by David Dyer
I tried to lighten the mood. I laughed about how Senator Smith in America had asked a Titanic officer what icebergs were made of.
Herbert Stone had all the while been sitting still and silent, but now he spoke. ‘It’s not such a silly question,’ he said. ‘Icebergs can have rocks, earth, and there can be air, too, trapped in them.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.
‘They can be beautiful,’ he went on. ‘I saw three that very afternoon, when I was taking my sights – great tall things they were, with high cliffs and flat tops. I’d never seen anything like them.’
Here was my chance. ‘And you also saw some the next morning, I think?’
He poured himself some more tea but did not offer me any. ‘Why are you here, Mr Steadman?’
‘I’ve come to observe the London inquiry. I want to write about it.’
‘No. I mean here – right here, in my house, with us, now.’
I couldn’t tell whether his question was defensive or aggressive or pleading. ‘I wanted,’ I began, ‘to talk to you in Boston – in private. Mr Thomas had allowed it. He was to organise our meeting, but the business with the marshal, and Washington, intervened.’ For a moment I saw again the pained, shy eyes I’d seen on the Californian. ‘I wondered then,’ I continued, ‘and I wonder now, whether there’s some way I might help you.’
‘Help me?’ Stone gave a short, dismissive laugh. ‘When you said in Boston that you would help me, you were all the while arranging to publish the story of Mr Gill. That’s how you helped me then. Heaven knows how you plan to help me now.’
‘I do remember, Mr Stone, what I said, but I also remember what you said – that you saw no signals that night.’ I paused. Mrs Stone put down her cup. ‘But now, here in England, will you admit what you saw?’
Stone stood up and extended his hand. ‘Goodbye, Mr Steadman. I’m sorry if you’ve wasted your time.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, standing slowly and taking his hand, ‘publishing Mr Gill’s affidavit might, in the end, help you very much.’
Mrs Stone showed me out. At the door I thanked her and asked where I might find a nearby public house. She gave me some directions and then held my cold hands in her own. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that you have to leave so soon.’
‘You have absolutely nothing to be sorry for,’ I said.
* * *
I had not been drinking for more than ten minutes in the local tavern – a dark, squat building lying low among the odorous vapours of the Mersey – when I was interrupted by none other than Mrs Stone herself. She strode into the small room and drew up a chair at my table, panting a little. ‘You were able to follow my directions, then,’ she said. ‘I’m glad I found you.’
I stood and bowed and said the pleasure was all mine.
‘I had to come,’ she said, dabbing her face with a handkerchief, ‘to tell you that you are wrong.’
‘I often am,’ I said, smiling.
‘About the children, I mean,’ she went on. ‘The Titanic children. When you said that nobody knew or cared about them, you were wrong.’
She produced from her handbag a folded newspaper clipping and slid it across the table to me. NORFOLK FAMILY OF ELEVEN WHO WERE WIPED OUT IN THE TITANIC DISASTER ran the headline above a photograph. ‘The first photograph published of the Sage family,’ the caption read, ‘all the eleven members of which went down in the Titanic. The group shows the father and mother with their five boys and four girls.’ Every one of the children’s names was set out, and the piece went on: ‘Mr and Mrs Sage kept an inn at Gaywood, near King’s Lynn, on the main road to Sandringham, and afterward moved to Peterborough, where they had a business in Gladstone Street. Some time ago Mr Sage decided to emigrate to Jacksonville, Florida, where he intended to start fruit-farming, and the family were on the way to the land of their adoption.’
I had not so far, in all of the hundreds of pages of newsprint I’d read about the disaster, seen a single image of any of the children who died. But now, in my hands, I saw nine of them. And they were all from the one family.
‘You see, we do care,’ Mrs Stone said. I didn’t know who she meant by ‘we’ – she and her husband? Liverpool? England? humanity? – but it didn’t matter. I studied the photograph. The Sage family had positioned themselves stiffly and formally in front of their large, perfectly square brick house. The shot had been taken from a distance but I could see the children clearly enough: a girl sulking near a window, a boy standing with his little sister and looking dreamily into the middle distance, two children sitting precariously on a wall, a handsome young man in a doorway, and the eldest son sitting on a horse. The father was leaning nervously near a window, his arms crossed. The mother, straight-backed and tight-corsetted, sat with a little boy on her lap. And there, in the centre of the photograph, the eldest daughter stood tall in her bleached-white shirtwaist, her hair high and wild.
I slid the clipping back across the table and Mrs Stone replaced it in her handbag. ‘He knows their names,’ she said. ‘Every one. He has memorised them.’
I drained my ale. ‘It’s very sad,’ I said, ‘to think of all those children drowning.’
‘But they didn’t drown,’ she said. ‘I know that’s what the newspaper says, but please don’t think they drowned. My husband told me – they had lifejackets on, and the water would have taken the heat from their little bodies very quickly. Soon they would have stopped shivering and by the end they’d have felt quite warm.’
‘Quite warm?’ I smiled. ‘Among the icebergs?’
‘Yes,’ she said, without a trace of doubt or irony. ‘Quite, quite warm.’
It was an odd phrase, and I took out my notebook and wrote it down. Quite, quite warm. I tried to imagine the children floating in their lifejackets in that black and forbidding water feeling quite, quite warm. There was comfort in the idea – it was much better than thinking of them struggling for breath – and if it was comforting for me, I supposed it must be a hundred times so for Mrs Stone’s husband.
For a time we did not speak. Mrs Stone seemed nervous, as if she were building up courage to tell me something. Her eyes darted about and she ran her fingers through her great sweeping side curls. She adjusted and readjusted her green and white necktie, which reminded me of a schoolboy’s. Hard Merseyside men stared at her – she was the only woman in the tavern. ‘Would you mind terribly,’ she asked, ‘if we went somewhere else?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Wherever you like.’
I followed her from the tavern to the street outside. The sun had set long ago but the twilight lingered. We climbed some narrow stairs and walked along a series of laneways between cavernous brick buildings. We crossed a footbridge above a freight railway, then climbed more stairs and arrived at a wrought-iron bench set in a patch of grass not much bigger than the bench itself. We sat and caught our breath.
Behind us, somewhere, was ‘the street that died o’ shame’ and the ghosts of Maggie Donoghue and Tommy Foy. In front of us lay the great yards, warehouses and cranes of the Merseyside wharves. Gulls swooped and soared and the shouts of men drifted up from the piers. Through narrow gaps between buildings I could see the flat grey sheet of the river moving bodily and silently.
Mrs Stone told me that her husband’s ship was down there somewhere, being unloaded. ‘He’s a good man, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do know.’
She frowned a little. I did not think she’d expected such a quick and compliant response. She had been preparing herself for debate. ‘Do you think the people in London – at the inquiry – will see that he is?’
‘If he speaks the truth, I think they will.’ I leaned back a little and lit a cigarette.
‘When you said,’ Mrs Stone continued after a time, ‘this afternoon, in our garden, that you could help him, what did you mean?’
‘I could write his side of the story,’ I said. ‘I could explain it all.’
She looked at me awhile,
thinking. ‘You could show people that he’s a good man?’
‘I could try,’ I said.
‘How would you do it?’
‘I could describe you,’ I said, smiling. ‘Perhaps that would be enough.’
Mrs Stone laughed. This higher space seemed to calm her, to open her out, and she began to tell me about her husband’s voyage to Boston, and how difficult it had all been. She told me of his childhood – of a sensitive boy who loved books growing up among the granite and limestone of Devon, of a cruel father who stuffed rags in his mouth and told him not to cry. Herbert’s father had once drowned kittens in a bag and forced his son to watch.
‘His father was an odd man,’ Mrs Stone said. ‘When I first met him he made me hold his hands so I could feel how rough they were. Then he gripped me tighter and tighter, and when I cried out he just laughed. “A little princess,” he said. “Herbert’s got himself a little princess…”’ She winced at the memory.
‘Was Herbert scared of him?’
‘A little. He always tried to please him, but never could.’
She told me how hard Herbert had worked to get his First Mate’s Certificate and to obtain his position as second officer on the Californian. He’d looked forward to working with Captain Lord, whom he knew to be one of Leyland’s best skippers. But he’d been disappointed: for some reason, the captain seemed not to like him. Herbert had made some mistakes – small ones, but the captain never forgot them. ‘My husband is a shy man,’ Mrs Stone said. ‘The captain need only have encouraged him a little.’
Life at sea was difficult, but Herbert had made a go of it. The encouragement he did not get from his captain he found in his books. He loved the American novel Moby-Dick most of all, and hoped always to be as loyal to his captain as Starbuck was to Ahab.
‘Even unto death?’ I asked.
‘Unto death,’ she said, again without doubt or irony.
Mrs Stone looked at me with beautiful eyes. A delicate wetness had formed at their edges and in one there was a single tear. ‘Please do write his story,’ she said. ‘I would be grateful.’
‘I will write it,’ I said, ‘and I will do it justice.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I do.’
She took from her handbag the photograph of the Sage family and handed it to me. ‘Then you must keep this,’ she said. ‘I have a spare. And remember: he knows their names. Every single one.’
* * *
I had three days before the Californian witnesses were due to give their evidence in London, so the following morning, Sunday, I said goodbye to Liverpool and took a train to Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. The journey lasted more than four hours but I was glad I took the trouble. The air flowed more freely through this town than through Liverpool. Parks sparkled with the moisture of spring and lace curtains swayed gently in open windows. I ate a boiled egg and drank some gin at the station bar then walked the short distance to Gladstone Street. On the corner of Hankey Street I stopped before a small bakery nestled up against a long row of broad, two-storey brick terraces.
Outside, withered flowers were piled in an empty bread crate. When I stepped closer I saw an assortment of cards among them. ‘God Bless You John and Annie, and your dear, dear children. How sad we are for you.’ ‘For Fred, Gone to a Better Place, from Management, Lane Brickworks.’ I saw one note in a child’s handwriting: ‘To my Freind Connie who Sleeps with the Angels.’ This last was accompanied by a small drawing in light, feathery strokes of a stick-like figure lying back on what may have been wings, or otherwise the petals of a flower.
I knocked on the door of the bakery but there was no answer. An elderly woman emerged from the adjoining house to tell me that the family – the new family – were away for the day on a picnic. I asked her if she had known the Sages.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘They were my neighbours.’
I asked if she might be so kind as to tell me a little about them. ‘Whatever you like,’ she said, holding her door open for me. She showed me to a seat in her front parlour and brought tea and cakes. She was an ample woman, with teeth as brown as wood and a surprising cluster of jewels at her throat. Her name, she said, spreading herself on the sofa, was Mrs Goddard, with no children and a husband long dead.
She spoke freely, as if I were an old friend. The Sages, she explained, had bought the bakery next door two or three years ago. They’d lived in rooms above and behind it. In one corner of the large yard was a deep well, in which one of the girls, young Dolly, had nearly drowned. ‘After that,’ Mrs Goddard said, sucking crumbs from her fingers, ‘Annie had the well filled in and swore that her girls would never go near water again. Never. And now – just think of it! – they’ve all drowned.’
I thought about telling her that they’d died of cold, not drowning, but Mrs Goddard had already moved on. She told me that the town of Peterborough was so terribly sad about what had happened. Nobody could bear to take the flowers away. ‘We will never forget them,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes with the loose sleeve of her blouse. She told me of John Sage, the father, an adventurer who dragged his family hither and thither in search of fortune. The children, she said, were high-spirited. The middle boys, Doug and Fred, played rugby and bounced their chests together like seals; one of them had done some bricklaying. The youngest boy, Tom, not much more than a baby, had golden curls, and the youngest girl was an excellent mimic. Eleven-year-old William dreamt his days away and was forever getting lost. He cried once when he saw a caterpillar eaten by a sparrow. ‘The mother was too soft with that boy,’ Mrs Goddard said. ‘I don’t know why. Somehow his gentle ways mesmerised her. He was her favourite.’
But the most impressive of all the children, she said, was Stella, the eldest daughter. She was an excellent dressmaker, but in recent months had put away her sewing machine and collected signatures in support of the London window-smashers instead. She was only nineteen but had spoken at the town hall through a speaking trumpet and travelled alone to London, in defiance of her mother and father. ‘Such spirit that girl had,’ Mrs Goddard said, standing up to take a folded newspaper from the drawer of a side table. She opened the paper to a double-page spread of thirty or so inch-square images of people lost on the Titanic. ‘There,’ she said, pointing to one of them, ‘that’s her.’
I was astounded by what I saw: the high spirits, the wilfulness, the playfulness. Stella Sage was not smiling, but she seemed to be on the verge of an explosion of laughter. There was such mischief in her eyes that I nearly laughed myself. I saw in that picture a girl with an inexhaustible fund of strength and an unstoppable drive for life. In short, I saw my own daughter.
‘She never wanted to go,’ said Mrs Goddard. ‘Her work was in London, not the farms of Florida.’ She took back the clipping and looked again at Stella’s photograph. ‘I liked her most of all.’
‘I’m sure she was extraordinary,’ I said.
As I accepted one more of Mrs Goddard’s little cakes, I wondered how it was that this young woman who’d given public speeches and travelled to London by herself had been unable to find her way into a lifeboat. And how could it be that not one of her brothers and sisters had been saved?
CHAPTER 16
Samuel Johnson said that if you are tired of London you are tired of life. I must have been tired of life. It was the midst of the London Season and as I walked along I was buffeted by men in top hats and women clutching theatre programs. It was warm – so warm that people sweated and grunted on the underground train and complained that it was as hot as midsummer. On the streets trams rang their bells, automobiles broke down and horses fought for space. I smelled gasoline, spring flowers and excrement all at once. The newspapers advertised matinées and evening performances at a hundred theatres. The hotels were full; I found no lodgings until I drifted south across Waterloo Bridge and took a room in a cramped hotel in the shadow of the railway station. The station, the desk clerk told me, was being rebuilt – during the day there would be dust a
nd noise, which was why the rate was so reasonable.
I laughed when I saw the room: a narrow bed, a thin cupboard and a desk squeezed into a space no more than two yards across. But the hotel was within walking distance of Buckingham Gate, where the Titanic inquiry was being held, so I signed the register and wired my new address to my daughter. I then lay on my bed and drank myself to sleep.
The next morning I woke early. I wanted to be sure of a good seat at the inquiry. The day was overcast but still warm and as I walked across Westminster Bridge swampy vapours drifted up from the river. The grass in St James’s Park was lush with a heavy wetness and the flowers along Buckingham Gate sagged with the weight of bumblebees.
At half past nine I arrived at the Scottish Drill Hall. It was a vast place with three or four hundred folding chairs on the main floor and in two galleries above. There were towering walls, acres of oak panelling, and floorboards polished by years of soldiers’ marching boots. At the front of the hall was a raised chair for Lord Mersey, the Commissioner, and to the left and right were lower chairs for his assisting assessors. Before them were rows of desks for the barristers and solicitors. The witness stand – a small, flimsy desk on a raised platform surrounded by a thin rail – was an exposed, vulnerable place. Mounted behind it was a model of the Titanic’s starboard side, perhaps twenty feet in length, and a large chart of the North Atlantic. A little further along, hanging from an upper gallery, was an enormous cross-section of the ship’s interior.
It was wise of me to arrive early. Very soon there was a crowd of people bustling to find seats, and by ten o’clock the hall was full. Feathered hats bobbed impatiently and there was much tut-tutting. People grumbled about the acoustics, about the insects, about the uncomfortable chairs: there ought to be someone to show you where to sit; it was too hot and the curtains made it hotter; it was impossible to hear anything from such a distance. The reason the hall was so full, I learned from a newspaperman sitting next to me, was that two famous survivors of the disaster were due to give evidence that morning. Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon was said to have bribed the crewmen of his lifeboat not to row back for survivors, and Lady Duff-Gordon, his wife, was said to have complained about the loss of her secretary’s beautiful new nightdress. London society had turned out to hear how this couple might defend themselves.