further. I spoke of my interest in the children who died. I said that there’d been barely a mention of them in the papers, either in America or here; that it was hard to find out anything about them. You could read column after column about Mr Astor or Mr Guggenheim, I said, but nothing about the children. ‘There were fifty-three of them left behind,’ I added, sipping my weak tea. ‘But no one seems to care much about them.’

  Mrs Stone stirred her tea.

  ‘Or even know about them,’ I continued.

  Her spoon touched gently the rim of her cup. ‘We have no children,’ she said, as if that fact alone made all children irrelevant. She looked away.